Fake Senders, Real Charges: The Complaint Behind a Popular Teen Messaging App

Sendit lets users, mostly teenagers, post prompts to their Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok stories and receive anonymous replies through the app. By 2022, the app had grown enough that 116,000 of its registered users self-declared as being under the age of 13, according to a federal complaint.DOCUMENTED That complaint, filed against Sendit's operator, Los Angeles-based Iconic Hearts Holdings, Inc., and its CEO, Hunter Rice, alleges the company kept collecting children's personal data even after parents complained — and separately alleges that Sendit charged users for a paid feature that regulators say did not do what it claimed.DOCUMENTED

The complaint, filed by the Department of Justice at the FTC's request in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleges violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule, Section 5 of the FTC Act, and the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act.DOCUMENTED As of this reporting, the matter remains an active federal complaint; no settlement or court judgment has resolved the allegations.

What the complaint alleges about children's data

COPPA requires operators of apps and online services with actual knowledge that children under 13 are using their product to notify parents about what data is collected and to obtain verifiable parental consent beforehand.REVIEWED The complaint alleges that Sendit collected phone numbers, birthdates, photos, and usernames linked to Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and other accounts from users under 13, and that this collection continued even after parents raised complaints about the app.DOCUMENTED With 116,000 self-declared under-13 users registered in 2022 alone, the scale of the alleged data collection places the case among the larger COPPA actions the agency has brought against a messaging app.REVIEWED

The subscription allegations

Separately from the children's-privacy allegations, the complaint alleges that Sendit deceived users of all ages through its “Diamond Membership” subscription feature. According to the complaint, the app sent users messages designed to appear as though they came from real people in the user's social network — messages that press coverage of the complaint has described as often provocative in tone — and then charged users a recurring fee for a membership that promised to unmask the anonymous sender.DOCUMENTED In practice, according to the complaint, the paid feature did not reveal who had actually sent the messages, because in many cases the messages did not originate from a real sender at all.DOCUMENTED

That allegation is what brings the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act into the case: ROSCA requires that any online subscription clearly disclose its material terms and obtain a consumer's informed consent before charging them on a recurring basis. A subscription marketed around a specific promised benefit that the service does not actually deliver raises a distinct legal theory from the underlying children's-privacy allegations, even though both stem from the same app.REVIEWED

Part of a recognized pattern among messaging apps

Sendit is not the first anonymous-messaging app the FTC has pursued on similar grounds. In July 2024, the agency settled with NGL Labs and its founders for $5 million over allegations that the company used bots to send fabricated messages and marketed misleadingly to teenagers about paid upgrades.DOCUMENTED Consumer-technology reporters covering the genre have noted that several similar apps have followed a comparable playbook: attract young users through anonymous social features, then monetize curiosity about message senders through paid “reveal” features of questionable actual function.REVIEWED

According to the complaint, the paid membership promising to reveal anonymous senders did not work, because in many cases the messages did not come from a real sender at all.

Where the case stands

Because this matter remains an active complaint rather than a settled case, none of the allegations described here have been proven in court, and the defendants have not been found liable.REVIEWED The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction against the alleged practices, along with monetary relief and civil penalties, in a case that adds to a growing body of enforcement actions targeting messaging apps popular with teenagers over how they collect data and monetize anonymous engagement.

Why anonymous-messaging apps keep drawing scrutiny

The genre of app Sendit belongs to — anonymous question-and-answer tools layered onto existing social platforms — has a documented history of regulatory and platform-level trouble. Two earlier apps in the same category, YOLO and LMK, were removed from Snapchat's platform in 2021 following a lawsuit connected to a child's death, a decision that opened space in the market Sendit and similar apps later filled.REVIEWED That history matters because it suggests the underlying product category, not any single company's implementation of it, carries structural risk: anonymity paired with a teenage user base and monetized “reveal” features creates recurring incentives to manufacture engagement through fabricated messages, according to the pattern regulators have identified across multiple cases in the space.REVIEWED

For parents and platforms alike, the Sendit complaint underscores that an app's integration with mainstream platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok does not by itself indicate that the app has been vetted for how it handles children's data or subscription billing — those obligations run independently under COPPA and ROSCA, and, as this case shows, enforcement can follow years after an app has already accumulated millions of downloads and a substantial base of underage users. Whatever a court ultimately decides about the specific allegations, the case adds another data point to a now-familiar regulatory record for this category of app.

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