The Fake Review Sites Behind a Supplement That Claimed to Cure Alcohol Cravings

“STRUGGLING TO CONTROL YOUR ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION? Sobrenix is designed to reduce alcohol cravings and help you detoxify your body so you can successfully manage alcohol consumption,” read one advertisement for a liquid tincture sold on Amazon, the Walmart website, and other platforms. According to the Federal Trade Commission, Rejuvica LLC and its owners, Kyle Armstrong and Kyle Dilger, made numerous unsubstantiated and false claims about the product using paid endorsers and deceptively formatted advertising.DOCUMENTED

The FTC is sending more than $536,000 in refunds to 56,686 consumers who bought Sobrenix, following a July 2023 complaint alleging the company's marketing violated both the FTC Act and a specific federal law governing claims about substance use disorder treatment products.DOCUMENTED

What the complaint alleges

According to the FTC's complaint, Rejuvica and its owners made false or misleading representations that Sobrenix reduces or eliminates cravings for alcohol, enables users to substantially reduce or eliminate their alcohol consumption, and assists users in the broader process of managing or overcoming problematic drinking — claims the agency alleges lacked any competent scientific evidence.DOCUMENTED The product itself was a liquid tincture made of kudzu root combined with other herbs and vitamins, ingredients with no established clinical evidence supporting the specific alcohol-craving claims made in Sobrenix's marketing.DOCUMENTED

Fake TV segments and fake review sites

Beyond the underlying health claims, the complaint alleges Rejuvica used two distinct deceptive tactics to make those claims appear independently credible. First, the company allegedly paid “experts” to appear on local television news broadcasts to promote the product's benefits, without disclosing that these television appearances were, in fact, paid advertising rather than independent journalism — blurring the line between news content and sponsored promotion in a way designed specifically to borrow the credibility of a news segment for a commercial pitch.DOCUMENTED

Second, and separately, the complaint alleges Rejuvica created bogus review websites designed to appear as independent, third-party sources of consumer feedback, when in fact the sites were owned and operated by Rejuvica itself.DOCUMENTED Combining fabricated independent media coverage with fabricated independent consumer reviews gave prospective buyers two separate, seemingly unrelated sources of validation for the product's claims — both of which, according to the FTC, actually traced back to the company selling the product.

Why a federal opioid-recovery law applied to an alcohol supplement

The complaint's invocation of the Opioid Addiction Recovery Fraud Prevention Act of 2018 (OARFPA) is notable because the statute's title suggests a narrower scope than its actual application in this case. OARFPA prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices specifically with respect to any substance use disorder treatment product or service, a category broad enough to cover a product marketed, as Sobrenix was, as helping consumers manage or reduce alcohol consumption — alcohol being, alongside opioids, a substance whose disordered use the underlying statute was designed to address.REVIEWED Applying OARFPA to an alcohol-focused supplement, rather than limiting the law's use to opioid-specific products, signals that regulators read the statute's substance use disorder framing broadly enough to capture marketing claims across different categories of addictive substances.

How the reduced judgment reflects an inability-to-pay finding

The gap between the full $3,247,737 monetary judgment and the $650,000 the defendants were actually required to pay reflects a documented finding that Rejuvica and its owners lacked the financial resources to satisfy the larger figure, a common outcome in FTC settlements against smaller companies with limited assets relative to the scale of consumer harm alleged.REVIEWED As in similar settlements, the reduced payment is generally conditioned on the accuracy of the defendants' financial disclosures, meaning the full judgment could become due if the defendants are later found to have misrepresented their actual financial condition during settlement negotiations.

Terms of the settlement

The proposed order permanently bans Rejuvica and its owners from making any unsubstantiated claims about health care products or services in the future.DOCUMENTED The order includes a total monetary judgment of $3,247,737, reduced to $650,000 based on the defendants' documented inability to pay the full amount — funds the FTC has since distributed as refunds to the 56,686 consumers who purchased the product.DOCUMENTED

The supplement's marketing relied on paid TV segments designed to look like independent news coverage, and review websites the company secretly owned itself.

Why the case matters

For consumers evaluating any supplement marketed to address addiction, cravings, or substance use more broadly, the Sobrenix case is a reminder that both the underlying health claim and the sources appearing to validate it deserve scrutiny — a seemingly independent news segment or review site is not, on its own, evidence of a product's efficacy, particularly for claims involving something as medically significant as reducing alcohol dependence.

Why online marketplaces make this kind of claim harder to police

Sobrenix was sold through major online marketplaces including Amazon and Walmart's website, platforms that host millions of third-party product listings and generally do not independently verify the health claims made in individual product descriptions before they go live.REVIEWED That gap between marketplace scale and claim verification means a supplement making unsubstantiated medical claims can reach a large national audience through mainstream retail platforms well before any regulator identifies and investigates the underlying marketing, a lag this case's multi-year timeline, from the original 2023 complaint to the 2024 refund distribution, illustrates directly.

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