What the FTC settlement requires

The FTC settlement

The Federal Trade Commission's June 2025 press release names Paddle.com Market Limited and its subsidiary, Paddle.com, Inc. The money supplements redress for consumers harmed by the Restoro-Reimage tech support scheme.

In its complaint, the agency alleged that Paddle and its subsidiary processed payments for deceptive tech-support schemes aimed at U.S. consumers, including older adults. The statutes named are the FTC Act, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, and the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act. The release says Paddle opened merchant accounts as a merchant of record, or as a reseller, for unrelated third parties, and that those accounts gave overseas schemes access to the card system and a way to evade detection. The scheme named above used fake virus alerts impersonating brands. The complaint also says Paddle billed auto-renewing subscriptions without a clear disclosure of the recurring charge.

Any subscription Paddle processes has to show its terms clearly and conspicuously. Paddle has to get express informed consent, and buyers need a simple way to cancel that stops the recurring charge. The press release says Paddle must screen clients and keep monitoring them. The stipulated order requires a prospective client, before service starts, to say whether they know the business was on the MATCH list in the past five years, and to report a material change within 30 days.

If you sell tech support by phone, Paddle cannot process the payments. A software subscription is a different business. The screening, the MATCH notice, and the subscription rules above still apply.

What Paddle handles

Paddle solves a different problem from the rest of this category. It is a merchant of record, which means Paddle itself is the legal seller: it takes the payment, charges the tax, and answers to the card networks. For a software or SaaS business selling into dozens of countries, Paddle takes on worldwide tax compliance. That is the tedious part of payments, and it is why this is the right checkout for that seller.

You cannot move a charge between your own accounts, because every payment runs on Paddle's. It will not take high-risk business at all, so a direct-response supplement offer is a non-starter under its rules. Disputes are handled for you, which sounds ideal until you want to fight one your own way, and Paddle still keeps the fee and will suspend a seller who drifts above a 0.65% rate. Its recovery flow for failed renewals is genuinely good, with up to seven retries and a sequence of emails, though it runs on Paddle's schedule with little for you to adjust.

There is no monthly platform fee. The percentage on each sale is simple, and it gets expensive once sales volume picks up. Pick Paddle when you sell mainstream software and want the tax and compliance load gone. Skip it when you send ad traffic to your own offers. Letting Paddle be the seller makes checkout easy, but a direct-response seller gives up the control they need.