Singapore Orders 45 Businesses to Publicly Apologize for Buying Fake Online Reviews

Singapore's Competition and Consumer Commission (CCS) announced on Sept 30 that it had taken action against 45 businesses and a review-fabrication operator called Reputifly in what the agency calls its largest fake-review investigation to date by number of businesses involved, according to The Straits Times and the Business Times Singapore.

The operator behind it, Julian Tung Yan Kai, is the sole director of Reputifly Pte Ltd and ran two websites, BuyReviewSG and GetReviewSG, that sold fake reviews to approximately 100 businesses starting in or before 2023, according to CCS findings reported by marketech-apac and the Business Times.

Businesses could buy packages, like 35 five-star reviews posted over seven days for S$219, according to goodyfeed. There was a calculator so businesses could figure out exactly how many fake five-star reviews they needed to hit their target rating.

Tung used generative AI to write reviews with varied sentence structures, Singapore-specific detail, and deliberate imperfections designed to look authentic, according to marketech-apac. The system could even pull from a business's real four- and five-star reviews to generate new fake ones in a matching style. He recruited people through Telegram to post the content under their own accounts for payment, told them to avoid duplicates to dodge detection, and offered replacement reviews if platforms took the fake ones down, per goodyfeed and the Business Times.

The fake reviews landed on Google, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Carousell, Yelp and Trustpilot, according to CCS findings cited by marketech-apac.

Who Got Caught

The businesses involved span a wide range of Singapore's economy, including medical services, beauty, restaurants, professional services, logistics and education, according to goodyfeed. The South China Morning Post reported the list also includes a funeral parlour, a law firm, and an aesthetics clinic, showing that this wasn't just a handful of restaurants trying to boost their Google ratings.

One named business, Burma Social, posted a public apology on Instagram on Sept 30 acknowledging its conduct violated the Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act, according to time.news.

The Penalty: Shame, Not Fines

CCS's first phase covered 47 businesses. Forty-five admitted buying fake reviews and agreed to stop, remove the fabricated content, strengthen internal compliance, and publish apologies prominently on their websites, social media accounts, and physical premises for six months, according to The Straits Times.

Two businesses refused to agree to CCS's terms. The agency says it will keep investigating those two and may pursue firmer enforcement if the facts support it, according to the Business Times. A second phase targeting the remaining businesses that used Reputifly's services, plus other potential offenders, is still underway, per the Straits Times.

Reputifly itself agreed to stop selling the service, publish its own six-month apology, and voluntarily donate proceeds from the fake-review business to charity, according to CCS as reported by the Business Times.

CCS chief executive Alvin Koh didn't mince words: "Fake reviews deceive consumers, distort competition and disadvantage businesses that compete honestly," he said, adding that CCS will "pursue not only those who buy [the fake reviews], but also those who profit from supplying them," according to the Business Times.

What This Misses

Public apologies and undertakings are a soft landing for businesses that knowingly deceived paying customers for years. A funeral parlour and a law firm buying fake five-star ratings isn't a rounding error, it's a trust violation in sectors where trust is the entire product. Critics could reasonably ask why Singapore isn't levying fines on top of the apology requirement, especially against repeat or larger operators.

CCS's answer, per its own statement, is that businesses who cooperate before an investigation starts get treated more favorably, and the agency is explicitly inviting other offenders to self-report. That's a deterrence strategy built on incentives, not just punishment, and it's the same tactic that's worked in other regulatory contexts to surface wrongdoing that would otherwise stay buried.

Alton Chua, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, told the South China Morning Post that review ecosystems are constantly evolving and warned that generative AI will make fake reviews more common going forward, meaning consumers need to be more skeptical of what they read online.

CCS caught one operator serving roughly 100 businesses. Nobody knows how many Reputifly-style operations are running undetected right now, in Singapore or anywhere else, because AI-generated reviews are specifically engineered to be indistinguishable from real ones. The two holdout businesses CCS is still investigating will be the next test of whether this enforcement has real teeth beyond a forced apology.