The federal rule against fake reviews turned two yesterday. It took effect on October 21, 2024, and it lets the FTC seek civil penalties from businesses that buy, sell or invent reviews. The agency’s first public move under it came in December 2025, when it sent warning letters to 10 companies it didn’t name. In May 2026 the Justice Department, working with the FTC, sued a home repair outfit accused of posting five-star reviews for fake local businesses, decorating them with photos of real people and buying more on top.
That’s progress. It also tells you the problem is alive and well, and that enforcement arrives long after the reviews do. Holiday shopping starts in earnest in a few weeks, and a lot of us will be choosing between two nearly identical air fryers or kids’ tablets based on a star rating and a few paragraphs from strangers.
So it’s worth having a routine. What follows is the one I use: what the rule actually bans, a ten-minute check you can run on any product page, and what the review labels do and don’t tell you.
What the FTC rule covers, and what it left out
The final rule goes after six practices:
- Fake reviews and testimonials, including ones written by AI or by people who never used the product, and buying or knowingly posting them.
- Paying or rewarding people for reviews that have to be positive (or negative, when aimed at a competitor).
- Reviews from employees, managers or their relatives that don’t clearly disclose the connection.
- Company-controlled “review” sites that pose as independent.
- Suppressing bad reviews through threats, intimidation or false accusations, or claiming the reviews on display are all of them when negative ones were hidden.
- Buying or selling fake followers and views for commercial use.
One practice didn’t make the final cut: review hijacking, where a seller attaches the reviews of one product to a different one. The FTC dropped that section because it couldn’t settle how different two products had to be for it to count. That doesn’t make it legal. In 2023 the agency settled a case with The Bountiful Company, which it accused of using Amazon’s variation feature to group supplements with different ingredients so new products borrowed the ratings of established ones. The company paid $600,000 and did not admit the allegations.
Review hijacking matters for shoppers because it’s invisible at a glance. The rating under the product title looks like it belongs to the thing you’re buying. Sometimes it belongs to that product’s older cousin.
A ten-minute check before you buy
None of these steps proves anything alone. Together they usually separate a product with a real track record from one with a manufactured one.
1. Look at the spread, not the average
A 4.5 can come from hundreds of reviews spread across every star level, or from a wall of fives sitting on top of a cluster of ones. The second shape deserves a closer look. Open the one-star reviews and read what they complain about. If they describe the same failure over and over (it died after a month, the zipper broke, it doesn’t fit the model it claims to fit), that’s information the five-star reviews never mention.
2. Sort by newest
Product pages usually default to “top” or “most helpful” reviews, which can be years old. Sort by most recent and scroll for a minute. You’re looking for timing patterns: a burst of glowing reviews within a few days, or a recent run of complaints after a long stretch of praise. The second one often means the product changed (new factory, cheaper part, new seller) while the old reviews stayed put.
3. Read the three-star reviews first
This is the habit I’d keep if I could only keep one. Three-star reviewers tend to be people who wanted to like the product and are telling you exactly why they couldn’t fully. They mention fit, noise, battery life and assembly time in plain terms. Paid and fake reviews rarely land at three stars, since the whole point of them is to move the average.
4. Make sure the reviews are about this product
On listings with several sizes, colors or versions, many retailers show which variation each reviewer bought. Check whether the reviews you’re reading match the one in your cart. If a listing for a 10-inch skillet is full of people describing a saucepan, or a phone case listing has reviews for three different phone models, the ratings were pooled. Pooling can be harmless, but it means the stars aren’t telling you about your specific item.
5. Trust buyer photos over brand photos
Photos and videos uploaded by buyers show real lighting, real scale and real wear. Look for shots taken weeks or months in, not just unboxing pictures. A product with thousands of reviews and almost no buyer photos is unusual enough to notice.
6. Check the reviewer, not just the review
On sites that let you click a reviewer’s name, do it for two or three of the most enthusiastic ones. A profile full of five-star reviews of unrelated products posted on the same day doesn’t look like a person shopping. A profile with a mix of ratings and some complaints usually does.
7. Notice the language
Fake and paid reviews tend to be vague and oddly formal. They repeat the full product name, praise “quality” without saying what part is good, and could be pasted under any similar item. Real reviews are messier. They name the thing that annoyed them, compare it to what they owned before, and mention a detail you’d only know from using it. AI has made fakes more fluent, so polish alone doesn’t prove much either way. Specifics still do.
What the review labels mean
On Amazon, a Verified Purchase badge means Amazon confirmed the reviewer bought the item on Amazon at a price available to most shoppers. It’s useful, but it’s a fact about the purchase, not about honesty. A seller can still pressure a real buyer into a five-star review.
Vine reviews come from Amazon’s invitation-only reviewer program, where members get products free and their reviews are labeled. Amazon says staying in the program doesn’t depend on giving positive feedback. I read Vine reviews as early, detailed first impressions from people who didn’t pay, which is useful for features and setup and less useful for how something holds up after a year.
The insert card and other red flags
Some products arrive with a small card offering a gift card, a free accessory or an extended warranty in exchange for a five-star review. That’s exactly the kind of sentiment-linked reward the FTC rule bans, and Amazon’s own policy says sellers can’t offer compensation for a positive or negative review. If you get one, Amazon has a page for reporting review compensation offers, and the card itself is a good reason to discount that product’s rating.
Watch brand websites too, since a company’s own site decides which reviews you see. In April the FTC settled with TruHeight, which sells growth supplements for kids, over several thousand five-star reviews on its website that the agency says were written by employees. It also accused the company of handing out free or discounted products in exchange for five-star reviews. Back in 2022, the online retailer Fashion Nova agreed to pay $4.2 million to settle FTC charges that, for about four years, it held back reviews under four stars while publishing the rest. Fashion Nova disputed the claims. The lesson for shoppers holds either way: reviews on the seller’s own site should be checked against a retailer or forum the seller doesn’t control.
The FTC’s guidance for businesses says the same thing from the other side. It tells companies not to ask for reviews only from customers they expect to be happy, a practice known as review gating. When a follow-up email sends happy customers to a review page and everyone else to a private feedback form, that’s what the setup looks like from the buyer’s side.
Where the shortcuts went
For years a lot of people pasted links into Fakespot to get a letter grade on a product’s reviews. Mozilla shut Fakespot down on July 1, 2025, and the Review Checker built into Firefox ended on June 10, 2025. Some smaller tools still exist, but I wouldn’t hand the decision to any automated score. The seven checks above take about as long as reading a grade and explaining it to yourself.
Outside opinions help with bigger purchases. A long-term owner thread on a hobby forum, a teardown video, or a recall search on the manufacturer’s site can tell you things no star rating will.
When you still can’t tell
Sometimes the reviews are a coin flip: decent spread, no obvious fakes, no obvious real owners either. In that case, let the return policy make the call. Buy from the seller with the longer and simpler return window, keep the box until you’ve used the item for a week, and put the return deadline in your phone. A generous return policy is protection a fake review can’t take away.
And if a product’s page only looks convincing after you’ve ignored three of the checks above, the cheaper move is usually the one with fewer reviews and more honest ones.
