This Popular Online Sales Tactic Will Now Be Illegal In October!

Tell me if this has ever happened to you before. You are shopping online, looking for a widget. You head over to a popular a to z online retailer, and you find there are 100s of widgets. You want the best widget you can get, so you start reading the online reviews and all of them state how amazing the product is. You buy the widget with the best reviews, you get it home, and it falls apart because it's junk. Sound familiar? Well, these online fake reviews will now be illegal, thanks to the Federal Trade Commission.

Can you believe that somewhere between about 30% to 40% of online reviews are fake? That's a lot of bad/fake reviews for honest people looking for products online.

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According to the FTC press release announcing this new rule on online reviews, it will 'prohibit' businesses from:

• Fake or False Consumer Reviews, Consumer Testimonials, and Celebrity Testimonials
• Buying Positive or Negative Reviews
• Insider Reviews and Consumer Testimonials
• Company-Controlled Review Websites
• Review Suppression
• Misuse of Fake Social Media Indicators

Lina Khan, FTC chair - "Fake reviews not only waste people’s time and money but also pollute the marketplace and divert business away from honest competitors. By strengthening the FTC’s toolkit to fight deceptive advertising, the final rule will protect Americans from getting cheated, put businesses that unlawfully game the system on notice, and promote markets that are fair, honest, and competitive."

Currently, if a review is found to be knowingly false "the maximum civil penalty is currently $51,744 per violation, but courts must take into account the statutory factors outlined in Section 5(m)(1)(C) of the FTC Act and may impose much lower per-violation penalties."

The FTC stated in their rules that the courts will have to set the new penalty on a case-by-case basis, but the new rules will make enforcing these bogus reviews easier to prosecute.