Instacart will pay $60 million to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission that it misled users with false advertising and deployed “unlawful subscription enrollment” practices.

The federal agency alleged that Instacart used deceptive tactics in its subscription sign-up and “satisfaction guarantee” advertising that caused consumers to pay more in fees, and prevented them from securing refunds.

For example, the FTC said Instacart falsely dangled promises of “free delivery” to consumers on their first order, while shoppers were still required to pay a mandatory service fee to get their groceries delivered.

The FTC also said that Instacart falsely advertised full refunds for users who had problems with their order.

“Instacart misled consumers by advertising free delivery services — and then charging consumers to have groceries delivered — and failing to disclose to consumers that signed up for a free trial that they would be automatically enrolled into its subscription program,” Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement.

In a blog post, Instacart acknowledged the FTC settlement but denied “any allegations of wrongdoing by the agency.”

The grocery delivery platform said it uses “straightforward marketing, transparent pricing and fees, clear terms, easy cancellation and generous refund policies” that comply with the law.

“This settlement allows us to move forward and remain focused on what’s important to our company: delivering value for customers, shoppers and retail and brand partners in the communities we serve,” an Instacart spokesperson said.

The move comes as Instacart reportedly faces a separate probe by the FTC into its pricing practices.

The probe was launched after a wide-ranging study was released last week showing that its algorithmic pricing tools caused shoppers to pay different prices for identical items from the same store.

News of the FTC probe sent Instacart shares lower by about 7% in extended trading on Wednesday. The stock closed down more than 1% on Thursday.

The FTC has recently ramped its scrutiny of companies alleged to be using deceptive billing and enrollment schemes.

It sued Uber in April, claiming the ride-hail provider charged users for Uber One subscriptions without their consent. On Monday, 21 states joined the agency’s lawsuit as part of an amended complaint.

In September, the agency sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster for allegedly using bait-and-switch pricing tactics and illegally coordinating with ticket brokers.

Earlier this month, the FTC said it was sending more than $27.6 million to consumers who were unknowingly enrolled in and charged for plans that shipped them products marketed to promote weight loss, clear skin and other health-care benefits.

Shares of grocery delivery service Instacart dropped about 7% in extended trading on Wednesday, following a report that said the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has begun an investigation into the company’s pricing practices.

The FTC sent a civil investigative demand to Instacart, Reuters reported, citing unnamed people.

“The Federal Trade Commission has a longstanding policy of not commenting on any potential or ongoing investigations,” the FTC told CNBC in a statement. “But, like so many Americans, we are disturbed by what we have read in the press about Instacart’s alleged pricing practice.”

A study released last week showed that prices for the same products in the same supermarkets that work with Instacart can vary by around 7%, which can result in over $1,000 in extra annual costs for customers. Instacart responded by saying that retailers determine prices listed in the app.

In 2022, Instacart spent $59 million to acquire Eversight, a company specializing in artificial intelligence-driven pricing and promotions for retailers and consumer packaged goods. Instacart sought to “create compelling savings opportunities for customers in real-time” with Eversight, according to a regulatory filing.

Instacart declined to comment on the investigation but said reporting has mischaracterized its pricing system.

“Much of what’s been reported has mischaracterized how pricing works on Instacart,” a company spokesperson said in an email. “First, our retail partners control their pricing strategies, and we work with them to align their online and in-store pricing wherever possible. Second, these tests are not dynamic pricing nor surveillance pricing – prices on Instacart do not change in real time nor are they based on supply or demand, and we never use personal, demographic, or user-level behavioral data to set item prices.

“These tests are a form of randomized A/B testing, similar to the way retailers have long run pricing tests between different stores.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Robert Garcia, a U.S. House Democrat from California, sent a letter to Instacart CEO Chris Rogers asking for a report on how the company sets prices.

“It is unconscionable that corporations are adding to Americans’ financial strain with algorithmic — and potentially surveillance — pricing,” wrote Garcia, who is ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

— CNBC’s Annie Palmer contributed to this report

Read Reuters’ full report here.

Meta won its high-profile antitrust case against the Federal Trade Commission, which had accused the company of holding a monopoly in social networking.

In a memorandum opinion released Tuesday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the FTC failed to prove its argument. The case, initially filed by the FTC five years ago, centered on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now,” Boasberg said in the filing. “The Court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so. A judgment so stating shall issue this day.”

Boasberg dismissed the case in 2021, saying the agency didn’t have enough evidence to prove “Facebook holds market power.” In August of that year, the FTC filed an amended complaint with more details about the company’s user numbers and metrics relative to competitors like Snapchat, the now-defunct Google+ social network and Myspace.

After reviewing the amendments, Boasberg in 2022 ruled that the case could proceed, saying the FTC had presented more details than before.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former operating chief Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and other current and former Meta executives all testified in the trial, which began in April.

The social media company’s shares were little changed on Tuesday. The stock is up about 2% for the year, badly underperforming broader indexes and most of its megacap tech peers.

“The Court’s decision today recognizes that Meta faces fierce competition,” the company said in a statement. “Our products are beneficial for people and businesses and exemplify American innovation and economic growth. We look forward to continuing to partner with the Administration and to invest in America.” 

The FTC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.  

The ruling comes a little over two months after Google avoided the harshest possible penalty from an antitrust case it lost last year. While Google was found to hold an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta decided the company would not be forced to sell its Chrome browser, bucking the Department of Justice’s request. Google was, however, ordered to loosen its hold on search data.

In the Meta case, the FTC claimed the company shouldn’t have been allowed to buy Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, and the agency called for those units to be divested. The commission also alleged that there were no major alternatives for apps like Facebook and Instagram that people use to communicate with friends and family in a online, social space.

However, a major challenge for the FTC, according to the judge, was in proving that Meta is breaking antitrust law today, not years ago when the primary use of social networks was very different and based on sharing other kinds of content.

“To win the permanent injunction that it seeks here, the FTC must prove a current or imminent legal violation,” he wrote.

Boasberg ultimately sided with Meta’s argument that the technology industry has evolved since the early days of Facebook, and the company now faces a wide variety of competitors like TikTok.

“While each of Meta’s empirical showings can be quibbled with, they all tell a consistent story: people treat TikTok and YouTube as substitutes for Facebook and Instagram, and the amount of competitive overlap is economically important,” Boasberg wrote. “Against that unmistakable pattern, the FTC offers no empirical evidence of substitution whatsoever.”

U.S. Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter raised questions on Friday about the status of an artificial intelligence chatbot complaint against Snap that the agency referred to the Department of Justice earlier this year.

In January, the FTC announced that it would refer a non-public complaint regarding allegations that Snap’s My AI chatbot posed potential “risks and harms” to young users and said it would refer the suit to the DOJ “in the public interest.”

“We don’t know what has happened to that complaint,” Slaughter said on CNBC’s ‘The Exchange.” “The public does not know what has happened to that complaint, and that’s the kind of thing that I think people deserve answers on.”

Snap’s My AI chatbot, which debuted in 2023, is powered by large language models from OpenAI and Google and has drawn scrutiny for problematic responses.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Snap declined to comment.

Slaugther’s comments came a day after President Donald Trump held a White House dinner with several tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“The president is hosting Big Tech CEOs in the White House even as we’re reading about truly horrifying reports of chatbots engaging with small children,” she said.

Trump has been attempting to remove Slaughter from her FTC position, but earlier this week, U.S. appeals court allowed her to maintain her role.

On Thursday, the president asked the Supreme Court to allow him to fire her from the post.

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who was selected by Trump to lead the commission, publicly opposed the complaint against Snap in January, prior to succeeding Lina Khan at the helm.

At the time, he said he would “release a more detailed statement about this affront to the Constitution and the rule of law” if the DOJ were to eventually file a complaint.

WATCH: FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter on President Trump’s latest attempt to fire her.

Criminals are increasingly pilfering the retirement and other financial accounts of older Americans via so-called “imposter” scams, the Federal Trade Commission reported Thursday.

The frauds tend to go like this: Scammers conjure a fake crisis and pose as trustworthy sources — perhaps a representative for a bank or companies like Amazon, Apple or Microsoft, or workers at a federal agency like the Social Security Administration or FTC — who can supposedly help them fix it.

In the process, they persuade unsuspecting victims to transfer their money to “keep it safe” or for another bogus reason, the FTC said.

In 2024, the FTC received 8,269 reports from adults age 60 and older, claiming to have lost at least $10,000 to an imposter scam. That figure is up 362% from 1,790 reports in 2020, according to FTC data.

Total losses among older Americans amounted to $700 million in 2024 — a more than fivefold increase from $122 million in 2020, the FTC said.

Sometimes, financial loss amounts to households’ entire life savings.

“Some people 60+ have reported emptying their bank accounts and even clearing out their 401ks,” the FTC wrote.

Losses among those older adults who lost at least $100,000 have swelled to $445 million in 2024 from $55 million in 2020, according to the FTC.

The increase in imposter scams tracks an increase in overall elder fraud reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Internet crime led to $4.9 billion in losses from 147,127 consumer complaints in 2024. Those figures represent a 43% increase in losses, and a 46% jump in complaints from 2023, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

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“The reported losses are most likely much higher because older Americans are less likely to report fraud because they either don’t know how to report it, are embarrassed, or don’t know they have been scammed,” the FBI wrote in June.

Losses over $100,000 were three times as likely to be reported by adults 60 years and older compared with younger households, according to the FTC’s 2024 data.

Here are a few ways the FTC suggests to avoid falling victim to imposter scams:

• Don’t move money to “protect” it. Never transfer or send money, cryptocurrency or gold to anyone you don’t know — no matter who they say they are — in response to an unexpected call or message, the FTC said.

• Don’t believe people who say to quickly move your money to “protect” it. Anyone who tells you that is a scammer, the agency said.

• Hang up and verify. Even if the scams start online, they generally still rely on phone calls at some point in the process. Contact the company or government agency in question using a phone number, website or email address you know is real. “Don’t trust what an unexpected caller says, and never use the phone number in a computer security pop-up or an unexpected text or email,” according to the FTC.

• Block unwanted calls. Learn about call blocking options through your carrier that can stop scammers before they reach you.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning out Instagram in 2018 on concerns about the rising threat of antitrust litigation against Facebook, according to an email presented Tuesday in a Washington, D.C. courtroom.

During Zuckerberg’s second day of testimony in Meta’s antitrust trial with the Federal Trade Commission, lawyers representing the FTC presented an email from May 2018, in which Zuckerberg appeared to comment on the possibility of separating the photo-sharing app his company purchased in 2012 for $1 billion. In 2012, Instagram had fewer than 10 employees while Facebook, prior to its corporate rebranding to Meta, was approaching its initial public offering.

“And i’m beginning to wonder whether spinning Instagram out is the the only structure that will accomplish a number of important goals,” Zuckerberg wrote in the email. “As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway. This is one more factor we should consider.”

Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and its ensuing 2014 purchase of WhatsApp for $19 billion are at the heart of the blockbuster antitrust trial that kicked off Monday and could last weeks.

The FTC alleges that Meta monopolizes the personal social networking market, and believes that the company should never have been able to acquire the photo-sharing and messaging apps. The commission is seeking to cleave those apps from Meta as a possible remedy.

Meta disputes the FTC’s allegations and claims the commission mischaracterizes the competitive landscape and fails to acknowledge a number of rivals like TikTok and Apple’s iMessage.

WATCH: Mark Zuckerberg takes witness stand on first day of antitrust trial.

Former U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said Monday that Facebook “panicked” when making the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp as smartphone use took off.

“It saw companies like Instagram and WhatsApp experiencing astronomical growth, and that’s the point at which it resorted to this buy-or-bury scheme where, if it couldn’t outcompete a rival, it either bought them out or cut them off its network,” Khan said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, begins a trial with the FTC on Monday. The government alleges that the company monopolized the personal social networking market with its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014.

Meta did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The trial could result in the social media giant divesting the two companies. Meta has filed a pretrial brief detailing its disagreement with the FTC and reiterating that it believes the company does not have a monopoly.

“There’s no expiration date when it comes to the illegality of the transaction,” Khan said. “I think there is a way in which the entire social networking ecosystem looks different today because Facebook was permitted to go out and make these acquisitions.”

The case is, at its core, about “free and fair trade,” Khan added. Though no settlement has been reached, she said there’s always a possibility of a settlement before the case concludes.

With President Donald Trump regularly holding court with tech executives, Khan said she’s “glad” that Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to dismiss the case have been, thus far, unsuccessful.

Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, co-hosted an inaugural ball and has reportedly met with the president multiple times since January.

“Until the trial is over and until we actually get a liability verdict and then a remedy, we’re all going to have to wait and see,” Khan said.

Meta will face off against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Monday in a high-stakes antitrust trial that could result in the company divesting Instagram and WhatsApp.

The trial in Washington is expected to last weeks and centers around the FTC’s allegations that Meta monopolizes the personal social networking market. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and other current and former Meta executives are expected to testify, along with top brass from rivals TikTok, Snap and Google’s YouTube, according to a legal filing.

The FTC claims Meta shouldn’t have been allowed to buy Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, and the agency is calling for those units to be sliced off from the Menlo Park, California, company.

“Acquiring these competitive threats has enabled Facebook to sustain its dominance—to the detriment of competition and users—not by competing on the merits, but by avoiding competition,” the FTC said in a legal filing.

Meta disagrees and filed a pretrial brief last week reiterating its arguments that it is not a monopoly and that acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp has not harmed competition. 

The trial will test the boundaries of the U.S.’s antitrust laws pertaining to corporate acquisitions, said Prasad Krishnamurthy, a law professor at U.C. Berkeley Law. The FTC will have to prove that not only did Meta monopolize the social media market but that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp actively “harmed competition.”  

“It’s a big case because it involves Meta, a social media giant, and it involves one of the most important kind of markets in the world, the social media market,” Krishnamurthy said. “It has big implications for something that consumers use as part of their daily life, Instagram and WhatsApp.”

The FTC filed its antitrust case against Meta in 2020, but judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington dismissed the case in 2021, saying the agency did not have enough evidence to prove “Facebook holds market power.” 

Despite the dismissal, the FTC in August 2021 filed an amended complaint with more details about the company’s user numbers and metrics relative to competitors like Snapchat, the now-defunct Google+ social network and Myspace. After reviewing the amendments, Boasberg in 2022 ruled that the case could proceed, saying the FTC had presented more details than before. 

“Although the agency may well face a tall task down the road in proving its allegations, the Court believes that it has now cleared the pleading bar and may proceed to discovery,” Boasberg wrote.

Meta motioned to end the case last April, but Boasberg denied it, ruling in November that the company must face trial. In a small victory for Meta, however, Boasberg did dismiss the FTC’s allegation that Facebook restricted third-party app developers’ access to its platform to maintain market dominance.

The company is expected to push back on the rest of the FTC’s allegations at trial on Monday. In a recent pre-trial brief, Meta’s lawyers wrote that the FTC fails to acknowledge that the company competes with numerous rivals, including TikTok, YouTube and Apple’s iMessage.

In a statement provided to CNBC, Meta said the FTC’s lawsuit “defies reality.”

“The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others,” Meta said. “More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final.”

But the FTC’s core argument is that the company has monopolized the specific market of personal social networking, saying there are no major alternatives to Meta’s apps like Facebook and Instagram, which are used by people to stay up to date and communicate with friends and family in an online, shared-social space.

This disputed notion of the market that Meta operates and competes in could be crucial to the case’s outcome, Krishnamurthy said.

“When you look at antitrust cases, the market definition that comes out of the case, even what ends up being the one that determines the ruling, is often not anything remotely like how lay people or even businesses in that market will describe it,” Krishnamurthy said.

The case kicks off Monday and is expected to last several weeks, and it could be months before Boasberg issues a ruling. It’s also unclear how the change of power in Washington could impact the case. 

After being inaugurated in January, President Donald Trump replaced FTC Chair Lina Khan with Andrew Ferguson. Khan served as chair of the commission under former President Joe Biden and earned a reputation for being tough on businesses.

With the tech industry in particular, Khan brought an antitrust case against Amazon in 2023 and unsuccessfully sued to block Meta, Nvidia and Microsoft’s acquisitions of virtual reality startup Within, chip-design giant Arm and Activision Blizzard, respectively.

Though this case kicked off during Trump’s first time in office, Khan continued to pursue it during the Biden administration, telling a House Committee in May 2024 that the lawsuit “highlights the competitive importance of data and notes that privacy degradation can constitute an antitrust harm.”

Some legal experts have said that Trump’s pick of Ferguson could mean the FTC eases up on antitrust enforcement.

Zuckerberg has courted favor with the Trump administration as part of a broader policy change within Meta. The social media baron has reportedly met with the president at least three times since January, he attended Trump’s inauguration and he co-hosted a ball for the president in Washington.

Khan told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in early Jan. that she hopes the new Trump Administration won’t give Meta a “sweetheart deal” in the FTC case after Zuckerberg’s overtures to the White House.

Ferguson, however, has not indicated that the FTC plans to abandon its case, and in March, he told CNBC that his team has a “trial coming up” and that they are “pressing toward that.”

“My job is to make sure that everyone is complying with the antitrust laws,” Ferguson said. “And if they aren’t, we go to court.”

Ferguson is painting himself as an independent and is proceeding with trial outside of the broader political world, said George Hay, an antitrust law professor at Cornell Law School. Hay added that he’s pleased that Ferguson appears to be moving forward with the case despite much of its progress occurring during the Biden Administration.

“When you come in to the FTC, you inherit a staff of professionals who’ve been doing a lot of work, and it’s not that easy just to say, ‘Throw it all away,'” Hay said.

WATCH: Apple, Meta to face lighter fines under EU digital law.

The Federal Trade Commission is going after an e-commerce company that allegedly took millions of dollars from consumers as part of a “passive income” scheme, which spun up Amazon storefronts on their behalf and promised “insane returns” that were higher than the stock market.

The FTC said Tuesday it filed a lawsuit against the company, called Click Profit; its co-founders Craig Emslie and Patrick McGeoghean; and two other business associates. It also asked a judge to bar the parties from doing business temporarily.

The case is the latest example of the FTC cracking down on e-commerce “automation” services. These companies launch and manage online storefronts on behalf of clients, who pay money for the services and the promise of earning tens of thousands of dollars in “passive income.” The companies often make extravagant claims about potential earnings and the use of artificial intelligence technology to guarantee profits. Despite their assurances, consumers frequently end up losing money.

Click Profit, which also operated under the names FBALaunch, Automation Industries and PortfolioLaunch, promised investors they would “build you a massively profitable e-commerce store from the ground up” by selling products on Amazon, Walmart and TikTok, according to the FTC.

The company charged consumers between $45,000 to $75,000 for the initial investment, plus an additional $10,000 or more to pay for inventory, the FTC alleged in its complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Click Profit took up to 35% of any profits from their customers’ stores, the complaint states.

The company claimed the business opportunity was “safe, secure and proven to generate wealth,” according to marketing materials referenced in the FTC’s complaint. They posted screenshots of purportedly successful Amazon storefronts, including one they claimed generated product sales of over $540,000 in one month.

Emslie often appeared in TikTok videos and other online ads to pitch prospective consumers. In one ad, he said that “the stock market, real estate or precious metals will never be able to offer you” the level of security offered through investing in Click Profit, according to the FTC’s complaint. Other TikTok videos show him appearing alongside an image of Warren Buffett while “fanning himself” with wads of cash, per the complaint.

Click Profit talked up its expertise by claiming it had product sourcing partnerships with legitimate brands, including Nike, Disney, Dell, Colgate and Marvel, the complaint alleges. It also claimed to have spent $5 million to build a “super computer” and other AI technologies to locate the “most profitable products,” claiming the super computer had generated “around $100 million in sales,” per the complaint.

The company even implied that investors’ online store could be bought out by venture capital firms connected with Click Profit “at a 3-6x multiple,” the FTC alleged.

“In reality, the highly touted AI technology and brand partnerships do not exist, and the promised earnings never materialize,” the FTC said in its complaint.

Amazon suspended or terminated about 95% of Click Profit’s stores after they violated Amazon’s seller policies, the FTC alleged. After accounting for Amazon’s fees, more than one-fifth of Click Profit’s stores on the platform earned no money at all, while another third earned less than $2,500 in gross lifetime sales, the FTC stated.

As a result, most consumers were unable to recoup their investments and “some are saddled with burdensome credit card debt and unsold products,” according to the FTC, which also said that Click Profit often refused to refund victims their investments and threatened them with legal action if they posted publicly about their experience.

One unnamed consumer mentioned in the lawsuit invested “his life’s savings” in Click Profit and was later terminated as a client “with nothing to show for his payments,” the complaint states. He posted a negative review online and was allegedly approached by Emslie’s attorney, who threatened to sue the consumer and “take everything he and his wife owned,” per the complaint.

The consumer took the reviews down, then asked Emslie whether he could receive a partial refund, according to the FTC.

“The attorney told the consumer that Emslie had responded, ‘F*** off,'” the FTC alleged.

Representatives for Emslie and Click Profit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The FTC alleges Click Profit violated the FTC Act, the Consumer Review Fairness Act and the Business Opportunity Rule. It seeks to permanently prohibit Click Profit from doing business, as well as monetary relief for the victims.