NOW alerts Amazon to counterfeit dietary supplements sold on its site impersonating prominent industry brands

Pictured: Counterfeit supplements NOW said were sold on Amazon.com. Photo from NOW.

Supplement brand NOW says it has alerted Amazon.com after the company detected counterfeit NOW products being sold on Amazon’s site. NOW is asking Amazon to recall the products, which fraudulently claim to be from NOW itself as well as from another unnamed leading supplement brand.

NOW says it discovered nearly a dozen counterfeit supplements so far illegally using the NOW name and being sold by a company called A2X1. Now said that Amazon agreed to block all sales from A2X1 on its platform. However, NOW is also asking Amazon to go a step further and recall any items sold via Amazon from A2X1 and to “give NOW a list of these consumers, plus inventory levels and information about the fraudulent seller,” the company’s press release states. The counterfeit products include pectin, D-mannose, L-glutamine, L-lysine, lutein and zeaxanthin, magnesium citrate, mood-support, psyllium husk, valerian root, and Saccharomyces boulardii probiotic supplements, among other products.

NOW said it discovered the fraudulent products after being tipped off by several consumers about suspicious NOW-branded products they had purchased. NOW said A2X1 had been selling the counterfeit NOW supplements on Amazon for about two weeks.

“The products look like NOW supplements at first appearance, but the packaging, labels, and contents are clearly falsified,” the company states. “Each product contains small white capsules with an odorless white powder.” When NOW analyzed the white powder, they determined it was white rice flour. Not only that, but the company also detected trace amounts of the pharmaceutical Sildenafil in some of the products. NOW said it reported this fact to FDA and, “as a result, expect Amazon to do a recall of all items sold on Amazon by the seller A2X1.”

NOW also notes that the packaging for the fraudulent product is not NOW packaging and feature a different bottle neck, lids that aren’t NOW’s signature purple color, labels without UPC number, no lot numbers printed on the bottles, square-edged labels as opposed to rounded-edge labels, an abnormally elongated NOW logo, and labels that can be peeled off and that are shinier.

“We remain on high alert regarding this problem and have contacted the FDA Health Fraud Brand division as well as Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit,” said Dan Richard, NOW Health Group’s vice president of global sales and marketing, in the press release. “Additional legal steps are being taken in order to find the source of the problem and put it out of business. However, we fear that these fraudulent products may reappear on Amazon by a different seller name, or on another platform or in other international markets.”