Amazon Prime Day Lawsuit: Fake Sales, Dropped Case, and FTC

The Amazon Prime Day lawsuit was a proposed class action filed in September 2025 accusing Amazon of faking Prime Day discounts by advertising percentage savings off inflated “list prices” that products had not actually sold for. Two shoppers, Cathy Armstrong of California and Oluwa Fosudo of Maryland, brought the case in federal court in Washington under the state’s Consumer Protection Act. They voluntarily dismissed it on April 20, 2026, weeks after a Washington Supreme Court ruling made their theory of harm nearly impossible to win on.¹

What the Lawsuit Alleged About Prime Day Pricing

The complaint, filed September 22, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, targeted the four-day Prime Day event Amazon ran July 8 through 11, 2025.² The heart of the case was simple. When Amazon showed a stricken-through list price next to a percentage-off deal, the plaintiffs said, that reference price was often fictional. Products had not actually been sold at those higher numbers within the previous 90 days, which is the window Amazon’s own internal policy requires a crossed-out reference price to reflect.³

The plaintiffs also argued that the short, high-pressure format of Prime Day compounded the deception. Shoppers seeing a countdown clock next to a large “percent off” number were pushed to buy before they could check whether the discount was real. In some cases, according to the complaint, Amazon sold a product at the claimed reference price for as little as a single day, just enough to give the crossed-out figure a thin factual basis.³

The Product Examples

The complaint pointed to specific items to show the pattern. A pair of Shokz headphones was advertised as 44% off a $179.95 list price during Prime Day, but the plaintiffs said the actual selling price had ranged between $130 and $160.

An 8-inch Android tablet marketed for kids offered a sharper illustration. Amazon showed it at 40% off $119.99, or roughly $72.18. In the 90 days before Prime Day, the plaintiffs said, the tablet had sold for between $50 and $85, with a median price of $72. The Prime Day “deal” was actually higher than what the same tablet had sold for in April, when it went for $50.⁴

Who Would Have Been in the Class

The plaintiffs asked the court to certify a nationwide class covering every U.S. resident who was a Prime member and bought a product during Prime Day 2025 that was advertised with a percentage discount off a crossed-out reference price the product had not actually sold at within the prior 90 days.² The legal claim ran under the Washington Consumer Protection Act, which forbids unfair or deceptive business practices. The plaintiffs said class members would have either shopped elsewhere or waited for a genuinely lower price if the phantom discounts had not misled them.⁴

Amazon declined to comment on the suit. Its corporate site described the July 2025 event as its “biggest Prime event to date” and said customers “saved billions on deals.”⁵

Why the Case Was Dropped

The case never reached the merits. The parties agreed to stay proceedings in October 2025, and on April 20, 2026, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1)(A)(i). The court closed the file the same day.¹

The timing lines up with a Washington Supreme Court decision handed down 18 days earlier. On April 2, 2026, the court decided Montes v. SPARC Group LLC, a case squarely on the question of whether consumers can sue under the Washington Consumer Protection Act over misleading reference pricing. The court held that a shopper who gets the exact product they wanted at the price they agreed to pay has not suffered the kind of “objectively measurable economic loss” the statute requires, even if the seller lied about the product’s price history to make the deal look better. Disappointed expectations and hypothetical alternate spending decisions, the court said, are not enough.⁶

That was the exact theory the Armstrong plaintiffs were running: that Prime Day shoppers were injured because they bought items they would have skipped, or bought elsewhere, if the discount claims had been honest. The Montes court did note that state regulators like the Washington attorney general can still pursue deceptive pricing without proving individual loss, but private class actions of this shape face a much steeper climb.⁷

Not the Same as the FTC Prime Settlement

The Prime Day pricing lawsuit is often confused with a much larger Amazon Prime case resolved the same month. They are separate matters. Days before Armstrong was filed, Amazon agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over how it enrolled and retained Prime subscribers, not over Prime Day pricing. The FTC deal included a $1 billion civil penalty and $1.5 billion in consumer refunds for roughly 35 million subscribers who signed up through a “challenged enrollment flow” or tried to cancel between June 23, 2019, and June 23, 2025.⁸

If you think you may qualify for that refund, which pays up to $51 per person, it is a different process from anything connected to the dismissed Prime Day case. Eligible customers who used three or fewer Prime benefits received automatic refunds in November and December 2025. Everyone else began receiving claim notices by mail and email in January 2026, and can choose payment by check, PayPal, or Venmo. The claim deadline is July 21, 2026.⁹ Amazon expects to issue the claims-based payments in late 2026.¹⁰

Shoppers who felt misled by Prime Day list prices are not covered by that FTC refund. With Armstrong dismissed and the Montes decision on the books in Washington, there is no active private class action delivering money to Prime Day buyers on this theory.

1
PacerMonitor. Armstrong et al v. Amazon.com Inc
2
ClassAction.org. Armstrong et al. v. Amazon.com, Inc. Complaint
3
ClassAction.org. Prime Day Lawsuit Alleges Four-Day Amazon Event Is Rife With Fake Sales
4
CBS News. Amazon Fake Sale Prime Day Lawsuit
5
The Hill. Lawsuit Accuses Amazon of Fake Prime Day Deals
6
RILA. Washington Supreme Court Draws a Clear Line: No Injury When Consumers Get What They Paid For
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WSHB Law. Objective Economic Loss Required Under Washington’s Consumer Protection Act in False Discounting Case
8
FTC. FTC Secures Historic $2.5 Billion Settlement Against Amazon
9
ABC7 New York. How to Claim Amazon Refund for Prime Membership
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FTC. Amazon Refunds