Amazon users who post fake reviews, or who commission agents to post them, became more likely to face legal action from 2016, when the company said it had issued more than a thousand lawsuits in a year against users and vendors for posting or buying fake or manipulated reviews. Some sellers were offering refunds and discounts in exchange for good reviews. In the same year the Competition and Markets Authority published its investigation into online reviews, following complaints about fake reviews on review sites, negative reviews going unpublished, and businesses paying for endorsements in blogs without saying so.
What the law said in 2016
In April 2016 the Authority wrote to more than fifty marketing companies, the businesses that used them and the publishers of blogs and online articles, warning that helping to arrange or publish advertising that is not clearly distinguishable from the independent opinion of a journalist or blogger could break the law. The law in question was the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, which made it an offence to mislead consumers, and the Authority’s advice to businesses was blunt: a business that pretends to be a customer and reviews its own products, commissions a third party to write fake reviews, or offers money or gifts to customers for positive reviews may be committing an offence. In the United States, Amazon pursued vendors who manipulated its review system with inducements. I discussed the developments on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours at the time.
What the law says now
Since 6 April 2025 fake reviews have been banned outright. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 replaced the 2008 Regulations and added to the list of banned commercial practices the writing or commissioning of fake reviews, the publication of reviews in a misleading way, and the running of a platform that hosts reviews without taking reasonable and proportionate steps to find and remove fake ones. The Competition and Markets Authority can now enforce the ban itself, without going to court, with fines of up to 10 per cent of worldwide turnover, and its guidance to platforms, CMA208, spells out what “reasonable and proportionate” means. The Authority had already been investigating the two biggest platforms: Google gave undertakings in January 2025 to sanction businesses that manipulate reviews and to warn consumers on their profiles (CMA, January 2025), and Amazon gave undertakings in June 2025 to assess the risk of fake reviews, to remove reviews that trip its detection thresholds, to let customers report suspected fakes easily and to cut off sellers and reviewers who abuse the system (CMA, June 2025). For a seller whose competitor is buying reviews, or a business hit by a fake negative one, the practical routes are in Are review websites liable for defamatory reviews?, and the individual reviewer remains liable in defamation where the review is false and damaging.
First published 8 July 2016. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.