The FTC Just Started Enforcing Its Ban on Bought Followers — Here's What Changed

For years, buying followers, views, or engagement was a legal gray area in the US — clearly against every platform’s terms of service, but not something a federal regulator had explicit rulemaking authority to punish on its own. That changed with the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Review and Testimonials Rule, finalized in August 2024, and in December 2025 the agency took its first concrete enforcement step under it — a signal worth understanding if you buy, sell, or evaluate audience size for a living.

What the rule actually bans

Per the FTC’s own announcement, the Rule — which took effect October 21, 2024 — prohibits several specific practices, including:

• Creating, buying, or disseminating fake or false consumer reviews and testimonials, including ones from people who never used the product
• Buying positive reviews or paying for reviews contingent on a positive rating
• Undisclosed insider reviews (employees or close relatives reviewing their own company’s products without disclosure)
• Review suppression — companies that intimidate or threaten people to remove honest negative reviews
• Buying or selling fake indicators of social media influence — specifically, followers, views, or other engagement generated by bots or hijacked accounts, when the buyer knew or should have known they were fake

That last provision is the one that lands squarely on this site’s beat: it is now a federal violation, not just a platform-policy violation, to purchase fake followers or views intended to misrepresent your (or a client’s) real audience size for commercial purposes.

The first enforcement letters went out in December 2025

Rules on paper only matter once there’s enforcement behind them. On December 22, 2025, the FTC sent warning letters to 10 companies, flagging practices that included fake or undisclosed reviews and the misuse of fake social media influence indicators — the agency’s first public step toward enforcing the Rule since it took effect over a year earlier. Multiple law firms that track FTC advertising enforcement, including Kelley Drye and Venable, described the letters as a signal that active enforcement — not just the existence of the Rule — was beginning.

The letters directed each recipient to immediately stop any non-compliant practice and to confirm in writing the steps taken to come into compliance. They are warnings, not lawsuits — but they establish that the companies were on notice, which matters for any future case. Violations of the Rule can carry civil penalties, which multiple outlets tracking the letters put at up to $53,088 per violation.

Why this matters beyond the 10 companies involved

The Rule’s fake-followers provision doesn’t just target businesses that sell follower packages — it also creates exposure for whoever buys them to misrepresent their reach for a commercial purpose. That reframes “buying followers” from a platform-terms-of-service problem (your account gets banned) into a regulatory-exposure problem (you can be fined by a federal agency). For any brand vetting a creator for a paid partnership, that raises the stakes on doing real due diligence before money changes hands, not just trusting a media kit.

It also lines up with where the FTC says it’s headed next: the agency’s FY 2026-2030 Strategic Plan, published in April 2026, names bot-inflated engagement and purchased followers as an ongoing enforcement priority — so the December letters are very likely a first step rather than a one-off.

What this means if you’re vetting a creator

The regulatory risk sits on top of the reputational and financial risk that already existed — a sponsor paying for reach that isn’t real was always a bad deal even before a federal rule existed to punish it. The practical response hasn’t changed: check engagement against audience size, look for unexplained growth spikes, and don’t take a follower count at face value. We cover the manual version of that process in how to spot bought followers and how to verify a YouTube or Twitch account is legit; our free authenticity checker automates the same math for any YouTube or Twitch handle, with a transparent 0-100 score and an estimated fake-follower percentage instead of a black-box verdict. Browse the creator directory if you’re starting a vetting shortlist from scratch.

Sources: FTC final rule announcement, ftc.gov, August 2024; FTC warning letters to 10 companies, ftc.gov, December 2025; legal analysis from Kelley Drye and Venable.