Can You Sue for False Advertising Over Fake Reviews and Rigged “Independent” Ratings?

Your competitor’s product is not better than yours, but its reviews say otherwise. A “top-rated” list you have never heard of ranks it first. A glowing “independent” guide steers your customers elsewhere. You are losing business to a scorecard someone paid to rig. Can you do anything about it?

Potentially, yes. Under federal law, the Lanham Act gives businesses a way to challenge false or misleading advertising, and in 2021 the Ninth Circuit held that a supposedly independent review can qualify as commercial speech when it is really paid promotion.

Fake customer reviews and rigged “independent” rankings raise somewhat different legal questions, but both can create false-advertising exposure when they send a misleading commercial message.

A Ninth Circuit case says you may have a claim

In Ariix, LLC v. NutriSearch Corp., 985 F.3d 1107 (9th Cir. 2021), Bona Law represented a supplement maker whose competitor had secretly paid the author of a supposedly independent ratings guide to inflate the competitor’s scores. Bona Law’s client prevailed on appeal when the Ninth Circuit held that Ariix had plausibly alleged commercial speech, because the guide was allegedly less an independent review than a paid marketing vehicle for the competitor, and that the guide contained potentially actionable statements of fact, including its claim of independence. The court did not hold that every paid or biased review violates the Lanham Act. A plaintiff still has to satisfy the Act’s other requirements.

Aren’t reviews protected free speech?

Genuine reviews receive strong First Amendment protection, even when they are harsh, biased, or wrong. Paying for a review changes the analysis, but payment alone is not necessarily enough. The strongest case arises when a supposed reviewer is really running a promotion while falsely presenting itself as independent, or making other verifiable factual claims.

The actionable falsehood is usually not the low score itself. It may instead be a false claim of independence, a falsified certification, or another specific factual representation.

What makes a review “rigged” enough to sue over?

Some facts make a potential claim much stronger:

• The reviewer claims or implies that it is independent or objective.
• A hidden payment, financial relationship, or other economic incentive points the other way.
• The evidence suggests that the financial relationship actually affected the ratings, certifications, or recommendations.

Bias by itself is not enough, and disclosed sponsorship does not immunize a false factual claim. It simply removes the deception that the reviewer is independent.

Fabricated or manipulated customer reviews are the other half of the problem. In one case, a seller was held liable for false advertising after it had employees up-vote its favorable Amazon reviews and down-vote unfavorable ones and used incentivized reviews to skew the overall picture consumers saw.

What law applies?

The main tool is the federal Lanham Act, which allows a business suffering commercial injury to challenge false or misleading advertising. Many states have parallel unfair-competition and false-advertising laws that can sometimes reach conduct the Lanham Act does not. (We have written separately about [what a Lanham Act false-advertising claim requires] and [whether you have a claim against a competitor].)

What do you have to prove?

For a rigged-review claim, the key questions are:

• Is it really advertising? The review has to be commercial speech and commercial advertising or promotion, not genuine editorial commentary.
• What is false or misleading? A subjective star rating is usually opinion, but a false claim of independence, a certification, or another verifiable representation may be actionable, including a misleading message conveyed by implication.
• Would it matter to buyers? The deception has to be material to purchasing decisions.
• Did the message reach the market? A private comment or an isolated communication may not qualify as advertising.
• Did it hurt your business? You have to connect the deception to lost sales, reputational harm, or another commercial injury.

A recurring complication is whose product the review promotes. The Ninth Circuit left that question open in Ariix when the nominal reviewer was promoting someone else’s goods. You can read more about the Ariix decision and its implications here.

Who do you sue, the reviewer or the competitor who benefited?

Depending on the facts, either or both may be potential defendants. You can pursue the reviewer for the rigged review itself. You can also pursue the competitor that paid for and benefited from it. In Bona Law’s later Ariix litigation against Usana, the court denied Usana’s motion to dismiss on two theories: Usana allegedly used the guide’s false claims of independence in its own marketing, and the reviewers allegedly acted as Usana’s agents. See Ariix, LLC v. Usana Health Sciences, Inc., 2023 WL 2574319 (D. Utah Mar. 20, 2023). That can make the seller a cleaner target than the reviewer, especially where the seller republished or exploited the supposedly independent endorsement.

What about Yelp, Amazon, or the app stores?

A platform generally has substantial Section 230 protection when the claim tries to hold it liable merely for hosting content supplied by someone else. The statute protects a service provider from being treated as the publisher or speaker of information provided by another, and it treats an entity responsible in whole or in part for developing the information as itself a content provider. That protection is much weaker when the defendant created or materially developed the deceptive content. A competitor generally cannot escape liability for its own conduct just because the false review appeared on someone else’s platform.

Does the FTC’s new fake-review rule help me?

The FTC’s Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule, effective in 2024, prohibits several practices involving fake and manipulated reviews, including fake reviews, incentives conditioned on a positive or negative sentiment, certain undisclosed insider reviews, company-controlled sites masquerading as independent reviewers, and fake social-media indicators. The FTC alone enforces it. There is no private right of action, so you cannot sue a competitor under the rule directly.

For a private competitor, the claim ordinarily has to come from the Lanham Act or applicable state law. The FTC’s rules and guidance help in evaluating whether a practice is deceptive, but they do not replace the elements of a private claim. An undisclosed payment alone does not automatically create a Lanham Act claim. You still have to identify a false or misleading representation in commercial advertising or promotion, which can include an implied factual message. That is why a false claim of independence is so often the key.

What about paid influencers?

Paid influencer posts can raise the same issues. Ariix itself noted that although influencer posts may not look like traditional advertisements, “there can be little doubt that these paid posts are in fact advertisements,” and the FTC requires influencers to disclose that they were paid. For Lanham Act purposes, nondisclosure alone is not necessarily enough. The stronger private claim involves a false or misleading factual message, such as an influencer falsely posing as an ordinary customer or making a false claim about the product.

What can you recover?

An injunction can be especially valuable, because it can stop ongoing false advertising before the damage is fully measurable. For preliminary relief, the Lanham Act now provides a rebuttable presumption of irreparable harm once you establish a likelihood of success on the merits, though the other requirements for an injunction still apply.

Monetary relief may include your damages and, in appropriate cases, the defendant’s profits. Attorney’s fees are available only in “exceptional cases,” a standard that can be met by an unusually weak litigating position, unreasonable litigation conduct, or other circumstances that make the case stand out.

What should you do now?

Preserve the evidence before it disappears. Capture the reviews, ratings, and pages with dated screenshots. Note anything that suggests a financial relationship between the reviewer and your competitor, such as sponsorships, affiliate links, paid placements, or shared ownership. Preserve evidence of how widely the review was distributed, such as search rankings, view counts, retailer pages, emails, or sales materials, because how far the message spread matters under the Lanham Act. Track the effect on your sales. The strongest cases pair a clear false statement of independence with a visible money trail and real business harm.

How we can help

Bona Law represents businesses on both sides of false-advertising and unfair-competition disputes, and we litigated the leading Ninth Circuit case on rigged “independent” reviews. If a competitor is using fake reviews or a bought ranking to take your customers, or you have been accused of doing so, contact us. If you are researching this issue on behalf of your client, consider co-counseling with us.