The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is pursuing separate legal actions against Amazon for mis-selling Prime, and Ticketmaster for colluding with ticket touts …
Amazon accused of duping 40 million customers
A lawsuit the FTC filed against Amazon goes to trial this week, with the company accused of seeking to confuse or deceive customers. The Wall Street Journal reports that the e-commerce giant is accused of duping almost 40 million of its 200 million subscribers.
The FTC, which sued Amazon in 2023, alleges the company tricked people into signing up for the service without their knowledge or consent, including by obscuring details about billing and the terms of free trials. It says Amazon created a labyrinth to make it hard to cancel, which the company dubbed “Iliad,” a reference to Homer’s epic about the long, arduous Trojan War. Several individual Amazon executives are also named as defendants.
The FTC says Amazon required customers to navigate four webpages and chose from 15 options to cancel a Prime membership […] Amazon denies the allegations, saying it has always been transparent about Prime’s terms and offers straightforward ways for customers to back out of their memberships.
The case is part of a broader push against tech giants who make it easy to subscribe but hard to cancel. Adobe has been similarly accused of trapping users in subscriptions and using hidden pricing.
The case against Amazon is viewed as an important test case. If the company loses, it is expected to act as a wake-up call to other tech companies engaged in similar practices.
Ticketmaster accused of colluding with touts
Separately, Engadget reports that the FTC has joined with seven US states to tue Ticketmaster owner Live Nation for allegedly colluding with online ticket touts for its own financial gain.
The lawsuit accused the company of knowingly allowing brokers to buy tickets in bulk. Ticketmaster allegedly then let them resell the tickets at a significant markup on its own second-hand market.
The FTC claims Ticketmaster was aware that resellers routinely bypassed its security measures for these purchases. The company profits three times from resales. It collects fees at the initial purchase, followed by both buyer and seller fees upon resale. Between 2019 and 2024, Ticketmaster raked in $16.4 billion in fees, according to the FTC.
The company is said to have admitted in an internal email that it deliberately turned a blind eye to these bulk purchases.
The company has previously been accused of using deceptive pricing.
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