Skincare brand Sunday Riley has reached an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission after the brand admitted to encouraging employees to write positive product reviews on Sephora’s website under fake names.
“Dishonesty in the online marketplace harms shoppers, as well as firms that play fair and square,” said Andrew Smith, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in anofficial statement. “Posting fake reviews on shopping websites or buying and selling fake followers is illegal. It undermines the marketplace, and the FTC will not tolerate it.”
According tothe settlement, the FTC prohibits Sunday Riley from engaging in “similar allegedly illegal conduct in the future” and is not requiring the brand to give “any refunds to consumers, forfeiture of profits or admission of wrongdoing,” a spokesperson for FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra said in a statement toBuzzFeed News.
But there are some who believe the brand should have faced a harsher punishment including Chopra and FTC Commissioner Kelly Slaughter, who both voted against the settlement and released a joint statement disagreeing with the FTC’s decision.
PEOPLE has reached out to Sunday Riley for comment.
Last year a former Sunday Riley employee shared an email with the subject “Homework time – Sephora.com Reviews” on a Reddit thread titled, “[PSA] Sunday Riley Employee: We Write Fake Sephora Reviews,” which ignited the controversy.
In the email, the brand’s employees were told to write “at least” three reviews over the course of two weeks to support the launch of Sunday Riley’s Saturn Sulfur Acne Treatment Mask and Space Race Fight Acne, Oil + Pores at Warp Speed Kit.
“We were forced to write fake reviews for our products on an ongoing basis, which came direct from Sunday Riley herself and her Head of Sales. I saved one of those emails to share here. Also, check out the glassdoor reviews for Sunday Riley, the ones that we weren’t asked to write, anyway, which are ACCURATE AF.”
In the email, employees were told what product details to include in the reviews. “Credibility is the key to the reviews! When reviewing Saturn please address things like how cooling it felt, the green color, the non-drying mask effect, radiance boosting, got rid of your acne after a couple uses.”
The story went viral once the anonymous Instagram account@esteelaundry, which shares beauty industry gossip, posted the news of the Reddit thread. Shortly after, Estee Laundry posted a comment from Sunday Riley’s Instagram account, in which the brand admitted to posting the fake reviews.
“At one point, we did encourage people to post positive reviews at the launch of this product, consistent with their experiences. There are a lot of reasons for doing that, including the fact that competitors will often post negative reviews of products to swing opinion. It doesn’t really matter what the reasoning was. We have hundreds of thousands of reviews across platforms around the globe and it would be physically impossible for us to have posted even a fraction of these reviews.”
source: people.com
