SAN DIEGO — An investigation led by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Criminal Investigation Division and Office of the Inspector General, and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control resulted in guilty pleas from two California businessmen and their company.

On Dec. 1, Integral Hygienic Solutions, Inc., a La Mesa-based sanitation company doing business as TruClean, pleaded guilty in federal court to defrauding customers by falsely claiming that its antimicrobial cleaning product was tested and approved by the EPA.

The company had claimed that its antimicrobial product, TruClean 365, eliminated bacteria and viruses, including COVID-19, on treated surfaces for one year with a single application. The company also claimed that its product had been submitted to the EPA’s Antimicrobials Division for testing and that the EPA had validated their claim of one year of effectiveness through “rigorous testing.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, the defendants put TruClean’s own labels on bottles of chemical products purchased from a chemical company on the East Coast. Ray Louis Smith Jr., Ramont Joseph Smith and TruClean then marketed, sold and distributed the newly relabeled products as providing year-long protection against infection from viruses, including the virus that causes COVID-19, on its social media pages and its website.

Products represented to kill viruses in the environment are regulated by the EPA as...

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