Like a third act reveal we all should have seen coming, it turns out that MoviePass was even more of a villain than we thought.
The movie ticket subscription service, which promised customers the ability to see one film in theaters per day for $9.95 a month, officially shuttered (for good) in 2019. However, according to a Federal Trade Commission complaint released Monday, the company actively worked to prevent its customers from seeing movies in theaters.
MoviePass allegedly did this in three calculated and rather hilariously screwed-up ways.
First, according to an FTC press release announcing the complaint, MoviePass invalidated users' passwords and claimed, falsely, that it had detected fraud related to their accounts. And we're talking about a lot of customers. According to the complaint, MoviePass did this to 75,000 users — many of whom where then locked out of their accounts as "MoviePass's password reset process often failed."
The FTC notes that MoviePass's then CEO Mitchell Lowe, along with the CEO of MoviePass's parent company, "knew of, ordered, or helped execute the password disruption program."
Second, MoviePass allegedly launched a "ticket verification program" that didn't work correctly, and, as a result, "blocked thousands of subscribers from using the service."
And, perhaps most outrageously, "MoviePass's operators used 'trip wires' that blocked certain groups of users—typically those who viewed more than three movies per month—from utilizing the service after they collectively hit certain thresholds based on their monthly cost to the company."
Oh yeah, and that's not all.
In addition to locking out customers who saw more movies than MoviePass wanted to pay for, the company also allegedly burned the rest of its customers for good measure.
SEE ALSO: MoviePass left customers' credit card numbers exposed on unprotected server
"MoviePass's operators also failed to take reasonable steps to secure personal information it collected from subscribers, such as their names, email addresses, birth dates, credit card numbers, and geolocation information, the FTC alleges," reads the press release. "For example, the company stored consumers' personal data including financial information and email addresses in plain text and failed to impose restrictions on who could access personal data."
MoviePass and its parent company agreed to settle the FTC's allegations, which comes with prohibitions on misrepresenting future businesses and the implementation of better data security.
Hopefully that's enough to prevent this villain from getting a sequel.
