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In early April 2022, Google users looked to find out if an interview with Keanu Reeves about products named Smilz CBD Gummies and Keanu Reeves CBD Gummies, which included a mention of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company, was a scam or legit. After a quick glance, we came to the conclusion that these were both scams. Reeves, the popular movie star of The Matrix: Resurrections, never owned a company named Smilz CBD Gummies, nor did he found it. He also had nothing to do with the fake endorsements for any products under the name of Keanu Reeves CBD Gummies or Keanu Reeves CBD Oil. In our research, we found that users had looked to Google to find answers with search terms like Keanu Reeves CBD Gummies interview or Keanu Reeves Smilz CBD Gummies. This indicated to us that there was a fake article out there posing as being from a major news website such as Fox News or CNN, for example. That article likely said something about how Reeves had been interviewed on the news and had endorsed his supposed line of Keanu Reeves CBD Gummies or Smilz CBD Gummies. We know this because of other CBD scams we've covered in the past. They usually follow similar patterns. These kinds of articles, where the image and likeness of a celebrity are used without their permission, are usually hard to find if not accessed through an ad. This is because the people who publish these fake articles make sure to hide the pages from appearing in search results. However, after a little bit of digging, we were still able to find the fraudulent Reeves interview about Smilz CBD Gummies, all because of a tweet. It showed the headline of an article that's likely being advertised to users online: Keanu Reeves on the Hot Seat with Pfizer After his CBD Project Soars - Here's How he's Fighting Back. A Google search for the headline in this tweet brought us to a Facebook comment that was saved to a Google cache page. A user had copied and pasted the entire fake article with the Time Magazine name. Time never published this story. (Google cache is the company's way of archiving websites.) The first part of the fake interview with Reeves about Smilz CBD Gummies read as follows: After the fake interview with Reeves, the rest of the article for Smilz CBD Gummies included other supposed celebrity endorsements from Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Aniston, and Matthew McConaughey. Again, none of these people ever endorsed Smilz CBD Gummies or any other similar products with Reeves' name. Aside from the interview with Reeves about Smilz CBD Gummies, which again was a scam, we also found traces of a product named Keanu Reeves CBD Gummies. On these pages that mentioned this product with Reeves' name were links to place orders. Those links all led to Smilz CBD Gummies. We previously reported on several other celebrities who were included in fake endorsements for CBD gummies products, including Jeopardy hosts Alex Trebek and Mayim Bialik, Blake Shelton, and Tom Selleck. The ads that led to these fake endorsements usually included clickbait that mentioned allegations or described a death hoax. For example, one scam had an ad that falsely claimed Whoopi Goldberg had died, which led to a CBD scam that featured Oprah Winfrey. According to The New York Times, in 2021, legendary Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood once sued and won after a Lithuanian company was accused of using his image and likeness to make it look like he had endorsed its CBD gummies products. It's likely that a picture of Reeves was used in the fake article from Time Magazine. However, we noticed that there weren't other pages that used photographs of the actor. This was likely done on purpose in case the scammers were eventually located by law enforcement. In sum, the question of whether Keanu Reeves CBD Gummies and Smilz CBD Gummies were a scam or legit was simple. It was all a scam.
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