The Price You Are Not Told Until the Call

$3,500 to $9,800 is the range, and paragraph 46 of the First Amended Complaint in FTC v. Growth Cave, LLC, filed 9 May 2025, records where a buyer first hears it: on a video call, live, with a stranger, after the call has already begun.

Everything before that call is free. The advertisement is free, the opt-in page is free, the emails are free, and the video the buyer is instructed to watch before the call is free. The first number attached to the transaction arrives in a conversation with a person whose job is to end it in a payment, and it arrives there because that is where it was put.

The sequence below is reconstructed from a federal pleading rather than from a review site, because a pleading is the version a hostile reader can check. The First Amended Complaint in FTC v. Growth Cave, LLC, No. 2:25-cv-01115-DOC(RAOx) (C.D. Cal.), was filed on 9 May 2025 and is a public document with numbered paragraphs. Nothing in it was tried. The defendants settled on stipulated orders they consented to, signed 23 January 2026 by Judge David O. Carter and announced by the Federal Trade Commission on 27 January 2026. What those orders actually recovered is Chapter 4's subject and is printed there in two columns, because a judgment figure standing on its own is the opposite of a finding.

Move one is an advertisement. Paragraph 27 of that filing lists the surfaces it ran on: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube. Paragraph 30 states that most prospective purchasers first learned of the business opportunity through videos posted on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other sites. The Commission's press release of 7 March 2025, announcing a temporary restraining order, uses a narrower phrase for the product itself, describing a business opportunity "sold via YouTube ads."

Paragraph 27 of the complaint also records what the advertising said about the seller rather than about the buyer: that the "exact same strategies" being sold had earned the sellers $60 million per year.

Google's own advertising rules prohibit the shape of that claim. The Misrepresentation policy on Google Ads Help, under the heading "Unreliable claims" and retrieved 5 September 2026, reads: "Making inaccurate claims or claims that entice the user with an improbable result (even if this result is possible) as the likely outcome a user can expect is not allowed." The advertisements ran on the platform that publishes that sentence. How many advertisements of this kind were reviewed, approved, refused or removed is not something this desk could establish; no figure for that category was located as of September 2026, and the absence is printed here rather than filled with an estimate.

The circularity is worth holding still for a moment, because it is the reason this particular matter belongs at the front of this volume rather than in a general book about consumer fraud. A product sold on the promise of money from YouTube was, on the Commission's own wording of 7 March 2025, sold via YouTube ads. The advertising budget that reached the buyer was spent on the same surface the buyer was told to go and earn on. Whatever else the transaction was, at the point of contact it was one party paying the platform to reach somebody who had not yet paid the platform anything.

Four subject lines, verbatim from the First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025; the last of them belongs to one of the successor brands. Read them once for what is in them and once for what is not. Every one names a sum of money. Every one names a mechanism, or the pointed absence of one. Not one of them names a price. That is not an oversight committed four times. The sequence those lines open exists to hold the price away from them, and each step in it is free precisely so the buyer keeps taking the next one.

Move two costs a name and an email address. The opt-in page takes both and returns a video. What follows, per the First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025, is near-daily email, and the four lines above are samples of it.

The email sequence does one job that can be named from the outside without speculating about anyone's intent. It converts a stranger who saw one advertisement into a correspondent who has read a month of them, and it does so without either party having spoken. Nothing is asked for at that stage except attention. Nothing is disclosed either, except figures with no denominators underneath them.

The asymmetry that opens there is the one the rest of this chapter measures. On the account in the First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025, the seller has sent near-daily email by the time the buyer speaks to anybody, and the buyer has handed over a name and an email address. The buyer leaves that stage holding a folder of advertisements and no document. Neither party has said a price, and only one of the two is waiting to hear one.

Move three is a video the buyer is told to watch before the call. The complaint filed 9 May 2025 quotes the instruction as it was presented: "IMPORTANT: Please Watch The Video Below BEFORE Your 1-On-1 Strategy Call." The capitalisation is the seller's.

That video is where the proof lives, and its position in the order is what this chapter needs from it. By the time the call begins, the buyer has already been shown the payouts screenshot, the lifestyle footage and the testimonials, none of which the person on the call then has to say out loud. What is inside that video, and what it is evidence of, is taken apart in Chapter

1. What matters here is that it is delivered before the only conversation in which the buyer

could ask a question, and delivered to a person who has still not been told what anything costs.

Move four is the call, and paragraph 46 of the First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025 is the paragraph this chapter is built on: it records that the price of $3,500 to $9,800 was disclosed to the buyer for the first time on that call. The call is presented as a strategy session and framed as a screening rather than as a sale, which is a separate claim with its own federal answer, and Chapter 2 takes it apart on the document that names it.

Read that range once more, because it is doing something a single figure would not. The Commission pleaded a band of $3,500 to $9,800 in its 9 May 2025 filing, and a band means different buyers were quoted different numbers for the same product in the same conversation. Nothing located in the record for this volume states the criterion. Whether the number moved with what a buyer said they could raise, with what the salesperson judged in the moment, or on some published schedule this desk did not find, is not established, and as of September 2026 this was unresolved. What can be said is narrower and is enough: a price that is a range at the point of sale is a price being set during the sale.

Move five happens inside move four. Paragraph 46 also records that payment, or an application for third-party financing, was taken during the same call. There is no interval between learning the price and paying it. A buyer who wants to sleep on the number has to interrupt a live conversation in order to say so, and the conversation was structured by one of the two people in it. Who was providing that financing, and what relationship the financier had with the seller, is also in the record, and it is Chapter 4's material rather than this chapter's.

Financing also changes what is being decided. A price of $9,800 pleaded in the 9 May 2025 filing is a single decision. The same amount taken as an application on a call is two decisions bundled into one, and the second of them creates a debt to a third party who was not in the conversation and whose terms were not in front of the buyer either. The seller's exposure ends at the moment the application is approved. The buyer's does not.

Move six is the contract, and its position in the order is the finding. Paragraph 47 of the same filing states that the agreement arrived by electronic signature after payment, and that it was non-negotiable. The document that defines what was bought is delivered to the buyer after the buyer has bought it. Scope, obligations, refund terms and the meaning of any promised guarantee are all disclosed at a point where the only decision left is whether to sign for something already paid for.

The word non-negotiable is the second half of that. A contract handed over before payment can be argued with, because the party holding the money still has something the other party wants. A contract handed over after payment can only be signed or not signed, and declining to sign does not return the payment. What is inside that document in this matter — specifically, what the advertised guarantee turned out to mean once it was written down — is Chapter 3's subject, and Chapter 3 prints the advertised wording and the contractual wording one under the other with nothing in between them.

There is a federal rule about exactly that ordering, and almost no buyer in this market knows it exists. The Business Opportunity Rule, 16 C.F.R. Part 437, in the amended form effective 1 March 2012, requires a covered seller to give the buyer a disclosure document at least seven calendar days before the earlier of a signature or a payment. That document must carry the seller's identifying information, its litigation history, its cancellation and refund policy, a list of references, and, where the seller has made an earnings claim, a separate earnings statement.

The boundary of that Rule is real, and this book prints it rather than stretching it. The Rule reaches business opportunities: broadly, a solicitation in which the buyer makes a required payment and the seller supplies locations, accounts, or ongoing business assistance. A pure information product sold with no ongoing assistance from the seller can sit outside it. On 13 January 2025 the Commission published a proposal to extend the Rule to money-making opportunities, including business coaching, on a three-to-two vote and with a sixty-day comment period. As of September 2026 that proposal, and a companion proposed earnings-claims rule, were both listed as rulemakings in progress on the Commission's Regulatory Agenda of 14 August 2026 — proposed, not final, and not withdrawn. As of September 2026, this was unresolved.

What survives that boundary is not a rule but a question, and it costs nothing to ask. A seller who answers that the seven-day document does not apply to them has answered that there is no ongoing assistance in the package. Those are the same sentence said twice, and the second half of it is a description of what the buyer is not getting for the money.

Set the Rule's list against the sequence and it lines up item for item. The Rule's disclosure document, at 16 C.F.R. Part 437 in its form effective 1 March 2012, carries the seller's litigation history; the buyer in the sequence above learns the seller's litigation history, if at all, from a search they run themselves. It carries the cancellation and refund policy; the buyer receives that with the agreement, after payment. It carries references; the buyer is given a reference on request, chosen by the seller. It carries an earnings statement wherever an earnings claim was made; the buyer has by then watched a video full of earnings claims and been handed no statement at all. Each of those four is a document that exists on one side of the transaction and not the other, and the seven-day interval is the mechanism the Rule uses to move them across.

Move seven is the upsell, and it is priced an order of magnitude above the entry. The First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025 describes a mastermind sold to existing buyers for an additional $30,000 to $50,000.

Move eight arrives after the money has gone. The Commission's press release of 7 March 2025 describes a credit-repair product cross-sold at $6,800 to buyers who had already spent what they had, and which in practice meant applying for multiple business credit cards. The last item in the sequence is a loan application offered as a remedy for the first seven.

Paragraph 6 of the First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025 states the range across the whole operation: consumers purchased these business opportunities and related services for $3,500 to $50,000 each. That is a fourteen-fold spread between the cheapest and the dearest thing a buyer could walk away holding, and no part of it was published anywhere a buyer could read it before the call.

That design is not confined to one matter, and the prices in the adjacent ones are on the public record with dates on them. The Commission's press release of 18 March 2025 in the Click Profit matter describes consumers charged a "management fee" of at least $45,000, in a case the Commission's own listing still showed as pending. Its press release of 9 May 2025 in the Ecommerce Empire Builders matter describes training programs costing nearly $2,000 and done-for-you storefronts costing as much as $35,000. What those matters recovered, and what the buyers in them measurably earned, are Chapter 4's columns and are printed there beside the judgments rather than instead of them. What they establish here is that the entry price and the real price are different numbers in more than one operation, and that the gap between them is a shape that recurs across separate matters in the same record.

Read as a sequence of disclosures rather than as a sequence of events, the funnel pleaded at paragraphs 6, 27, 30, 46 and 47 of the First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025 looks like this.

Four of those nine steps cost nothing and disclose nothing. The fifth discloses the price and takes the payment in the same conversation.

Prices for this category do exist in public, and the best public list this desk located carries a label that has to travel with every figure on it. It sits on an affiliate and lead-generation blog that sells a competing local lead-generation program of its own, which makes the page an advertisement for a rival product as well as a price list. Retrieved 5 September 2026 at United States pricing, it names four YouTube-automation courses, and four is the entire sample.

Three of the four disclose no refund policy on that page and one carries a thirty-day money-back guarantee, per the same page retrieved 5 September 2026. The sample is four. The selection was made by a business with a competing product to sell, the prices are geo-personalised, and the page publishes no effective date of its own. None of that makes the figures wrong. It makes them four observations from an interested party, which is how they are labelled here and how they stay labelled for the rest of this volume.

The useful thing about that table is not the prices. It is that they sit on a page. A published price can be read, compared against a second page, screenshotted with the date visible, and put in front of somebody else before a payment is made. A price that exists only inside a closing conversation can do none of those four things. The difference between them is not a matter of the seller's manners; it is the difference between a number a buyer can check and a number a buyer can only respond to.

Set the two lists side by side and then decline the obvious comparison. The published courses on that page, retrieved 5 September 2026, run from $497 to $6,000. The price pleaded at paragraph 46 of the First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025 runs from $3,500 to $9,800. Those are not the same product, they were not sold in the same year, and nobody has published what either delivered, so the ratio a reader's hand reaches for is not available and this book does not print one. What is available is the one difference that can be verified from a chair: in the first column the number was on a web page before anybody spoke, and in the second it was not.

The prices move when the brand does. The First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025 describes the successor products and what they cost: the course became PassiveApps at $1,999, or four payments of $699, with a done-for-you tier near $10,000, and the coaching product became Apex Mind at $4,850. The same filing, at paragraphs 114 and 122, records that testimonials from the earlier products were replayed in the advertising for the later ones, which is Chapter 4's subject rather than this chapter's.

Do the arithmetic on the instalment option, because it is the one place in this chapter where a buyer is shown two prices for the same thing at the same time. Four payments of $699, on the figures in the First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025, come to $2,796 against the single payment of $1,999 quoted beside them — $797 more, or close to 40% on top of the cash price. The complaint does not describe that difference being presented to buyers as a cost of anything, and this book does not know whether it ever was.

The software layer publishes its prices, and the contrast is the point of putting it here. Skool's pricing page, retrieved in September 2026 at United States pricing, lists two tiers: Hobby at $9 per month with a 10% transaction fee, and Pro at $99 per month with a 2.9% transaction fee. Both tiers carry unlimited members, courses, videos and live calls, and both carry a built-in affiliate program.

A buyer can read that page in about ninety seconds without speaking to anybody, and can work out from it what a community costs to run and what the platform takes on every sale made inside it. What happens inside that room, and why the survivors are the only members visible to the next buyer, is Chapter 2's subject. What this chapter takes from the page is narrower. The software that hosts a course publishes its price and its cut, on a page with a date on it. The course hosted on that software does not.

One sentence covers the whole ordering, and it is a description rather than an accusation: a price that exists only inside a closing conversation is a price designed to be closed against.

This chapter carries no measured buyer cohort, and the reason belongs in it rather than in a silence. Nobody has published an outcome distribution for people who bought a course of this kind — not the sellers, not a platform, not an academic, and not a trade body. Every measured buyer outcome anywhere in this book was produced by a regulator counting a cohort while it was suing the seller, and all of them sit in Chapter 4. A chapter that takes apart an advertisement, a call and a contract has documents to work with and no survivors to count, because nobody ever counted them.

Take whatever offer is currently in front of you and write down two dates. The first is the date you first saw the pitch — the advertisement, the email, the direct message, whichever reached you first. The second is the date you learned the price, meaning a number you could write down without asking anyone. If there is no second date yet, leave the line blank and keep the sheet.

Then write down a third date beside them: the date you first spoke to a human being about it. If the price arrived after that conversation started, the gap between the first date and the second is the finding, and it is the same gap the Federal Trade Commission pleaded at paragraph 46 of the First Amended Complaint filed 9 May 2025.