Your company just lost a deal you should have won.
Instead of choosing you, the buyer chose a competitor with lots of glowing reviews, dazzling testimonials and awards you’ve never heard of. It’s frustrating because you know your work is better. What you may not know is that much of that competitor’s reputation was bought, and some of those reviews may not even have been written by a human.
We see this every day
BBB of Los Angeles & Silicon Valley receives more consumer complaints than any other BBB in North America, roughly 900 each day. That gives us a front-row seat to how trust breaks down. And in 2026, the biggest threat to trust is no longer the faceless scammer.
It is ordinary businesses deciding that reputation is something they can buy rather than earn. When our ad-review team checks suspicious listings, they often find the same testimonial, word for word, praising one company here and another in a different state and industry. Sometimes it is a photograph: the identical picture of a finished roof, offered as proof of work by a contractor in Los Angeles and by another in Michigan.
Fake reviews have broken
the old signals
Last December, the Federal Trade Commission took its first enforcement action under the Consumer Reviews Rule, which bans the buying, selling and faking of reviews. The letters went to companies suspected of violations including paying for reviews tied to a positive rating, dressing up employees’ endorsements as independent, and posting testimonials from people who never used the product.
The problem is widespread. U.S. PIRG, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, estimates that 30% to 40% of online reviews are misleading or dishonest. And artificial intelligence is making the fakes easier to produce and harder to spot.
Regulation helps, but cannot solve the problem
The FTC’s rule is welcome, and it has teeth. Violations can incur civil penalties exceeding $53,000 each.
But regulation alone cannot fix this. More than a year passed between the rule taking effect and the first enforcement action, which amounted to just 10 warning letters. Government can set the rules of the road, but it can’t solve the problem alone.
The marketplace has to do the work of rebuilding trust itself.
Being trustworthy is no longer enough
The fundamental challenge is that being trustworthy and being trusted are no longer the same thing.
Previously, businesses earned trust by doing good work, and customers shared their experiences. Reviews, referrals and reputation generally reflected reality.
Today, credibility can be manufactured. A fake business only has to look convincing, while a legitimate business has to prove it
is real.
What businesses should do
That means honest companies must think differently about trust.
First, perfection is now a warning sign. A wall of uninterrupted five-star reviews can start to look manufactured rather than earned. Sophisticated buyers understand that flawless could mean fabricated. A few critical reviews answered with a genuine human response can build more credibility than a perfect ratings score.
Second, businesses need validation that does not come from their own marketing. Self-published claims carry less weight than they once did. Verified review platforms, licenses and certifications confirmed by someone other than the business, and organizations willing to investigate complaints all matter.
That checking is real work. Between a quarter and a third of the businesses that apply to us for accreditation do not qualify at first. They first have to correct unanswered complaints, unsupported website claims or missing licenses. A particularly potent example is the precious metals industry, which is heavily concentrated in Los Angeles. In a crowded field, new gold dealers often pursue accreditation to signal instant credibility, and some pad their reputations with fabricated testimonials to keep pace with rivals. Businesses that won’t back up their claims drop out rather than meet the standard.
Third, businesses must stay visibly human. Show the people behind the work and make it easy to reach a real person rather than a chatbot.
The whole market pays for fakery
Every fake review makes consumers a little more suspicious of everyone, and honest businesses pay the price in longer sales cycles and harder-won customers.
This hits close to home, as Los Angeles deals with the problem more than most areas. L.A. County is the nation’s most populous and home to more than a million small businesses, which simply means a larger marketplace to defend. Its makeup adds another layer: we see scams run in many languages and aimed at immigrant communities, a challenge that is especially acute in a place where nearly a third of residents were born outside the United States.
The businesses that succeed in the years ahead will not be the ones that merely deserve trust. They will be the ones that can prove it.
I see this from both sides every day. I see consumers who contact our office after losing real money to a company whose reputation was never real, and I see honest businesses forced to compete against rivals who manufactured their reputations. Both deserve a marketplace where trust means something.
Steve McFarland is president and chief executive of the Better Business Bureau of Los Angeles & Silicon Valley.
