New law on reviews: Consequences for “bullsh*tting your way to number 1”

A few years ago, a journalist for Vice Magazine went viral with an article about how he turned his shed into London’s top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor. How did he do it?

1. Create a website for fake restaurant, The Shed, bookable "by appointment only."
2. Populate the website with photos of "avant garde" cooking, which is in fact composed of ingredients like dishwasher tablets and shaving foam.
3. Secure a series of fake five-star reviews from friends and family.
4. The air of exclusivity fostered by the impossibility of booking a table does the rest.

The Shed eventually did open – for one night only – and the journalist secured a deal for his first book: How to bullsh*t your way to number 1.

Whether you admire the chutzpah required to pull off such a stunt or not, the episode showed that it was too easy to manipulate reviews to boost your business’ profile and influence where consumers decide to spend their money. This is set to change, after the consumer review provisions in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA) came into force on 6 April 2025. 

What’s changing?

1. A series of commercial practices relating to reviews will be banned (as set out below).
2. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will gain the power to directly issue fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover (or £300,000, whichever is the greater) for noncompliance with the new law, without the need to go through the courts.

If you publish consumer reviews on your company’s website or any other medium, or commission or incentivise others to provide such reviews, this law is relevant to you. The CMA issued its final guidance to help traders comply with the new law on 4 April (a mere 2 days before the new legal regime began). While the final guidance does not contain any major updates from the draft guidance published on 11 December 2024, there are some changes in emphasis, now reflected in this updated article. 

The new law

From April, the following commercial practices will be banned:

1. Submitting, or commissioning another person to submit or write:
   1. A fake consumer review.
   2. A consumer review that conceals the fact it has been incentivised.
2. Publishing consumer reviews, or consumer review information, in a misleading way.
3. Publishing consumer reviews, or consumer review information, without taking such reasonable and proportionate steps as are necessary for the purposes of:
   1. Preventing the publication of-
      1. fake consumer reviews.
      2. consumer reviews that conceal the fact they have been incentivised.
      3. consumer review information that is false or misleading.
   2. Removing any such reviews or information from publication...

Understanding the terminology

Consumer review: "A review of a product, a trader or any other matter relevant to a transactional decision." The draft guidance clarifies that this is a broad concept and includes reviews which focus on matters such as the delivery or after-sales care of the product. It can take different forms, including text, speech and graphic representations such as a star rating or even a "thumbs up" next to a helpful review from someone else. 

Fake review: A review "that purports to be, but is not, based on a person’s genuine experience." Fake reviews are usually positive, artificially boosting a product or trader’s rating in comparison to its competitors. However, they can also be negative, designed to damage a competitor’s reputation. 

Consumer review information: "Information that is derived from, or is influenced by, consumer reviews." This means things like overall ratings, review counts and rankings. 

What do I need to start/stop doing now to ensure my business is compliant?

To keep things simple, let’s assume you are a company selling products through your own website – and publishing consumer reviews of those products (eg, in the form of star ratings and text feedback).

      1. Don’t commission fake reviews, for example:

1. 1. Offering an existing customer a free/discounted product in exchange for a five star review (which is not reflective of their genuine experience) of a purchase they made previously.
   2. Asking consumers to buy products with their own money and telling them they will be reimbursed when they have submitted a positive review. 
   3. Buying reviews, which look as if they have been written by individual consumers but have in fact been generated by software applications (eg, bots). 
   4. Sharing a post on social media asking for five-star reviews in exchange for free products. 
   5. Asking customers to buy products and informing them they will be refunded when they leave a positive review.
   6. Contacting a customer who has left a negative review and offering them a refund and/or a gift card if they amend their review to remove any negative commentary (so that it is no longer reflective of their genuine experience).

      2. Don’t publish consumer reviews in a misleading way, for example, suppressing negative reviews, selectively promoting positive reviews or omitting information about how reviews have been written. 

The CMA advises that traders refrain from interfering from the ability of reviewers to leave genuine reviews by, for example: 

1. 1. Threats of harm or legal action.
   2. Preventing bona-fide users from leaving reviews.
   3. Arbitrarily stopping and starting review invitations.
   4. Making an offer of dispute resolution contingent on a consumer not leaving a negative review.

The CMA also advises that traders avoid editing, withholding or removing genuine negative reviews, cherry-picking positive reviews for publication, or highlighting certain positive reviews when most reviews were negative.  

     3. Other practices that the CMA advises avoiding are:

1. Concealing the fact that reviews have been incentivised (this includes situations where the reviewer has a financial interest in the trader/product being reviewed (eg, is an employee/shareholder) or a commercial link with the trader (eg, one of its suppliers)
2. "Catalogue abuse" or "review hijacking", which involves presenting reviews of a different product as if they relate to the product a consumer is considering buying (this may be permissible in situations).
3. Outdated genuine reviews – if a product changes over time, traders need to consider whether genuine reviews published before the changes could be misleading. 

     4. In addition to refraining from the kinds of activity listed at 1-3 above, traders have a positive obligation to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove from publication fake reviews and false or misleading consumer review information. All "publishers" will need to: 

1. Have published policies which prohibit fake reviews and explain their approach to incentivised reviews and misleading consumer review information. These policies should be "easily accessible… not tucked away in a hard to find place [and]…written in plain English".
2. Conduct risk assessments to assess the risks of non-compliance with the new law on reviews and identify measures to address those risks. Where risks are identified, it is necessary to make proportionate efforts to detect, investigate and remediate non-compliant reviews/review information. The guidance goes into considerable detail on the kinds of steps that may be needed. It also makes clear that risk assessments should be kept under review rather than treated as a one-off exercise.

The CMA advises that traders take an "outcomes focused" approach to compliance. They caution that "even a small trader publishing only reviews from their own customers…is required to implement reasonable and proportionate measures where their content poses a risk."

When considering the risk posed by consumer reviews on your platform, it is important to consider factors such as:

1. The publisher’s business model (hosting reviews of third party products may be riskier than hosting reviews of your own products where you have direct proof of a purchase or genuine experience).
2. The source of the reviews/consumer review information – if you publish "second hand" reviews from another website, you need to take steps to assure yourself that the first party publisher has taken proportionate and appropriate steps to comply with the law on reviews. If it is not possible to find, evaluate and have reasonable confidence in the "first party" publisher’s procedures, the "second party" publisher should be wary of publishing second hand information. 

The CMA note that publishers "which enable many users to generate and read reviews about third-party traders or their products… may pose higher risks, for example by creating a strong incentive for third-party traders to procure banned reviews and obtain high overall ratings." In such cases, publishers will be expected to take more stringent steps to comply with the law, for example "applying automated tools designed to spot suspicious networks of reviewers and other anomalies."

Comment

The bottom line is that where fake reviews and false or misleading consumer review information is present on your platform, the CMA is likely to ask questions about whether or not you have been doing enough to detect, investigate and remove such content. Egregious or persistent failures are likely to lead to enforcement action from the CMA (including fines, as set out in the intro to this article).

How can we help?

1. Help you assess compliance gaps under the new law, and the risk CMA enforcement poses to your business.
2. Undertake a risk assessment and recommend changes to the way that you handle consumer reviews in order to mitigate those risks.
3. Draft reviews policy on your behalf and run training for key staff on how to apply those policies in practice.

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