Fake Five Stars: FTC Orders Supplement Company to Pay Fine for Hijacking Amazon Reviews

The Bountiful Company, the company behind supplements such as Nature’s Bounty vitamins, has been accused of exploiting Amazon’s review features to boost sales by merging the reviews of different products.

TechCrunch reports that The Bountiful Company, the manufacturer of Nature’s Bounty vitamins and other brands, has been ordered by the FTC to pay $600,000 for misleading customers on Amazon by engaging in “review hijacking.” This practice involves taking customer reviews of certain products and applying them to other products to increase sales of the lesser known items. The case represents the first time the FTC has taken enforcement action regarding review hijacking.

ROMEOVILLE, IL – AUGUST 01: Workers pack and ship customer orders at the 750,000-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center on August 1, 2017 in Romeoville, Illinois. On August 2, Amazon will be holding job fairs at several fulfillment centers around the country, including the Romeoville facility, in an attempt to hire more than 50,000 workers. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The Bountiful Company took advantage of a feature on Amazon that lets vendors ask for the development of “variation” relationships between various goods and SKUs. By creating a single detail page on Amazon.com that displays comparable products differing only in narrow, specific ways, the feature aims to assist both marketers and consumers. However, using this feature, the business combined its more recent products with more established, older products with various formulations.

“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, when the consent order was first announced.

The FTC’s decision was made unanimously by a 4-0 vote and requires The Bountiful Company to pay the Commission $600,000 as a form of financial relief for consumers. The company is also prohibited from making similar types of misrepresentations and barred from using “deceptive review tactics that distort what consumers think about its products or services.”

The feature that allowed The Bountiful Company to commit fraud was provided by Amazon, which has been fighting the fake review industry through lawsuits and permanently banning brands for review fraud. However, it appears that Amazon did not oversee the feature’s use. Since Amazon has entered the healthcare industry with its online pharmacy and telehealth service, this raises questions about health-related fraud.

In response to a request for comment, an Amazon spokesperson stated: “There’s no place for fraud in Amazon’s store. We have proactive measures in place to prevent listing abuse and we continuously monitor our store… Amazon will continue to assist enforcement agencies in holding bad actors accountable, including the FTC.”