AI-generated fitness app ads secretly drain your bank account

Video ads with voices and faces generated by artificial intelligence promise users rapid weight loss and toned muscles without ever setting foot in a gym — and instead quietly drain money from their bank accounts. Ads like these promote fitness apps such as MadMuscles and Unimeal, as well as services offering diets and back-pain exercises.

A user typically clicks the ad, answers a few short questions about age, weight and goals, and gets a personalised plan for a token price. The problems start later — with an extra paid add-on or an automatically renewing subscription.

Czech users left out of pocket

Czech user Jiří Tugáček wrote in a review of the MadMuscles app this August that the company refused to refund him 99 dollars for a service he never used. The service itself says that prices and subscription terms are shown to the customer before payment.

Another Czech user said that after paying 260 crowns for a month of training, an extra 1,070 crowns was charged to her account on top of that. A customer of the weight-loss app Unimeal reported that 49 dollars was added to her initial payment for a service she never ordered — she eventually got her money back.

A scheme familiar from dating sites

Dating sites have long used similar tricks: a cheap trial membership renews automatically, and a much larger sum is charged to the card. Cancelling is often difficult, and unpaid bills sometimes end up with debt collectors. Regulators in several European countries have found such services giving unclear information about prices, how to cancel, and how membership renews.

Artificial intelligence makes it possible to produce such ads cheaply and in bulk: operators quickly swap faces, voices and storylines and test what works best on different groups of people — one version of the ad targets men over fifty, another targets women who want to lose weight without working out. The sheer exaggeration of the promises may itself be part of what makes such ads work: a sceptic won't even click, while someone willing to believe that a few minutes a day can replace diet and exercise is more likely to go through with the purchase.

A US lawsuit and nearly 5.4 billion crowns

In June this year, the US Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against a network of 15 companies and eight individuals linked, among others, to the MadMuscles and Unimeal apps. According to the commission, customers were lured in with cheap or one-off offers, while information about recurring charges was made hard to notice. Five products from this group, the lawsuit claims, earned almost a quarter of a billion dollars — about 5.4 billion crowns — between early 2023 and mid-2025.

“Automatic subscription renewal is a frequently recurring problem,” said Martin Pitron, a lawyer at the Czech independent consumer protection organisation dTest. According to him, this most often affects dating sites, but it also turns up with meal-plan services, CV-writing tools and other digital products. If a customer wasn't properly warned about automatic renewal — for example, if that information was hidden only in the fine print of the deal — such a clause may be invalid, and the customer has the right to demand their money back. According to the European Commission, one in ten consumers in the EU has run into an unwanted subscription.

How to avoid getting caught out

Don't believe promises of dramatic weight loss, toned muscles or an end to back pain in just a few minutes a day — that alone is a warning sign. Before paying, it's worth finding out who is actually behind the service, looking for independent reviews about billing and cancellation, and checking whether a pricier subscription appears after the low starting price. Be sure to check the terms of automatic renewal — when the next payment will be taken and for how much — and don't fall for countdown timers or “today only” messaging. After buying, keep the order confirmation and the terms of the deal, then watch your card statement: if an unexpected charge appears, cancel the subscription right away and demand your money back.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz

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