When Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên agreed to do a commercial for a supplement called Joint Bonus that helps people with joint aches, she didn’t think much of it. The renowned Vietnamese American singer and emcee had done many paid commercials and product reviews before, so she didn’t think twice about the request from the FTB Group.
She asked her assistant Huynh Thi Ngoc Han to help her vet the company, and they decided that the paperwork backing the product seemed legitimate. She also recognized the supplement factory from other supplements she previously helped promote, she said, so she felt confident in working with them. Kỳ Duyên often placed time limits on how long her business partners could use her likeness and told FTB Group to limit their use of her likeness to three months.
She flew to Vietnam, shot the commercials, and collected her fee. She also entered into another contract with FTB Group to market a product called Sugar Care, which is aimed at helping people manage their high blood sugar.
Little did Kỳ Duyên know that after the campaign launched on the YouTube channel of the FTB Group, her footage would be copied, re-edited and then used by vendors who published their new false ads on YouTube and Facebook, she said. Kỳ Duyên’s imagery was only supposed to be used until the end of December 2023, according to a contract reviewed by Documented, and yet, new ads kept popping up — some as recently as January of this year.
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Those ads and the sellers behind them were the focus of an investigation that Documented published, in which we detailed how a network of sellers used false claims, fake doctors and pressure tactics to sell questionable supplements to Vietnamese elders in the U.S.
It was after the investigation was published in late February that Kỳ Duyên reached out to Documented. She said she had not responded to Documented’s request for comment earlier because she had not seen the request until the day after the article was published. Kỳ Duyên explained to Documented that since early 2024, she has been trying to find ways to have the footage of her Joint Bonus and Sugar Care commercials removed from YouTube and Facebook after seeing the ad still in circulation and despite having initially entered into a legitimate business relationship with FTB Group.
She provided documents and screenshots to Documented showcasing the contract that Documented was able to verify. Kỳ Duyên, who is a trained lawyer, said that she carefully vetted the language of the script she was reading for the advertisement but that edited versions of the ads now put out false claims that she never made about the products, such as Sugar Care being able to make people less dependent on insulin.
Her story shows how easy it is for online scammers to spin false campaigns based on footage stolen from the internet and how easy it can be to target immigrant groups like the Vietnamese using various online tools.
Certificate of the supplements provided by Nguyễn’s assistant Ngọc Hân
The idea for Joint Bonus came from Nguyễn Linh, who said that she came up with the product after hearing her friend who lived in the U.S. complain about joint aches. Having been in the supplement business in Vietnam for more than a decade Nguyễn Linh decided to launch a product to help her friend and “other Vietnamese people in the U.S.,” she said.
Nguyễn Linh, who is based in Hanoi, is a shareholder of and works for FTB Group, the company that originally approached Kỳ Duyên. She had developed the product in 2023, a few months before reaching out to Kỳ Duyên.
The company spent $900,000 developing the product, building a distribution plan and marketing. She said she spent roughly $200,000 on hiring and shooting commercials with Kỳ Duyên and other Vietnamese celebrities who had made a name for themselves in the U.S.
Kỳ Duyên declined to comment on how much FTB Group paid her but Nguyễn Linh said she paid celebrities between $50,000 and $70,000 to participate in commercials.
Nguyễn Linh said that she started seeing a rapid increase of imposters using footage of Kỳ Duyên and other celebrities to sell products not produced by her company. She said since seeing the false ads online, her company has reduced much of their production and now only sells supplements to long-term customers whom she trusts and has gotten to know over the years. Most recently, Nguyễn Linh has seen people steal the footage and use it to market an imitation of Joint Bonus in Australia and Europe.
For the investigation that Documented published in February, we called and texted 16 telephone numbers that sellers had used to market Joint Bonus and Sugar Care on YouTube. Six numbers were no longer in service, nine did not respond to a request for comment, and one person texted back, saying they did sell the product and asked if we wanted to buy it, though they did not answer any questions related to this story.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, did not respond for comment, and YouTube told Documented that the six channels selling Joint Bonus and Sugar Care were removed as they violated terms of service.
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Kỳ Duyên says that while people had previously copied and republished footage without her permission, it has not reached this extreme before. As a result of this ordeal, she said that she’s stopped taking on gigs like this.
“For the past 2 to 3 years I’ve stopped taking on commercials at a loss to my income,” she said. “I’m so afraid that something like this will happen again. So I don’t know what to do.”
