'Popular on SNS!' was a paid fiction — Nobilun's stealth-marketing order

Between April and December 2025, Takamitsu Seiyaku, a supplement seller based in Kobe's Higashinada Ward, recruited third parties for promotional purposes, provided its products free of charge and asked them to post on SNS. It then reused the posted images on its official website and on its own storefronts in Rakuten Ichiba and Yahoo! Shopping.

Those pages carried lines such as 'SNSでも大人気！' ('popular on SNS!') and 'ノビルンCがSNSでも！' alongside images of consumers holding the products — with no disclosure that the posts had been commissioned by the company. The Consumer Affairs Agency concluded that general consumers could not tell the display was the business operator's advertising.

On 29 June 2026 the CAA issued an administrative order under Article 7(1) of the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, finding a violation of Article 5(3) — the stealth-marketing notice. The display ran for Nobilun from 25 April to 11 December 2025 (with gaps) and for Nobilun C from 16 October to 11 December 2025.

The order requires the company to publish a notice to consumers, formulate recurrence-prevention measures and communicate them to officers and employees, and never repeat the representation. The investigation was carried out jointly with the Japan Fair Trade Commission's Kinki-Chugoku-Shikoku Office.