Donna O'Toole, founder of August Recognition, has been tracking the trend. "If you didn't know the organiser personally, you wouldn't realise the invitation wasn't real," she warns. One white paper interviewee described the pay-to-win model bluntly: "They'll email you and say you've won — and if you want to appear in our magazine, it's a £1,000 fee."

The backlinking variant is the most insidious. Recipients are offered free "award" badges to display on their sites — titles like "Top Innovator" or "Best in Industry." No money changes hands, but each badge embeds a link back to the scammer's domain, juicing its SEO authority across hundreds or thousands of sites. The scammer's domain can later be sold or repurposed for unsavoury industries, leaving the badge-displaying business linked to whatever the new owner does with it.

Sarah Austin, founder of the British Business Excellence Awards, has fought imitators in court. "Some of them are impersonating real awards like ours. They're damaging trust and scamming honest business owners out of money. And they're multiplying," she says. She's now calling for an independent, ideally media-led, accreditation body for the sector.

The risk is amplified by AI. In June 2025, Cannes Lions revoked a Grand Prix awarded to Brazilian agency DM9 after discovering AI-generated and manipulated footage in the case film. Three of the agency's winning campaigns were withdrawn in total, accounting for 12 awards including a Grand Prix, three golds, four silvers and three bronzes. Cannes responded with mandatory AI disclosure and a new code of conduct.

The report's recommendations for entrants are practical: research the organiser's track record, verify communication channels, never trust a payment link sent in an unsolicited email, and avoid embedding badges from unverified domains. Initiatives like the Awards App's Verified Awards Database aim to make credibility checks easier — and as O'Toole puts it, calling out the bad actors is how the legitimate ones survive.