Legal Library: Search

Reckitt Benckiser Group plc has agreed to pay $50 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it violated the antitrust laws through a deceptive scheme to thwart lower-priced generic competition to its branded drug Suboxone. According to the complaint, before the generic versions of Suboxone tablets became available, Reckitt and its former subsidiary Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals, now known as Indivior, Inc., developed a dissolvable oral film version of Suboxone and worked to shift prescriptions to this patent-protected film. Worried that doctors and patients would not want to switch to Suboxone Film, Reckitt allegedly employed a “product hopping” scheme where the company misrepresented that the film version of Suboxone was safer than Suboxone tablets because children are less likely to be accidentally exposed to the film product. Indivior has agreed to pay an additional $10 million to settle FTC charges. On May 10, 2021, the FTC announced that it sent nearly $60 million in payments to consumers who were victims of the scheme.

The operators of a deceptive newspaper subscriptions scheme are permanently banned from the direct mail marketing business under a federal court order obtained by the Federal Trade Commission. 

The Federal Trade Commission charged the operators of two similar student loan debt relief schemes, Manhattan Beach Ventures and Student Advocates Team, and a financing company that assisted them, Equitable Acceptance Corporation, with bilking millions of dollars from consumers.

In May 2021, the FTC sent payments totaling more than $273,500 to consumers who lost money to the student loan debt relief scheme.

In April 2021, the FTC charged St. Louis-based chiropractor Eric Anthony Nepute and his company Quickwork LLC with violating the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act, by deceptively marketing products containing vitamin D and zinc as scientifically proven to treat or prevent COVID-19. This is the first such case in which the agency has sought civil penalties.

The Federal Trade Commission is sending full refunds totaling more than $11 million to consumers who lost money to a bogus credit card interest rate reduction scheme operated by E.M. Systems & Services.

The FTC and the State of Florida alleged that the company’s owners, Steven D. Short and Karissa L. Dyar, used a variety of phony business names with associated websites, cold-called consumers with credit card debt and falsely promised to save them thousands of dollars by reducing their credit card interest rates. The FTC says that the defendants charged an up-front fee between $695 and $1,495, and falsely promised to provide refunds to consumers if they failed to reduce the interest rates.

In April 2021, the FTC used funds from this case to provide $11 million in redress to consumers harmed by the E.M. Systems and Services scam.