Anonymised, illustrative composite. A brokerage's content calendar needed a testimonial to fill a weekly social post. An assistant reused a name and a quote from an old draft that had never actually been approved by the person named.
At a glance
A brokerage ran a weekly testimonial post as part of its social content calendar. One week's post was attributed to a named former lead — someone who had toured properties with an agent but never actually closed a deal with the brokerage. A marketing assistant, working from an old voicemail transcript where the lead had said something complimentary in passing, drafted a polished quote and published it under that person's name.
The person named saw the post after a mutual contact shared it, and did not recognize the quote — it had been embellished well past anything they remembered saying, and they had never agreed to be featured at all, let alone in the specific words used. They messaged the brokerage directly, unhappy at being quoted without ever having been asked.
The voicemail the assistant worked from had said, in substance, that the agent had been “pretty helpful during the search” before the lead decided not to proceed with an offer — a mild, half-hearted compliment about a relationship that never became a transaction. The published version turned that into a five-star endorsement of the brokerage's service and communication, attributed by full name and headshot.
No dollar figure attaches to this file; the exposure is regulatory and reputational rather than financial. What is measurable is the gap between what was published and what was ever actually said: the posted quote used two full sentences that do not appear anywhere in the original voicemail transcript the assistant worked from, dressed up with specific praise the person never voiced about the brokerage's process or communication.
Testimonials are not free-form marketing copy in Canada — they carry their own specific rule under the Competition Act. Section 74.02 makes it reviewable conduct to publish “a testimonial with respect to a product, unless the person making the representation or publishing the testimonial can establish that” either the testimonial was previously made or published by the person giving it, or written approval was obtained beforehand — and critically, that “the testimonial as published” actually matches what was approved. An embellished quote fails that test even if the underlying person is real and did say something positive once; the published version has to match what they approved, not just be inspired by it.
The burden here sits with the brokerage, not with the person named. It is the publisher who must be able to establish approval existed and that the published wording matches it — and in this file, no approval of any kind had been sought before the post went up.
The brokerage removed the post within a day of the complaint and sent a written apology to the person named, along with a follow-up call from the managing broker. The person did not pursue the matter further once the post was down and the apology was made directly rather than through a generic customer-service reply. No Competition Bureau complaint followed — but the exposure if one had is not trivial: s.74.1 sets administrative monetary penalties running to $750,000 for an individual on a first order and $10,000,000 for a corporation, figures set as a deterrent ceiling rather than a scale tied to any one post, and entirely separate from the smaller CASL and privacy-law penalty regimes that can apply to unrelated marketing conduct on the same file.
The tell was a content calendar that needed to be filled and a marketing assistant who reached for the nearest complimentary-sounding material rather than an actually-approved quote. A real testimonial process asks for consent twice: once to use any version of what someone said, and again to confirm the exact wording that will actually be published — skipping either step, even with a real client and a real compliment somewhere in the background, is enough to fail s.74.02. The brokerage's fix afterward was procedural: every testimonial now needs a written approval on file, tied to the exact published wording, before it goes on the calendar at all.
The person named here was never even a closed client, which made the file worse than a merely-embellished quote from someone who did transact — but the statute does not actually distinguish the two cases by severity. Section 74.02 is written around whether approval exists and whether the published wording matches it, not around how close the underlying relationship came to a real transaction. A polished quote attributed to a genuine long-time client, embellished past what they actually approved, fails the same test a fabricated one does.
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