Amazon Fined $2.5b for Using Deceptive Methods to Sign Up Consumers for Prime

I’ve never heard of legalshield. What’s their deal?

Adobe. The only "free trial" subscription I actually had to pay to cancel. Despicable company.

My guess is 95%+ of the restitution will be in the form of a free year of Amazon prime. I'm pretty cynical though.

Amazon will pay $1 billion to the government as a penalty and set aside $1.5 billion for consumers. The settlement terms have most of the details. [0]

Amazon will do an automatic payout to some people for up to $51. No need to claim anything for that. I'm guessing they'll mail checks or prepaid debit cards or something.

Then Amazon will make a website, within 30 days, and post it on their site (and I'm sure news media will also post it) that will be for manual claims. These claims are also for up to $51 and people will have 180 days to manually claim.

After that, if there's still money, then Amazon will repeatedly do more $51 automatic payments to more people until they're out of money (basically more lax automatic qualification of Prime members from June 23, 2019 to June 23, 2025).

Basically ~30 million people get up to $51.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Amazon-ROSCA-Or...

This wasn't a class action lawsuit, so the process will be a bit more strict. But yes, ultimately there is a pool of money set aside for payments and everyone will get a tiny bit ($51).

It is two screens, three clicks - not hard at all.

https://www.amazon.com/mm/pipeline/cancellation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddxPcnMG0fE

Which because they have gotten away with it for so long, everyone else has been copying (or well I guess this has been going on for decades in various forms) them.

Ex, netflix, which has decided to pop up a 'we noticed there are people who don't live with you using your account, click here to pay us another $9/month' every time it starts on my TV, presumably because my underage child, who legally lives with me, uses it on her phone when she is away at school for 5 months a year.

And then when someone clicked the default pay us button, I was unable to figure out how to remove the charge without actually calling and telling them I was canceling after 20+ years. (the whole extra member thing wasn't showing up in the web ui, no idea why, maybe its because of the TV clicking process).

Huh, I was wondering why cancelling after a free trial recently was easier than the last time I cancelled a few years ago.

I canceled Prime about 18 months ago, and now every single time I go to check out on Amazon, before the checkout page there's a splash screen a the gigantic, bright blue CHECK OUT WITH PRIME button, and then under that, in 8pt font with grey-on-white text, a "No thanks, continue without Prime" link. The lack of any subtlety would be hilarious if it wasn't so irritating. Throw the book at them.

It's pretty heavily dark patterned for me. When you go checkout there is a big prime banner inviting you to click now that looks the the default "next screen" button, and smaller fainter text below saying "continue without enjoying prime benefits".

Something similar happens again with the shipping. I only ever buy enough to get free shipping, but it never defaults to that, it tries to trick you by defaulting to paid, and then when you scroll to change your shipping to free, it again makes "join prime" the most default looking option to pick.

I'm pretty sure in the past there was an extra nag somewhere but the above is my most recent experience. Maybe legal but certainly feels like you're dealing with a scammer.

This is the resolution of a years-old FTC case against Amazon, which included an internal program called "Project Iliad" to lower cancellation rates by increasing the number of steps involved, among other things. The cancellation process has changed between the initial filing and now.

This is a quick visual walk thru of the pattern before they fixed it:

https://youtube.com/shorts/FYnr1llUVG0?si=xzMV-Q7NHdtfoKSs

You should read the original complaint. It alleged that Amazon made is really easy to inadvertently sign up for Prime, but much more difficult to cancel. See the PDF below and the screenshots that has.

Upon filing of the complaint, Amazon removed these dark workflows quickly.

https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/FTC-Amazon-c...

It's when the button that signs you up for Prime is the blue button marked "Continue" or something similarly vague, on top of defaulting your shipping options to the paid, expedited ones, and changing the card you are using if there are multiple and one benefits Amazon more than the other (i.e. Amazon Store Card, the non-Amex option), where it gets cumulatively ridiculous.

> And even the cancellation part, it's just two confirmation screens.

Call me a fool, but I fell for this and paid them for several months.

First, I don't think it was just two screens (the article mentions 3).

Second, unless you read really carefully, they made it appear that you had indeed unsubscribed, when you hadn't. I think the messaging was something along the lines of "OK, you have access to it until the end of the month". I was a monthly subscriber, so I took it to mean it would stop at the end of that month. But what they were really saying was something along the lines of "... and maybe you can think about it some more to see if it's worth it for you, and if you still want to cancel, click here". Only it wasn't as obvious as how I wrote it.

> It honestly seems about the same as any other website subscription I've ever had.

Not for me. For all the subscriptions I've canceled, Amazon Prime was the only one I fell for and ended up paying continually. Yes, other sites may have multiple steps, but the verbiage was always much clearer that you still hadn't unsubscribed.

I'm a stickler for reading details, and they still got me once by making the 'sign up to pay for prime' "offer" looking/reading very similar to the 'free trial' offer. The customer service chat straightforwardly canceled it and refunded the fraudulent charge, but the way all of their dialogs are set up and stylized its obvious they're trying to induce mistaken (ie fraudulent) transactions.

Anything that happens during this presidency (even if started under biden) gets a trump by-line...

Yeah, these things are silly and I don't even know the audience for them. I remember seeing a lot of local infrastructure projects around with the attribution "President Biden BBB Infrastructure Bill." Does anyone really care? Politics have become really stupid.

Edit: A search reveals that this was apparently controversial at the time: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/21/biden-infrastructur.... The shamelessness of "Trump-Vance" here funny.

It's a very "Thank You Dear Leader" of our current regime. Also look at them wanting huge picture of him in Washington on various buildings much like Mao/Stalin/Ayatollah etc always liked

https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/09/17/trump-f...

Didn't you know that this administration is all about feeding lies?

They have an answer for that:

"Shipping is 2 day." That doesn't mean it will be shipped as to arrive within two days from ordering, but when we ship it (which may be that day, or may be three days later) you'll get it within 2 days...

> It’s a good deal on shipping and then a bunch of second-rate other stuff tacked on.

It is and it isn't. The cost of shipping is built into the price of most of the items. You get a good deal if you buy things where pricing is more or less fixed, or if you buy things one at a time, but if you purchase several items at the same time, you can often save money if you purchase from a vendor that has better unit prices and charges shipping, or offers free shipping with a minimum order.

I see this all the time with my hobby purchases. Amazon has everything (mostly), but it's more cost efficient to put together orders of multiple parts at other vendors. Sometimes just one part at another vendor works too, if it fits in an flat envelope and they charge appropriately for envelope shipping.

I kept Prime when they rolled the video streaming service into it. I had already been toying with the idea of canceling to break the addictive habit of using their fast shipping. Now that they've gone ads inserted into nearly everything including "included with prime" content, I'm just over it. Laziness and knowing my annual renewal is months away still keep me from experiencing the cancel hell that is in my future

> I’ll admit the shipping is pretty addictive. The rest of Prime is pretty meh. It’s a good deal on shipping

It's not a good deal on shipping because shipping can be had for free without Prime for $25 or $35 orders. It's a paid course where they train you to be an impulse buy addict.

Did the situation get resolved or are you still being charged? I need a resolution here STAT!

In my personal experience, Amazon has an acceptable customer support when compared to Google, but nobody with that type of scale can even touch Apple's support experience.

> I'd hope that they fixed this. If an account is locked, it seems like it would be common sense to place a hold on any subscriptions associated with it.

The problem with this is you can deny someone's service very easily just by knowing publicly associated data (e.g. email address) and intentionally getting the password wrong a few times.

> So, while being locked out of my account, I couldn't cancel my subscription to Kindle (lost all of the books, too). I just kept getting charged month after month (of which I'd just forget about it after getting angry for a minute).

Most places have some law where you must be able to cancel by calling or some other path. But as a last line stop gap, you can contact your credit card company and deny the charges based on the inability to cancel.

In fact, this is one of the explicit value propositions of an intermediary payment company.

I had a similar experience with Google. Got locked out of gmail and Youtube premium kept billing. Couldn't log in to cancel, couldn't even find a phone number to call to cancel, there's no gmail customer support whatsoever. Youtube premium apparently has some customer support but you have to be logged in to use it. Ended up having to cancel my credit card.

lol you think they're going to actively put any effort towards something that isn't legally required and loses them money? Nah, there's no way they're going to implement that. I hope you issued chargebacks on your card for those charges.

It keeps nagging me to upgrade to the family plan or plus or whatever. And if I ignore it enough it enrolls me in a free trial of the family plan without me even asking every once it a while. The amount of up-selling they try to push on you now is so annoying.

If anyone has any recommended alternatives where I can learn Japanese I'm interested. Despite all the crap Duolingo has, it has been very convenient when it comes to spending 30 minutes at the end of the day doing some Japanese lessons.

For good or for bad, I've switched to Walmart for many of my orders as well as home delivery of groceries now and then and they have been decent. It's good to have competitors who are catching up.

Prime ain't what it used to be. Used to be reliably 2nd day delivery, by a real shipping company, and good movies added, etc.

Now it's as slow as "free" delivery, by a random contractor who does God knows what to the package, and prices aren't even better than Walmart or Target on many things.

The "avoid subscribing to prime" shuffle you have to do to even order anything anymore drives me away too, I only use Amazon if it's more than 5% cheaper.

> I don’t know why any non-Prime customer would want to sign up

At least for me, it's easy -- the Prime credit card, which has no extra fee beyond Prime itself. I get 5-7% back, instead of the 1-2% with my other credit cards. It literally pays for itself and more over the course of a year. The faster shipping is just a bonus.

And I'm not buying junk I don't need either. It's literally just regular toiletries, my normal grocery shopping at Whole Foods (also 5% off), and then just replacing all the things in my home when they wear out or break -- kitchen things, bedding, electronics, and so forth. All things that are usually cheaper on Amazon than anywhere else anyways. (I still use Target.com for things that are cheaper there.)

Just for personal use, and not any sort of support for Amazon's business practices:

When you get a free (or cheaper than you're currently paying for shipping) Prime offer, you can accept it and then the second the order has gone through go into your account and cancel it and still get the remaining number of promotional days, as well as the benefits for the current order. It's a slightly annoying step, but I figure if they're going to be dumb enough to keep offering me free promotions I might as well take advantage of it.

As a non-US based customer, I can totally relate. Even though prime is not really applicable to me (in terms of free shipping, a small selection of the media libary, etc), I'm still getting pushed to try Prime each time I try to shop at Amazon.

The main problem is that unless it's a specific brand store, with products sold and shipped by Amazon, all the other products are pure junk. I can easily find them on AliExpress with much lower prices.

> I think my goal for 2026 will be not to order anything from Amazon

This has been my position for upwards of 5 years. Between the quality / UX / social issues - well frankly I'd rather spend money elsewhere (although not at all is likely)

I have similar experiences though a different usage graph. My shipping peaks were college (textbooks and college needs/wants) and early in owning my own home. After that point I didn't need as much delivered, so many of my purchases had moved digital (books, music, videogames) or back to retail stores. I realized late in 2020 that the only two Amazon purchases I made that year (in 2020!, with quarantines and lockdowns and it being weird to visit physical stores, I still made more retail store purchases than Amazon purchases) were inconsequential and neither of them shipped as Prime delivery because all of them I took a discount to wait a week for (because there wasn't any rush).

In the meantime I was fed up with Prime Video and wondering why I was paying for it.

Between the dark patterns cancelling Prime and the many dark patterns trying to get you to join Prime I also stopped feeling like a welcome customer of large sections of Amazon's website and have gone even more back to boring old retail stores. My biggest remaining relationship with Amazon is because of the kindle, but their worsening DRM decisions do keep me wondering if I need to explore another ecosystem despite kindle's hardware advantages (including the possibly sunk cost that I invested in too much kindle hardware).

I always check both. Ironically, I buy more books from eBay than Amazon.

Can't forget the hidden subscriptions within PrimeTV millions of people were charged for, for more than a year in some cases.

This should be its own lawsuit.

Why not make it a trillion!

That's impressive but man what an unfair hiring policy. A candidate is trying to guess corporate culture, makes the wrong guess, and then you reject them? It's a coin flip.

I think the company just took retail and AWS to their logical conclusion, and so the old culture doesn’t even make sense

Amazon started going downhill when they started losing their founding builders and started hiring cisco and other silicon valley insiders at executive levels. The Amazon Way is now a quaint retrospective, and the quality and attractiveness are quickly moving to the lowest common denominator.

My experience is they're more aggressive about prime ads when they think they can get you. So I'd get a bunch of ads and an extra screen to join prime student, and the buttons are deliberately confusing.

But I agree. It's just an extra button you have to press. Annoying, but not the worst thing a company has done to me

> I don't really understand all the fuss about Amazon Prime.

Oh, the fuss is because Amazon is big. The big players receive a lot of scrutiny.

> I found it really easy to cancel.

I find it a lot easier to sign up. I think that's the issue at play here.

I feel your apathy, friend.

Our local parking authority (meter maids) just paid out a massive settlement (/s): each claimant gets four (4) twenty-five cent (25¢) parking credits (==$1.00), which expire within one month. They also raised parking rates by about that much, per hour.

Winning! /s