Venus ET Fleur LLC, a luxury floral arrangement brand known for its preserved roses and gift-focused marketing, was charged with enrolling gift recipients in subscription services without obtaining their consent — billing individuals who had received a flower arrangement as a gift for ongoing subscription deliveries they had never agreed to purchase, in a manner that regulators found violated federal negative option rules and the prohibition on unauthorized charges to consumer payment accounts.DOCUMENTED
The specific harm in Venus ET Fleur's scheme was the targeting of gift recipients rather than purchasers — people who received an arrangement as a gift found they were being charged for an ongoing subscription they had never requested and had no reason to expect. The scheme exploited the common consumer assumption that receiving a gift carries no financial obligation to the recipient, and created financial harm for individuals who had no commercial relationship with Venus ET Fleur and had not agreed to any terms of service with the company.DOCUMENTED
- Gift recipients whose contact information was provided by the gift purchaser were enrolled in subscription programs and billed for recurring deliveries
- The gift purchaser's transaction flow did not clearly disclose that the recipient would be enrolled in a subscription as a result of the gift purchase
- Subscription billing used payment credentials associated with the gift recipient's information rather than the purchaser who authorized a one-time purchase
- Regulators found a substantial number of consumers were billed for subscriptions they had not authorized and did not know they were enrolled in
- Cancellation of the unauthorized subscriptions required contact with Venus ET Fleur's customer service — a process some affected recipients found difficult after discovering the charges
The Enrollment Mechanism
When a customer purchased a floral gift through Venus ET Fleur's website, the checkout flow asked them to provide the recipient's contact information for delivery and follow-up purposes. The terms governing what would happen with this information — including the possibility that the recipient would be enrolled in a subscription service — were not clearly disclosed in the purchase flow. After the gift was delivered, Venus ET Fleur enrolled the recipient in a subscription using the contact information the purchaser had provided, billing whatever payment method was associated with the recipient's profile in the company's system.DOCUMENTED
The consent problem is layered. The purchaser was not clearly informed that providing the recipient's information would result in subscription enrollment for the recipient. The recipient was not asked to consent to subscription enrollment at all. And neither party — the purchaser who made the one-time purchase nor the recipient who received the gift — had agreed to the ongoing billing relationship that the enrollment created. Regulators found that this arrangement met the definition of an unauthorized charge: billing for a service that neither the account holder nor any authorized party had agreed to purchase.DOCUMENTED
Gift Recipients as Unwilling Subscribers
The particular vulnerability of gift recipients in this scheme is that they have no prior commercial relationship with the company from which to form expectations about billing or subscription terms, have not received any offer of a subscription that they could have evaluated and consented to, and may not even know which company sent them the gift they received — making it difficult to identify the source of the unexpected charge when they discover it on their payment account. The combination of lack of relationship, lack of disclosure, and lack of consent made the charges experienced by gift recipients a particularly clear case of unauthorized billing.DOCUMENTED
Consumers who discovered the charges faced the additional hurdle of contacting a company with whom they had no account relationship to cancel a subscription they had not known they were in. Venus ET Fleur's cancellation process required contact through customer service channels, and some affected recipients described difficulty getting the company to acknowledge the subscription or to process a cancellation for an account associated with their information but not their consent.DOCUMENTED
Recipients who had simply received a flower arrangement as a gift discovered, when reviewing their payment accounts, that they were being billed for an ongoing subscription to a company whose product they had received without choosing to purchase anything from it.
Settlement and Refunds
The settlement requires Venus ET Fleur to obtain affirmative consent from gift recipients before enrolling them in any subscription or recurring billing arrangement, to clearly disclose in its gift purchase flow that recipient information may be used for subscription enrollment purposes and what that enrollment would entail, and to issue refunds to all recipients who were billed for subscription services without their consent. Venus ET Fleur is also required to delete recipient payment information that was collected through gift purchase flows without the recipient's direct authorization for the subscription billing.DOCUMENTED
Consumers who received gifts from Venus ET Fleur and were subsequently charged for subscription services should file complaints with their payment card provider to dispute unauthorized charges and request chargebacks if refunds from Venus ET Fleur are not received in a timely manner. Any consumer who receives an unexpected charge from a company they do not recognize should check whether a family member or colleague may have given them a gift from that company that triggered the enrollment, and should contact both the company and their payment card provider to address the unauthorized billing.REVIEWED
Protecting Yourself From Subscription Traps Attached to Gifts
The Venus ET Fleur scheme illustrates a specific risk for gift recipients: that receiving a gift from a company can, without your knowledge, initiate a commercial relationship that generates ongoing charges to your payment account. Consumers should periodically review their bank and credit card statements for recurring charges from companies they do not recognize, paying particular attention to charges that began within the past few months — the timing most consistent with a subscription enrollment that was triggered by a gift transaction. If you find an unauthorized recurring charge, contact the charging company immediately and request cancellation and a refund of all charges made without your authorization; if the company is unresponsive, file a dispute with your bank or credit card provider. Gift givers can help prevent this problem by checking whether a company's gift purchasing flow includes any subscription or ongoing service enrollment for the recipient, and declining to provide the recipient's payment information if the gift purchase process asks for it in a context that is ambiguous about its intended use.
Sources behind this report
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