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On 2 October 2026, the Federal Trade Commission, the Utah Attorney General and the Nevada Attorney General filed a joint complaint against a contact lens retailer in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada.
The defendants named are Lens.com, Inc., its owner Cary Samourkachian, and an affiliated entity, Speed Commerce LLC.
Start with the only sentence in this article that matters more than the law: this is a complaint, not a judgment. Everything below is an allegation that has not been tested in court. There is no ruling, no order and no finding against anyone. We looked for one and there is none to find, five days after filing.
But you do not read a complaint to learn who wins. You read it to learn what a regulator thinks is already illegal under statutes that are already in force — and this one is about a checkout page for contact lenses, which is probably a description of something you own.
What is alleged
Two things, and they are joined at the hip.
The first is about price. From the Commission’s own release:
“Lens.com’s hidden fees routinely double the price it advertises for contact lenses, costing consumers hundreds of millions of dollars, the joint complaint alleges.”
The mechanism alleged is not a hidden charge in the usual sense. It is a placement:
“Lens.com hides the ‘Taxes & fees’ line item during the checkout process, hiding the line item below the viewable portion of the screen while encouraging consumers to click a prominent ‘Continue’ button to proceed with the checkout process rather than scroll down.”
Read that again with a merchant’s eye rather than a lawyer’s. The fee line is on the page. It is in the order summary. It is itemised, named and disclosed. The allegation is that it sits below the viewable portion of the screen, above a prominent button that moves the customer on.
That is not a copy problem or a terms problem. It is a layout problem, and it is measured in a viewport.
The second half: the replenishment plan
The alleged low prices are also said to do a second job:
“Lens.com uses these same deceptively low prices to induce consumers to enroll in AutoRefill, a negative option plan”
And then the cancellation limb:
“Lens.com also fails to clearly and conspicuously disclose how to cancel the AutoRefill subscription and the deadline by which consumers must cancel to avoid incurring charges for a future shipment”
Note precisely what is alleged there, because it is narrower and stranger than “cancelling was too hard”. The allegation is a failure to disclose two things: how to cancel, and by when — the cut-off before the next shipment bills.
That second item is the one most lens merchants have never written down anywhere. Every replenishment programme has a cut-off. It is the moment the next order locks: the picking window, the fulfilment handoff, the day the card is run. Most merchants know it to the hour internally and have never put it on a page.
The statutes, and the one that does the work
The complaint pleads six laws. The release names them in one sentence:
“The FTC, Utah and Nevada allege these practices violate the FTC Act, the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB Act), the Utah Consumer Sales Practices Act (Utah CSPA), the Utah Automatic Renewal Contracts Act (Utah ARCA) and Nevada Deceptive Trade Practices Act (Nevada DTPA).”
Three notes before going further, all of them limits on what we can tell you.
The release does not allocate facts to counts, so we cannot tell you which allegation supports which statute, and we are not going to guess. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley count is pleaded and unexplained in the release; GLB is financial-privacy legislation and why it appears here is not something the public document answers, so we leave it alone rather than invent a theory. And we have not read the Utah or Nevada statutes, so we describe them by name only. The case number was not given in the release.
What we have read, verbatim, is ROSCA — because ROSCA is the part of this that reaches every online seller in the country, today, with no rulemaking required.
ROSCA, in full
This is 15 U.S.C. section 8403, quoted in full. It is short, which is part of why it is dangerous.
It shall be unlawful for any person to charge or attempt to charge any consumer for any goods or services sold in a transaction effected on the Internet through a negative option feature … unless the person—
(1) “provides text that clearly and conspicuously discloses all material terms of the transaction before obtaining the consumer’s billing information;”
(2) “obtains a consumer’s express informed consent before charging the consumer’s credit card, debit card, bank account, or other financial account for products or services through such transaction;” and
(3) “provides simple mechanisms for a consumer to stop recurring charges from being placed on the consumer’s credit card, debit card, bank account, or other financial account.”
Three obligations. Look at the timing hook buried in the first one.
“Before obtaining the consumer’s billing information.” Not before charging. Not before shipping. Before you collect the card.
That is a position in your funnel, and it is early. All material terms of the transaction — which on any ordinary reading includes what the customer will actually pay — have to be clearly and conspicuously disclosed upstream of the payment fields. A fee line that resolves below the fold at the payment step is on the wrong side of that sequence, whatever else is true about it.
And note what ROSCA is not. It is not the FTC’s click-to-cancel rule. That rule was vacated in its entirety by the Eighth Circuit in July 2025 and we have written about where the obligation went instead. ROSCA is the statute underneath it, which was never vacated, never stayed and never required a rule to be enforceable. The rule is gone. The statute is what you are being sued under.
The point of this article: “simple” means two different things
Here is the comparison that should change what you do this week.
ROSCA, limb (3), requires that you “provide simple mechanisms” to stop recurring charges. That is an absolute standard. Simple, full stop. It has no reference point. A court or a regulator assesses your cancellation flow against an ordinary consumer’s ability to use it.
Six days ago, a New York City rule took effect using almost the same word and anchoring it. The duty requires
“a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent and that is through the same medium that the consumer used to provide consent.”
Same adjective. Completely different standard. That one is relative — measured against your own sign-up flow, so the better your subscribe funnel, the stricter your cancel duty.
A merchant can satisfy one of these and fail the other, in both directions. Two worked examples:
Pass the relative test, fail the absolute one. You take subscriptions through a five-step configured sign-up — prescription entry, eye selection, base curve, cadence, payment. Your cancellation is a four-step portal flow. Ratio-wise you are comfortable. But nobody can find the portal, because the link is in a transactional email footer and the account page does not surface it. Relative standard: arguably fine. ROSCA: a mechanism nobody can locate is not obviously a simple mechanism, and it is the Lens.com allegation almost exactly — a failure to disclose how to cancel, not a failure to build a cancel button.
Pass the absolute test, fail the relative one. You offer a single, prominent, well-signposted cancellation route: call this number, nine to five, and we will do it immediately, no retention script. That is genuinely simple. But subscriptions are accepted in two seconds through an express wallet button at checkout. The New York rules ask for the same medium. A telephone line is not a website, and that limb requires no argument about degrees of difficulty at all.
The intersection, not either rule on its own, is the actual compliance target: a cancellation mechanism that is easy in itself, disclosed where the customer will see it, with its deadline stated, in the same medium they signed up in.
The New York statute we were wrong about
A correction, because we would rather make it than leave it standing.
When we wrote about the New York City click-to-cancel rule last week, we said the City rule was the instrument that added same medium to as easy as, and that we had not read the State statute directly. We have now read it. That sentence was wrong, and it was wrong in the direction that matters.
New York General Business Law section 527-a — a State statute, headed “Unlawful practices” — makes it unlawful for a business making an automatic renewal or continuous service offer “to a consumer in this state” to:
“fail to provide the consumer with the option to cancel at any time using a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent and that is through the same medium that the consumer used to provide consent”
That is the City rule’s sentence, word for word, in a State statute. Secondary commentary puts the amendment that inserted it in force on 13 December 2023.
So the duty is not six days old. On the substance, it is approaching three years old, and it applies across New York State rather than in the five boroughs. The exemption lists match too: franchises issued by a political subdivision, entities regulated by the Department of Financial Services, security system alarm operators, banks and licensed financial institutions, and sellers and administrators of service contracts under Insurance Law section 7902. Utilities, finance, alarms and warranties, in both instruments. No retail, small-business, out-of-state or prescription carve-out in either.
Note the scope phrase, because it has two axes and only one of them is about you: “a consumer in this state”. The limit is on the customer’s location, not the seller’s. An out-of-state Shopify store shipping a lens plan to Buffalo is inside the State statute on its face.
So what did the City actually add?
Not the duty. Compare the enforcement.
The State statute is enforced by the Attorney General, and the penalties are modest: on the statute’s own words, a civil penalty of not more than one hundred dollars for a single violation and not more than five hundred dollars for multiple violations resulting from a single act or incident, rising to five hundred and one thousand dollars respectively for a knowing violation.
And it carries something the City rule does not visibly carry at all:
“No business shall be deemed to have violated the provisions of this section if such business shows, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the violation was not intentional and resulted from a bona fide error made notwithstanding the maintenance of procedures reasonably adopted to avoid such error.”
That is a bona fide error defence, and it is conditional on something specific: not on your good faith, but on the maintenance of procedures reasonably adopted to avoid such error. A merchant who runs a documented quarterly check of the subscribe-versus-cancel flows is building the factual basis for that defence. A merchant who does not, cannot assert it, because the defence has a housekeeping requirement baked in.
The City rule, by contrast, classifies a breach as a deceptive and unconscionable trade practice and prices it at $525, $1,050 and $3,500 by violation number, with liability measured from the customer’s first cancellation attempt. We did not find a knowing-violation distinction or a bona fide error defence in it.
Which gives the honest summary of all three layers: the duty was already there. What the City added was arithmetic, and the removal of your excuses.
The sleeper provision: shipped goods become a gift
While we were in section 527-a we found the provision no one writes about, and for a replenishment business it is worse than the cancel button.
“In any case in which a business sends any goods, wares, merchandise, or products to a consumer, under a continuous service agreement or automatic renewal of a purchase, without first obtaining the consumer’s affirmative consent, the goods, wares, merchandise, or products shall for all purposes be deemed an unconditional gift to the consumer, who may use or dispose of the same in any manner such consumer sees fit without any obligation whatsoever on the consumer’s part to the business, including, but not limited to, bearing the cost of, or responsibility for, shipping any goods, wares, merchandise, or products to the business.”
Sit with that for a moment in the context of a lens subscription.
If product goes out under an auto-renewal without first obtaining the consumer’s affirmative consent, the boxes are deemed an unconditional gift. The customer keeps them. The customer owes nothing. The customer does not even have to pay to send them back, and you cannot ask them to.
This is not a penalty capped at a few hundred dollars. It is a per-shipment forfeiture of the goods, and on a replenishment programme shipments are the whole model. The exposure scales with your shipping cadence and your subscriber count, not with a schedule.
And it bears directly on the case filed on 2 October, because the allegation there is that enrolment in the refill programme was induced by deceptively low prices. We make no claim about that business. But as a general proposition, the weaker your evidence of affirmative consent to the renewal, the closer you sit to a deeming rule that treats your inventory as a present.
One caution, stated plainly: this is a deeming provision, and we have not found a case applying it to a defective-consent fact pattern. How it interacts with a consent that was obtained but is alleged to be tainted is exactly the sort of question that needs counsel rather than a blog.
The private right of action: a better answer than last week’s
We told you last week that we could not establish whether a consumer can sue over a breach of the City click-to-cancel rule, and that you should not read our failure to find the answer as a negative. We have now done the work. The answer has three parts and the third is the one to take to your counsel.
One: the City’s Consumer Protection Law does not appear to grant one. We read sections 20-700 to 20-706 of the Administrative Code section by section — unfair trade practices prohibited, definitions, regulations, enforcement, settlements, persons excluded, permitted practices. The enforcement mechanisms in those sections run through the Commissioner and the City. We found no sentence permitting an injured consumer to bring their own action for damages.
Two: the State statute is explicitly Attorney General enforcement. Section 527-a provides that “an application may be made by the attorney general in the name of the people of the state of New York” for an injunction, with restitution available at the court’s direction. It names no private claimant.
Three — and this is the part that matters — New York has a general consumer statute that very much does. General Business Law section 349(h) provides:
“In addition to the right of action granted to the attorney general pursuant to this section, any person who has been injured by reason of any deceptive act or deceptive practice made unlawful by this section may bring an action in such person’s own name to enjoin such deceptive act or deceptive practice, an action to recover such person’s actual damages or fifty dollars, whichever is greater, or both such actions. The court may, in its discretion, increase the award of damages to an amount not to exceed three times the actual damages up to one thousand dollars, if the court finds the defendant willfully or knowingly violated this section. The court may award reasonable attorney’s fees to a prevailing plaintiff.”
The per-claimant numbers are small. The last sentence is not. Reasonable attorney’s fees to a prevailing plaintiff is the mechanism that makes a fifty-dollar claim worth a lawyer’s time, and it is the engine behind most consumer litigation in New York.
But read the qualifier carefully, because it is the whole question: section 349(h) is available to a person injured by a deceptive act “made unlawful by this section” — by section 349 itself. It is not a general key that unlocks a private claim for breach of any other statute or city rule. A plaintiff would have to plead deception under section 349 on its own terms.
So: does a bare breach of the cancellation duty, with no other deception, constitute a deceptive act under section 349? We do not know, and we are not going to assert it in either direction. That is the live question, it is a question for litigators rather than for us, and it is a much more useful thing to hand your counsel than “we could not find out”.
One honest caveat on the City code: the texts we read were published versions that may not be the current enacted text, and we have a reason to think the figures in them have moved — the penalty amounts in the version of section 20-703 we read are lower than the $525 to $3,500 schedule in the current rules. We are reporting the structure we found, not certifying today’s numbers.
What to actually do, in order
1. Open your checkout on a phone and find the fee line. Not on your desktop. The allegation in this case is about what is visible in a viewport above a button. Use the oldest, smallest phone in the office. If the total moves below the fold while a “Continue” or “Pay now” button sits above it, you have found the thing the complaint is about.
2. Compare your advertised price to your landed total. Pick five products. Note the price in your Google Shopping feed and your ad copy. Run each to the final total. If the gap is routinely large and only resolves at the last step, write down why, because that is the question you would be asked.
3. Write down your renewal cut-off and put it on a page. The deadline by which a customer must cancel to avoid the next shipment. You know it. The allegation here includes failing to disclose it. This is a half-hour job and it is the cheapest item on this list.
4. Disclose the cancellation route upstream of the payment fields. ROSCA’s first limb is about what is disclosed before you take billing information. “Cancel anytime in your account” next to the subscribe toggle, not only in a confirmation email.
5. Run the ratio test and the medium test. Count the actions to subscribe and the actions to cancel. Then ask the separate question of whether both happen in the same medium. We set this out in detail for the New York rules, and the medium test is the one most flows fail.
6. Create the procedure that earns you the bona fide error defence. The State statute’s defence requires “procedures reasonably adopted to avoid such error”. A dated quarterly check of both flows, with a saved screenshot, is the cheapest insurance policy in this article — and unlike most compliance work it produces the evidence as a by-product.
7. Check your affirmative consent records for renewals. Given the deeming provision, the question is not only whether you got consent but whether you can show it per renewal. Ask your subscription app what it stores and for how long.
Why this one is different from the others
Most of what lands on eyewear retail draws a line you can look up. Whether the frame is a medical device. What you printed on the case. Where you are established. You read the instrument and work out which side you are on.
This cluster does something else, and the Lens.com complaint shows both halves of it at once.
On the cancellation limb, the New York rules measure you against your own sign-up flow — the same self-referential move we flagged when the City rule took effect. On the fee limb, the measure is also something you generated: your own advertised price. The complaint’s theory is not that the lenses cost too much. It is that the number at the end did not match the number at the beginning, and you supplied both numbers.
Which means the compliance artefact in both halves is not a document. It is a sequence of screens, and it changes every time someone ships a theme update. A duty measured against your own interface cannot be discharged by the legal team, because the legal team did not build the checkout, and it cannot be audited from a specification, because the specification stopped matching production months ago.
The federal rule died. The statute underneath it did not, the State statute has been there since 2023, the City added a penalty ladder, and now the agency has filed against a lens retailer. If you have been waiting for the regulatory picture to settle before touching your checkout, it has settled. It settled on the gap between what you advertise and what you charge, and the gap between how easy you made it to say yes and how easy you made it to say no.
Frequently asked questions
Has Lens.com been found to have done anything wrong?
No. A complaint was filed on 2 October 2026 and, as at the date of this article, there is no ruling, order or finding. Every allegation described here is an allegation. We quote the Commission’s release because it tells you what the agency’s theory is, which is useful whatever the outcome.
Does ROSCA apply to us if we are small?
ROSCA contains no small-business threshold. It applies to charging a consumer for goods sold in an internet transaction through a negative option feature. If you run a replenishment plan online, you are within its subject matter. Enforcement priorities are a separate question from coverage, and only one of them is in your control.
We are not in New York or Nevada or Utah. Why does this matter?
Because ROSCA and the FTC Act are federal, and because the New York State statute limits itself by the consumer’s location rather than yours. The Utah and Nevada counts reflect where this particular case was brought. The federal counts reflect where everyone is.
Our fees are disclosed. They are right there in the order summary.
So were the fees in this complaint, on the allegation. The claim is about placement relative to the viewable screen and relative to the button that moves the customer forward. Disclosure and visibility are being treated as different questions, and the second one is tested on a device rather than in a document.
Is this the FTC’s click-to-cancel rule coming back?
No. That rule was vacated in July 2025 and has not returned; the Commission began a replacement rulemaking in early 2026 and it has no fixed timetable. This case is brought under statutes that were always in force. That is the point: the enforcement did not need the rule.
Is the “unconditional gift” rule real, and could it actually be used against us?
The provision is real and we have quoted it verbatim above. Whether it would be applied to a renewal where consent was obtained but is alleged to be defective is a different question, and we have not found a case deciding it. Treat it as a reason to be able to evidence consent per renewal, not as a settled outcome.
What is the single cheapest thing on this list?
Publishing your renewal cut-off date. It costs half an hour, it removes one of the two disclosure failures alleged in this case, and it reduces support contacts. Nothing else here has that ratio.
Does any of this touch our prescription obligations?
No. Prescription verification for contact lenses is a separate regime with separate requirements, and complying with one does nothing for the other. They sit on the same checkout and come from different bodies of law.
This article is general information about regulatory and enforcement developments, not legal advice. It describes a complaint filed on 2 October 2026 that contains allegations which have not been proven, and against which no finding has been made. Statutory text is quoted as read on 7 October 2026 from the sources listed below. Two questions are expressly left open: whether a breach of a cancellation duty alone is actionable as a deceptive act under General Business Law section 349, and how the “unconditional gift” deeming provision applies where consent was obtained but is disputed. Take advice on your own position before changing a checkout, a fee presentation or a cancellation flow.
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Sources: Federal Trade Commission press release, “FTC, States Sue Lens.com for Misrepresenting the Price of Contact Lenses in Search Ads and on its Website”, 2 October 2026, ftc.gov, read 7 October 2026 — for the filing date, the defendants (Lens.com, Inc., Cary Samourkachian and Speed Commerce LLC), the court (United States District Court for the District of Nevada), the six statutes pleaded, and the quoted allegations about the “Taxes & fees” line item, the doubling of advertised prices, enrolment in AutoRefill as a negative option plan, and the failure to disclose the cancellation method and deadline, each quoted verbatim; the release does not give a case number and does not allocate facts to counts · 15 U.S.C. section 8403 (Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act), quoted in full from the Legal Information Institute’s United States Code text · New York General Business Law section 527-a, read directly; the cancellation sentence at subsection 1(d) was obtained identically from the New York State Senate’s published law text and from a second published source, and the enforcement provision, the civil penalty amounts, the bona fide error defence, the unconditional-gift provision and the five exempt categories are quoted verbatim · the 13 December 2023 effective date of the amendment inserting that language is from secondary commentary (Consumer Finance Monitor, 20 December 2023) and was not confirmed against the session law · New York General Business Law section 349(h), quoted verbatim · New York City Administrative Code sections 20-700 to 20-706, reviewed section by section on two published sources, neither of which is certified as the current enacted text; no private right of action appears on the face of those sections, and the penalty figures in the version read are lower than the current rules schedule, which is noted in the body · Title 6 RCNY sections 5-110 to 5-110.3 and amended section 6-47, as quoted in our earlier article on the New York City rule, which carries that document’s full citation · the July 2025 Eighth Circuit vacatur of the FTC Negative Option Rule, from contemporaneous law firm analyses; the opinion itself has not been read. No finding has been made against any defendant named in this article.
