The Federal Trade Commission Monday sued Florida-based Evoke Wellness, LLC and Evoke Health Care Management and their officers Jonathan Mosley and James Hull for using a combination of deceptive Google search ads and telemarketing to masquerade as other substance use disorder treatment providers.
“Preying on consumers suffering from addiction and other substance use disorders is wrong, and it’s illegal,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The use of deceptive online ads to trick consumers into selecting one clinic over another is unacceptable, and the Commission will continue taking action against clinics, marketers, and others in this space, as well as their executives when they break the law.”
According to the complaint, Evoke tricked consumers into contacting Evoke’s call centre by using deceptive Google search ads that appeared to be from the specific substance use disorder treatment clinics searched for by consumers.
Evoke targeted consumers who were searching on their mobile phones not only by using the specific names of other clinics as keywords but also by prominently displaying the names of those other clinics in the Google ads in a format that impersonated the searched-for clinics.
When consumers clicked on or dialled the telephone number in those ads, Evoke funnelled them to their own telemarketers. Evoke’s telemarketers continued the deception, typically by falsely claiming that consumers had reached a centralized admissions office or addiction treatment hotline rather than a call center associated with Evoke.
Even when callers indicated clearly that they sought a different, specific treatment clinic, the telemarketers consistently reinforced the callers’ misimpressions created by Evoke’s deceptive ads, for example ,by falsely claiming to have a relationship with the other clinic.
The complaint further alleges that between 2021 and 2023, Evoke disseminated at least 68,510 misleading Google search ads, resulting in at least 3,500 calls to Evoke’s call centre.
The commission alleges this conduct violated both the FTC Act and the Opioid Addiction Recovery Fraud Prevention Act of 2018. The lawsuit asks the court to permanently stop the deceptive practices and seeks civil penalties.
This is one of several FTC actions in recent years targeting deceptive conduct in the substance use disorder treatment industry.
The FTC has previously brought actions against, for example, R360 LLC and its owner, Steven Doumar, for deceiving consumers about the evaluation and selection criteria for the treatment centres in their network; Michael J. Connors and his companies for deceptively claiming their Smoke Away products could eliminate consumers’ nicotine addiction; Rejuvica, LLC and its owners for making numerous unsubstantiated and false claims about Sobrenix, marketed to reduce and even eliminate alcohol consumption; Dr. Dalal A. Akoury and a set of companies operating as AWAREmed Health & Wellness Resource Center for making a wide range of false or unsupported claims for addiction treatment services; Cerebral and its former CEO, Kyle Robertson, for breaking their privacy promises to consumers and misleading them about the company’s cancellation policies in connection with telehealth services; and Monument, Inc., an alcohol addiction treatment service provider, for allegedly disclosing users’ personal health data to third-party advertising platforms.
The commission vote authorizing the filing of the complaint against Evoke Wellness, LLC and Evoke Health Care Management, LLC, as well as Mosley and Hul,l was 5-0. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District for the Southern District of Florida.
