Tag: Consumer Protection

In March 2026, the FTC announced that it secured a settlement against Xponential Fitness for Franchise Rule violations and related deceptive practices, including $17 million that will be returned to franchisees, which is the largest amount ever to go back to consumers in a franchise case.

The FTC alleged that Xponential Fitness, which sells franchises for popular fitness studios brands such as Club Pilates, Pure Barre, YogaSix, StretchLab, and BFT, misrepresented key information about the costs, risks, time to open and operate studios, and essential details about the company’s operations, leaving many franchisees and prospective franchisees in the dark about their investment.

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 has taken action against Financial Education Services and its owners, Parimal Naik, Michael Toloff, Christopher Toloff and Gerald Thompson, as well as a number of related companies, for scamming consumers out of more than $213 million.

In response to a complaint filed by the FTC, a federal court has temporarily shut down the sprawling bogus credit repair scheme. The FTC’s complaint alleges that the company preys on consumers with low credit scores by luring them in with the false promise of an easy fix and then recruiting them to join a pyramid scheme selling the same worthless credit repair services to others. 

According to the FTC’s complaint, Michigan-based Financial Education Services, also doing business as United Wealth Services, has operated its scheme since at least 2015. The company claims to offer consumers the ability to remove negative information from credit reports and increase credit scores by hundreds of points, charging as much as $89 per month for their services. Their techniques, according to the complaint, are rarely effective and in many instances harm consumer’s credit scores.

In March 2026, the FTC sent more than $10.9 million to consumers harmed by the credit repair pyramid scheme.

The FTC filed a complaint alleging that Mercury Marketing, LLC, and other defendants impersonated substance use disorder treatment clinics in Google search ads to deceptively route consumers trying to call those clinics to defendant clinics.

Walmart, Inc. has agreed to a $100 million judgment to settle FTC allegations that the company caused delivery drivers to lose tens of millions of dollars’ worth of earnings, by deceiving them about the base pay, incentive pay and tips they could earn.