Kevin Trudeau was trusted by many consumers for his medical advice and his ability to sell to them via infomercials until he was exposed by the Food and Drug Administration as telling half-truths on his programs.New Jersey-based Telebrands Corporation brought the Ab Force onto the market to make exercise easier, but had to alter their image to be truthful to consumers.Both Trudeau and Telebrands have been defendants in cases of false advertising, further defining the lines which advertisers cannot cross when appealing to consumers.These two cases are also examples of how the government will outright go after companies and individuals who take advantage of the public and violate laws, even if they are hard to understand.In the book “Mass Media Law” by Don Pember and Clay Calvert, it is stated there are three parts to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) definition of false advertising. The first part is there must be a representation, omission or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer. The second part is the act or practice must be considered from the perspective of a consumer who is acting reasonably. The final part is that the representation, omission or practice must be material.In the 2004 case FTC versus Trudeau, the FTC was granted a permanent injunction against Kevin Trudeau for falsely promoting “Coral Calcium Supreme” as a cure for cancer and “Biotape” as a cure for chronic pain. Trudeau was guilty of all three components of false advertising.An injunction is one of the tools the FTC uses to stop false advertising. As defined by the legal website FindLaw, an injunction is a “court order compelling a party to do or refrain from doing a specified act” and can be used when there is no adequate remedy at law.  FTC spokespersons have said this power will only be used when there is harm done through the advertising and there is no foreseeable end to the advertisements.Trudeau was in court again in 2007 for promoting his own book “The Weight Loss Cure ‘They’Don’t Want You to Know About,” in which he claims to have cures for everything from herpes to AIDS. The only exclusion from his injunction was that he could be in infomercials for books, as long as the content of the book was not misconstrued.In the infomercial he claims “you can eat whatever you want” after completing the four phase program and “the pounds will stay off forever.” However, during the trial, U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman wrote that “nowhere in the infomercial does Trudeau mention the organ ‘cleanses,’ 100 percent organic food diet and 15 colonics in a 30-day period.” “Mass Media Law” states the best defense against a false advertisement suit is the truth, “proving that a product does what the advertiser claims it does, that it is made where the advertiser says it is made or that it is as beneficial as it is advertised to be.”Trudeau countered he was only repeating what he had wrote and what he said was truth. He did not have proper medical training or approval for his “natural medicine” techniques and glossed over the exact measures that needed to be taken in his commercials. The court concluded “choosing a few key phrasing from the book did not accurately portray the book’s overall content.”The FTC’s rules against deceptive advertising come down to two critical components; advertising must be truthful and not misleading, and all claims made in the advertisements must have “a reasonable basis for any and all expressed and/or implied product claims, with claims relating to health and safety coming under even closer scrutiny … that typically requires proof by competent and reliable scientific evidence.”Thus, Trudeau was violating his 2004 injunction for false advertising by appearing on television for his book and misrepresenting it.For this misrepresentation of content, Gettleman charged Trudeau in 2007 with $5,173,000 in fines, approximately the sum of royalties Trudeau would have reaped from the book sales. Later in 2008, upon the urging of the FTC, Gettleman increased the sum to more than $37.5 million which would equate to the amount consumers paid for his deceptive infomercials.As for the case against Telebrands, which was accused of false advertising in their Ab Force infomericals, the FTC’s Chief Administrative Law Judge Stephen J. McGuire requested an order against them to stop advertising their claims. The infomercial for the Ab  Force claims users can lose weight by applying electronic stimulation to their abdominal muscles through the use of a belt and it was an “effective alternative to regular exercise,” according to the FTC court document. McGuire made the order because the ads were likely to “mislead consumers, acting reasonably under the circumstances, in a material respect.”With these two cases only, it is evident the FTC has handled false advertising claims with the utmost seriousness. Seeing as both advertisements were directly misconstruing the use of their products, the outcomes from the cases are reasonable.