Open wide

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 specifically outlaws fake and misleading consumer reviews. This law came into force in April 2025. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued guidance to businesses on the new law in April 2025, carried out a compliance sweep of various websites in July and has recently warned of enforcement action on this topic.

Consumer review information also typically includes aggregated information in the form of overall star ratings, overall summaries, review counts and rankings. 

Because of the weight placed on this information by consumers in their decision-making, it is important that this information is accurate.  It is a banned practice (strict liability offence) under the DMCC Act to publish consumer review information that is false or misleading, and to present that information in a misleading way.

As well as the DMCC Act and CMA guidance, the CAP Code also includes rules about misleading advertising and substantiation as well as testimonials... so the ASA sometimes has a thing or two to say on this topic too.

Take a seat

For example, this week, the ASA published the results of its investigation into a complaint about ads from ZING Oral Care. The ad promoted Zing's toothpaste.  

The ads referenced words like "Excellent", "Based on 13,183 reviews" and "Loved by 67,000+ UK customers", and showed five white stars in green squares with a cut-in below the right-hand point.

Say aaaaargh!

The complainant challenged the ads because they understood ZING Toothpaste did not have the number of reviews claimed in the ads, or an overall five-star rating on Trustpilot.

Drilling into the details

ZING said that when the ads were created the Trustpilot rating and number of reviews were accurate. They explained that they later moved to a new review software provider, which caused their original Trustpilot reviews and five-star rating to disappear. They said they had not realised the switch would reset their Trustpilot profile. Zing said that since the change they had received over 1,000 reviews, 85% of which were five stars. Therefore, they believed the claims in the ad accurately reflected customer feedback. They also said Trustpilot had given them permission to continue using star ratings in their ads. 

Make sure you get in between the gaps

This cut no ice with the ASA, which took the view that the ad was misleading because the ad appeared to claim a five-star Trustpilot rating for the company based on 13,183 reviews in two of the ads and over 67,000 in the other ad, and it had not seen evidence that ZING Toothpaste had an overall Truspilot rating of five stars or those numbers of reviews on Trustpilot. 

The ASA told ZING Oral Care Ltd not to claim or imply that they had a five-star Trustpilot rating if they did not hold evidence to demonstrate that this was the case. 

Look into this mirror...

In this case, the ASA took action and ZING managed to get away with a slapped wrist, because it was an ASA ruling rather than an investigation by the CMA (or Trading Standards). The had to be removed or amended, and can't run again. 

However, it is really important that businesses make sure that your star ratings and claims based on customer reviews are accurate, as the CMA can now levy hefty fines and will seek to surgically remove consumer reviews that are misleading, as well as giving you a hefty bill in the process!

Rinse your mouth out

Businesses involved in writing, procuring or publishing consumer reviews or using information derived from reviews, such as ratings, should arrange for a check up with their legal team.

Visit our Consumer Law Hub for more information and guidance on the new law.