The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced investigations into five businesses as part of its ongoing crackdown on fake and misleading reviews. This comes following the CMA’s new powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA), which came into force in April 2025 and could result in the first fine by the CMA using their power to fine up to 10% of global turnover.
The CMA has already issued guidance on the new offences in relation to online reviews and gave businesses a three-month grace period before starting enforcement. Following which we saw the CMA carry out a review of over 100 publishers of reviews in which advisory letters were issued to 54 firms. This prompted 90% to make changes in response however, the CMA is evidently not satisfied that this has had the envisaged effect and is now testing compliance with its investigations across three sectors including, funerals, food delivery, and car sales.
Why this matters
The CMA investigation is into businesses’ conduct across the entire reviews process. This includes, how reviews are collected, incentivised, moderated and presented, along with how star ratings are calculated and displayed. Importantly, the risks do not start and end with publication but are in the way in which reviews are collected, moderated, and displayed. This reflects the breadth of the regime which requires that traders run a fair and transparent process for collection, moderation and presentation of reviews and star ratings. The new offences mean there are particular consequences in relation to certain issues such as cherry picking reviews to catalogue abuse, and outright posting of fake reviews.
It's also important to note that outsourcing reviews to external platforms doesn't remove your compliance responsibilities. This is also an area in focus as the CMA is currently investigating both a platform and its third-party moderator for the treatment of negative reviews.
At this stage the CMA has reached no conclusions about whether the law has been broken in any of these investigations and we expect to learn more about the CMA’s findings and any further action later in the year.
Now is the time to act
The number of businesses under investigation through the CMA’s new powers is now 14 as in addition to fake and misleading reviews, the CMA is investigating pricing transparency issues across 9 businesses.
This enforcement wave in relation to consumer protection should be taken as a warning from the CMA about enhanced scrutiny in relation to consumer protection law. We have already seen that the CMA is ready to act and use its new powers, with a recent fine for failing to comply with an information notice. This resulted in a fine of 75% of the maximum penalty for such an offence, being 1% of turnover.
Now is the time to ensure your business is compliant.
For more information on the new obligations, please see our coverage below:
- How to comply with new laws on fake reviews
- New duties to tackle fake and misleading reviews
- New law on reviews: Consequences for “bullsh*tting your way to number 1”
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