Four hundred reviews in six weeks, for a business running one van.
Sixty of them posted on the same Tuesday. Reviewers with one review each, no profile photo, and a vocabulary that never mentions a product, a technician’s name, or anything that happened. Five stars, every one, from a company that opened last year.
You are not imagining it. That pattern is not what a real customer base looks like, and you can tell because you have spent three years collecting reviews the slow way.
So the question is what you can actually do about it, and the honest answer has three parts, only one of which is satisfying.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. It is a description of how enforcement has gone so far, and where I think your effort is best spent.
Enforcement started, and it is slower than you want
The FTC’s Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule has real penalties behind it, up to $53,088 per offending review, and those stack. A hundred fake reviews is a theoretical exposure north of five million dollars.
Here is how that has actually played out.
In December 2025 the FTC took its first enforcement step under the rule, sending warning letters to ten unidentified companies and giving them five days to explain how they would come into compliance. Letters, not lawsuits.
In July 2026 a final order landed with an injunction and a $4 million judgment. That judgment was partially suspended on payment of $750,000, on the basis that the respondents could not pay the full amount.
Read that last sentence twice if you have been imagining a competitor being ruined. Headline penalties and collected penalties are different numbers.
And the pattern legal commentators are describing matters more than either figure: review violations tend to appear as an adjunct to cases the FTC opened for some other reason, usually a bigger piece of deceptive conduct like false health claims or misleading service marketing. The rule is a charge they add, not usually the thing that starts the file.
Which means reporting a competitor’s fake reviews to the FTC is closer to filing a data point than to calling the police.
That is worth knowing before you spend a week building a dossier.
What you can actually do, in order of usefulness
Report it to the platform first. Google acts on review manipulation considerably faster than any regulator, and it has real consequences: blocking new reviews, unpublishing existing ones, and putting a public banner on the profile saying fake reviews were found and removed. I went through what Google actually removes and how to flag it separately. Flag the specific policy, not a general complaint, and expect the first answer to be no more often than not.
Report it to the FTC anyway. It takes ten minutes. It does not open an investigation on its own, but patterns across multiple complaints are how files get opened, and a business cheating on reviews is very often cheating somewhere else too, which is the part that actually attracts attention.
Talk to a lawyer about the Lanham Act. This is the route with genuine teeth for a competitor, because false advertising claims can be brought by the businesses harmed rather than only by regulators. It is also expensive and slow, and it makes sense in a narrow set of cases where the damage is large and provable. Worth one conversation with counsel if the harm is serious. Not worth starting on principle.
Your state attorney general. Most states have their own unfair and deceptive practice statutes, several with their own enforcement appetite, and state regulators sometimes move faster on local matters than federal ones.
Do the first two this week. Consider the third only with advice.
Now the part I actually want to argue
None of that is your best move, and I would be doing you a disservice by leaving you on the enforcement path.
The rule did something more useful to you than any individual case will. It changed the expected cost of cheating, permanently, for everybody in your category. Before October 2024 buying reviews carried platform risk. Now it carries platform risk, regulatory risk, and litigation risk from competitors, and every quarter that passes adds another enforcement story to the pile.
Your competitor’s advantage is not gone but it is now borrowed against a liability that did not exist three years ago. Their profile is fragile in a way yours is not. One enforcement action or one platform sweep and their four hundred reviews become a banner announcing that fake reviews were removed, which is considerably worse than never having had them.
Yours cannot be taken away, because it is real.
So press the advantage that is actually yours rather than litigating theirs. The things a business buying reviews structurally cannot fake:
Volume that keeps arriving. A purchased burst is a spike. A real collection habit is a line that keeps climbing, and any reader scrolling by date can see the difference.
Reviews that describe specifics. Names, jobs, dates, the thing that went wrong and got fixed. Bought reviews are generic because the writer was not there.
Replies to the bad ones. A profile with a few three star reviews, answered properly, reads as more trustworthy than a wall of fives. That asymmetry is free and most operators never use it.
Recency across years. Somebody who has been collecting since 2022 has a shape on their profile that cannot be manufactured retroactively.
That is a compounding position. Their four hundred reviews are a one-off purchase with an expiry date attached.
The uncomfortable question
Before you report anybody, check your own house, because most operators who ask me this question have a violation running that they think is normal practice.
If your review request flow asks people how their experience was and sends the happy ones to Google while routing the unhappy ones to a private feedback form, that is suppression under the same rule your competitor is breaking. It is sold as best practice by a lot of reputable software. It is still on the wrong side of the line, and I set out the compliant way to ask, which works better anyway.
The same applies to asking staff to post reviews, offering anything in exchange for a positive one, or asking customers to mention a technician by name, which Google made an explicit rating manipulation violation earlier this year.
A complaint filed by a business that is itself gating reviews is not a good look, and more to the point, it is a liability you control and have not fixed.
Where I would leave it
Report it to Google, because that is the mechanism that actually moves. File with the FTC because it costs you ten minutes. Then stop thinking about it.
The regulator is not going to arrive and restore the ranking you feel you are owed, and the time you would spend building a case is time you could spend widening a gap that widens on its own.
The uncomfortable good news is that this is now a category where doing it honestly is not merely the ethical choice. It is the one with the better risk profile, and it took a federal rule to make that true.
My notes on SEO cover where reviews sit alongside the rest of local search. If you’d like a second opinion on your own review process before you point at anybody else’s, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch.