FTC, Utah and Nevada sue Lens.com: the advertised price doubled at checkout

A federal agency and two states file one complaint

In a press release dated October 2, 2026, the FTC said it had filed a joint complaint with the Utah and Nevada attorneys general. Three defendants are named: Lens.com Inc., its owner Cary Samourkachian, and an affiliated company, Speed Commerce LLC. The case sits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada. Local station News 3 Las Vegas reported that the suit was filed on Friday and ran its story on October 3.

The core allegation is a gap between two numbers. According to the FTC, Lens.com puts eye-catching, artificially low prices in its sponsored Google search results and on lens.com, and then adds a compulsory "Taxes & fees" line once the shopper reaches checkout. The agency claims these hidden charges routinely double the advertised price and have cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars in total.

Checkout layout, a misleading label and a subscription flow

Much of the complaint is about page design. The FTC says the fee line itself sat below the part of the checkout screen a shopper sees without scrolling, while a prominent Continue button stayed in view. Shoppers who simply pressed that button, the release says, never saw the fee line. The label itself is also challenged: it suggests the charge includes sales tax, yet many US states do not tax contact lenses at all.

The case also covers AutoRefill, a plan that ships lenses and bills customers on a recurring basis. The complaint says the same low prices were used to draw people into AutoRefill, and the hidden fee was not clearly disclosed before billing details were collected. Nor, it says, did Lens.com clearly explain how to cancel or by when a customer had to cancel to avoid paying for the next shipment. The FTC and the states cite the FTC Act, ROSCA, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, two Utah statutes (the Consumer Sales Practices Act and the Automatic Renewal Contracts Act) and Nevada's Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Commissioners voted 2-0 to authorize the complaint.

The target is the whole path from ad to payment

Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, put it plainly, saying "Lens.com advertised one price for contact lenses but charged a substantially higher price at checkout". The agency argues that hiding the total stops shoppers from knowing what they will actually pay and from comparing Lens.com with competing sellers. In other words, the case looks beyond a single ad and asks whether the ad, the product page, the checkout total and the cancellation terms tell the same story.

One limit matters here. These are allegations in a complaint, not findings by a court. The FTC's note explains that it files when it has reason to believe a law is being broken, and that the court will decide the case. Google appears in the release only as the place the ads ran; it is not a defendant.

The sources say nothing about Türkiye, so this section is our view

Neither source mentions Türkiye. There is nothing on whether Lens.com sells there, whether Turkish consumers were affected, or whether any Turkish authority is involved. The case rests entirely on US federal and state law. What follows is therefore UNALSOFT commentary, not reporting from the sources.

Our view: consumer and advertising rules in Türkiye also put weight on price transparency. The price in a search ad, the product page, the checkout total and any subscription terms should line up, both for compliance and for customer trust. The open questions are worth listing too. The release says the suit aims to stop the practice but gives no figure for any monetary relief sought, gives no example price or fee figure, and sets no date for a ruling. Whether the case has any direct consequence for sellers or platforms in Türkiye cannot be drawn from the sources.

Sources

Federal Trade Commission · News 3 Las Vegas (KSNV)