FTC, Two States Sue Lens.com Over Hidden Fees in Online Contact Lens Ads

The Federal Trade Commission, joined by the attorneys general of Utah and Nevada, sued online contact lens retailer Lens.com Inc. on Friday, alleging what the agency calls a long-running deceptive pricing scheme built around Google search ads and a checkout page designed to keep shoppers from noticing hidden charges.

According to the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, Lens.com advertised artificially low prices in its search ads and on its website, then added a line item labeled "Taxes & Fees" at checkout that regulators say often roughly doubled the advertised price. The agency alleges the company positioned that line item below the visible portion of the checkout screen and encouraged customers to click "Continue" without scrolling down to see it — and that the "taxes" label was itself misleading, since many states exempt contact lenses from sales tax altogether.

Subscription Traps Also Alleged

The FTC also claims Lens.com used the same deceptively low headline prices to push customers into its "AutoRefill" subscription program without clearly disclosing the added fees, and failed to adequately spell out how or when customers could cancel. The agency says the hidden-fee scheme cost consumers "hundreds of millions of dollars" in the aggregate.

The complaint invokes the FTC Act's ban on unfair and deceptive practices, the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act — a federal law aimed squarely at negative-option and subscription traps — and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act's privacy and data-handling provisions, alongside Utah's and Nevada's own consumer-protection and automatic-renewal statutes. The general FTC Act authority cited in the filing is laid out on the agency's own statute page. As is typical in FTC Act enforcement suits, the complaint does not list a fixed dollar demand but asks the court for a permanent injunction barring the challenged practices along with consumer redress — refunds or other compensation for shoppers harmed by the alleged scheme — plus any additional relief the court finds equitable.

Part of a Broader Crackdown

The case lands amid a sustained federal and state push against so-called "dark patterns" — interface designs that nudge or trap consumers into paying more than they intended. Utah and Nevada, which joined the FTC as co-plaintiffs, have each ramped up their own online-pricing enforcement in recent years; both states' consumer-protection offices, including the Nevada Attorney General's office, have pursued parallel actions against e-commerce "fee drip" practices.

The agency's biggest recent example of that push involved Amazon: the FTC's $2.5 billion settlement over Prime enrollment and cancellation practices, finalized in September 2025, remains active more than a year later. In a separate press release issued last month, the FTC said Amazon had distributed more than $845 million in refunds so far and had agreed to raise the maximum per-consumer payment from $51 to $200 to cover millions of additional affected customers — a sign of how aggressively the agency has continued enforcing fee- and subscription-related settlements even after they're finalized. The Lens.com complaint cites the same Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act invoked in the Amazon case.

Lens.com had not filed a public response as of Friday. Consumers who believe they were charged undisclosed fees by Lens.com or a similar retailer can file a report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, the FTC's consumer-complaint portal, which the agency uses to track patterns of deceptive pricing across the e-commerce industry. If the FTC prevails, the case could set guardrails for how online retailers more broadly must disclose mandatory fees in search advertising — a practice regulators across both the Biden and Trump FTCs have targeted with increasing frequency.