The FTC, joined by the New York Attorney General, brought action against gig-economy company Handy Technologies — which currently operates under the name Angi Services — alleging the company made a broad array of deceptive claims about how much money workers on its platform could realistically expect to earn.DOCUMENTED
- The complaint alleges Handy's advertisements were, in the agency's own characterization, "peppered" with earnings claims that don't reflect the reality for the overwhelming majority of platform workers.
- The complaint further alleges Handy failed to clearly disclose fees and fines that led to millions of dollars being withheld from workers over time, reducing their effective take-home pay well below any advertised figure.
- Under the proposed settlement, Handy would provide $2.95 million for refunds to harmed workers.
- The company would be required to make changes ensuring workers clearly consent to any fees charged, and to give clear direction on how to avoid the fines that had previously reduced their pay.
- A joint federal-state action of this kind — combining FTC and a state attorney general as co-plaintiffs — typically indicates the underlying conduct affected a specific state's residents severely enough to warrant that state's independent legal involvement alongside the federal case.
Earnings claims meet gig-work fee structures
This case combines two mechanisms seen separately elsewhere on this site: an overstated earnings claim used to recruit participants into the platform in the first place — the same core allegation structure as the Forever Living MLM case, despite Handy and Forever Living operating in entirely unrelated industries — plus a fee and fine structure that, according to the complaint, further reduced actual take-home pay below even a conservative estimate of the advertised earnings, and which was not clearly disclosed to workers before they signed up to work on the platform.REVIEWED
The combination of these two alleged practices compounds the harm in a specific way: a worker recruited by an inflated earnings claim who then also loses additional income to poorly disclosed fees and fines experiences a larger gap between expectation and reality than either practice would produce alone, since the two mechanisms — the initial overstatement and the subsequent fee erosion — work in the same direction rather than offsetting one another.
Why gig-economy earnings claims draw particular scrutiny
Gig-economy platforms occupy a specific regulatory gray area that traditional employment does not: workers are typically classified as independent contractors rather than employees, which affects what disclosure obligations apply and what recourse workers have if actual earnings fall short of what was advertised. This case, alongside similar earnings-claims actions in the multilevel-marketing space, suggests the FTC applies a broadly consistent standard regardless of the specific legal classification of the working relationship — an earnings claim used to recruit participants must be substantiated and representative, whether the recruited party is technically an employee, an independent contractor, or an MLM distributor.
Sources behind this report
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