FTC order will ban NGL Labs and its founders from offering anonymous Messaging Apps to kids under 18

The Federal Trade Commission and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office are taking action against NGL Labs, LLC and two of its co-founders, Raj Vir and Joao Figueiredo, for a host of law violations related to their anonymous messaging app, including unfairly marketing the service to children and teens. The defendants will pay $5 million to settle the lawsuit, and will be banned from offering their “NGL: ask me anything” app to anyone under the age of 18.

In their complaint, the FTC and Los Angeles DA’s Office allege that NGL and its co-founders not only actively marketed their service to children and teens, but that they also falsely claimed that its AI content moderation program filtered out cyberbullying and other harmful messages. In addition, the complaint alleges that the defendants sent fake messages that appeared to come from real people and tricked users into signing up for their paid subscription by falsely promising that doing so would reveal the identity of the senders of messages.

Read the full news release.