“Amazon tricked and trapped people into recurring subscriptions without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them significant money,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement.
Customers pay $139 a year for prime, which includes free, expedited shipping for purchases, video streaming and other services.
This is the FTC’s third legal action against Amazon in less than a month. At the end of May the company agreed to pay more than $30 million to settle a pair of privacy cases involving its Ring camera and Alexa for kids products. The agency has several other ongoing investigations of the company, including a sprawling antitrust probe of its retail business and its acquisition of robot vacuum maker iRobot.
Dark patterns, sometimes known as deceptive designs, are meant to trick people into making choices that they might not have under different circumstances. An example would be a request for data collection where the button to opt-in would be large and bolded while the choice to opt-out would be obscured.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation last Congress that would ban dark patterns, but the bill failed to pass.
Late last year Fortnite-maker Epic Games agreed to return $245 million to customers over FTC allegations that it duped children into making unintentional purchases.
In the FTC’s case Wednesday, the agency accused Amazon of hiding non-Prime options on its marketplace, and not telling customers they were subscribing to Amazon Prime with certain purchases. The agency also alleged Amazon purposely made it difficult to cancel subscriptions.
“Amazon leadership slowed or rejected changes that would’ve made it easier for users to cancel Prime because those changes adversely affected Amazon’s bottom line,” the agency said in a statement.
Amazon did not immediately respond for comment.