CCPA Penalizes ‘Raising Superstars’ for Misleading Claims

The Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) directed Raising Superstar Pvt. Ltd., a digital platform offering child development programs, to cease and desist from making any development milestone or performance-related claims unless backed by credible scientific evidence. In addition, a penalty of 8 lakhs was imposed for the dissemination of misleading advertisements. The platform, having more than 169,000 users with over 300,000 downloads, offered a “Prodigy Framework Program” for newborns that claimed to enable crawling in 3 months, walking at 8 months and 200+ vocabulary by 18 months.

The authority opined that the dissemination of such outcome-oriented claims, in the absence of scientific substantiation, influenced enrollment decisions of an inherently vulnerable category of consumers, i.e. parents and guardians of infants and toddlers and exploited parental concerns, thereby aggravating the violation. Further, the misleading representations were found to be directly connected to the commercial offerings generating revenue for the platform, which had substantial outreach. Notably, the platform neither had any in-house data sets nor any third-party evaluation, hence rendering the claims misleading and in violation of Section 21(2) read with Section 21(7) of the Consumer Protection Act.

Although the entity submitted that the impugned claims were subsequently removed and disclaimers were introduced, such post facto measures were not deemed sufficient to alter the position that the misleading representations had been disseminated to the public for a considerable period. Further, a higher degree of diligence and care was expected of the entity and the claims failed to adhere to the standards of accuracy and transparency required under the statute.