Five thousand reviews look impressive until you discover that half of them describe a different product.
That is the basic trick behind review hijacking.
A seller does not need to manufacture thousands of new five-star opinions if it can attach an existing body of praise to something else.
The Federal Trade Commission brought its first review-hijacking case against The Bountiful Company in 2023. According to the FTC, the supplement marketer used Amazon’s product-variation system to combine newer supplements with different, better-established products so the new items appeared to inherit larger review counts, higher ratings, and badges such as Amazon’s Choice. See the FTC’s Bountiful review-hijacking case.
The company later agreed to a final order and monetary relief.
The reviews may be real and still be misleading
This is what makes recycled listings different from simple fake reviews.
A customer may have genuinely purchased Product A.
They may have honestly rated Product A five stars.
The manipulation occurs when that legitimate review is displayed in a way that makes shoppers believe it describes Product B.
The witness is real.
The testimony has been moved to the wrong trial.
Mismatched history can expose the problem
Review hijacking can leave visible clues.
A page for a vitamin gummy suddenly contains old reviews discussing capsules. A listing for an electronic accessory contains comments about an unrelated household item. Review dates predate the apparent launch of the current product. Photos show packaging that no longer resembles what is being sold.
Those mismatches are useful warning signs.
They are not always proof of deception. Legitimate products change packaging, sizes, colors, formulas, and model revisions, and marketplaces sometimes group closely related variations on one page.
The question is whether the inherited reviews still describe substantially the same thing shoppers are evaluating.
The FTC’s current Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule now explicitly addresses review hijacking by prohibiting businesses from using or repurposing a review written for one product so that it appears to have been written for a substantially different product. See the FTC’s rule Q&A.
Consensus can be manufactured by rearranging history
Manufactured Consensus is not always generated from scratch.
Sometimes the operator starts with authentic evidence and changes what it appears to prove.
That is more efficient.
The stars already exist. The customers already wrote the praise. The marketplace already trusts the listing history.
All that remains is to quietly make those old opinions answer a new question they were never asked.