A federal court has temporarily shut down what the US Federal Trade Commission describes as a sprawling enterprise of deceptive subscription apps, freezing the operations of 15 corporations and eight individuals accused of charging consumers without permission and making cancellation deliberately hard.
The order, granted at the agency’s request, came alongside a complaint filed on 17 June in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
At the centre sits Genesis Tech, which the FTC alleges operated as a single common enterprise behind a portfolio of unrelated-looking products. The roster reads like a tour of the app stores’ long tail: the fitness and nutrition apps MadMuscles, Harna, and Unimeal; the PDF editors PDF Guru and PDF Master; a fashion-advice app called Lumi; the self-help brand Wisey, which the agency says marketed courses claiming to diagnose and treat ADHD symptoms; and Nebula, a horoscope and psychic-chat app.
The complaint names founder-CEOs Vladimir Mnogoletny and Vasily Ulianov, along with six other co-defendants.
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The structure is the part the FTC lingers on. According to the complaint, Genesis Tech ran through a chain of affiliates incorporated in Cyprus and operating in Ukraine, which marketed the apps to American users while routing payment processing through counterpart companies registered in Delaware.
As fraud-monitoring systems caught up with one merchant account, the agency alleges, the operators simply registered another company and opened a fresh account, then moved the proceeds across borders between affiliates. It is the corporate equivalent of changing your name every time the bill arrives.
The money was not small. From early 2023 to mid-2025, five of the products alone brought in nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in global revenue, the complaint says. The transactions through the enterprise’s connected PayPal accounts totalled nearly $700m in the 12 months ending September 2025.
The alleged playbook was consistent across the catalogue. Products were advertised as free or as a low one-time purchase, often with a money-back guarantee, while the auto-renewing subscription was relegated to the smallest print on the page. The defendants then added charges consumers had not agreed to, the FTC says, double-billing for the same product or quietly bundling in extras.
And cancellation was an obstacle course: options missing from apps and websites, demands that users explain why they wanted to leave, and, in some cases, charges that continued even after a cancellation had been confirmed.
The agency alleges the conduct violates both the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, the 2010 law written for exactly this kind of recurring-billing trap.
“The Trump-Vance FTC is engaged in robust enforcement to address deception and illegal subscription offerings,” said Christopher Mufarrige, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, calling the case an illustration of the bureau’s “reinvigorated anti-fraud program.”
The Commission voted 2-0 to authorise the complaint. The named co-defendants are Stamatis Skianis, Oksana Kucher, Iryna Oleksyn, Olga Garbuzenko, Rostyslav Ivanitsa, and Viktoriia Savchuk.
The FTC files a complaint only when it has reason to believe the law is being broken; the allegations are unproven, and the case will be decided by the court.
For Apple and Google, the case is less a verdict than a diagnosis. A network that can spin up new shells faster than the stores can flag the old ones is not a single bad app to be removed. It is a moving target, and the FTC has just described, in some detail, how the target moves.
