FTC sues alleged subscription scheme using shell companies to evade complaints

Subscription apps accused of misleading consumers kept resurfacing because, the FTC says, the operators behind them repeatedly changed names, opened new merchant accounts and pushed payments through a web of Cyprus and Delaware entities. The agency says that playbook let the alleged Genesis Tech enterprise stay active across app stores even as complaints mounted and consumers were left facing recurring charges they struggled to stop.

The complaint, FTC v. Growthmind/Wisey, was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, case no. 26-cv-5232. It names the alleged Genesis Tech enterprise as 15 corporations and eight individuals, and says the network marketed subscription products including MadMuscles, Harna, Unimeal, Wisey, PDF Guru, PDF Master, Lumi and Nebula. The agency says the businesses were built to look like a shifting collection of separate operations while continuing to draw money from U.S. consumers.

According to the complaint, the defendants used entities incorporated in Cyprus, Delaware and other jurisdictions to market to U.S. consumers, register new corporate identities and open fresh merchant accounts when earlier ones faced scrutiny. The FTC alleges the enterprise launched new deceptive product offerings, moved ill-gotten gains through cross-border transfers and obscured who controlled the businesses and how the money flowed. From early 2023 to mid-2025, the agency says, five of the products generated nearly a quarter billion dollars in global revenue.

The case lands in the middle of a broader enforcement push against recurring subscriptions. In October 2024, the FTC finalized its click-to-cancel rule after saying it had received more than 16,000 public comments and thousands of complaints about recurring subscriptions each year. The agency said those complaints were rising, averaging nearly 70 consumer complaints per day in 2024, up from 42 per day in 2021.

That pressure has also reached the payments industry. In June 2025, the FTC announced a $5 million settlement with Paddle and said the company would be permanently banned from processing payments for tech-support telemarketers after allegedly helping foreign-based deceptive schemes reach the U.S. card system and evade detection by merchant banks and card networks. The commission has framed the Growthmind case as another test of whether payment intermediaries can be used to keep suspect schemes alive longer than consumer complaints should allow.

Apple has argued that its own App Store defenses are robust, saying in May 2025 that it prevented more than $9 billion in fraudulent transactions over five years, blocked nearly 2 million risky app submissions in 2024 alone, terminated more than 146,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected 139,000 developer enrollments. The FTC case now sharpens a larger question for the app economy: whether store screening, payment controls and enforcement actions are moving fast enough to catch operators that can rename, relaunch and reroute money before consumers can get out.