Competitor fake reviews on Trustpilot

Which rule do competitor fake reviews break?

Trustpilot gives a business five reasons to flag a review. Three of them can fit a review you believe came from a rival.

All five reasons are on Trustpilot's page about why a business can flag a review. Our reference pages go further on genuine experience, advertising or promotional and a different business.

Read the middle row twice. Trustpilot says it will not remove a review just because it mentions another business or compares you with a rival. The review has to sell something.

Why does naming the right reason matter?

You get one reason per flag. Trustpilot says a flag cannot be edited once it is sent. Send the wrong reason and the review is assessed under that reason, then left online. Flagging it again to correct yourself is itself misuse.

Each reason also has its own first step. Miss the step and the flag fails on process, before anyone reads your facts.

There is no side door. Trustpilot's Guidelines for Businesses say flagged content is treated the same way whether or not the business pays for its services.

When can you not use the genuine experience reason?

Two blocks close this reason, and both come from Trustpilot's own page.

• The review is more than a year old. Trustpilot generally does not investigate this reason for older reviews. A batch from last year is usually out of reach.
• You invited the reviewer. The reason is closed for a customer you invited to review you.

The second block catches people out. If you invite at scale, you lose this reason for everyone you invited. That is a real trade-off, and our guide on getting more Trustpilot reviews covers the other side of it.

Neither block stops you using the other two reasons. A promotional review can be flagged at any age.

What evidence helps, and what does not?

The question Trustpilot answers is whether the review breaks a rule. It is not asking you to name a culprit.

Keep each flag to one plain sentence of fact. Then attach the screenshot, the link and the date.

Trustpilot may also ask the reviewer for documents that show an experience, such as an order confirmation or an email trail. You never see what they send. Your job is your own side of the record.

Health brands have one extra rule. Never put patient information in a flag. Say that no order or ticket matches the name and the date, and stop there.

What does Trustpilot's own detection do?

More of this work is done for you than most owners expect. Trustpilot says its automated detection technology checks every review before it appears and keeps watching published reviews. It looks at review content, IP addresses, device characteristics and location data.

A coordinated run of reviews is exactly the shape that system is built to catch. When it finds an unusual pattern, the review is kept offline or moved offline, and the reviewer is told and can challenge it.

Trustpilot also says paying businesses get no special treatment from this technology. For wider misuse, such as a company that buys reviews, the same page points to a whistleblower function. That is the route for a report about a rival's behavior, rather than a flag on your own profile.

What should you never do about a competitor's reviews?

Five moves turn a problem on your profile into a problem with Trustpilot or the FTC.

1. Do not buy the reviews back. Offering money, a refund or a gift card to get a review changed or deleted is misuse under Action We Take. It is also the conduct the FTC charged in the case below.
2. Do not flag every negative review. Trustpilot treats that as misuse, along with flagging compliant reviews over and over.
3. Do not flag in bulk. Flagging many reviews in a short period is one of Trustpilot's four named examples of misuse. Send a few, wait, and keep the reasons mixed.
4. Do not threaten the reviewer. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews bans groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation and knowingly false public accusations used to stop or remove a review.
5. Do not review the competitor. A rival is not eligible to review a business, so anything you post there is a fake review by Trustpilot's definition and by the FTC's rule.

The record of what you flag is public. Trustpilot's Transparent Flagging page shows 12 months of your flagging activity, including how many cases were invalid and the star ratings of the reviews you flagged. Our guide to the flagging misuse rules has the full ladder of penalties.

What does enforcement look like when a business goes too far?

In July 2025 the FTC took action against the telehealth firm NextMed. The agency said the company suppressed negative Trustpilot reviews by selectively challenging critical reviews, by offering Amazon gift cards to consumers to remove or change negative reviews, and by conditioning refunds on agreement to remove them. It also said the company used fake positive reviews.

That is what the wrong response to a bad run of reviews can cost. The order was finalized in December 2025 with a payment of $150,000.

Is suspecting a competitor enough?

No. Trustpilot decides every case, and it decides on what the review shows. A belief about who is behind the account is not a fact it can act on, however reasonable the belief is.

This matters for your own planning. Assume that some of the batch will stay online. The ones with a rival's promo code or a product you never sold have a real case. The ones that are simply harsh and vague usually do not, even if you are right about the source.

What is the right order of steps?

If the reviews keep arriving in waves, read our guide on what to do when your brand is review-bombed before you touch the flagging tool.

For help with your own profile, start with our Trustpilot review removal service. Our review removal pricing is $475 to $600 per confirmed removal, with nothing paid up front.

Promo-code reviews from a rival are most common on supplement profiles, where affiliates and competitors use the same tactic.