The UK Fake Reviews Ban and What Vendor Ratings Now Mean

Since 6 April 2025 fake and undisclosed-incentive reviews are banned practices under the DMCC Act 2024 - what does that change about how a UK buyer should read a research supplier's reviews and ratings?

On 6 April 2025 the consumer-protection part of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force, and with it a banned practice covering consumer reviews ^[3]. Writing or commissioning a fake review is now unlawful in itself. So is commissioning or submitting a review that hides the fact it was incentivised, and so is publishing reviews in a way that misleads. The Competition and Markets Authority can enforce the ban directly and fine without going to court ^[4].

For a buyer reading a supplier's rating, the ban does two things. It makes some manipulation clearly illegal and gives the CMA the power to act on it. It does not turn a rating into evidence about the contents of a vial. A clean five-star average remains a statement about customer experience, not a measurement of purity. Dates and figures below were checked against the cited sources on 10 October 2026.

What changed on 6 April 2025

Before April 2025, fake reviews were already caught by general rules on misleading practices, but enforcement ran through the courts. The Commencement No. 2 Regulations 2025 brought Part 3 of the Act (enforcement of consumer protection law) and Chapter 1 of Part 4 (protection from unfair trading) into force on 6 April 2025, with a small number of sections excepted ^[3].

Schedule 20 lists commercial practices that are unfair in all circumstances. Paragraph 13 is the one that concerns reviews ^[2]. The CMA published its guidance on it, CMA208, on 4 April 2025, two days before the ban applied ^[1].

The new regime is not limited to the seller being reviewed. The guidance addresses traders who submit or commission reviews, those who publish them, and those who offer services to traders that supply or facilitate banned reviews ^[1].

The banned practices

Paragraph 13 describes a fake review as one that purports to be based on a person's genuine experience but is not. It covers submitting one, or commissioning someone else to write one, and commissioning includes incentivising by any means ^[2].

It separately covers a review that conceals the fact it was incentivised. The CMA's examples include offering an existing customer a free or discounted product for a five-star review, and contacting a customer who left a negative review to offer a refund or gift card if they change it ^[1].

Negative reviews are protected too. The guidance says suppressing genuine negative reviews is problematic, and that a trader should not interfere with a reviewer's willingness to leave one, or edit reviews to limit their impact ^[1]. Fake negative reviews, such as those a rival might post, are equally banned.

What the CMA expects of a review policy

The guidance sets out steps that publishers of reviews are likely to need. They include a published policy that prohibits fake reviews and states the approach to incentivised ones, an assessment of the risk that consumers meet banned reviews, and then detection, investigation and action ^[1].

Where incentivised reviews are allowed, the policy should require the incentive to be apparent. Where they are not, the policy should say so. Either way, concealed incentives must be prohibited ^[1].

A buyer can use that as a test. A supplier that collects reviews on its own site should be able to say where its policy is, whether it offers anything in return for a review, and how it handles a negative one. Silence on all three is not proof of a breach, but it is the opposite of a documented process.

Penalties and who enforces

Under the direct enforcement regime the CMA can decide for itself whether a breach occurred, order a business to change its practices, require redress for affected consumers and impose financial penalties. Law-firm commentary puts the maximum at 10 per cent of annual global turnover for a breach of the new prohibitions, with lower caps for failing to comply with information notices or breaching an undertaking ^[4].

The same commentary says breaches of the review prohibitions are enforced through this civil route rather than criminal sanctions ^[4]. Read the Act and the CMA's own pages for the exact penalty provisions before quoting a figure in a formal setting; this article relies on a secondary summary for that number.

Reading a rating after the ban

The law raises the cost of manipulating a rating. It does not guarantee that any given rating is clean. The signals that were always worth checking are still worth checking.

1. Look for labelled incentives. Under the guidance, an incentivised review should be distinguished from the rest ^[1]. A page with a large number of reviews and no label anywhere has either no incentives or a policy gap.
2. Look at the distribution. A genuine spread includes some middling and some poor reviews. An unbroken wall of identical five-star text is a pattern, not a verdict.
3. Look at timing. Dozens of reviews in a few days after a long silence is worth a question.
4. Look at what the reviews describe. Useful ones talk about dispatch, packaging, communication and paperwork. Reviews that speak of effects on a person are a different problem, covered below.
5. Look for where the reviews are published. A review hosted by an independent platform is subject to that platform's own duty to prevent and remove banned reviews ^[1].

Why reviews of a research reagent cannot describe outcomes

A review of a research reagent has a narrow lawful range. It can describe the order process, the condition on arrival, whether documentation matched the item, and how the seller handled a problem. It cannot lawfully claim that a product treats, prevents or improves any condition in a person, because research compounds are not medicines and are supplied for laboratory research only.

That is useful for a buyer. A review page that fills up with testimonials about physical effects is not showing customer satisfaction; it is showing that the seller either wrote them or tolerates them. Either way, the seller is the party responsible for the page. The advertising rules article on this site covers the separate regime that governs claims.

If you suspect a pattern

A consumer who suspects fake reviews or concealed incentives can report the trader through the Citizens Advice consumer service, which passes reports to Trading Standards. The CMA is the body that enforces the review ban, and its website sets out how to contact it. Keep screenshots with dates, the page address and the names of the reviews you are concerned about.

Before reporting, make sure the concern is a pattern rather than a single poor review. One unhappy customer is not evidence of anything. Twenty near-identical reviews posted within an hour is.