Primary document

Paddle and the FTC, June 2025

On 16 June 2025 the United States Federal Trade Commission announced that Paddle.com Market Limited and its US subsidiary Paddle.com, Inc. had agreed to pay $5 million and to accept permanent bans on parts of their business, to settle an action brought against them. ¹

This page exists because the settlement is the single most useful document for anyone deciding whether to entrust funds to this company, and because a settlement press release does not surface in a search for a company's name.

What the FTC alleged

The allegations set out in the announcement were that Paddle:

• processed payments for deceptive tech-support schemes aimed at US consumers, including older adults;
• opened merchant accounts under false pretences — as a "merchant of record" or software reseller — and used them to process payments for numerous unrelated third-party merchants;
• thereby gave overseas operations access to the US credit card system while evading detection by merchant banks and card networks;
• facilitated schemes that used fake virus alerts and pop-ups impersonating brands including Microsoft and McAfee;
• charged consumers for automatically renewing subscriptions without clearly disclosing the recurring charge.

The conduct was alleged to violate the FTC Act, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, and the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act.

"Paddle provided foreign-based tech-support schemes with access to the U.S. payment system, allowing these companies to harm consumers."

— Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, quoted in the FTC's announcement of the settlement.

What the order imposes

Under the settlement Paddle is permanently banned from:

• processing payments for tech-support merchants that engage in telemarketing, or that use pop-up messages about computer security or performance;
• assisting deceptive merchants, or employing tactics designed to avoid fraud and risk-monitoring programmes.

A settlement is not a finding of guilt by a court, and Paddle's agreement to the order is not an admission of the allegations. It is, unambiguously, a $5 million payment and a set of permanent restrictions that the company accepted rather than litigated.

What the order means for a seller's account

The order is mostly about how Paddle screens and watches the businesses it processes for. Four of its rules decide whether a seller's account stays open, and each is written as a number that can be checked against a seller's own business. Quotations are from the stipulated order as filed with the court on 16 June 2025.³

Order provisions that bear on a seller's account

Rule	Who it applies to	What Paddle must do
Section VI.C, high-chargeback clients	A client that, in any two of the past six months, had a monthly chargeback rate above 0.9% and more than 75 chargebacks in the month	Investigate, and "stop processing sales transactions and close all accounts" within 90 days of starting the investigation, "unless Defendants draft a written report establishing facts that demonstrate, by clear and convincing evidence" that the offers are not deceptive or unfair
Section VII.D, terminated elsewhere	A high-risk or high-volume client, or its principals, that an acquirer or payment provider tells Paddle was terminated in the past three years for excessive chargebacks, fraud, laundering or similar	Stop processing and close all accounts within 90 days of the notice
Section V, high-risk clients	A client that does outbound telemarketing, sells a technical-support product, or in the past 10 years was named in a public complaint, settlement or assurance of voluntary compliance by the FTC, another federal agency or a state attorney general over fraud or unfair or deceptive practices	Take extra screening steps before providing service, then monitor, including quarterly test purchases
Section VII, high-volume clients	A client with more than $2,000,000 in gross sales through Paddle in a year, counted across all its accounts	Monitor chargeback rates monthly; close on the terminated-elsewhere rule above

Two matters are not addressed in the order. It sets no period for holding a closed seller's funds and says nothing about when a balance must be paid out; a search of the full text for the words payout, withhold, release and hold returns no provision on the subject. It also did not exist when many of the closures in the incident record happened: the order was filed in June 2025, while the record includes closures from 2018 onward, among them September 2023 and September 2024. The public record does not show whether the order has changed how often Paddle closes accounts. For what Paddle's own contract says happens to the balance once an account is closed, see the Paddle file.

The primary documents

The underlying filings are published by the FTC:

• The FTC's announcement of the settlement, 16 June 2025
• Complaint for Permanent Injunction, Monetary Judgment, and Other Relief (PDF)
• Stipulated Final Order (PDF)

Related

The FTC's announcement links the action to the Restoro-Reimage matter, a separate case settled in March 2024 for $26 million, involving the fake-virus-alert operation whose payments were among those at issue. ²

Sources

1. US Federal Trade Commission, "Paddle Will Pay $5 Million to Settle FTC Allegations of Unfair Payment-Processing Practices and Facilitation of Deceptive Tech-Support Schemes", 16 June 2025. ftc.gov. Retrieved and read in full on 7 September 2026. All allegations, quotations and terms on this page are taken from that announcement and the filings it links to.
2. US Federal Trade Commission, Restoro-Reimage case file, ftc.gov.
3. Federal Trade Commission v. Paddle.com Market Limited and Paddle.com, Inc., No. 1:25-cv-01886 (D.D.C.), Stipulated Order for Permanent Injunction, Monetary Judgment, and Other Relief, Document 2-1, filed 16 June 2025, definitions R to T and sections V, VI and VII. ftc.gov. Read in full on 21 October 2026.