The US Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon.com Inc. Wednesday, alleging that the e-commerce giant misled consumers into signing up for its Prime membership service and intentionally made it difficult to cancel.
The consumer protection agency filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington state claiming that Amazon’s website manipulated users into enrolling in Prime, where subscribers pay $139 a years for privileges like instant free delivery, video streaming and access to 100 million songs. The cancellation process for Prime is also difficult to navigate and requires multiple steps, the FTC said. The agency says that Amazon refers to the content process as the Iliadafter Homer’s long epic poem.
In its complaint, the FTC said consumers would have to click through five pages on the desktop web store or six on the mobile app to cancel Prime. It also claimed that Amazon failed to hand over information sought by investigators, taking more than 18 months to produce materials sought by the FTC.
The FTC said Amazon’s tactics violated a 2010 consumer protection law designed to protect online shoppers.
About 167 million Amazon shoppers had Prime memberships in March, unchanged from a year earlier, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.
“Amazon is deceiving and trapping people into recurring subscriptions without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them a lot of money,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement.
The case is the third filed by the FTC against Amazon in the past month. The company agreed to pay $30.8 million to settle allegations that it failed to delete data about children collected by its Alexa speakers and that its Ring doorbells and cameras illegally spied on users. Amazon said it disagreed with the FTC’s allegations but agreed to settlements to resolve the lawsuits.
Photo: Prime trailers at an Amazon delivery station in Dallas, Texas. Photographer: Kathy Tran/Bloomberg
Copyright 2023 Bloomberg.
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