A nutrition and vitamin supplement company in East Ham has been closed down amid claims it was using ‘unscrupulous’ tactics against elderly and vulnerable people.

GoNutri in Shoebury Road, is claimed to have persuaded customers to had over a total of £128,000.

A High Court hearing was told tt often coerced customers into paying multiple times for the same product or sent items they had not ordered and then hounded them for payment.

GoNutri is also claimed to have used cold calls and high-pressure sales tactics to push people into buying their supplements.

Operating from call centres abroad, the sales people sometimes posed as representatives of UK health centres or other parts of the NHS.

Ravi Kumar Lachireddy was the director of GoNutri, which he ran out of an address on Shoebury Road.

The Insolvency Service, who investigated the company, can ban directors from running businesses for a period of two to 15 years.

The Insolvency Service is an agency sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

More than 400 people, with an average age of 85, were targeted by the company, which operated from May 2016 until June 2018.

The High Court closed GoNutri for ‘trading with a lack of commercial probity, objectionable trading practices and improper sales techniques’.

The hearing was held before Mr Justice Snowden who made the winding up order in the public interest.