Adobe Sued by US Government For “Trapping” Customers

The United States government is suing Adobe for allegedly concealing costly costs and making subscription cancellation challenging. Adobe “has harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms,” according to the Department of Justice’s complaint, which was filed on Monday.

According to the agency’s complaint, Adobe declined to change its behavior since doing so would have a negative financial impact on the company.

Adobe refuted the allegations and declared it will defend itself in court.

General counsel and chief trust officer Dana Rao stated, “We have a simple cancellation process and are transparent with the terms and conditions of our subscription agreements.”

“We will refute the FTC’s claims in court,” he added.

Let us take you through the purchasing flow to help you understand the complaint. For any service, including Photoshop, clicking “See plan and pricing details” will provide you a number of options, including “annual, paid monthly.”

The complaint did highlight one issue, though: in order to obtain any information on an ETF, users have to move their mouse pointer over a “i” indicator.

According to U.S. accusations, Adobe is “hiding” its APM plan provisions in “fine print” by placing optional textboxes and URLs underneath them, which are meant to be ignored.

The complaint claims that the information concerning the ETF is insufficient, even with the information provided by the gray box, which states, “If you cancel after 14 days, your service will continue until the end of that month’s billing period, and you will be charged an early termination fee.”

“With deceptive early termination fees and multiple obstacles to canceling, Adobe locked users into one-year subscriptions,” stated Samuel Levine, the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection director, in a news release.

“Americans are tired of companies hiding the ball during subscription signup and then putting up roadblocks when they try to cancel,” Levine continued.

The methods mentioned in the complaint bear resemblance to those that regulators discovered in a case filed against Amazon in the previous year, which led to other complaints being filed with organizations like the Better Business Bureau.

Despite claiming to have begun investigating the matter in 2022, the government claimed that the “defendants have repeatedly decided against rectifying some of Adobe’s unlawful practices because of the revenue implications.”

It requested that the court stop Adobe from using its method and impose monetary fines for each legal infraction.