Consumer Alert
FTC says Care.com misled workers
Looking for local caregiver gigs that pay well? Care.com said it could help, for a monthly subscription fee. But, in a settlement announced today, the FTC says Care.com misled workers about how many jobs were available on the platform and how much they could earn — and made it hard to cancel subscriptions — costing a lot of people a lot of time and money.
Put in your zip code and Care.com was likely to show hundreds or thousands of nearby jobs with high hourly rates. But the FTC says those numbers and rates were based on jobs that workers were unlikely to get. That’s because, since 2019, more than half of the millions of job postings on the site were posted by people with free memberships — people who couldn’t respond to workers’ job applications unless they upgraded to a paid membership.
What happened if you wanted to apply for a job? You’d need a paid auto-renewing membership to Care.com. And if you wanted to cancel? The FTC says the company made you navigate its cancellation maze and, even if you think you successfully canceled, you might still get billed the next month. Reaching customer service was difficult — and if you did, you still might not get a full refund.
Looking for a job as a caregiver? Here are some things to know.
- You don’t have to pay to find a job. Consider using free websites with job listings (but first learn how to recognize the signs of a job scam). Or, sign up with an agency or company that can place you with people who need caregivers.
- If you’re looking at gig work, talk to other gig workers. Reach out to your friends or family members who are gig workers to find out about their experiences, how they’re paid, and what a realistic hourly wage might be.
- If you sign up for a subscription like Care.com, you’ll be charged until you cancel. To cancel, start by contacting the company and follow their instructions.
If a company doesn’t deliver on its promises or you’re having trouble canceling a subscription, report it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
Image
Topics
It is your choice whether to submit a comment. If you do, you must create a user name, or we will not post your comment. The Federal Trade Commission Act authorizes this information collection for purposes of managing online comments. Comments and user names are part of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) public records system, and user names also are part of the FTC’s computer user records system. We may routinely use these records as described in the FTC’s Privacy Act system notices. For more information on how the FTC handles information that we collect, please read our privacy policy.
The purpose of this blog and its comments section is to inform readers about Federal Trade Commission activity, and share information to help them avoid, report, and recover from fraud, scams, and bad business practices. Your thoughts, ideas, and concerns are welcome, and we encourage comments. But keep in mind, this is a moderated blog. We review all comments before they are posted, and we won’t post comments that don’t comply with our commenting policy. We expect commenters to treat each other and the blog writers with respect.
We don't edit comments to remove objectionable content, so please ensure that your comment contains none of the above. The comments posted on this blog become part of the public domain. To protect your privacy and the privacy of other people, please do not include personal information. Opinions in comments that appear in this blog belong to the individuals who expressed them. They do not belong to or represent views of the Federal Trade Commission.
Thank you!
I was looking fir a caregiver, and got lost in a rabbit hole that I thought I had gone into a couple years ago where I paid for the connection and then it took me MONTHS to get out oif their RECURRING debits from my bank account.
Thank you for fixing some of these issues for folks like us who are just looking for safe connections.
RMG, MSN,RN
I should’ve known that Care.com was a fraud when I lived in Illinois Care began advertising all the time and caregivers when I contacted Care.com, I had to also pay for my own background and I never heard back from Corrupt Care.Com who is worse than the Corrupt Indeed
They also don’t fulfill their end of the bargain when it comes to back up care reimbursement. They just make up arbitrary rules, depending on who you’re talking to, They straight up lie, they steal daycare’s information off of Google, I assume, any daycare that says that they have drop-in care or back up care and post that daycare on their website (illegally), claiming that the daycares work with them, and I called these daycare and they most certainly do not work with care.com and don’t want anything to do with them.
They owe me $1000 for back up care reimbursement they never reimbursed me for because they kept changing their rules. I still have the emails, the voicemails, etc., as well as the policies that I screenshot and they all contradict each other.
And yes, you’re absolutely right, they will allow people to make profiles as babysitters, caregivers, housekeepers, etc., they do not do background checks like they claim, and that’s been proven, and you can see the jobs, but they’re not real jobs. If they are, you can’t respond to them. So you’ll get emails every day saying that there’s families that need assistance in our area but you can’t contact them because they’re not real because they want you to pay monthly subscription fee. I’m not paying to work.
I’m not going to shut up about the thousand dollars they owe me and I hope that no one else Let’s go either. These people are corrupt, evil, have no morals, and they are intentionally deceiving people and stealing from people and from businesses. And they’re making businesses look bad.
I hope that anyone else experiencing the same issue with Not being reimbursed will continue to fight, get their money, and shut these scumbags down.
So, FTC found out what care.com was doing, FTC decides care.com is scamming job seekers and has done WHAT? Shut down care.com's site? Has filed a complaint in federal court alleging what? Fraud? What? This alert doesn't say that FTC has done anything useful other then send out an email warning, which is likely to not be seen by many people, including some who might come across care.com. Please tell readers what the FTC is doing. Years ago, I got spammed w/ads, etc. by fax, in the days of paper fax machines, I got reported the businesses, etc, sending the fax spam to me to the FTC & the state AG's office Consumer division of the state where I lived/had an office. For several months, I submitted what I received every time I got another spam fax. Never got a response from either so I gave up. I'd like to think that both offices/agencies are doing better now but there's little in this Consumer alert that suggests the FTC does or is even able to act to force care.com to change its subscription & membership policies/practices.
In reply to So, FTC found out what care… by azore
This blog post is connected to the FTC Press Release about the legal action. The words "settlement announced today" in the second sentence of this blog are underlined in blue. The blue underline means the words connect to a new page. Click on the words "settlement announced today" and you will go to the FTC Press Release about the legal action against Care.com.
The Press Release says Care.com agreed to a settlement that will require it to turn over $8.5 million to be used to refund people who were harmed by their practices, and to take other action. Go directly to the Press Release at www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/ftc-takes-action-ag….
Activist democratic government protecting consumers from scams. Thanks. I support this and your antitrust activism
Home Health care in NJ is and has been underpaying trined, compassionate workers for a decade that I can document
As a person in need of a Caregiver, I went to Care.com. I signed on, paid for the membership and found a Caregiver selected out of about 20 who applied. After my weekend event, I easily canceled the membership during the first month, in April 2024.
I am sorry that Care.com treated the Caregivers so poorly. I will use them in the future. Easiest way to find a Caregiver when traveling to a distant city.
Care.com misled those trying to find caregivers as well. I paid for a subscription for my daughter who needed a caregiver for her 2 children. The people who care.com said were vetted and approved turned out to be unreliable - even after getting the hourly rate they wanted. Worker reliability may not be the fault of care.com but this model was bad for everyone.
Additionally this firm signs up people who get hire a short term cleaner from them for long term Premium services without your expressed consent. They send an email which requires careful reading to realize that you have to cancel the subscription rather than sign up for it.
Lots of people on internet complaining about this.
My wife and I tumbled to it only after realizing the monthly $38.95 was not for health care but a subscription for services we weren't using. Totally misleading and I think deliberately so.