‘Fraudulent’ Sites to Be Filtered on EU Search Engines — RegTech being developed

The Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) is an organization of government entities enforcing EU consumer protection legislation. The network conducts annual sweeps based on agreed criteria developed by the European Commission. Their efforts are coordinated at the EU level to address cross-border challenges. 

The details of an EU-wide website screening ("sweep") on online consumer reviews were announced on January 20, 2022, by the European Commission and state consumer protection agencies.

Two hundred twenty-three major websites were examined for fraudulent consumer evaluations under the supervision of the Commission authorities from 26 Member States. Almost two-thirds of the shopping websites and comparison service websites questioned raised concerns about the reviews' reliability: Authorities could not ensure that these traders were doing enough to ensure that reviews were genuine.

The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, namely paragraphs 6 and 7, covers consumer reviews' fraudulent practices. To make enforcement more accessible, it is stated expressly that selling, purchasing, and generating misleading customer evaluations to promote items is forbidden. The Better Enforcement and Modernisation Directive has recently clarified this rule, which will take effect on May 28, 2022. Furthermore, there is now a clear need to notify customers about how reviews are handled.

Source: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_394