14-year-old Ribena vigilantes cost GlaxoSmithKline NZ$220K in false advertising case

When 14-year-old New Zealand schoolgirls Jenny Suo and Anna Devathasan handed in their surprising Science Fair project results in 2004, they hardly expected to strike a financial blow for the consumer, but that's exactly what happened when global pharmaceutical juggernaut GlaxoSmithKline admitted to 15 charges of breaching the Fair Trading Act at the Auckland District Court earlier this month. The girls' project tested the vitamin C content of 8 different juices against the claimed amount on the packaging and were surprised to find that despite GSK's assertion that Ribena contains 7 milligrams of Vitamin C per 100ml, they were able to find "no detectable level" of the vitamin. Go to it kids! Be inspired by Jenny and Anna and keep 'em honest.

GSK was fined NZ$227 500 (US$164,416) and ordered to run newspaper apologies such as this one, in which they claim the deficit was due to vitamin breakdown during storage.

The penalty is unlikely to be of great concern to the major multinational, but the girls, now aged 17, are proud of their persistance in contacting the Commerce Commission after initially being brushed off by the company. “I think it’s good that they at least admitted it and didn’t try and say we were still wrong,” said Suo.

“It’s quite insane when you think about,” Devasathan mused. “Most people wait their whole lives to find a chance like this, and we just stumbled on it. It cracks me up that we were 14 at the time.”