The FTC announced today it was going to send more than $527,000 in refunds to consumers who bought products which were marketed based on “review hijacking”.

This announcement is related to a case where the FTC brought charges against The Bountiful Company, a supplement marketer. The FTC accused The Bountiful Company of “review hijacking” by merging new products under existing products to take advantage of the existing product’s ratings and reviews on Amazon. This complaint marked the first time the FTC’s first law enforcement action around “review hijacking”.

The FTC mentioned review hijacking in the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking around fake reviews they released in October 2022. They described it as “Review Reuse Fraud” and claimed that “Some sellers hijack or repurpose reviews posted about another product or service”.

The Bountiful Company was tagging new products (for example, zinc gummies) as a “variation” of an existing product (for example, zinc plus magnesium tablets). The existing product typically had a large number of positive reviews and the vitamin company was hijacking that large number of reviews to propel the sales of the new product. The complaint demonstrates numerous examples of this behavior as well as damning statements from internal emails about “borrowing” the ratings to launch new products.

However, the FTC said the company was creating a false impression around the reviews of the new product. And in doing so, these tactics were unfair acts and practices. From the FTC’s press release announcing the charges:

“Boosting your products by hijacking another product’s ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Three initial takeaways from the initial complaint from February 2023:

1. The FTC is serious about review hijacking which the FTC views as essentially a form of review manipulation.
2. Always remember to be careful what you put in emails. The poor person at the Bountiful Co. whose emails are one of the focus points of the complaint forgot this one.
3. Interesting that the focus is on the company doing this, and NOT Amazon for creating a system that allows this type of behavior.

If you are going to manipulate reviews, you will be at risk of running afoul of the FTC. An FTC which is focusing on reviews. This will not be the last case of review hijacking we will see, but it should be very interesting to see what other examples of review hijacking the FTC can find.