Click Profit Lawsuit: Inside the FTC's AI Amazon Store Case

Click Profit was a Florida company that sold "done for you" Amazon, Walmart and TikTok stores as a passive income investment, for an upfront fee of at least $45,000. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued it in March 2025, alleging it took at least $14 million from consumers with false earnings claims, a fictional AI "supercomputer" and made-up partnerships with brands like Nike and Disney. In August 2025 its owners agreed to a permanent ban from selling business opportunities, without admitting or denying the charges.

So if you are asking "is Click Profit legit", the record answers it. A federal court froze the business and handed it to a receiver at the FTC's request. Amazon's own data, quoted in the FTC complaint, shows the median Click Profit store earned about $7,200 over its entire life after Amazon's fees. Buyers paid $45,000 to $75,000 to get one.

Imagine the buyer. Maybe it is a couple in their fifties with a paid-off car and some savings sitting in a bank account earning almost nothing. A sponsored ad says "generate up to $150k in sales guaranteed." A video shows a confident founder fanning himself with cash. A salesperson explains that the company only sells name brands, picks products with AI, and will buy back unsold stock. There is a money-back guarantee. It sounds safer than the stock market. Buyers heard every one of those lines, according to the complaint.

If you have money to put to work and you are tired of watching it sit still, this is the kind of offer that finds you. The rest of this page shows how to tell it apart from a real business before you sign anything.

Key facts about Click Profit

Unless another source is named, what follows comes from the FTC's complaint. A complaint sets out the FTC's allegations. The defendants settled without a trial, so no court ruled on each claim.

Is Click Profit a scam? What the FTC found

The FTC charged Click Profit and its operators with breaking the FTC Act, the Business Opportunity Rule, the Consumer Review Fairness Act and the rule against impersonating businesses. The court entered a temporary restraining order on 5 March 2025, froze assets and appointed a receiver. Preliminary injunctions against all three groups of defendants were posted on the FTC case page on 2 May 2025.

The FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection director, Christopher Mufarrige, put it plainly in the 18 March 2025 release: "Click Profit misled consumers by falsely promising them guaranteed passive income using cutting-edge AI technology and exclusive brand partnerships."

The complaint says three claims carried the whole sale, and calls all three false:

1. Buyers would earn substantial income.
2. Click Profit had partnerships with name brands such as Nike and Disney, so it could buy popular products cheaply in bulk.
3. Proprietary AI and machine learning picked the products, "thereby ensuring demand and profitability."

What Click Profit promised

The income. Google ads promised to "generate up to $150k in sales guaranteed" and to "build, manage and scale amz FBA stores to 6, 7 & 8 figs (with 100% guarantee)." Co-founder and CEO Craig Emslie appeared in ads, the FTC says, "fanning himself with wads of cash", and in TikTok videos presented a store he said made over $100,000 in seven days. The complaint quotes him saying buyers would "reap insane returns month over month that far exceed anything you would see in the stock market or real estate", and that they could "see a 19% estimated return in just 60 days and that's me being extremely conservative."

Co-founder Patrick McGeoghean, the complaint says, showed customer sales as high as $13 million a year and told consumers they could "get a 100% handsfree passive income", "We Can Guarantee It", and "We want the ROI [return on investment] at or around -30%!"

One Click Profit website claimed an average profit of $142,833 on $446,509 a year in revenue, and stressed these were "just the AVERAGES", meaning "half our FBA Launch clients did BETTER."

The safety net. "We'll do $100,000 in sales in 52 weeks or less," Emslie said in one social media ad, "or you get every single penny of your investment back." The site advertised a "$150k sales guarantee" and a buyback of unsold stock. Emslie said these guarantees meant "a ZERO% chance you lose money", and that the "stock market, real estate, or precious metals will never be able to offer you that level of security."

The exit. Click Profit claimed a "network of VC [venture capital] firms" to "help you exit your store for a 3-6x multiple", and cited one buyer it said sold his store for $1.25 million.

The brands. "We've partnered with top brands, like Colgate, 3M, Dove, Yeti, and many more," Emslie said in promotional videos, adding that Click Profit had "exclusive wholesale licenses". McGeoghean wrote that buyers could "piggy back off our established wholesale relationships." Brand logos sat on the website.

The AI. "We use our private software that leverages AI and Machine Learning technology so we can find the most profitable products to put in your store," McGeoghean said. Click Profit said 16 developers spent over three years and nearly $5 million building a "super computer" that had generated around $100 million in sales. Emslie called it an "AI-backed bot".

What buyers actually got

The FTC's answers come from Amazon's data and from buyers.

The products. Instead of name-brand stock, the complaint says, Click Profit's stores carried "a seemingly random assortment of generic and off-brand consumer goods, such as makeup applicators, drying racks, stuffed animal 'warmies,' food storage bags, and paper clips." The FTC says the brand partnerships and the AI did not exist in the form described.

The stores. Some buyers never got a store at all. Others waited months. Many stores were shut by Amazon for policy violations. As of mid-2024, the complaint says, about 78% of Amazon stores linked to Click Profit were non-operational, and Amazon had "blocked, suspended, or shut down around 95% of Click Profit's stores at some point."

The money. Here is Amazon's picture of Click Profit's 230 stores as of mid-2024, as quoted by the FTC:

Those are sales, not profit. Out of what was left, Click Profit took at least $3 a shipment and a "profit split" of about 25% to 35%, and buyers kept paying for inventory several times a year. The complaint notes that Click Profit claimed average yearly revenue of $446,509.56, yet "not a single store earned nearly that much revenue during its entire lifetime."

Do the arithmetic for a median buyer on the cheapest package. $45,000 fee plus $10,000 starting inventory is $55,000 in. About $7,200 comes out over the store's life before the profit split and the cost of the goods themselves. The buyer is down well over $45,000.

You can check the economics of a real Amazon product yourself with the site's Amazon FBA calculator, which subtracts Amazon's fees from a selling price. Try it with a $15 drying rack and you will see why a pile of cheap generic goods cannot pay back a five-figure fee.

The money machine: how Click Profit sold it

1. The ad. Search ads, social media ads and listings on BizBuySell.com, a site where people shop for businesses to buy. Many showed sales dashboards with six- and seven-figure numbers.
2. The website. clickprofit.io and fbalaunch.co invited visitors to "apply", with testimonial videos recorded as conversations with Emslie.
3. The sales call. Salespeople told prospects customers "are usually seeing anywhere from 60 to 120 percent return on their cash." One prospect was sent a video of a man presenting himself as a current customer who said he woke up each morning to another $10,000 in his account.
4. The packages. One example in the complaint: Bronze, $45,000, profit split 65/35; Silver, $60,000, 70/30; Gold, $75,000, 75/25. A Bronze buyer was told to add $10,000 for inventory, making $55,000.
5. The contract. A standard, non-negotiable agreement with a non-disparagement clause.
6. The store. Opened under the buyer's own LLC and Amazon account, run day to day by William Holton, a co-founder, and Jason Masri, operations manager, according to the complaint.
7. The reinvestment. If a store earned anything, the FTC says, Click Profit often pressed buyers to put it back into inventory. In one case it threatened to shut a store unless the buyer paid back his entire profit share.

At no point, the FTC says, did buyers receive the disclosure document the Business Opportunity Rule requires: litigation history, contacts for earlier buyers, the refund policy and an earnings claim statement.

How Click Profit silenced complaints

This is the part of the case that should worry you most as a buyer, because it explains why the warning signs were hard to find online.

The contract banned buyers from saying anything negative. According to the complaint, Click Profit used that clause to threaten buyers who posted honest reviews or filed with the Better Business Bureau. In one case, a man who had put his life savings in and was dropped as a client posted negative reviews. The FTC says an attorney hired by Emslie threatened to sue him and take everything he and his wife owned, including their home and pensions. He took the reviews down. When he then asked about a partial refund, the complaint says, the attorney reported that Emslie had replied "F*** off."

Refunds, when they came, often came only after a complaint to the BBB, a lawyer or a threat of legal action, and sometimes on condition that the buyer delete reviews and sign a new gag agreement. The FTC also says Click Profit told the BBB that one complaint was invented by "a competitor who is slandering and attacking us online", and that "we do not have a product or service that we offer that costs $45k."

In the US, the Consumer Review Fairness Act, which the FTC enforces, prohibits standard contract terms that threaten or penalize people for posting honest reviews. That was one of the four laws in this case. If a seller's contract stops you from reviewing them, that clause tells you what they expect you to want to say.

Who is behind Click Profit?

The court record names four individuals.

• Craig Emslie, co-founder and CEO, the face of most of the ads.
• Patrick McGeoghean, co-founder, who presented to consumers and sent promotional emails.
• William Holton, co-founder, who helped manage stores day to day.
• Jason Masri, operations manager on the "leadership executive team", who the FTC says told consumers they would make a 20% return within three months.

The companies named are Click Profit LLC, SA Automation Enterprise LLC, M23 Holdings LLC, Click Profit Distribution LLC, Automation Industries LLC, M7 Investments LLC, Express Ecom LLC and Ecom Direct LLC.

Their side: all of them signed stipulated orders in which they "neither admit nor deny" the allegations, except for facts needed for jurisdiction. We found no public statement from any of the four about the case.

How the Click Profit case ended

The FTC announced the settlements on 25 August 2025. The court approved them on 26 August 2025, according to the receiver's site.

• Bans. Every defendant is permanently banned from "any involvement with the sales, marketing, or operations of any business opportunity", from false claims about earnings, business affiliations and "use of artificial intelligence", and from stopping consumers from sharing truthful reviews.
• Money. A $13.6 million judgment against Emslie, McGeoghean, Holton and their companies, and a $7.3 million judgment against Masri and his companies. Both are partly suspended because the defendants said they could not pay. If they lied about their finances, the full amounts fall due.
• Assets. The defendants must turn over cash, real estate and personal property for consumer redress.

Can Click Profit customers get their money back?

Probably some of it, later. On 23 September 2025 the receiver explained the process: the defendants turn frozen personal funds over to the FTC, the receiver sells the vehicles and real estate handed over and passes the proceeds to the FTC, and "Once the FTC receives all funds, it will commence its redress/refund process for consumers." The receiver added: "we do not anticipate that consumers will need to affirmatively submit claims. Rather, consumers may expect a payment representing a pro rata refund."

That has not started yet. There is no Click Profit programme on the FTC's list of active refunds as of 29 October 2026, and the receiver posted on 25 April 2026 that the court had granted a second extension of the receivership. A pro rata refund means everyone gets the same share of what was recovered, which will be far less than what was paid in.

What you can do now:

1. Take control of your store. On 9 April 2025 the receiver told buyers they may keep running their Amazon stores if they stop using Click Profit staff and services. It asked them to change Amazon and email passwords, remove secondary users tied to Click Profit, remove any remote access from their computers, cancel cards used for inventory or fees, and stop dealing with anyone claiming to act for Click Profit, "including via WhatsApp."
2. Keep your contact details current with the receiver. The receivership site lists [email protected] and (305) 787-3770.
3. Report your loss at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
4. Ignore recovery offers. Anyone who asks for a fee to "recover" your Click Profit money is not the FTC or the receiver.

Red flags you can test before you buy any "done for you" store

1. It is sold as an investment, but it is your business. If the pitch compares returns to stocks and real estate while the store, the LLC and the Amazon account are in your name, you carry the business risk and the seller carries none.
2. The fee is paid before any product is chosen. A $45,000 fee buys time from staff. Ask what share of it goes into actual inventory.
3. "Guaranteed" sales or buybacks. Ask who backs the guarantee and with what money. A guarantee from a company with no assets in your name is a sentence in a brochure.
4. Brand partnerships you cannot confirm. Write to the brand and ask whether the seller is an authorized distributor. A real partnership survives one email.
5. AI you cannot see. Ask for a live demo that picks a product in front of you, and for the store's product list before you pay.
6. A gag clause. Search the contract for "disparage". Walk away if you find it.
7. Results with no denominator. Ask how many stores they run in total, how many are active today, and what the median store earned. Click Profit advertised an average no store ever reached.
8. Amazon suspensions. Ask how many of their stores have ever been suspended. In this case the answer was about 95%.

Amazon FBA vs Dropshipping: Which is Better in 2026? explains how both models really earn, and Online Business Course Scams: 10 Red Flags (From Reviewing 189 Gurus) covers the same tricks in coaching offers. Amazon Automation Scams: 5 FTC Cases, One Sales Pitch compares Click Profit with four other done-for-you store sellers the FTC has sued.

What to do with $45,000 instead

The honest version of Amazon selling is slower, cheaper and in your control. The site's Amazon FBA guide walks through finding a product, testing it in small batches and working out fees before you order stock. Start with one product and a few hundred units. If it sells, you will know why. If it does not, you will have lost hundreds, not tens of thousands, and you will still have the account.

Picture two people a year from now. One handed $55,000 to a company that promised a store and a buyout. The other kept most of that money in the bank and spent $2,000 testing two products of their own. The second person may not be rich. But they can still pay the mortgage without flinching, and they know how the business works. If someone offers you the first path again, you will recognise it now.