Tag: Consumer Protection

Greenway Auto Group has agreed that its price advertisements will prominently include the actual price a consumer must pay for a vehicle, excluding only charges the government requires consumers to pay, to settle the Commission’s lawsuit alleging the company advertised prices that were thousands of dollars below what it actually charged.

Franchisor Premier Franchising Group LLC (PFG) and its former franchise sales organization, Franchise Fastlane LLC (FFL), will pay $1.85 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that they made misleading representations about the Premier Martial Arts (PMA) franchise opportunity and violated the Franchise Rule. 

Under the proposed settlement with PFG, certain franchisees will be given the option to cancel their franchise agreements without penalty. 

The Federal Trade Commission is acting against a large automotive dealer group, Asbury Automotive, for systematically charging consumers for costly add-on items they did not agree to or were falsely told were required as part of their purchase. The FTC also alleges that Asbury discriminates against Black and Latino consumers, targeting them with unwanted and higher-priced add-ons.

In an administrative complaint, the FTC alleges that three Texas dealerships owned by Asbury that operate as David McDavid Ford Ft. Worth, David McDavid Honda Frisco, and David McDavid Honda Irving, along with Ali Benli, who acted as general manager of those dealerships, engaged in a variety of practices to sneak hidden fees for unwanted add-ons past consumers. These tactics included a practice called “payment packing,” where the dealerships convinced consumers to agree to monthly payments that were larger than needed to pay for the agreed-upon price of the car, and then “packed” add-on items to the sales contract to make up that difference.

The Federal Trade Commission, joined by the Utah and Nevada Attorneys General, sued to stop a long-running deceptive pricing scheme run by contact lens retailer Lens.com Inc.

In a joint complaint, the FTC, Utah and Nevada allege that Lens.com, along with its owner Cary Samourkachian and an affiliated entity Speed Commerce LLC (together referred to as Lens.com), advertise artificially low prices for contact lenses but then charge consumers much higher prices through substantial, mandatory “Taxes & fees” charges.

Lens.com’s hidden fees routinely double the price it advertises for contact lenses, costing consumers hundreds of millions of dollars, the complaint alleges.

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.