Frank Sarcona, the creator and marketer of Lipoban has been sentenced to 20 years in Federal Prison on Friday, the 26th of February.
This sentence brought to an end a three decade long dubious career in which Mr. Sarcona created and marketed a host of weight loss supplements under an assortment of companies and brand names.
Lipoban was marketed as a pill that could absorb fat and help people lose weight without chaning their diet. These claims were deemed to be false but that didn’t stop Mr. Sarcona from selling Lipoban to some 130,000 people, earning about $10 million in total during his now ended career.
Sarcona was found guilty by a federal jury of 29 felony counts related to Lipoban. These counts included money laundering, wire fraud and misbranding of a food.
What’s astonishing is that Sarcona formed Lipoban in 2000 just weeks after he made a deal with the Federal Trade Commission regarding misleading claims surrounding his previous company, SlimAmerica. The serial nature of his action may have weighed in on the jury’s verdict and the judge’s stiff sentence.
It seems that Sarcona had a long history of fraudulent enterprises, dating back into the late 1990′s when a judge described him as having “a long record of assorted fraudulent schemes which have bilked thousands of victims out of millions of dollars in more than a dozen states.”
In fact, Lipoban wasn’t Sarcona’s final effort in promoting weight loss products. He managed to start yet another company, Nature’s Pharmacy, which ran a campaign very similar to that of Lipoban.
In his final statement before sentencing, Sarcona made the case that he was in fact a crusader, a fighter for diet supplements who has struggled against a government that, according to him, wants to suppress them.
While Sarcona could have faced up to 33 years in prison for the crimes of which he was found guilty, presiding District Judge, Kenneth Marra decided upon a shorter sentence, saying that the lighter sentence was due to the relatively minor damage Sarcona inflicted upon each of his former customers who only had to pay $60 for the pills.
Sarcona may have faced an even lighter sentence had the State not shown his long history of making such fraudulent claims.
In the Lipoban campaign, Sarcona created an advertising campaign that claimed there was a Lipoban Clinic with a doctor acting as medical director. In fact, there was no clinic and the doctor was from Mexico and not licensed in Florida.
The advertisements were filled with claims like: “Imagine yourself 12, 25, 35 … even a ‘mind-warping’ 50 pounds or more lighter with no painful rigorous exercise! No starvation! No skimping on the foods you love to eat and best of all with no tortuous dieting!”
The pills contained chitosan, a substance derived from shellfish exoskeletons. Federal prosecutors argued in court that there was no way Lipoban could deliver the results promised without people changing their diets.
Source: Norwalk Reflector
