From the Performance Marketing Insider archive. Originally published September 2020. Revisited October 2026.

Amazon Deletes Tens of Thousands of Fake Reviews in the UK

The Financial Times found Amazon UK's top reviewers flipping free products on eBay. Amazon deleted about 20,000 reviews. Regulators took five years to catch up.

By Pesach Lattin

This post first ran on Performance Marketing Insider (performinsiders.com), the affiliate and lead generation trade site Pesach Lattin published from 2011 to 2020. The original text was lost when that site went dark. This page sits at the same address the old links point to, keeps the original headline and date, rebuilds the subject from the public record, and says what happened next.

In early September 2020, after a Financial Times investigation, Amazon removed about 20,000 reviews from its UK site. The FT had found suspicious activity by nine of Amazon UK's top ten reviewers, and Amazon deleted reviews from seven of them.

What the FT found

Top reviewers were receiving products, posting five-star reviews and then reselling the products on eBay as unused. The top UK reviewer had reviewed roughly £15,000 of products in August alone, about one five-star review every four hours. He said the items were duplicates and denied profiting from positive reviews. Fakespot estimated that at the May 2020 peak, more than half of Amazon UK products had apparently fake reviews.

Why it mattered to marketers

A review is the cheapest, highest-converting ad on Amazon, which makes it the most tempting thing to buy. When the most trusted reviewers on the platform are running a side business, every rating on the page is an unaudited ad unit.

How it aged

The UK's competition regulator opened a formal investigation, and in June 2025 Amazon gave the CMA binding undertakings to strengthen detection, ban sellers and reviewers who game the system and stop moving reviews between products. The UK's 2024 consumer law explicitly banned fake reviews from April 2025, with fines of up to 10% of global turnover. In the US, the FTC's 2024 rule did the same, at more than $51,000 per violation. It took the governments five years to treat the review box as advertising. The fraudsters knew in 2020.

This page rebuilds a September 2020 Performance Marketing Insider post whose original text is not available. Facts come from the Financial Times's findings as reported by Silicon UK, the UK government's June 2025 announcement and Morgan Lewis on the FTC rule. The reviewer's explanation is his own.