False advertising 

or deceptive advertising is the use of false or

misleading statements in advertising. As advertising has the
potential to persuade people into commercial transactions that
they might otherwise avoid, many governments around the world
use regulations to control false, deceptive or misleading
advertising. Truth in labeling refers to essentially the same
concept, that customers have the right to know what they are
buying, and that all necessary information should be on the label.
False advertising, in the most blatant of contexts, is illegal in most
countries. However, advertisers still find ways to deceive
consumers in ways that are not illegal.
Contents

 1 Pricing-based methods
o 1.1 Hidden fees and
surcharges
o 1.2 "Going out of business"
sales
 2 Other deceptive methods
o 2.1 Manipulation of
standards
o 2.2 Fillers and oversized
packaging
o 2.3 Undefined terms
 3 Regulation and enforcement
o 3.1 United States
 4 References
Pricing-based methods

Hidden fees and surcharges

Service providers often tack on fees and surcharges that are
not disclosed to the customer in the advertised price. One of the
most common is for activation of services such as mobile phones,
but is also common in broadband, telephony, gym memberships,
and air travel. In most cases, the fees are hidden in fine print,
though in a few cases they are so confused and obfuscated by
ambiguous terminology that they are essentially undisclosed.
Hidden fees are frequently used in airline and air travel
advertising.
"Going out of business" sales
In many cases, the liquidators which are hired to sell merchandise
from a closing store will actually raise the prices on items that
were already marked-down on clearance. For items already
marked-down to 50% off, this means the liquidator is doubling the
price (quadrupling it for a 75%-off price), and then "discounting" it
from there. Also common is for the sale prices at a retail chain's
other stores to be lower than the liquidator's prices at the closing
stores. Both of these were proven to be the case in November
2008, with the same liquidator (Hilco) committing both offenses:
the markups at Linens 'n Things, and the higher prices on around
one-third of the items compared to other Circuit City stores
remaining open. Additionally, liquidators refuse to accept returns,
so if a customer does find he or she has been overcharged, there
is no apparent recourse.
Other deceptive methods

Manipulation of standards
Sellers may manipulate standards to mean something different
than their widely-understood meaning. One example is
with personal computer hard drives. While a megabyte has
always meant 220 (1,048,576) bytes in computer science, disk
manufacturers began using the metric system (SI) prefix meaning
of 106 (1,000,000). By stating the sizes of hard drives in
'megabytes' of 1,000,000 bytes instead of 1,048,576, they
overstate capacity by nearly 5%. With gigabytes, the error
increases to over 7% (1,073,741,824 instead of 1,000,000,000),
and nearly 10% for the newer terabyte. Seagate
Technology and Western Digital, were sued in a class-action
suit for this. Both companies agreed to settle the suit and
reimburse customers in-kind, yet they still continue to advertise
this way. To help combat this problem, a number of standards
and trade organizations approved standards and
recommendations in 2000for a new set of binary prefixes,
proposed earlier by the International Electrotechnical
Commission (IEC), that would refer unambiguously to powers of
1024. In addition, some operating systems, including Apple's OS
X, now measure disk memory in metric to help further eliminate
confusion for the customer.
Fillers and oversized packaging
Some products are sold with fillers, which increase the legal
weight of the product with something that costs the producer very
little compared to what the consumer thinks that he or she is
buying. Food is an example of this, where chicken meat is
injected with broth or even brine (up to 15%), or TV dinners are
filled with gravy or other sauce instead of meat. Malt andCocoa
Butter have been used as a color filler in peanut butter.
Undefined terms
Many terms do have some meaning, but the specific extent is not
legally defined, leading to their abuse. A frequent example (until
the term gained a legal definition) was "organic" food. "Light" food
also is an even more common manipulation. The term has been
variously used to mean low
in calories, sugars, carbs, salt, texture, thickness (viscosity), or
even light in color. Tobacco companies, for many years, used
terms like "low tar", "light", "ultra-light", "mild" or "natural" in order
to imply that products with such labels had less detrimental
effects on health., but in recent years it was proved that those
terms were considered misleading.
Another example is the United Egg Producers' "Animal Care
Certified" logo on egg cartons which misled consumers by
conveying a higher level of animal care than was actually the
case. Both the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade
Commission found the logo to be deceptive and the original logo
can no longer be used.

Regulation and enforcement

United States
Advertising is regulated by the authority of the Federal Trade
Commission, a United States administrative agency, to prohibit
"unfair and deceptive acts or practices in commerce."While it
makes laymen's sense to assume that being deceptive is being
unfair, deceptiveness in practice has been treated separately by
the FTC, leaving unfairness to refer only to other types. All
commercial acts may be deceptive, not just advertising, but
noncommercial activity such as advertising for political candidates
is not subject to prosecution under the FTC Act. The 50 states
have similar statutes, which generally are very similar to that of
the FTC and in many cases copied so closely that they are known
as "Little FTC Acts." While the terms "false" and "deceptive" are
essentially the same for most, being deceptive is not the same as
producing deception. What is illegal is the potential to deceive,
which is interpreted to occur when consumers see the advertising
to be stating to them, explicitly or implicitly, a claim that they may
not realize is false and material. The latter means that the claim, if
relied on for making a purchasing decision, is likely to be harmful
by adversely affecting that decision. If an ad is implicitly false,
evidence must be obtained for what consumers saw the ad
saying, and for the materiality of that, and for the true facts about
the advertised item, but no evidence is required that actual
deception occurred, or that reliance occurred, or that the
advertiser intended to deceive or knew that the claim was false.
The goal is prevention rather than punishment, reflecting the
purpose of civil law in setting things right rather than that of
criminal law. The typical sanction is to order the advertiser to stop
its illegal acts, or to include disclosure of additional information
that serves to avoid the chance of deception. Corrective
advertising may be mandated. But there are no fines or prison
time except for the infrequent instances when an advertiser
refuses to stop despite being ordered to do so.
The actual statute defines false advertising as a "means of
advertisement other than labeling, which is misleading in a
material respect; and in determining whether an advertisement is
misleading, there shall be taken into account (among other things)
not only representations made or suggested by statement, word,
design, device, sound, or any combination thereof, but also the
extent to which the advertisement fails to reveal facts material in
the light of such representations or material with respect to
consequences which may result from the use of the commodity to
which the advertisement relates under the conditions prescribed
in said advertisement, or under such conditions as are customary
or usual."