VIETNAM: Vietnamese beauty queen Nguyen Thuc Thuy Tien, who won Miss Grand International back in 2021, was arrested on Monday! According to VNExpress, it’s all tied to this investigation about tricking customers over those Kera Supergreens Gummies, the fibre supplement she was promoting.
The 26-year-old beauty queen is under investigation for allegedly deceiving consumers, according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security. Tien co-owned Kera Supergreens Gummies with other investors, and authorities discovered that she controlled a 30% profit stake in the company.
Marketed gummies as healthy snack
It was not just Tien promoting these gummies. She teamed up with two other influencers, Pham Quang Linh and Nguyen Thi Thai Hang, and they were all publicly talking about how great the product was back in December of last year. On her Facebook page, she was telling everyone that these gummies were a healthy snack and that just one gummy was like eating a whole plate of vegetables! She even said they were good for people of all ages.
It turns out a customer was unsure about these gummies and decided to get them tested on their own at a place called the Quality Assurance and Testing Centre 2. And that’s when the truth started to come out and all the controversy began.
Each box of those gummies, even though it was supposed to have a good amount of fibre, actually only had a tiny 0.51 grams! That’s way less than what they were saying. And after all the fuss started, Tien quickly took down all her posts promoting the gummies from social media.
It turns out that the people in charge of food safety in Ho Chi Minh City did an official test on these gummies. They did this because the Food Safety Department, which is part of the Ministry of Health, asked them to. It sounds like the higher-ups were definitely concerned and wanted to get to the bottom of what was really in these things.
Counterfeit product
Even though what was inside the product matched what the company said about the sugar, protein, fat, and energy, the people in charge noticed that the packaging didn’t mention fibre at all.
This is a bit strange because they were actually advertising it as a fibre supplement! Because of this missing info on the label, the authorities ended up calling the product “counterfeit.”
The people looking into it found out that the vegetable powder in those gummies was supposed to come from farms in Vietnam that had this special “VietGAP” certification, which means they meet certain quality standards.
But get this – the production staff making the gummies were told to use really cheap powder instead, which barely had any fibre in it, only around 0.61–0.75%. And to top it off, they were lying and saying it had a whopping 28% fibre!
High sorbitol content
Apparently, these gummies also had a whole lot of sorbitol in them – like 35%! That’s an artificial sweetener that can actually make you need to go to the bathroom.
They didn’t even mention any other extra stuff they put in there. So, people thought these gummies were helping their digestion because of natural fibre from vegetables, but really, it was just the high amount of that artificial sweetener making things move.
So, they were all over social media and online, using really misleading lines like “eating one of these gummies is the same as eating a whole plate of veggies!” Can you believe that?
The authorities found out they sold a massive amount – over 135,000 of these things to more than 30,000 people! And they made a ton of money doing it, over VND17 billion, which is more than S$845,000.
After the authorities looked into everything, they called in Tien, Linh, and Hang to ask them some questions. And guess what? All three of them admitted that they were saying things that weren’t true or were misleading.
Against the rules
Linh and Hang got hit with a pretty big fine – VND140 million each – for lying in their ads. Tien also got fined, though not as much, VND25 million, because she didn’t say that her posts on social media were actually paid promotions. It’s like she was secretly advertising without letting people know she was getting paid for it, which is against the rules.
After all of that, Hang, Linh, and two other people were actually arrested and are now facing charges for “deceiving consumers.” That means they could be in some real trouble for tricking people with their product and false advertising.