Brushing scams are a form of review fraud in which a seller ships cheap, unordered items to real people so it can record the shipments as sales and post verified purchase reviews in the recipients’ names. The surprise package is the part consumers see. The fraud itself happens on the seller’s side, where fake orders lift a listing’s sales rank and fake reviews pull shoppers away from merchants who compete on product quality and service.
Brushing distorts marketplace search, wears down shopper trust in reviews, and sits inside a wider fake-review economy. Read on to learn more about this type of scam.
What Is a Brushing Scam?
A brushing scam is a scheme in which a seller, usually a third-party marketplace seller, mails merchandise nobody ordered to addresses found online, then uses those shipments to pose as a verified buyer. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service describes the goal plainly: the seller posts fake reviews in the recipient’s name to inflate its ratings and sales, and the practice is illegal in the United States, according to the USPIS brushing scam alert (updated March 24, 2025).
The FTC’s January 2025 consumer alert lists the kinds of items that show up: fake luxury rings, beauty products, and Bluetooth speakers. The items are cheap on purpose. Their only job is to create a shipment and a delivery confirmation that the seller can attach to a fake order.
How Does a Brushing Scam Work?
The mechanics are simple, which is why brushing keeps coming back on every large marketplace. A typical brushing operation runs through five steps:
- Collect real identities. The seller obtains names and addresses from breached data, public records, or scraped sources.
- Place orders it pays for itself. The seller buys its own product through accounts it controls, using those real names and delivery addresses.
- Ship something cheap. A low-cost item goes out so the carrier records a real delivery to a real address.
- Claim the verified purchase. With a delivery on file, the order qualifies for a verified purchase label, and the seller posts a five-star review.
- Ride the ranking boost. The extra orders and reviews push the listing higher in marketplace search, where real shoppers find it.
Each step costs the seller a few dollars. The return is a listing that looks popular and well reviewed, which marketplace algorithms and shoppers both reward. The FTC also notes that an unexpected package is a sign that someone has the recipient’s personal information, so brushing often runs on data from earlier breaches.
The QR Code Version of the Brushing Scam
In 2025 and 2026, brushing packages are projected to become a delivery method for phishing. Federal agencies issued several warnings about the change:
- USPIS: packages now include cards with a QR code that promises to reveal who sent the gift, and the code leads to a fake site that collects personal information.
- FBI: its July 31, 2025 public service announcement (I-073125-PSA) calls these packages a variation of brushing and warns that the QR codes can lead to data-harvesting sites or to malware that steals information from phones.
- FTC: an August 20, 2026 consumer alert warns that notes inside the box may ask recipients to scan a code to find the sender or to process a return, then phish for card numbers and passwords.
For merchants, the QR version matters because the phishing pages often imitate well-known marketplaces and brands. A shopper who loses card details to a fake return page may blame the brand on the package, and the stolen card numbers can then be used for card testing and payment fraud against legitimate stores.
The Seller-Side Fraud Behind Fake Reviews
Brushing is one tactic in a larger market for manufactured reputation. The FTC’s final rule on consumer reviews and testimonials lists the main forms, and each one fakes a different signal that shoppers rely on:
Fake social proof tactics
| Tactic | How it works | Signal it fakes |
|---|---|---|
| Brushing | Seller ships unordered items to real addresses and reviews its own product as the buyer | Verified purchase badge, sales velocity |
| Paid review brokers | Websites and groups pay or refund buyers in exchange for five-star reviews | Organic customer reviews |
| Insider reviews | Employees, owners, or relatives review products without disclosing the connection | Independent opinion |
| Review suppression | Threats, intimidation, or false accusations used to remove negative reviews | Average star rating |
| Fake social indicators | Purchased followers, views, or likes used to misrepresent influence | Popularity and reach |
The tactics share one goal: to make a listing look more trusted than its real sales history supports. Brushing is the one that also fakes the order itself, which is why marketplaces treat it as seller fraud as well as review fraud.
Why Brushing Scams Hurt Honest Sellers
Brushing scams take ranking and sales from merchants who earn their reviews. Marketplace search rewards sales velocity and review volume, so a brushed listing can outrank a better product within weeks. The honest seller then pays more for ads to win back visibility that the fake orders took for almost nothing.
The scale is large enough to change shopping decisions. A 2023 study commissioned by the UK Department for Business and Trade estimated that 11% to 15% of reviews in three common product categories were fake. It put the annual harm to UK consumers at £50 million to £312 million, a range the authors call conservative (UK government fake online reviews research, April 25, 2023). Every fake review in that share makes real reviews less useful, and shoppers who stop trusting reviews are harder to convert for every seller in the category.
Seller fraud of this kind also feeds other scams. Fraudsters who build fake listings with brushed reviews use the same playbook for counterfeit storefronts, and MFJ’s coverage of AI-generated fake online stores shows how quickly those storefronts now scale.
Amazon Brushing Scam Rules and Enforcement
The Amazon brushing scam is the version most consumers recognize, because Amazon is where many of these packages originate. Amazon’s help pages state that third-party sellers are prohibited from sending unsolicited packages to customers. When Amazon confirms brushing, it can suspend or remove selling privileges, withhold payments, and work with law enforcement.
Amazon’s community guidelines also ban the review tactics that brushing supports: reviews given in exchange for compensation (including refunds offered to change a negative review), reviews of a seller’s own or a competitor’s products, and reviews coordinated across accounts. Amazon reports these enforcement figures:
- It blocked more than 250 million suspected fake reviews in 2023 and more than 275 million in 2024.
- It reported blocking hundreds of millions more in 2025, without giving an exact count, in its Trustworthy Shopping Experience Report published April 22, 2026.
- It has filed lawsuits against fake review brokers, including joint suits with the Better Business Bureau (July 2024 and October 2025) and with Google (October 2024).
- It won a July 2025 court ruling against operators of more than 75 fake review websites and says it has deactivated more than 150 such sites in total.
These numbers come from Amazon’s actions against fake review brokers (updated October 8, 2025). Blocking reviews at that volume means fake Amazon reviews are still being written at that volume, so sellers should assume competitors in their category are attempting it. Amazon scams that target sellers cover the related schemes, such as fake buyer messages and phishing for Seller Central credentials.
The FTC Rule That Makes Fake Reviews a Penalty Risk
The legal exposure from fake reviews changed on October 21, 2024, when the FTC’s Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465) took effect. The Commission approved the rule 5-0 on August 14, 2024, and it gives the FTC authority to seek civil penalties from businesses that knowingly violate it, according to the FTC final rule banning fake reviews. The rule prohibits:
- Creating, buying, selling, or spreading fake reviews and testimonials, including AI-generated ones.
- Paying for reviews on the condition that they are positive or negative.
- Insider reviews posted without disclosing the reviewer’s connection to the business.
- Company-controlled review sites presented as independent.
- Suppressing reviews through threats, intimidation, or false accusations.
- Buying or selling fake social media indicators, such as followers or views.
The maximum civil penalty is $53,088 per violation after the FTC’s January 2025 inflation adjustment, and the FTC’s 2026 notice says penalty amounts remain unchanged this year. Enforcement has started.
What the rule means for your marketing vendors
The rule covers anyone who buys fake reviews, which includes brands whose agencies or growth vendors do it on their behalf. Any vendor that promises a guaranteed number of five-star reviews, offers refunds in exchange for reviews, or sends free products only to customers who agree to rate highly is creating risk for the brand that hired it. Review these contracts in the same way you review payment and fraud protection services vendors.
How Merchants Can Respond to Brushing Scams
Most merchants meet brushing from one of three directions: a competitor brushing its listings, customers receiving unordered packages that carry the merchant’s brand, or a marketplace operator finding sellers who buy their own goods. The response is different for each, but the warning signs overlap.
Red Flags to Watch For
These patterns are worth a closer look in your review feeds, customer messages, and order data:
- A burst of short, generic five-star verified reviews on a competing listing, posted within a few days of each other.
- Reviewer accounts with no other purchase or review history.
- Customer service contacts from people who received packages with your brand name on them that they never ordered.
- On a marketplace you operate: many low-value orders from one payment method shipped to unrelated names and addresses, followed by reviews from those orders.
- Packages or inserts that use your brand name next to a QR code you did not create.
None of these signals proves brushing on its own. Two or more together justify a report to the marketplace and a record of what you found, with screenshots and dates, in case the activity escalates.
How to Report a Brushing Scam
Reports go to different places depending on where the package came from and what it contained. Use the channel that matches the situation:
- Amazon packages: use Amazon’s Report Unwanted Package form or contact customer service with the number of packages received and a tracking number from at least one of them.
- Any marketplace: file a fraud report with the marketplace and ask it to remove any reviews posted in the recipient’s name.
- Federal consumer report: file at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
- Mail fraud: send USPS brushing scam reports to the Postal Inspection Service at uspis.gov/report or 1-877-876-2455.
- QR codes or malware: report the package to the FBI at ic3.gov, and do not scan the code.
Recipients do not need to return or pay for the item. Under 39 U.S.C. 3009, unordered merchandise sent by mail may be treated as a gift. Merchants can put this guidance in a help-center article so customer service agents give the same answer every time a brushed customer writes in.
Protect Your Brand's Review Profile
The best defense against brushing by others is a review program that is clearly clean. These practices keep your own reviews defensible:
- Request reviews from every verified buyer in the same neutral wording, without conditions on the rating.
- Keep records of how and when you request reviews, and of any incentives you disclose.
- Require employees, agencies, and affiliates to disclose any connection when they review your products.
- Monitor review velocity on your listings so you can spot and report fake reviews posted against you.
- Train support teams to recognize unordered-package complaints and QR code phishing, and to route them to fraud staff.
These steps fit naturally into the wider work of post-purchase fraud prevention, where review abuse, refund abuse, and chargebacks often trace back to the same actors. Merchants evaluating tools for that work can compare options in the list of eCommerce fraud prevention companies, and the broader cyber fraud attacks on merchants guide covers the phishing side of the QR code variant.
Keep Brushing Scams Out of Your Marketplace Strategy
Brushing scams work because marketplaces reward verified orders and fresh reviews, and a few dollars of shipping can fake both. Merchants cannot stop competitors from trying, but they can document and report the patterns, give customers clear answers about unordered packages, and keep their own review programs clean enough to pass FTC scrutiny. Audit your review vendors this quarter, set up review-velocity monitoring on your top listings, and write a support script for unordered packages before the holiday volume arrives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Charity Amancio
Charity Amancio specializes in SaaS solutions for global eCommerce businesses, including payments and risk management applications. She bridges the gap between technology and merchant needs, offering practical perspectives on the tools shaping eCommerce. Her insights appear regularly in B2B publications covering the digital commerce space.