Diet Patch Makers Violate FTC Order, Face New Fines

WASHINGTON—Two corporate defendants and their leaders were fined an additional $110,539 by FTC, which reopened their 2004 final judgment after the companies continued to use false claims to peddle weight-loss products. This violated the prior settlement, which involved substantial fines for consumer redress as well as multiple prohibitions on marketing activities relative to weight-loss products, including the transdermal patches the companies sold.
FTC learned since that 2004 judgment, the defendants—Advanced Patch Technologies (APT), its distributor, Buckhead Marketing & Distribution LLC, and their officers—have been marketing weight-loss patches with bogus diet claims, this time overseas.
As a result of violating the settlement, APT, which had been fined $175,000 in the 2004 case, will now have to forfeit more than $67,000; Buckhead, which had a $24 million fine suspended in lieu of an actual $1.0 million fine in 2004, will have to pay more than $43,000 under the latest judgment.
Both companies and their executives face additional limitations on their future activities in the weight-loss category, including being banned from selling any transdermal weight-loss products and from advertising that any product can cause weight-loss.