Reckitt Benckiser, manufacturers of pain relief medicine Nurofen has been fined $1.7m in Australia for misleading customers.

The fine is in relation to their range of pain products that were said to be able to 'go to the source' and 'target different pain areas'. The verdict was delivered by Judge James Edelman in Sydney on Friday, according to The Guardian. Nurofen had said they had introduced the 'specific pain' products to make it easier for people to choose what was right for their particular pain, especially when there is no pharmacist present to offer advice. The painkillers on offer had names such as Tension Headache, Migraine Pain, and Period Pain, but the painkiller itself was the same, BBC News report. Reckitt Benckiser has also had to remove an advertisement from television for its Nurofen Express tablets, whereby it was made look like the painkiller directly targeted muscles in the head. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said that the penalty was too low, stating it should have been around the $6m mark “to send a strong deterrence message and due to the longstanding and widespread nature of the conduct and the substantial sales and profit that was made by selling the product.” All products in that range contain 342mg of ibuprofen lysine – a different formula of ibuprofen than is used in the standard, cheaper, Nurofen products.