Tag: Consumer Protection

The FTC and seven states sued Ticketmaster and Live Nation alleging they deceived artists and consumers by engaging in bait-and-switch pricing through advertising lower prices for tickets than what consumers must pay to purchase tickets; deceptively claimed to impose strict limits on the number of tickets that consumers could purchase for an event, even though ticket brokers routinely and substantially exceeded those limits; and sold millions of tickets, often at much higher cost to consumers, on its resale platform that those brokers obtained in excess of artists’ ticket limits.

Amway Corp., one of the largest multilevel marketing companies in the U.S., and two of its affiliates—World Wide Group, L.L.C. (WWG) and Leadership Team Development Inc. (LTD)—will pay $225 million to resolve allegations from the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Washington that the companies use unfair and deceptive tactics to recruit members to its direct selling and multilevel marketing opportunity.

FleetCor and its CEO will pay $100 million to settle a FTC administrative action alleging that the company charged its customers, who overwhelmingly are small businesses, undisclosed fees in connection with their use of fuel cards that FleetCor falsely promised businesses would save them money.

The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against Amazon.com, Inc. for its years-long effort to enroll consumers into its Prime program without their consent while knowingly making it difficult for consumers to cancel their subscriptions to Prime.

In a complaint filed today, the FTC charges that Amazon has knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime. Specifically, Amazon used manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as “dark patterns” to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions.

Amazon also knowingly complicated the cancellation process for Prime subscribers who sought to end their membership. The primary purpose of its Prime cancellation process was not to enable subscribers to cancel, but to stop them. Amazon leadership slowed or rejected changes that would’ve made it easier for users to cancel Prime because those changes adversely affected Amazon’s bottom line. 

Payment processing company Humboldt Merchant Services will pay $12 million and be permanently banned from processing payments for merchants with a heightened risk of potential fraud to settle allegations that Humboldt processed payments for merchants that defrauded consumers.

According to the FTC’s complaint, Humboldt processed payments for more than 1,000 merchants that were shell entities that served as fronts or pass-throughs for fraudulent companies engaged in unauthorized billing scams, including Legion Media, which the FTC shut down in 2024.

Nuvei will pay $4.85 million to settle FTC charges that the firm opened and maintained payment processing accounts for merchants that it knew or should have known were engaged in deception, including tech support scams that took millions of dollars from consumers.