NCPW 2025: Fighting against Deceptive Marketing

National Consumer Protection Week is here.

NCPW is an annual event dedicated to educating consumers about their rights and helping them make informed purchasing decisions, in addition to helping people learn how to spot, report and avoid frauds and scams.

When it comes to deceptive ads, consumers can file complaints with several agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and their state attorney general’s office.

Consumers can also file a complaint with us here at TINA.org.

Over the years, TINA.org has exposed thousands of examples of deceptive marketing claims, taking legal action against a multitude of companies we have found violating consumer protection laws. The evidence that we have provided to federal and state agencies has helped regulators obtain more than $250 million from wrongdoers and return millions in ill-gotten gains to consumers. Our investigations have also helped put a stop to a number of problematic ads. (See, among others, Gillette, Mercedes, Williams-Sonoma, Walmart and, most recently, Prevagen).

While our efforts to keep ads honest have spanned more than a decade, we upped our game in 2022 with the launch of a new website.

We designed the new website to make it easier for consumers to learn how to avoid common deceptive marketing practices such as “risk-free” trial offers, false made in the USA claims and greenwashing. We also made it easier for visitors to get all the information we have uncovered and collected over the years about a specific brand (and its parent company) in one spot by introducing brand pages. With a similar goal in mind, we unveiled industry pages to highlight our work exposing deception across entire industries, including the multilevel marketing industry, the menopause supplement industry and the energy drink industry, just to name a few.

What’s next?

In January, we published our annual list of deceptive ad trends we’re tracking in the new year. The list included junk fees, deceptive marketing aimed at children and AI-generated reviews. These are just some of the issues we’re focusing on this year.

We’re also keeping tabs on a number of new and proposed government rules that pertain to false and deceptive marketing, including FTC rules targeting false or misleading earnings claims, subscriptions that are difficult to cancel and junk fees.

If you have any thoughts or concerns regarding these rules or have seen a deceptive ad you’d like us to look into, we’d love to hear from you. Follow this link to file a complaint.

Thank you for joining us in the fight to Keep Ads Honest.