Chegg charged 200,000 people after they cancelled
The FTC announced on 15 September 2025 that the education company Chegg would pay $7.5 million over allegations that it hid its cancellation route and then kept charging people who had used it. Since October 2020 nearly 200,000 consumers were charged after requesting cancellation — the failure mode that a cancel button cannot fix.
- Year
- 2025
- Where
- United States
- Outcome
- Settled
- Reported loss
- $7.5 million
- Victims
- 200,000
- Schemes
- Subscription traps and free trials
- Last reviewed
- 2026-09-06
The facts, as recorded
- Chegg agreed to pay $7.5 million in consumer refunds under a proposed FTC order announced on 15 September 2025.
- The FTC alleged that since October 2020 Chegg charged nearly 200,000 consumers after they had requested cancellation.
- The cancellation route was alleged to be hidden and to require multiple clicks to locate.
- The FTC alleged Chegg continued the practices despite consumer complaints.
- The action was brought under the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act (ROSCA), which requires a simple mechanism to stop recurring charges.
- The order requires Chegg to maintain simple cancellation mechanisms for negative option features.
Why this case matters
The Amazon settlement is about people being enrolled without meaning to be. This one is about something worse and much harder to defend against: people who did everything right and were charged anyway.
Nearly 200,000 consumers, on the FTC’s allegation, went through Chegg’s cancellation process and kept being billed.
Why that specific failure matters
Every piece of consumer advice about subscriptions ends with “cancel it”. This case is the FTC saying that in at least one large company’s systems, cancelling did not stop the charges — for five years, and through complaints.
If the cancellation request is not honoured, then the only defence left to a consumer is the one that does not depend on the company at all: watching the statement, and going to the card issuer.
The other half of the allegation
The FTC also alleges the cancellation route was hidden and took multiple clicks to find. That is the familiar pattern, and it interacts badly with the first: a process that is hard to complete and sometimes does not work produces people who believe they cancelled and did not, and who will not discover it for months.
Scale, in proportion
$7.5 million against Amazon’s $2.5 billion looks small, and Chegg is a much smaller company. The number that matters is 200,000 people — for a single mid-sized subscription business, over five years, in one enforcement action.
That is the argument for treating this as a scheme rather than as a collection of billing errors. The pattern is common enough to have a rule of its own.
Sources
- Ed Tech Provider Chegg to Pay $7.5 Million to Settle FTC Allegations Concerning Unlawful Cancellation Practices. US Federal Trade Commission. Accessed 2026-09-06. Supports: The 15 September 2025 date, the $7.5m settlement, the 200,000 consumers charged after cancelling since October 2020, the hidden cancellation route and the ROSCA charge.
- Does your business offer subscription services? Learn about the FTC's settlement with Chegg. US Federal Trade Commission, Business Guidance. Accessed 2026-09-06. Supports: The FTC's own summary of what the order requires of subscription businesses.