Astroturf

Astroturfing is often the name for disguising "an orchestrated, paid campaign as a grassroots effort" to create "a false appearance of genuine, unpaid public support", the New York Attorney General's office has written. The office found that "the nation's largest broadband companies funded a secret campaign to generate millions of comments" to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in a 2017 proceeding to repeal net neutrality rules, which barred broadband providers from "blocking, slowing down, or charging companies to prioritize certain content". It also found that nearly every company hired to sign people up fabricated people's responses instead, so more than 8.5 million fake comments impersonated real people.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), its rule that took effect on October 21, 2024, bans buying or selling fake indicators of social media influence, such as "followers or views generated by a bot or hijacked account", when the buyer knew or should have known they were fake and they misrepresent the buyer's influence or importance for a commercial purpose.

Methods

Merriam-Webster defines astroturfing as organized activity "intended to create a false impression of a widespread, spontaneously arising, grassroots movement" that is "in reality initiated and controlled by a concealed group or organization (such as a corporation)". A sock puppet, in the same dictionary's definition, is "a false online identity used for deceptive purposes". The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines one sense of bot as "a computer program that creates fake social media accounts and communicates with other users".

Paid and fake reviews

The FTC says the New York-based rental listing platform Roomster "saturated the internet with tens of thousands of four- and five-star fake reviews" that it largely bought from Jonathan Martinez, doing business as AppWinn, who had already agreed to settle the FTC's charges. According to the complaint, filed in August 2022, Martinez used more than 2,500 fake iTunes accounts, as well as fake gmail accounts, to push out fake reviews on Roomster's apps, and before he became aware of the investigation his website said "Buy app reviews & boost your app ranking". The complaint alleges that even after receiving notice of the FTC's investigation, the Roomster defendants emailed Martinez: "please make sure it's always a random number of reviews, so it looks more natural".

Under a proposed order the FTC announced on August 28, 2023, Roomster and its owners, John Shriber and Roman Zaks, would be permanently banned from paying or otherwise providing incentives for consumer reviews. The proposed order includes a monetary judgment of $36.2 million and civil penalties totaling $10.9 million payable to the states; the FTC said these amounts would be suspended after Roomster and its owners paid $1.6 million to the six states that joined the case (New York, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois and Massachusetts), "based upon the defendants' inability to pay the full amount".

In April 2023, the UK consumer organization Which? reported finding 14 Facebook groups trading in reviews for Amazon, Google My Business and Trustpilot, which shared more than 62,000 members between them.

The Bountiful Company was the subject of what the FTC called its first law enforcement challenging "review hijacking", in which a marketer steals or repurposes reviews of another product. The final consent order, which the Commission approved on March 28, 2023 by four votes to none, required Bountiful to pay $600,000 as monetary relief for consumers.

The FTC alleges that between November 2015 and August 2017, managers at the cosmetics firm Sunday Riley Skincare, including its chief executive, Sunday Riley, posted reviews of their branded products on the website of the beauty retailer Sephora "using fake accounts created to hide their identity", and asked other employees to do the same. According to the FTC, a July 2016 email from Riley directed each staff member to "create three accounts on Sephora.com, registered as . . . different identities", to "[a]lways leave 5 stars" when reviewing the company's products and to "dislike" negative reviews. The FTC quoted Riley as writing: "If you see a negative review – DISLIKE it" and "After enough dislikes, it is removed. This directly translates into sales!!" The proposed consent order would prohibit the company and Riley, in connection with the sale of any product, from misrepresenting the status of any endorser or person reviewing the product; the Commission approved it by three votes to two, with Commissioners Rohit Chopra and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter voting no.

Fake followers and engagement

In October 2019, Devumi, LLC and its owner and chief executive, German Calas, Jr., agreed to settle what the FTC called its "first-ever complaint challenging the sale of fake indicators of social media influence", which the FTC describes as important metrics that businesses and individuals use in making hiring, investing, purchasing, licensing, and viewing decisions. According to the FTC, Devumi filled more than 58,000 orders for fake Twitter followers, and allegedly had more than 4,000 sales of fake YouTube subscribers and over 32,000 sales of fake YouTube views to its clients, including musicians who wanted to increase the apparent popularity of their songs.

Marketing firms and AI accounts

The video game website Kotaku reported in November 2025 that Trap Plan, a large video game marketing company, admitted that it used multiple fake Reddit accounts to help promote a game called WarRobots: Frontiers, with the accounts pretending to be fans and players who just happened to discover the game. According to Kotaku, a post by Trap Plan's chief executive, Pavel Beresnev, which the agency later deleted, described how the agency used multiple Reddit accounts to create over 40 posts. Beresnev told Kotaku in an email that the agency's intention had been to experiment with promoting games on Reddit "without using bots or fake accounts", and that the work "was entirely our initiative and not commissioned or endorsed by MY.GAMES in any way".

In May 2024, the artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI said it had disrupted activity by "a commercial company in Israel called STOIC" and nicknamed the operation Zero Zeno; according to OpenAI, the people behind the operation used OpenAI's models to generate articles and comments that were posted across multiple platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, X and websites associated with the operation. In its case study of the operation, OpenAI said it identified the operation's fake accounts, in some cases, commenting on posts made by the operation itself, "likely in an attempt to create the impression of audience engagement". According to OpenAI, open-source research by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab found some of the operation's content on Facebook, Instagram and X, and when those accounts were disabled, the operation acquired new ones. OpenAI said Zero Zeno's activity "appears to have attracted little if any engagement, other than from its own inauthentic accounts". Meta's threat report of May 2024 said that the individuals behind one network had attempted to conceal their identity and coordination, but that Meta found links to STOIC, "a political marketing and business intelligence firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel"; Meta said STOIC was banned from its platform and that it had issued STOIC a cease and desist letter.

Meta said in 2021 that it views coordinated inauthentic behavior as coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal where "fake accounts are central to the operation". In its August 2026 threat report, Meta said AI-enabled content generation had moved from an occasional tactic of the most resourced actors to "a near-standard component of influence operation tradecraft", and that every one of the coordinated inauthentic behavior networks it disrupted and shared in the report "incorporated some form of generative AI that we could identify". In one example from the report, a commercial operation based in Israel used one AI platform "to automate commenting at scale". In the report's case study of a coordinated inauthentic behavior network originating in Israel, Meta reported removing 215 Facebook accounts, 4 Pages and 1,044 Instagram accounts; the network also had a presence on TikTok, X and its own websites, and its operators spent around $100 on ads. Meta said the network maintained clusters of "lower-sophistication, automated fake accounts specifically designed to artificially boost engagement to its main accounts", and assessed that it was "an influence-for-hire operation, likely run on behalf of a number of distinct clients".

Cost and scale

Prices for fake engagement

In 2021, researchers at the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence spent 279 euros and received 114,061 inauthentic engagements (1,385 comments, 13,859 likes, 93,009 views and 5,808 shares) on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and VKontakte, which let them identify 9,846 accounts being used for social media manipulation. The same report found that in 2021, on Instagram, 10 euros was enough to buy almost 100,000 fake views, 25,000 fake likes, 1,000 fake comments, or 15,000 fake followers. Of the 114,061 fake engagements purchased, more than 96% remained online and active after four weeks; even after discounting fake views, more than 86% of the 21,052 other fake engagements remained active after a month.

In a December 2019 report, researchers at the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence assessed that "more than 90% of purchased engagements on social media are used for commercial purposes".

To register a new account, online platforms require verification by text message: a code sent to a valid phone number, intended to confirm that a human is setting the account up. Analysis of data from the University of Cambridge's Cambridge Online Trust and Safety Index, collected between July 25, 2024 and July 27, 2025, found that Meta, Grindr and Shopify ranked among the platforms with the cheapest fake accounts for sale, at a global average of $0.08 per verification. X and Instagram followed at an average of $0.10 per account, TikTok and LinkedIn at $0.11, and Amazon at $0.12.

A study of fake interaction services on social media by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the research institute IMDEA Networks, announced in February 2023, found that buying 1,000 likes on Instagram from such services cost 1.3 euros, while 2 euros could get 1,000 views on YouTube or 1,000 plays on Spotify.

Volume of fake reviews and bot traffic

Imperva, whose products include Advanced Bot Protection, reported in April 2026 that automated traffic accounted for "more than 53% of all web traffic in 2025, up from 51% the year before". In the same post Imperva wrote: "Human activity has declined to just 47% and continues to fall." The cybersecurity company Thales says the 2026 Thales Bad Bot Report is based on analysis of full-year 2025 bot activity and combines insights from its Thales Threat Research and Security Analyst Services teams, "who investigate and mitigate bot attacks across industries worldwide", and that Thales blocked 17.2 trillion bot requests in 2025.

On its fake-accounts enforcement page, Meta estimated that in the first and second quarters of 2026, less than 5% of its worldwide daily active people measured across its family of apps consisted solely of violating accounts. Meta counts as fake accounts both those created with malicious intent to violate its policies and personal profiles created to represent a business, organization or non-human entity, such as a pet, and it does not include blocked attempts to create accounts in these figures.

Trustpilot, a review platform, reported that of the 4.5 million detected fake reviews it removed in 2024, 90% were detected automatically by its fake review detection models. Trustpilot defines fake reviews as reviews that "don’t reflect genuine service or buying experiences with a business"; the detected fake reviews it removed were 7.4% of all reviews submitted in 2024, up from 6.1% in 2023. Trustpilot wrote that the increase demonstrates its automated detection systems are improving.

Amazon said in a November 2025 blog post that in 2024 it blocked more than 275 million suspected fake reviews from appearing in its store. Google said in an April 2026 blog post that in 2025 it blocked or removed over 292 million policy-violating reviews on Google Maps and removed over 13 million fake Business Profiles.

Money lost to fake reviews

Research published in April 2023 by the UK's Department for Business and Trade found that 11% to 15% of all reviews on e-commerce platforms for three common product categories (consumer electronics, home and kitchen, and sports and outdoors) are likely fake, and that fake review text on products alone causes an estimated £50 million to £312 million in total yearly harm to UK consumers. The findings do not extend to services purchased online or account for the impact of inflated star ratings, so the department said the true consumer detriment caused by fake reviews is "likely to be higher".

In the regulatory analysis of its August 2024 rule on consumer reviews, the FTC wrote that the study with "the most direct estimate of welfare losses from review manipulation", a November 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Jesper Akesson and others, finds that the presence of fake reviews leads consumers to lose $0.12 for every dollar spent in an experimental setting. The FTC wrote that $0.12 might be an underestimate of the rule's effect, because the study does not include suppression of negative reviews or misrepresenting the independence of reviews, and might be an overestimate, because the study measures the effect of complete elimination of inflated star ratings and false written narratives. Noting that estimates of the incidence of fake or false reviews vary by source, the FTC relied on studies finding that approximately 10% of products or businesses have some manipulated consumer reviews, and estimated annual welfare gains from the rule of $6.64 billion to $17.52 billion by applying the $0.12 figure to US sales likely to have some manipulated consumer reviews.

Harm to consumers

Deceptive marketing

In an October 2013 decision about bloggers hired to post comments online, Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission reasoned that blog readers "are likely to trust the experience of other consumers when shopping for certain products". It added that because the comments were posted by bloggers, "consumers usually would not associate them with any business entity", so their reliability was increased, & competitors "could not rule out the possibility that such comments did come from consumers".

Andrew Smith, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in an October 2019 press release: "Posting fake reviews on shopping websites or buying and selling fake followers is illegal". Samuel Levine, who held the same post in January 2022, said: "Deceptive review practices cheat consumers, undercut honest businesses, and pollute online commerce".

Fake reviews and purchase decisions

Research published by the UK Department for Business and Trade in April 2023 found that "well-written fake reviews distort consumer decision making", with consumers 3.1% more likely to purchase a product with well-written fake reviews. In a November 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Jesper Akesson and three co-authors found that participants in their online experiment who saw inflated star ratings plus fake written reviews were 12.6 percentage points more likely to purchase the product that the UK consumer protection organization Which? had classified as a "Don't Buy" than those shown no fake reviews. The authors wrote that this "corresponds to a 120% increase in the share of participants that purchase a low-quality product". The FTC's advice to consumers warns that fake reviews "are not always positive"; sometimes a company might post fake negative reviews to harm a competitor.

In July 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission announced that Australia's Federal Court had ordered Service Seeking Pty Ltd to pay A$600,000 in penalties for making false or misleading representations about reviews of businesses offering services on its platform. On the platform, customers can seek quotes for jobs such as gardening, building or cleaning from businesses registered with it. Service Seeking admitted that it had falsely represented that reviews published on its platform were by customers, when in fact the businesses themselves had created them through its "Fast Feedback" feature. In his judgment, Justice Jackson called the conduct "an abuse of the trust" that customers can be inferred to have placed in the site.

Businesses preventing negative reviews

The FTC announced in January 2022 that online fashion retailer Fashion Nova, LLC would be prohibited from suppressing customer reviews of its products & required to pay $4.2 million to settle the agency's allegations that it blocked negative reviews of its products from being posted to its website. The FTC alleged in a complaint that the retailer misrepresented that the product reviews on its website reflected the views of all purchasers who submitted reviews, when in fact it suppressed reviews with ratings lower than 4 stars out of 5. The agency said the case was its first involving a company's efforts to conceal negative customer reviews.

In November 2017, Australia's Federal Court found that from November 2014 to October 2015, Meriton Property Services Pty Ltd, which trades as Meriton Serviced Apartments, engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct by taking steps to prevent guests it suspected "would give an unfavourable review" from receiving TripAdvisor's "Review Express" prompt email. Meriton inserted additional letters into guests' email addresses provided to TripAdvisor so that the prompt email never reached the guest, or did not send guest email addresses to TripAdvisor. The court found that on several occasions Meriton did this for the majority of guests staying at one of its hotels during infrastructure or service problems, "such as no hot water or a lift not working". In July 2018, the court ordered Meriton to pay penalties of A$3 million for manipulating TripAdvisor reviews, in breach of the Australian Consumer Law.

Laws and enforcement

FTC consumer reviews rule

The Federal Trade Commission's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials is Part 465 of Title 16 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It took effect on October 21, 2024. In the Federal Register notice of the final rule, the FTC wrote that the rule, among other things, prohibits selling or purchasing fake consumer reviews or testimonials, buying positive or negative consumer reviews, certain insiders creating reviews or testimonials "without clearly disclosing their relationships", company-controlled review websites that falsely purport to provide independent reviews, certain review suppression practices, and selling or purchasing fake indicators of social media influence.

Paragraph (a) of § 465.2 makes it "an unfair or deceptive act or practice" for a business to write, create, or sell a consumer review, consumer testimonial, or celebrity testimonial that materially misrepresents, expressly or by implication, that the reviewer or testimonialist exists, that they used or otherwise had experience with the product, service, or business reviewed, or what their experience was. Under § 465.4, "Buying positive or negative consumer reviews", it is a violation for a business to provide compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned expressly or by implication on, consumer reviews "expressing a particular sentiment, whether positive or negative".

Under § 465.7, "Review suppression", it is a violation for anyone to use an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a public false accusation in response to a consumer review that is made with the knowledge that the accusation was false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity, in an attempt to prevent a review or any portion of it from being written or created, or to cause a review or any portion of it to be removed, whether or not it is replaced with other content. It is also a violation for a business to materially misrepresent, expressly or by implication, that the reviews it displays represent most or all of the reviews submitted when reviews are being suppressed based upon their ratings or their negative sentiment. For that provision, a review is not considered suppressed based upon rating or negative sentiment if it is withheld under criteria applied equally to all reviews submitted without regard to sentiment, such as when the seller reasonably believes the review is fake.

The text of § 465.8, "Misuse of fake indicators of social media influence", reads:

It is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this part for anyone to: (a) Sell or distribute fake indicators of social media influence that they knew or should have known to be fake and that can be used by individuals or businesses to materially misrepresent their influence or importance for a commercial purpose; or (b) Purchase or procure fake indicators of social media influence that they knew or should have known to be fake and that materially misrepresent their influence or importance for a commercial purpose.

Paragraph (h) of § 465.1 defines the term:

Fake indicators of social media influence means indicators of social media influence generated by bots, purported individual accounts not associated with a real individual, accounts created with a real individual's personal information without their consent, or hijacked accounts, or that otherwise do not reflect a real individual's or entity's activities, opinions, findings, or experiences.

The FTC announced the final rule on August 14, 2024. In the Statement of Basis and Purpose published with the rule, the FTC wrote:

It is not the creation of the bot or fake account, itself, that the rule makes illegal, but the use of the bot or fake account to follow another user, watch another user's videos, or create other fake indicia of social media influence.

The same statement says that any person or business that obtains fake indicators of social media influence is misrepresenting their social media influence, and that individuals who are not doing so for a commercial purpose "are excluded from the rule's scope".

In November 2024 guidance answering business questions about the rule, FTC staff wrote that a business that paid a third-party company to increase its followers, and was given fake followers without its knowledge, would not be liable "unless there were some red flags" that should have tipped it off. FTC staff also wrote that hiring influencers to recommend that their followers follow a business's account does not count as procuring fake indicators, "because these followers are real people who chose to follow the business account", and answered "No" to whether a business would be liable for hiring influencers "who happen to have fake followers".

On December 22, 2025, the FTC announced that its staff had sent letters to 10 companies warning them of potential violations of the rule, which the FTC calls the Consumer Review Rule. The FTC said the letters, based on consumer complaints and information provided by the companies, "are not formal determinations" that the recipients violated the rule, and that they warn that violations can result in a federal lawsuit or other legal action and "civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation".

The FTC set the $53,088 maximum for a "knowing violation of rule respecting unfair or deceptive acts or practices" in an adjustment effective January 17, 2025, up from $51,744; the new levels apply to civil penalties assessed after that date, including for violations that predated it. In a notice effective September 15, 2026, the FTC said civil penalty amounts "will remain unchanged during 2026" and that it "will continue to apply the 2025 civil penalty levels".

The FTC announced on July 15, 2026, that it had finalized an order with Vanilla Chip LLC, which does business as TruHeight, and its two principals over the advertising of supplements that claim to boost height growth in children and teenagers. The order imposes a $4 million judgment that will be partially suspended after they pay $750,000, based on their inability to pay the full amount. The FTC's complaint alleges that in May 2023 the respondents engaged a third-party contractor to operate software-automated profiles, and that they purchased approximately 176 Facebook and Instagram profiles that, "while masquerading as accounts belonging to real, existing users, were in fact software-automated bots" and posted fake, software-generated comments on their Facebook and Instagram pages. The complaint's counts under the rule, which allege violations in "numerous instances after October 21, 2024", cite Section 465.2(a) and Section 465.4.

On May 11, 2026, the FTC announced that the Department of Justice, on behalf of the FTC, and the state of Illinois had sued Premium Home Service, a Chicago-based company, and its owner, accusing them of creating thousands of fake online business listings for home repair companies. The complaint, which the Department of Justice filed in the federal district court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleges that the defendants violated the Reviews and Testimonials Rule by writing, creating, buying, or selling fake reviews and by seeking and using fake reviews from employees and relatives.

Earlier US enforcement

The New York Attorney General's office announced a settlement on July 14, 2009, with cosmetic surgery business Lifestyle Lift over the publishing of fake consumer reviews on the Internet. Under the settlement, Lifestyle Lift would stop publishing anonymous positive reviews about the company to Internet message boards and other websites and would pay $300,000 in penalties and costs to the State of New York. The office said the case was believed to be the first in the nation aimed at combating astroturfing.

On September 23, 2013, the New York Attorney General's office announced that 19 companies had agreed to cease writing fake online reviews for businesses and to pay more than $350,000 in penalties, after a year-long undercover investigation it called "Operation Clean Turf". The office found that many of these companies used techniques to hide their identities, such as creating fake online profiles on consumer review websites and paying freelance writers from as far away as the Philippines, Bangladesh and Eastern Europe $1 to $10 per review. According to the office, the management of US Coachways, Inc., a bus charter company based in Staten Island, wrote bogus reviews themselves, solicited freelance writers from oDesk.com and Fiverr.com to write bogus reviews, and urged employees to pose as customers and write positive reviews. Attorney General Schneiderman said astroturfing "is the 21st century's version of false advertising".

On February 26, 2019, the FTC announced what it called its "first case challenging a marketer’s use of fake paid reviews on an independent retail website", against Cure Encapsulations, Inc. and its owner, Naftula Jacobowitz, over their garcinia cambogia weight-loss supplement. The FTC alleged that the defendants paid a website, amazonverifiedreviews.com, to create and post Amazon reviews of the product, and contended that Jacobowitz told the website's operator that the product needed an average rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars in order to have sales. The proposed court order settling the complaint imposes a judgment of $12.8 million, which will be suspended upon payment of $50,000 to the Commission and the payment of certain unpaid income tax obligations.

Consumer Review Fairness Act

The Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 was approved on December 14, 2016; its section 2, on consumer review protection, is codified at 15 USC 45b. Except as the act provides, a provision of a form contract is void from the inception of the contract if it prohibits or restricts the ability of an individual who is a party to the contract to engage in a covered communication, or imposes a penalty or fee against that individual for doing so. The act defines a covered communication as a written, oral, or pictorial review, performance assessment of, or other similar analysis of, including by electronic means, the goods, services, or conduct of a person by an individual who is party to a form contract with that person. It defines a form contract as a contract with standardized terms, used in selling or leasing goods or services, that is imposed on an individual without a meaningful opportunity to negotiate those terms, excluding employer-employee and independent contractor contracts.

The FTC has said that the Consumer Review Fairness Act was passed in response to reports that some businesses try to prevent people from giving honest reviews about products or services they received. According to the agency, some companies put contract provisions in place, including in their online terms & conditions, that allowed them to sue or penalize consumers for posting negative reviews.

Rules outside the United States

In the UK, Schedule 20 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, titled "Commercial practices which are in all circumstances considered unfair", includes "Submitting, or commissioning another person to submit or write" a fake consumer review, or a consumer review "that conceals the fact it has been incentivised". That paragraph, paragraph 13, came into force on April 6, 2025. On January 24, 2025, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the act would empower it to fine firms that break the law up to 10% of their global turnover.

On March 27, 2026, the CMA announced that it was investigating five businesses over fake and misleading reviews: Autotrader and Feefo, over whether a number of 1-star reviews moderated by Feefo were not published on Autotrader's platform; Dignity, over whether it asked staff to write positive reviews about its crematoria services; Just Eat, over whether its ratings system has inflated certain restaurants' and grocers' star ratings; and Pasta Evangelists, over whether customers were offered discounts on future orders in exchange for leaving 5-star reviews on delivery apps without this being disclosed. In that announcement, the CMA said it "has not reached any conclusions about whether consumer law has been broken".

In the European Union, Directive (EU) 2019/2161 added to Annex I of Directive 2005/29/EC, which concerns unfair business-to-consumer commercial practices, a point 23c covering "Submitting or commissioning another legal or natural person to submit false consumer reviews or endorsements", or misrepresenting consumer reviews or social endorsements, in order to promote products. Member States were to apply those measures from May 28, 2022.

On January 20, 2022, the European Commission reported that, in a screening of 223 websites with online reviews, national consumer protection authorities concluded that at least 55% of the checked websites potentially violate the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, and had doubts for a remaining 18%.

Amazon lawsuits against fake-review sellers

On July 19, 2022, Amazon filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court in Seattle against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups, which Amazon said "attempt to orchestrate fake reviews on Amazon in exchange for money or free products" and are set up to recruit individuals willing to post incentivized and misleading reviews on its stores in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan. CNBC reported that, according to screenshots of Facebook messages included in the complaint, administrators allegedly sought out fake reviews and offered them to Amazon sellers, charging $10 per review. Amazon said that since 2020 it had reported more than 10,000 fake review groups to Meta, which had taken down more than half of them for policy violations and was investigating others.

On July 31, 2025, Amazon said it had won a case against the operators of more than 75 fraudulent websites that marketed the sale of fake reviews and fake Amazon seller accounts, and that the court's ruling ordered the transfer of ownership of all related domains to Amazon.

Examples

FCC net neutrality comments

By the time the FCC's 2017 net neutrality rulemaking concluded in late 2017, the agency had received more than 22 million comments, against a prior record of 3.7 million comments set by its 2015 net neutrality proceeding. On December 14, 2017, the FCC voted, in the words of its news release, "to restore the longstanding, bipartisan light-touch regulatory framework". Chairman Pai, Commissioner O’Rielly & Commissioner Carr approved; Commissioners Clyburn & Rosenworcel dissented. In May 2021, the New York Attorney General's office reported that its multi-year investigation of the 2017 net neutrality rulemaking had found 18 million fake comments filed with the FCC & half a million fake letters sent to Congress.

According to the attorney general's report, the broadband industry tried to manufacture support for repeal by hiring lead generators, companies hired to generate comments for a fee. Nearly 80% of the comments were expected to come through co-registration, in which people are offered rewards such as gift cards, sweepstakes entries or an e-book of recipes for providing information about themselves & responding to marketing offers. Most of the lead generators never ran the campaign's solicitation at all: they copied names & addresses they had purchased or collected months or years earlier through unrelated lead generation efforts & passed them off as people who had agreed to join. In one case, an advertising company copied the names & contact information of approximately 1.4 million people from records that had been stolen in a data breach & dumped online in 2016.

Many of the campaign's comments provided "cover" for the FCC's repeal of net neutrality rules, the office found. It was run through Broadband for America, a non-profit organization funded by the broadband industry. Planning documents obtained by the office show the campaign's goal was to manufacture "widespread grassroots support" for the repeal of the FCC's net neutrality regulations, & budget documents show the broadband industry players that funded it spent $4.2 million generating & submitting more than 8.5 million fake comments to the FCC.

On June 19, 2017, the FCC received a comment in the name of Kenneth Langsam of Nassau, New York. Langsam had died seven years earlier; the report says the comment was fabricated & his identity stolen. In complaints to the office quoted in the report, one person wrote that their 10-year-old son's name had been used with the family's correct address & his correct email, & another wrote:

I find it extremely sick and disrespectful to be using my deceased dad to try to make an unpopular decision look the opposite.

The office also found that the FCC received another 9.3 million fake comments supporting net neutrality that used fictitious identities, most of them submitted by a 19-year-old college student using automated software. According to the report, the student, who was in California & pursuing a degree in computer science, submitted more than 7.7 million comments; all were fabricated, but none used the names or addresses of real people.

In its report, the office said it had not found evidence that the broadband companies that funded & organized the lead generators had direct knowledge of fraud, & so had not found that they violated New York law. The same passage says red flags were ignored by the campaign organizers, & that the way they ran the campaign (hiding the broadband industry's involvement, relying on lead generators that used commercial incentives to lure people to comment, & paying dubious vendors for volume rather than quality) "is troubling and raises important policy questions".

The FCC's Restoring Internet Freedom order, adopted on December 14, 2017 & released on January 4, 2018, said the decision "did not rely on comments devoid of substance", or on thousands of identical or nearly identical non-substantive comments that "simply convey support or opposition". The order rejected calls to delay its adoption over concerns that some non-substantive comments may have been submitted under multiple different names or allegedly fake names, & said the agency was under no legal obligation to adopt identity-verification procedures beyond what the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires.

In June 2019, the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the APA does not require people who comment to disclose identifying information, and that agencies have no obligation under the APA to verify commenters' identities. According to FCC officials cited by the GAO, when someone said a comment to the Restoring Internet Freedom rulemaking had been submitted using their identity information without their consent, officials directed the person to enter the complaint as a new comment but did not remove the original comment.

The attorney general's office announced agreements in May 2021 with three of the lead generators: Fluent, Inc., responsible for approximately 4.8 million fraudulent comments; Opt-Intelligence, Inc., responsible for more than 250,000 fraudulent comments; & React2Media, Inc., responsible for approximately 329,000 comments, all or nearly all of them fraudulent. The agreements require the companies to adopt "comprehensive reforms" in future advocacy campaigns & pay more than $4.4 million in penalties & disgorgement. On May 10, 2023, the office secured a further $615,000 from three companies, LCX, Lead ID & Ifficient, that supplied millions of fake public comments to the proceeding.

Samsung forum posts in Taiwan

In October 2013, Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission found that Samsung & two other companies had violated Article 24 of the Fair Trade Law by concealing their identity, pretending to be private citizens & making deceptive comparisons of products from other enterprises online. The commission's investigation found that between 2007 & 2012 the approaches included hiring a large number of bloggers & appointing company employees to post comments on the website Mobile 01 & other online discussion platforms to help market Samsung's products. The comments covered new product test results, sought to neutralize negative information about Samsung's products, compared competitors' products by pointing out their imperfections & heated up related discussion, & the blog writers were required to publish a certain number of articles to boost the visibility of the targeted product.

The commission imposed fines of 10 million New Taiwan Dollars (NTD) on Samsung, 3 million NTD on OpenTide Taiwan & 50,000 NTD on Sales & Profit International Co. The Taipei Times reported that Samsung Electronics Taiwan Co was fined for hiring online writers to promote its products without identifying themselves as employees working for its public relations company, & reported the commission as saying it was the first time it had penalized companies for such behavior. Some online writers hired by OpenTide Taiwan compared Samsung's products with those of HTC Corp, but commission spokesman Sun Lih-chyun said Samsung Taiwan's action could not be defined as defamatory because HTC refused to clarify allegations posted by those writers. Samsung Taiwan said in a statement that it was "disappointed by the commission’s ruling" & would review the commission's report & take appropriate actions when necessary.

University of Zurich Reddit experiment

In April 2025, the technology news site 404 Media reported that researchers who say they are from the University of Zurich had run an "unauthorized", large-scale experiment in which they secretly deployed AI-powered bots into r/changemyview, a popular debate subreddit (a forum on Reddit), in an attempt to research whether AI could be used to change people's minds about contentious topics. In some cases, the bots generated responses claiming they were rape survivors, worked with trauma patients, or were Black people opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement. The researchers used a separate AI to mine the posting history of the people the bots replied to for personal details, such as age, race, gender, location & political beliefs, that they believed would make the bots more effective. The bots made more than 1,700 comments, according to 404 Media.

Reddit's top lawyer, Ben Lee, said the company was considering legal action against the researchers over what he called an "improper and highly unethical experiment". In a statement quoted by the technology news site Engadget, Lee said: "We have banned all accounts associated with the University of Zurich research effort." The University of Zurich told 404 Media that the results would not be published & that it was investigating how the research was conducted. In their response to the subreddit's moderators, as quoted by NBC News, the researchers wrote:

A careful review of the content of these flagged comments revealed no instances of harmful, deceptive, or exploitative messaging, other than the potential ethical issue of impersonation itself.

Eliminalia

In February 2023, as part of its "Story Killers" project with partner outlets, the journalism group Forbidden Stories reported on Eliminalia, a Spanish reputation management firm. Eliminalia claims its services remove "unwanted and erroneous information" for clients with a "right to be forgotten", but nearly 50,000 internal company documents leaked to Forbidden Stories contradict this, the group reported. Forbidden Stories identified Eliminalia clients in 50 countries, & the leak covers around 1,500 current & former clients. It described the method of reputation laundering firms like Eliminalia: copy an article, publish it on a third-party website such as a blog or fake website with a falsified date earlier than the original, then claim the original article infringed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The Guardian found that the company impersonated third parties such as media organizations, filed fake copyright complaints to search engines such as Google to get information taken down, & in other cases buried negative articles under a deluge of fluffy stories about dogs, cars & football. In one instance, an Eliminalia employee appears to have falsely claimed to represent the company that owns the Italian newspaper La Repubblica when filing a false copyright complaint to Google; the newspaper's owner told the Guardian it did not file the complaint or have an employee who matched the complainant's name. The Washington Post reported that company records show Eliminalia sent thousands of bogus copyright-infringement complaints to search engines & web hosting companies between 2015 & 2021 under made-up company names, falsely claiming that negative articles about its clients had previously been published elsewhere & stolen. Researchers at Qurium, a Swedish non-profit that provides web hosting & digital security services to investigative journalists & human rights organizations, linked more than 600 fake news websites to Eliminalia, the Post reported.

Most customers paid Eliminalia several thousand dollars, although three paid more than $200,000, & a 2018 contract priced targeting a single webpage at as little as 550 euros, or $590, according to the records the Post reviewed. Eliminalia reported combined revenue of just over 2.5 million euros, or roughly $2.7 million, in 2020 & 2021, according to public records it filed with the Spanish government. Eliminalia & its founder did not respond to the Post's detailed questions; lawyers representing the company said it would not answer, in part because the inquiries concerned "business secrecy" or information on customers about whom it could not answer.

Team Jorge

On February 15, 2023, Forbidden Stories published an investigation titled "'Team Jorge': In the heart of a global disinformation machine". The Guardian reported the same day that the team, Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage & automated disinformation on social media, is run by Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces operative who works privately under the pseudonym "Jorge". Between July & December 2022, journalists from Radio France, TheMarker & Haaretz posed as clients & attended several meetings with Jorge, three online & one in his office in Israel. In 2022, according to Forbidden Stories, Jorge had a catalog of more than 30,000 automated profiles of virtual people with real accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon & Bitcoin.

According to the Guardian, Hanan told the undercover reporters "[We have completed] 33 presidential-level campaigns, 27 of which were successful"; the Guardian wrote that it was not possible to verify all of Team Jorge's claims & that Hanan may have been embellishing them to secure a lucrative deal with prospective clients. In the summer of 2022, Jorge told a potential client, who presented himself as representing an African leader hoping to postpone or even cancel an election, that the job would cost some 6 million euros. The Guardian reported that Hanan said he would charge between 6 million & 15 million euros for interference in elections, & that it appears he may have inflated his fees.

One of the team's key services is a software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions (Aims); the Guardian & its reporting partners tracked Aims-linked bot activity behind fake social media campaigns, mostly involving commercial disputes, in about 20 countries including the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Senegal, India & the United Arab Emirates. Hanan did not respond to detailed questions about Team Jorge's activities & methods but said: "I deny any wrongdoing." His brother & business partner, Zohar Hanan, said: "I have been working all my life according to the law!"

Hollywood smear-campaign lawsuits

On October 6, 2026, The New York Times published an investigation headlined "How to Destroy a Reputation in Hollywood, as Told in 5 Women’s Lawsuits". It reported that in recent years at least five women had filed lawsuits describing malicious public relations campaigns intended to destroy their reputations. According to the Times, the campaigns were launched within months of each other & designed to be untraceable, but the same language echoed across multiple websites, & invisible links drove traffic back & forth among them.

Actress Blake Lively said a campaign was waged against her in 2024 in retaliation for accusing actor Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment; Baldoni denied the claims & filed a countersuit, which was dismissed. In her lawsuit, Lively described a coordinated social media campaign orchestrated by a Los Angeles lawyer, a New York publicist & a Texas digital strategist, the Times reported. TAG, the public relations group of publicist Melissa Nathan, & digital strategist Jed Wallace were named as defendants in her suit against Baldoni, while Bryan Freedman, who is not named as a defendant, is Baldoni's lawyer.

Lively & Baldoni settled their remaining claims against each other in May 2026 without either side receiving financial compensation, the Los Angeles Times reported. In August 2026, the clerk of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York entered a judgment awarding Lively $363,245.40 in attorney's fees & $44,206.35 in costs, a total of $407,451.75. Freedman said in a statement that the fee ruling "is a significant victory for my clients".

Alexa Nikolas, a former child actress who starred in Nickelodeon's Zoey 101, filed a defamation suit in Los Angeles in 2026 accusing Freedman, Nathan & Wallace of spreading a retaliatory digital campaign about her filled with "damaging lies". According to the Times, a website describing Nikolas as a "sinister and criminal force" was published in late November 2022, & was then amplified by at least 16 social media profiles & more than 70 Wikipedia posts with similar language, a strategy that all the women who have sued say manipulates internet search results to give more credence to lies & smears. Freedman, Nathan & Wallace have dismissed the allegations as defamation & harassment, & in several cases have countersued to clear their names, the Times reported. In an emailed response to the Times, Freedman wrote: "Allegations are not facts and these allegations are neither truthful nor accurate." Nathan and Wallace did not respond to the Times's requests for comment.

In August 2026, Judge Michael E. Whitaker denied Freedman's bid to dismiss Nikolas's case. In the ruling, as quoted by the entertainment news site TheWrap, the judge wrote of "a tangled web of connections" between the sites, & added:

Thus, the Court finds that Plaintiff alleges Defendants were engaged in a conspiracy to smear various individuals, including Plaintiff, each having an adversarial connection to one of Freedman’s clients, which not only alleges a motive, but also suggests that Freedman was involved in directing or otherwise effectuating all of those alleged smear campaigns.

Amanda Ghost, a songwriter & one of the producers of The Deb, the directorial debut of actress Rebel Wilson, sued Wilson for defamation in a dispute over screenwriting & songwriting credits on the film. According to the Times, text messages & emails included in Ghost's lawsuit show Nathan, then a publicist for Wilson, walking Wilson through how a disparaging website would unfold & how much it would cost. In one exchange recreated by the Times, Nathan wrote "110USD for untraceable site" with a "full algorithmic push across all platforms" for three months; when Wilson asked whether she meant only $110 in total, Nathan replied "110k" & "huge difference". In an emailed statement, Wilson's lawyer, Allyson Thompson, did not deny that Wilson had sent the texts or asked Nathan to create the website, but said Wilson did not personally & intentionally retain Nathan to destroy Ghost's reputation: "Those allegations are false."

Culinary influencer Paige Jimenez's lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court against Freedman, Wallace, Nathan & their companies, accuses all three of intentional infliction of emotional distress, the Times reported. A spokesperson for Nathan's firm, The Agency Group, said in a written statement quoted by the legal news service Courthouse News Service that the firm had "never had any contact with Paige Jimenez" or provided services to anyone relating to her; Freedman did not respond to the outlet's email requesting comment, nor did a spokesperson for Wallace's firm, Street Relations.

Taylor, Texas data-center video comments

In June 2026, consumer advocate Louis Rossmann posted a video about a city park in Taylor, Texas, becoming a data center, & wrote in a comment he pinned under it:

There are 3 bots replying to every comment. They have a name followed by a dash and then a random string of letters & numbers, and talk in traditional chatgpt speak.

In his own analysis of the video's comment section, in which an automated classifier rated the comments, Rossmann found 149 comments rated bot or likely bot, posted from 12 accounts; 11 of those accounts had a handle made of a name, a hyphen & a random string of letters & numbers, & 4 handles began with "jeffrey-". He also counted 13 comments from 8 accounts listing the same four meeting dates in the same order, 4 of them in identical wording. YouTube's help pages say that in certain instances, such as when a channel is created by posting a comment on mobile, YouTube may auto-assign a handle based on the chosen channel name, & that there may be cases where the handle is randomly assigned if the chosen channel name cannot be converted to a handle.

Signs to check

For years, the FTC's main recommendation when considering reviews has been to look at a variety of sources, including well-known websites that have trustworthy and impartial expert reviews. The FTC's December 22, 2025 consumer alert adds that people should pay attention to whether a website or its reviews are independent or sponsored. The FTC also advises checking how recent the reviews are and watching for a burst of reviews over a short period of time, which "can sometimes mean the reviews are fake". If it seems that a reviewer created an account just to write one review for one product, the FTC says "that review may be fake". The CMA advised in a March 27, 2026 press release that advances in artificial intelligence mean fake reviews "can now sound fluent, polished and highly convincing", and that a review which "uses very similar wording to others" may not reflect a real customer's experience.

The FTC tells readers not to assume that, just by looking, they can spot the difference between a real review and a fake one, and says "it can often be nearly impossible to tell for sure". It notes that some fake positive reviews give less than the highest possible rating "in order to seem more believable". The FTC asks people to report fake reviews to the website or platform where they appear, such as Google, Amazon or Walmart, and to tell the FTC about them at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

In a 2017 guide to spotting fake Twitter accounts, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) says that accounts which "all post the same content, or type of content, at the same time" are "probably programmed to do so". The guide calls an account's handle a further indicator of "probable botness" and says many bots have handles that are "simply alphanumeric scrambles generated by an algorithm". DFRLab cautions that "no single factor can be relied upon to identify bot-like behavior" and that it is "the combination of factors which is important".

See also

• DCS sues small YouTuber for accurate review
• Dark pattern