I am being bribed to change my Amazon UK review

An Amazon UK seller has offered me £40 to delete a one-star review.

I bought a battery-powered shaver from a third-party seller on Amazon UK as a verified purchase. It worked exactly once. After a full recharge, clean and rinse, the device would not cut hair, so on 12 April 2026, I left a one-star review describing the failure in two sentences.

A few weeks later, the offer landed in my inbox. The first email opened with an apology and a request to delete the review in exchange for compensation.

The seller listed three options:

• A £40 Amazon gift card;
• £40 sent through PayPal;
• A £40 Starbucks gift card.

The message included instructions on how to remove the review through my Amazon account and asked me to reply with a preferred payment method.

A second email followed days later, noting that the review was still live and pressing for a response.

What Amazon’s own rules say

The conduct breaches Amazon’s published policy. Amazon’s community guidelines for the UK state that the platform does not allow reviews created, edited, or removed in exchange for compensation, and that compensation covers cash, discounts, free products, gift cards, and refunds.

The guidelines tell buyers who receive such offers to report them through Amazon’s Report Review Compensation form.

Amazon also warns sellers in its anti-manipulation policy that account suspension, product delisting, and forfeiture of payments can follow review manipulation.

The law is also clear

The offer also runs into UK consumer protection law. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 introduced specific bans on fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews, with the new prohibitions taking effect on 6 April 2025.

Conduct breaching the rules counts as automatically unfair and illegal under the Act, and the Competition and Markets Authority can fine companies up to 10% of their global turnover and impose penalties of up to £300,000 on individuals.

Commissioning a review removal in exchange for compensation sits squarely within the conduct the regulator is targeting.

In a recent enforcement update, the CMA confirmed it had carried out a sweep of review publishers and issued advisory letters to 54 firms, with 90% of those contacted then taking action; in March, it opened investigations into five companies over suspected breaches of the misleading reviews rules.

How common is this in the UK?

A nationally representative Which? survey of 1,556 shoppers in August 2023 found that 10% of people who bought from Amazon in the previous 12 months had received a note or card in the packaging offering an incentive for a five-star review, equivalent to around 4.5 million people in Great Britain.

8% said a seller had asked them to leave a five-star review in exchange for an incentive, and 4% reported offers of a reward specifically for changing a negative review to a positive one.

The Department for Business and Trade estimates that 11% to 15% of reviews for common product categories are fake.

A separate Which? investigation reported by Newsweek found that a seller had offered a £25 Amazon gift card to a customer who criticised a product for not working as advertised, in exchange for removing the criticism.

The £40 the seller has offered me sits above that figure and exceeds the price of the head shaver itself.

I have not deleted the review, and I am not taking the money. The review stands because the product is broken.

The product listing and the seller account remain live on Amazon UK at the time of writing.

Any UK shopper who relies on Amazon’s star ratings to decide whether to buy is reading numbers that sellers are paying to bend, and the regulator now has the power to act on it.

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