FTC Lawsuit Prompts Shutdown of Alleged ‘Online Business Opportunity Scam’

A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit that alleges an “online business opportunity scam” led a federal court to temporarily shut down the operations of Lunar Capital Ventures, Ecom Genie and Profitable Automation.

According to a complaint filed by the FTC, these three entities and the now-dissolved company Valiant Consultants claimed consumers could earn “lavish” profits by paying tens of thousands of dollars to start online eCommerce businesses, but most consumers lost substantial amounts of money.

“At a time when consumers are increasingly looking online for opportunities to supplement their income, this scheme made grand promises of guaranteed passive income,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a Monday (Oct. 28) press release. “Instead, the scheme’s operators took millions of dollars, lined their own pockets, and left consumers with debt and stress.”

The complaint alleges that the companies operated the same scheme since 2022 and were controlled by Steven Mayer, and that Mayer and the companies deceived consumers and failed to provide them with disclosures required by the FTC’s Business Opportunity Rule, according to the release.

The FTC alleges that the business opportunity scam took in more than $12 million from consumers, per the release.

In another recent, separate action, the FTC said in September that a federal court approved settlements at its request that require defendants who allegedly enrolled consumers, without their knowledge, into continuity plans for products they did not buy to forfeit assets valued at $40 million and be banned from certain conduct.

In August, the FTC took action against a child and older adult care platform that it alleged deceived caregivers about the availability of jobs and the amount they could expect to earn, while also failing to offer families looking for care a simple way to cancel their paid subscriptions to the platform.

In another August action, the FTC announced proposed settlements in a case involving the owners and operators of a credit repair operation that Levine said “promised to clean up people’s credit but failed to deliver.” The FTC alleged that the company falsely promised an easy fix to consumers with low credit scores and then recruited those consumers to join a pyramid scheme that sold credit repair services to others.