On Thursday, the FTC stated that it has made its charge against the creators of Pact for leaving to live up to their contract with users. A $1.5 million assessment will be partially excluded based on Pact’s seeming lack of funds, the FTC writes, but Pact will be expected to pay out $948,788 to consumers who were exploited by the company.
Supported by investors like PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Pact was originally called GymPact before it became its name to reflect its new meal-tracking features. The idea after the app was relatively frank A user could set a goal like, “I’ll go the gym for an hour five days in a row.” Then, the user sets a sum of money that they’d be ready to pay a fine if they failed to reach their goal. When establishing a goal, the app would tell you how enough money you’d be paid with if you accomplished to achieve your goal usually a small number that was removed from the pool of failures out there. At first, Pact had a contract with thousands of gyms that the user could check into and that feature was developed to GPS tracking.
It seems like common people had a good experience with Pact since it began in 2012. iMedical Apps, a site that reports medical apps, ran a good review in 2014. After two years of use, the reviewer declared they’d earned $147.17. News ran a glowing analysis of the app in 2016 and gave it four-and-a-half out of five stars. When the business shut down in July, some users on Reddit were perplexed and disappointed. But not everyone loved it.
Defendants have not satisfied, and in fact have charged, many customers who satisfied their pacts. These prices have ranged from $5 to $50 per purportedly dropped activity. Moreover, many customers who have attempted to cancel Defendants’ setting instead have continued to be charged in following weeks without their consent. Defendants have obtained at least tens of thousands of consumer criticisms about unauthorized charges billed by the Pact app, with many customers reporting hundreds of dollars of losses in such charges.
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