00:00Today we're announcing the launch of five investigations into businesses that are
00:04operating across the whole ecosystem where businesses and consumers find online reviews.
00:09It's so important that consumers can have trust and confidence when they're shopping online.
00:13Nine in ten of us rely on online reviews when we're making choices about what we spend our
00:18money on and in a cost of living situation that is really important and there's billions of pounds
00:24spent on retail in the UK every year and we know online reviews are a big part of that.
00:28The Competition and Markets Authority, the nation's competition watchdog, also known as the CMA,
00:36has said it had launched probes against a number of companies to see whether consumer laws have been
00:43broken. The list includes Autotrader, Just Eat as well as London's Pastor Evangelists. The London-based
00:52artisan fresh pasta chain is being probed over allegations it offered customers discounts for
01:00leaving five-star reviews on delivery apps without this being disclosed. The company said it was
01:08cooperating fully with the CMA as it works to understand the facts and the CMA has itself made
01:17clear that no conclusions have been reached. Since April last year, companies have been banned from
01:24certain tactics around online reviews under law, such as fake posts paid for reviews that are not
01:32clearly marked as incentivised, as well as for hiding negative feedback.
01:37They can take multiple forms and we've been really looking across the whole value chain.
01:41So we've been looking at whether positive reviews are genuine, whether negative reviews that are
01:48genuine are hidden from customers, so they don't even know that they've been posted. And we're also
01:53looking at how businesses present the star ratings and whether they do that in a real way or whether
01:58it's misleading to consumers. So we're looking across a whole range of things. We're looking at what
02:03they've been doing and how that fits within the legal framework. The legal framework changed last year
02:08to ban fake reviews. So those practices that we've been talking about, they are illegal.
02:12Businesses are not allowed to do them and they should know that. So we're choosing those cases
02:16where we think that there is, based on what we've seen so far, evidence of businesses not doing what
02:23they should do and whether that is going to have a big impact on consumers when they're shopping on
02:28those websites. So there's definitely tools to allow businesses to identify AI reviews in the market
02:34and they can obviously use us if they like. Some businesses won't be able to use those tools and
02:39it is about looking, applying a bit of human judgment and making sure that all businesses, no matter how
02:44big or small they are, have a process to identify the fake reviews and to remove it. And that might
02:50be
02:50as simple as an alert so that customers can tell the business if they've spotted a review that they think
02:56is fake.
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