FTC offers refunds to consumers of deceptive health productsFTC offers refunds to consumers of deceptive health products
Golden Sunrise’s false advertising of its dietary supplements as treatments for serious diseases like Covid-19 and cancer culminated in an FTC lawsuit and criminal charges against one of its officers, who was sentenced to prison.

Consumers who purchased plans sold by a company that claimed to treat cancer, Covid-19 and Parkison’s disease have the chance to obtain a refund more than four years after the U.S. government filed suit against Golden Sunrise Nutraceutical Inc. and its two officers for deceptive advertising.
On Jan. 6, the Federal Trade Commission announced it was mailing refund claim forms, or notices, to 581 consumers who bought certain products from Golden Sunrise Nutraceutical Inc. (Golden Sunrise) between July 2017 and July 2020. Those products include Primary Plan of Care, Emergency D-Virus Plan of Care, Metabolic Plan of Care and Cancer Plan of Care.
Eligible consumers can file a claim online at www.ftc.gov/GoldenSunrise and have until April 6, 2025, to do so. The payment amounts will depend on certain factors including the number of individuals who file claims, and FTC said it anticipates mailing payments in 2026.
In 2021, the medical director of Golden Sunrise, Stephen Meis, was subject to a stipulated order for a permanent injunction and monetary judgment after the government charged him with participating in deceptively advertising a $23,000 plan as a proven way to treat Covid-19.
The order in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California required Meis to pay $103,420 for consumers refunds and barred him from making unsupported health claims in the future. Other defendants named in the FTC lawsuit, including Golden Sunrise, stipulated to a preliminary injunction entered by the court in 2020.
In the 2020 complaint, FTC specifically called out the company’s Emergency D-Virus plan, which Golden Sunrise began marketing in March 2020 on billboards, websites and social media. The company falsely claimed its supplements — ImunStem, Aktiffvate and AnterFeerons — were “uniquely qualified to treat and modify the course of the Coronavirus epidemic,” according to the lawsuit.
Regulators also detailed how Meis and the president and CEO at Golden Sunrise, Huu Tieu, promoted and sold dietary supplements as treatments for cancer and Parkinson’s disease, among many other serious health conditions and diseases. Some of the treatments cost as much as $170,000 to $200,000, while testing showed supplements were comprised mainly of familiar herbs and spices.
Tieu was also criminally indicted in 2020 by a grand jury on counts of mail fraud and introducing a misbranded drug into interstate commerce with the intent to defraud. In March 2024, he pleaded guilty to charges of three counts of introduction of misbranded drugs into interstate commerce, according to court documents.
“Golden Sunrise falsely asserted that the drugs were ‘uniquely qualified to treat and modify the course of [Covid-19],’ had ‘proven themselves to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA),’ had been ‘the first dietary supplement in the United States to be approved as a prescription medicine’ by … (FDA) to treat the Covid-19 virus, and had received a ‘Regenerative Medicine Advance Therapy (RMAT) designation in the 2016 Cures Act, enacted by the 114th United States Congress,’” federal prosecutors wrote in a 2024 sentencing memorandum. “Contrary to these statements, the drugs were not FDA approved, and no Golden Sunrise product had ever been approved by the FDA for any purpose or received an RMAT designation from the FDA.”
Tieu was released on pretrial supervision the same day as his arrest following the grand jury indictment. However, the government discovered in May 2023 that Tieu had published a research paper in which he suggested that one of the Golden Sunrise drugs was approved by FDA, according to the government’s sentencing memo. Tieu was remanded into custody in June 2023 for violating the condition of his pretrial release, prosecutors wrote.
Per an amended judgment entered in June 2024, Tieu was sentenced to the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons for 18 months. He was further ordered to be on supervised release for 12 months after being released from prison. And among his “special conditions of supervision,” Tieu “must not represent that [his] product has been approved or recognized by any government entity as preventing, treating or curing Covid-19, or any serious or life-threatening disease.”
John F. Garland, an attorney who represented Tieu in the criminal case, did not respond to a request for comment from SupplySide Supplement Journal.
With reporting by Duffy Hayes
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