The complaint alleges Cyprus registered subsidiaries and rotated merchant accounts let one operator run a network of fitness, horoscope, and PDF apps at industrial scale from 2023 through mid 2025.
The Federal Trade Commission sued Genesis Tech on Tuesday, alleging that Cyprus-registered shell subsidiaries, fresh merchant-account rotation, and cross-border revenue routing let a single operator run a network of subscription apps at industrial scale from early 2023 through mid-2025. The network produced roughly $250 million in global app revenue and nearly $700 million in PayPal transactions while evading app store fraud teams.
The complaint, filed in federal court, is civil and does not name individual defendants beyond the five Cyprus affiliates. The FTC's case does not just target individual apps such as the fitness app MadMuscles, the diet app Unimeal, or the horoscope app Nebula. It targets the network layer that allowed them to operate side by side: subsidiaries incorporated in Cyprus, operations in Ukraine, and a revolving door of merchant accounts designed to outrun fraud detection.
From early 2023 to mid-2025, the five named Cyprus affiliates (Amo Apps Limited, GuruDocs Limited, Bramol Limited, Obrio Limited, and Koflimin Limited) allegedly generated nearly $250 million in global revenue across apps marketed to U.S. consumers, according to the FTC complaint as reported by TechCrunch. Separately, the network moved nearly $700 million through PayPal in the 12 months ending September 2025.
The named brands give a sense of the network's breadth. MadMuscles, Harna, and Unimeal come from Amo Apps. PDF Guru and PDF Master come from GuruDocs. The fashion app Lumi comes from Bramol. The horoscope app Nebula comes from Obrio. Productivity and habit apps marketed under the Wisey brand come from Koflimin. Together they cover fitness, dieting, document editing, fashion, astrology, and productivity, the kind of everyday utility categories that consistently rank in app store charts.
What makes the filing structurally different, according to TechCrunch's reading of the complaint, is that the FTC is putting the evasion playbook itself on the legal record. The agency alleges that when one merchant account was flagged or shut down, the network would stand up another through a different Cyprus entity. When one app was removed from the Apple or Google store, the operator would push a near-clone under a new listing. The result, the FTC argues, was a corporate structure designed not to deliver a service but to absorb the friction of fraud detection.
The case is the first time U.S. enforcement has named the network architecture of subscription fraud as the actionable wrong, rather than treating each bad app as an isolated complaint. That distinction matters for platforms, payment processors, and future FTC actions. It gives Apple, Google, and PayPal a sharper template for what evasion looks like in practice: the same operator, the same Cyprus corporate veil, the same merchant-account rotation, recycled across apps that look unrelated to a casual reviewer.
The scale is the other half of the story. A network that produced roughly $250 million in app revenue across roughly two and a half years and moved nearly $700 million through PayPal in the 12 months ending September 2025 operated in plain sight of app store review, PayPal merchant onboarding, and cross-border enforcement. The complaint frames that gap as the harm: not just the dollars taken from consumers, but the structural failure of the platforms and payment rails that processed them.
The allegations are unproven. Genesis Tech has not yet been found liable, and the case will turn on whether the FTC can prove the network operated as a coordinated enterprise rather than a set of independent companies. The complaint also raises unresolved questions about what app stores and payment processors actually knew, and when. What the filing does establish, for now, is the template: evasion by design, at network scale, and routed through foreign shells.