False and Misleading Advertisement (1)

In Malaysia, Consumer Protection Act 1999 came into force in order to protect the rights of the consumers. Throughout the years, the governmental body has received a number of complaints on false and misleading advertisement.

What leads to a false and misleading advertisement?  Under the Consumer Protection Act 1999 (hereinafter referred as ‘the Act’) interpreted the word false, misleading or deceptive in relation to conduct, representation or practice, includes conduct, representation or practice which is capable of leading a consumer into error. Generally, there are few types of false and misleading advertisement namely:

1)False and misleading representation;

2)Misleading conduct;

3)False representation and misleading conduct in relation to land; and

4)Misleading indication of price.

Generally, under S. 10 of the Act, a business must not make false or misleading representation on the goods and services are of particular standard, quality or of particular history. An example of misleading representation about the nature of goods are where an importer sells bicycle helmets with labels indicating the helmets met all mandatory safety standard but turn out to be that the helmet were not tested nor checked during the whole manufacturing process.

A representation may still be misleading even if it is true especially advertisement which falsely claiming a person have benefited after using the product. An example can be seen from the 1972 US case of Federal Trade Comission v Pfizer Corp. In this case, Pfizer had claimed that their sunburn product, Un-burn, relieved sunburn pain by anesthetizing nerves in sunburned skin, the court held that it was a misleading advertisement, the type of claims issued without any support.

In the current marketing strategy, there are always statements which clearly stated that goods sold are not refundable however it is important to draw out that the consumer has a right to reject defective goods and seek for refund and replacement as per S.46 of the Act.

Always remember that even though the Act provides for the right for consumer to reject defective goods and seek for refund and replacement, there is always a big B-U-T to such right and I will talk about it in my upcoming post.