Business Competitor Attacks, Corrupt Reddit Mods, & Fake TEFL/TESOL Reviews
In response to the business competitor attacks, disinformation, and fake reviews that TEFL Online Pro has had to endure as a reputable Online TEFL/TESOL certification courses company over the past 6+ years.
Introduction
In any highly competitive business space, there is a resigned acceptance that business competitor attacks come with the territory.
In the world of Online TEFL/TESOL certification courses, the competitiveness of the space is on steroids — with hundreds of programs to choose from, programs that are largely owned and promoted by individuals leave an enormous amount of room for competitiveness that often borders on the bizarre.
ESLinsider
Let’s take for example, a loud voice within the industry: ESLinsider.
ESLinsider has made a name for itself as an investigative website that exposes Online TEFL/TESOL programs for such exploits like fake accreditation and fake reviews. The website’s solo owner also writes about paying for and taking Online TEFL/TESOL certification courses and then writing up honest reviews of those programs.
If you search for ‘TEFL Online Pro reviews’ online, you might come across a number of links that have been published by ESLinsider — all of which are highly critical of https://teflonlinepro.com/ and all of which accuse our program of being a “scam”.
At first glance, ESLinsider appears to be a force for good in an industry rife with misleading claims and outright dishonesty.
However, if you would care to delve deeper then you will discover that ESLinsider is actually an Online TEFL/TESOL course provider itself and that it is an outright purveyor of disinformation.
Every article that ESLinsider publishes on Online TEFL/TESOL programs is a disinformation article with the desire to create a strong sense of doubt and to ultimately have the reader pay for an ESLinsider Online TEFL/TESOL course.
Incidentally, https://trustedteflreviews.com/ and https://www.acteflc.com/ are not run by TEFL Online Pro.
TEFL Online Pro is Fully Accredited by ACTEFLC, and TEFL Online Pro is the highest-rated Online TEFL/TESOL certification course provider on Trusted TEFL Reviews — with six consecutive years of Teachers’ Choice Award wins under our belt.
But ESLinsider would like you to believe that there is a hidden conspiracy happening where all three websites are run by the same person.
Oh, and perhaps you should just choose the most reputable course to take — a course, of course, provided by ESLinsider.
Many TEFL Online Pro customers have, of their own volition, written a review on the TEFL Online Pro Facebook page — https://www.facebook.com/teflonlinepro/reviews
Currently, TEFL Online Pro is 100% recommended on Facebook.
This is great and all, but having the Reviews tab enabled on Facebook does make the page a target for business competitors.
Last year, one of our competitors — another loud one within the industry — kindly took some breathing time out from their busy schedule to inform us that they would be targeting our Facebook reviews.
Lo and behold, a few months later and spam comments and fake reviews began to appear on the TEFL Online Pro Facebook page.
Facebook has since removed most of the spam comments and fake reviews, leaving just one as a reminder of the times.
The irony with this fake review is that TEFL Online Pro is known for extremely fast email and internal course message responses.
We do, however, find amusing the comical audacity of having a plant as a profile picture, given that the review itself is a plant by one of our competitors.
Reddit is a fun space to find opinions on life, the universe, and everything.
It is also home to r/TEFL — a subreddit for everything TEFL/TESOL and one that is run by moderators that are suspiciously biased toward certain Online TEFL/TESOL certification programs.
r/TEFL is a subreddit that is absolutely the go-to place for anyone that runs a TEFL/TESOL program, for anyone that runs a TEFL/TESOL program who can create fake user accounts (which means anyone).
This subreddit is a breeding ground for disinformation — a soft target for TEFL/TESOL programs to sporadically take aim at their competitors.
Typically how it works is that a user (TEFL/TESOL program using an anonymous identity) starts a new thread by asking a random question and another user (TEFL/TESOL program using an anonymous identity) answers that question.
In some cases, one of the r/TEFL moderatos will step in and direct readers to the r/TEFL TEFL courses Wiki — https://www.reddit.com/r/TEFL/wiki/choosingateflcourse/ — where specific courses are praised and specific courses are dragged through the mud.
This recent thread is typical of this trend:
If you take a look at the Wike page in question, you will see the shocking news that TEFL Online Pro “shills”, that we are “reputation-wreckers”, that we should be avoided “like the plague”, and that we have threatened or attempted to “blackmail” or “extort money” from the moderators.
We have never done any of these.
Instead, we have always ignored r/TEFL because it was clear to us from the start that the subreddit is biased.
It is clear to us, the moderators of r/TEFL favor specific TEFL/TESOL programs because they receive financial kickbacks from those programs.
It needs to be understand that some Online TEFL/TESOL programs were established many years ago — long before r/TEFL was created. Given that the industry is so competitive, it isn’t a stretch of one’s imagination to question whether this subreddit was created (and is managed) by an Online TEFL/TESOL company.
There appears to be no other explanation because why else would someone spend so much of their time moderating a subreddit that theoretically is run for no financial gain and yet consumes a whole lot of time defending certain Online TEFL/TESOl programs and dissing others?
Conclusion
If you are reading this TEFL Online Pro Medium article, you are either going to be one of our existing students or graduates, an individual potentially interested in taking one of our Online TEFL/TESOL courses, or one of our business competitors.
If you are one of our existing students or graduates, thank you again for choosing us and we wish you continued teaching English success.
If you are an individual potentially interested in taking one of our Online TEFL/TESOL courses, we hope that you are savvy enough to ignore the noise and weigh up our course offers based on fact and not on competitive conjecture.
If you are one of our business competitors, we ask that you now stop wasting your time and, instead, try to focus on doing good in the little time that we all have. Your customers will thank you for it.
Read the ‘Business Competitor Attacks, Corrupt Reddit Mods, & Fake TEFL/TESOL Reviews’ article in full:
https://teflonlinepro.com/business-competitor-attacks-corrupt-reddit-mods-fake-tefl-tesol-reviews/
This TEFL Online Pro Medium article was written by Paul Murphy, the Operations Manager at TEFL Online Pro.
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The Teachers’ Choice Award winner in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024
Our verified customer reviews: https://trustedteflreviews.com/category/tefl-online-pro-teachers-choice-award-winner-2024/
