Are You FTC Compliant? with Anik Singal

In This Episode

• [02:17] – Stephan introduces Anik Singal, a globally recognized entrepreneur and marketing coach. Anik recounts a pivotal moment that set him on a new mission.
• [08:50] – Anik outlines the risk of a competitor reporting you to the FTC, potentially leading to serious issues. He also highlights his book, which covers various FTC regulations.
• [16:06] – Anik presents their AI-powered software, Complily, a compliance platform that monitors and evaluates ads, landing pages, sales videos, webinars, sales calls, and more.
• [23:36] – Stephan asks Anik if he nearly went out of business due to the battle with the FTC.
• [29:19] – Anik reflects on his perspective following his encounter with the FTC.
• [37:53] – Anik walks through the stages of the FTC process.
• [51:40] – Anik shares details on how to reach him.

Jump to Links and Resources

Anik, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thank you, Stephan. Thank you for having me. And yeah, the FTC case lasted 18 months. So it’s even more ruthless than the 12. But yeah, it’s an honor and pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Let’s talk about how you ended up in that spot. I’m sure you’ve told this story many times, but it really is a pivotal moment in your life and gave you a whole new mission. So, how did that all unfold?

I think I talk about this almost every day, and it’s a little bit interesting because people sometimes I’ll say, “Hey, my mission now is all about spreading awareness about what happened and what the rules are.” And people will look at that skeptically and say, “Well,” I’m like, “No, it really is.”

My mission now is all about spreading awareness about what happened and what the rules are.

As of now, I might be selling things, quote-unquote; I have a book and an academy and software, but I haven’t actually made any profit from it. If you think about it, Stephan, who’s actually out there talking about this?

Minus the lawyers, right? Because the minute a lawyer comes out and starts talking about it, we shut down. Our business owners and marketers, we just think, another person just trying to get billable hours. Lawyers don’t like anything, right? Everything is illegal, or everything is wrong. But no one is talking about the code, the law, and the rules. I was in this industry, and I have been in this industry now for almost 23 years. The time that we got hit was almost 20 years.

Many people would go around and say, “I’m one of the OGs of digital marketing.” It is an amazing honor to have that said about me. But it’s also embarrassing because while I was going through the investigation, multiple times I said, “What? We’re not allowed to do that? I didn’t know that,” right? Like, that’s ridiculous. Like, what? 

And here’s the crazy thing about all the companies in our space. I knew from day one way back that we were talking 15 or 16 years ago. I understood one hard reality, and that is that the industry in which I’m in is heavily regulated. Now, I’ve gone on to mature and understand that every industry, by the way, is a heavily regulated industry.

There is a three-letter agency looking over pretty much every industry. But I understood the risks of the FTC. So, I had an attorney for 12 years now would be longer. That was a compliant attorney. Now, that’s not the attorney that represents me at this point, but I did my part for that time, right? I had an attorney who would look at it and probably had paid over a million dollars in legal fees over those 12 years. I had a full-time paralegal in my company. This was far before I got hit by the FTC. 

I had a full-time paralegal in my company whose job was to monitor what we were doing. So I took it seriously. At that time, I had a conversation with my attorney and said, “How do I stay out of the purview of the FTC? I don’t want to get investigated, but I want to scale. I want to go big. That’s the only way my buying works.” I was given a very simple rule, which made sense. And I genuinely still believe this should be the rule. But the rule was summarized as follows. Be good, do good, you’re good.

Look, the FTC comes after both, like how you’re laughing. Yeah, but it’s simple, right? Be good, do good, you’re good. Six words. That’s how I summarized what I took away. In more specifics, the attorneys told me that the FTC comes after those inspiring many complaints. And so if you’re wronging customers to the degree that they feel the need to go to the FTC and complain about you in volume, the FTC will then look at you.

I’ve always thought for 20 years, I thought, that sounds about right. Like, cool. Then, if that’s the case, I will be here on the sidelines rooting them on. Because that’s what they should do: protect the consumer. And if consumers are complaining, go get them. So I built an engine and said, “let’s build a great company where the consumers don’t complain. Be good, do good, you’re good. So I won’t have a problem.” So, I built a company that, at its peak, was doing 20,000 transactions a year.

The litigation strategy of the FTC is specifically created to put the businesses that they go after out of business. Share on X

We had three customer support teams worldwide running 8, 8, and 8-hour shifts. So we were nights, weekends, and holidays covered, had 36 36-minute average response time, A rating at the BBB, a refund rate of less than 5%, and a chargeback rate of less than 0.7%. We had a twenty complaints a year on the BBB, 20 on 20,000 transactions, and all 20 are 100 % resolved. 

So, I built a machine that cared for the customer and cost me tons of money. But I was proud of that. I was like, this is how it should be done. So, although I knew I was in a regulated space, I don’t think I ever woke up expecting even one day that seriously expecting that I would get hit by the FTC. So when it happened, I was pretty shocked, right? I thought to myself, there are so many other players in this industry that I feel like deserved it far more than I do, whatever, right?

So when you get hit, you go through those stages. We’ll talk about them. But what got me there was my webinars. I can only tell you what came in the FedEx package, right? There was a 36 or 30-some-page letter with a bunch of things in there that they were demanding, and they were picking apart most of my webinars. So they would listen to a four-hour webinar and pick a sentence that, in my opinion, was taken out of context. But you know. They don’t really look at context. That’s not how the law works. That was enough for them to get their foot in the door and then start demanding and asking for many things.

As we talk about the investigative process, it’s pretty unfair if we do. You know, I will say this. Look, everyone, the FTC was incredibly cordial throughout the entire thing. They were professional. Every time we asked for an extension, we got one. They didn’t raid my office. They didn’t freeze my assets. They didn’t shut down my business. And for that, I’m grateful because they are doing that to many people. The fact is, sometimes I’ll be like, “Why’d you treat me like everybody else?” They didn’t.

They also understood, to some degree, that I wasn’t out here hurting and taking advantage of customers. If they did, they wouldn’t bother to send you an investigative document. They just sue you. They shut you down. They get a temporary freeze on all of your assets. So they didn’t do that with me. 

So, over the 18 months, they gave it whenever we needed an extension. But I thought it was a bit unfair because they sent me many questions. I had to spend money out of my pocket to answer every question. I mean, a lot of money. It took me 12 months, probably over a million, million and a half of salaries, million dollars in legal. I spent millions just defending it. But every time I asked them, like, “Why am I here? Was it customer complaints? It can’t be. What did you do? What’s going on?” They would say, “We don’t have to tell you.”

So, I can only do conjecture, which is why I got big. I was working with celebrities, and they didn’t like some of my marketing. And maybe a piece of me likes to believe that I was a good example to be made of. But beyond that, I mean, those are all hypotheses. I can never confirm it because they never told me exactly why I went where I went.

Is it possible that a competitor can daub you in and get you in trouble with the FTC?

I guess, in theory, yes. I’ve asked our attorneys this question, and they’re also smart. They’re not gonna just one complaint is probably not going to trigger it, what I’ve learned from my attorney, who’s the co-author of this book, who I brought on to the case a few months into the case. I wish he had represented me for the years prior because I would have never had this case. He’s brilliant. But He told me that typically when you get an asset freeze or, in my case, a subpoena for more information, they’ve already been investigating you for a good year. They invest a lot of resources. 

So, I don’t think one competitor complaint will do it. I actually know of somebody whose competitor attacked them so ruthlessly that the competitor got their customers to file FTC complaints against this person. It is estimated that over 400 complaints have been filed against this person. So, but I mean, it’s been a couple of months now, and they’ve not heard anything from the FTC. 

Now, I don’t know if that triggered something and if they’ll hear from them in a year, but the bottom line is if I’m the FTC and 400 complaints come flooding in and there seems to be a commonality in all of them, I’m probably gonna read through that. If anything, I feel like that competitor might get on the radar versus the other company. It’s not common. From what I’m hearing from the attorneys, it doesn’t work like that. We don’t know how they find their targets. But once they do, they invest a lot of resources in figuring it out. So they won’t do it willy-nilly.

Yeah. So, there’s a process that the FTC follows, and it can vary. As you said, they could just put an asset freeze on you. They can sue you, or they can subpoena you for more information. But they follow a process, and you probably documented it in your book, but don’t say that. What about the FDA? Because a lot of medical devices, biohacking devices, wearables, and supplements are being regulated by the FDA. And there are a lot of things you can’t say about dosages and stuff. You have to say servings. So many things that you could screw up inadvertently. And do you cover that in the book, or is that outside of the scope?

Yeah, so we don’t specifically cover the FDA. I think the book covers more FTC states. We do cover some of the states that outline beyond the FTC. But I can tell you that there’s very likely a book on the FDA in the future. Here is the interesting thing as we talk. So, for the rest of what I’m about to say, I have no experience with this. I think I should start by letting everybody know. I talk about this stuff at a deep level. I’m not an attorney.

Everything I’m telling you is I’m playing a game of telephone, which is me relaying the information as I’ve learned it from my attorney. So I want everyone to understand that anything I say, please don’t go run and apply it without professionally seeking the right advice of an attorney to make sure that it’s right. But I was on a podcast recently where another attorney, an FTC FDA attorney. And he specifically spoke about some of the differences in the investigative process. I thought it was really interesting. So this just happened a few days ago. He actually said that the FDA is far nicer, which was interesting.

Professionally seek the right advice of an attorney to make sure that you're compliant in your business. Share on X

I’ll tell another story. And again, this is to throw no shade at the FTC. I already said I have absolutely, believe it or not, as much of a PTSD-inducing, life-changing process that investigation was, I actually carry zero ill will towards them. I understand what the agencies try to do. But a part of this mastermind locally here that’s got some very, very successful people. This is the kind of mastermind that billionaires hang out with, and somehow, I’ve squeezed my way in.

When I got this investigative document from the FTC, I let people in that mastermind know I was just seeking help and advice. And there was a lawyer in that mastermind. He’s 80 years old. He’s retired. And he’d spent 40 or 45 years basically being an attorney defending against federal regulators. So yeah, he had a lot of background with the FTC, SEC, and a bunch of them.

So he came up to me and asked which agency it was. And I said, FTC. After that, Stephan, it was so funny because you got this 80-year-old really nice man sitting there with a drink in his hand. And he goes, “Son, what’s the agency?’ And I said, “FTC.” And he just goes like this. He freezes, and he goes, “Son of a mother!” And he just lays out. And I was like, Whoa, I wasn’t expecting that. I’m like, “What happened?” He goes, “They’re the worst.”

We took a hit, got bruised, and limped for a while, but now, a few years later, we’re finally starting to find our grip again.

That’s not the motivation I was looking for. He said he’s literally amongst all of the regulators. They are the least flexible and most hard-fisted. I find that intriguing, and I’ve not really ever pulled that thread more to see why the culture is being reported. I don’t know, right? I don’t know any of this. I’m talking from what I’m hearing. But why would the culture at these organizations that are down the street from one another be so drastically different?

So, a few days ago, this attorney told the FDA that they were actually there to work with the companies. So they don’t literally want to put you out of business. They genuinely want to just get you within compliance. So he said they actually have a concept called a courtesy letter. I was like, “Well, that’s nice. I would like to go to one of those.” They send a courtesy letter just saying, got some issues going on here. Do you mind fixing that up? And then, if you don’t listen, they send you a warning letter.

And then, if you still don’t listen, they issue some form of an official fine or whatever. But even that is usually very cordial because it’s a limited, reasonable fine. It’s not so bad that it puts the company out of business. And if you still don’t hear, that’s when they say, “Okay, that’s it. We’re pulling out. We’re pulling out the knives and swords.” Whereas with the FTC, according to this attorney and partially according to my experience, this attorney who was on this call said there was the past, not the current commissioner of the FTC, but the past one, and again, I’m relaying information. I purely heard from him. I have no idea if it’s true or not. He said the past commissioner is on record on a video stating, pure and simple, that the litigation strategy of the FTC is specifically created to put the businesses that they go after out of business.

And regardless of the outcome, the truth, the settlements, court case or not, if they’ve put a target on your back if they’re interested in you, you are to be out of business. That’s apparently what the old commissioner of the FTC said publicly about the thing; that’s the culture that they have. And I feel that I could see that.

You especially because I haven’t seen many companies, except for the really big ones, right? You’re talking about the big Fortune 500 companies, which all get hit by the FTC and seem to see, seem to live to fight another day, but smaller businesses that would be 50 million or below. I personally have only seen a few that have been able to take the hit and continue thriving. Even we, we took the hit and were bandaged, battled, bruised, and limping on a toe for a while and maybe just now, a few years later, are starting to find a grip again, but I wouldn’t say that we’ve recovered fully. 

So, the FDA seems to take a different cultural approach from what I’m hearing. But still, regulations are regulations. However, I will tell you that as a brand, we are moving into those fields as well. So our software is gonna cover SEC within the next about 30 to 45 days, and then the FDA is next. We’re gonna cover their rules as well.

That’s great. So, what does that software do?

So the software is called Complily, and it’s an AI-powered software that you can literally give it a link, upload a video, upload an audio file, copy-paste a script, give it your links to ads, social media, and within seconds, it scans it and finds violations. You know, here’s what happens. So if I do a webinar, which was popular in my time, it’s how I’ve made a large chunk of the revenue that I’ve made; it’s about a four-hour video file.

First of all, I have a slide deck. So now we just added a feature inside of our platform that can take webinar PowerPoints and review them before you even film them to let you know what the problems could be. But if you take a four-hour webinar that you’ve recorded, every attorney will ask you to send them the transcript of your speech because they’re like, slides aren’t enough. You might end up saying stuff that we need to see. 

Complily is an AI-powered software that scans files to detect violations.

A four-hour webinar transcript is going to take any attorney two weeks minimum to get back to you, if not more, and probably 10 to 15 billable hours. And that’s not unreasonable at all because they’ve got paralegals, they’ve got themselves. Someone has to sit there, watch, pause, watch, pause, note, watch, pause, note. It takes time. And that’s going to be about a $7,000 $10,000 bill, plus two to three weeks. So that was just that kind of when I was going through the investigation; that was just unacceptable.

I didn’t have my legal bills outside of the investigative defense. We’re starting to get to 20-25,000 a month. I was spending $20-$25,000 a month just to have my marketing copy reviewed. I’m like, this is not doable for most businesses. So that’s why they don’t do compliance. And right then, it was like a few months before that chat. ChatGPT had become like the thing, right? So I talked to myself, I can help with this. It’s been a lot harder. It’s taken us a year and a half. We’re still working on it.

It’s contextually driven. It’s not like black and white. But right now, a four and 1-hour webinar in our system takes about 10 to 12 minutes. And you’ll have some really constructive feedback. And we’ll get that 10 to 12 minutes down within the next couple of months, down to about two to three minutes. So you’re talking about near-instant feedback on your marketing to see if there are regulatory issues. Now, we’re adding other features.

So, for example, we’re adding something called a substantiation bank because the FTC and every regulatory body says anything you say in your copy, and you must have substantiation for it. So, we are adding an AI-powered substantiation bank, which means you can upload those substantiations to our system. We’ll keep them for you. We’ll tag them in their appropriate comments. Testimonial bank. We’re adding an affiliate compliance tool to monitor your affiliates to ensure they’re not saying stuff that could get you in trouble. We’re adding a negative review tool, which will track your BBB.

Go track Trustpilot, Google reviews, Yelp, and all the different places where people need reviews. So, it is being built to be your central compliance and marketing compliance watchdog. So, it can literally monitor what’s happening with your brand and keep you out of the grips of the regulators.

Wow, that’s cool. What about the hallucinations that are built into generative AI platforms? That’s kind of hard to get around the issue, right?

That’s a big part of the problem. When I started this a year and a half ago, and it’s been more than a year and a half now, my education on AI was so limited. I was like, cool. Using the API, we’ll prompt ChatGPT in three months, and we’ll be done. It’s been over a year and a half. We’re not done. Two reasons. First, there’s so much gray area when it comes to compliance, so much about the overall net impression, how and what was said before it, and after it. And that makes a deep impact. So we’ve been building to see how we make systems that don’t have the capability of doing that do that. But then the next thing was just checks and balances because, you know what? You can ask the same question to different models within the same company, and then you have different companies.

It’s like 20 different LLMs out there that are reputable. And you’ll get different answers. So we’ve built a mechanism and a system in our AI that’s now multi-layered in our engine. So it’s almost like you have different levels of employees. So you have a management level. Then you have the worker bees that are specific to one very specific type of issue. They find it. They compile it. It goes through the manager who reviews it. So, we have double and triple checks. And that’s helped eliminate a lot of those hallucinations and problems.

That’s great, okay. And how does your pricing work?

Right now, someone can start for as little as $100 a month. That’s not going to stick around for a long time, So we are going to bring the price. But it’s a consumption- and seat-driven feature, so there are three ways we can decide how much you pay: features, number of seats, and how many words you use at the moment since we’re still launching many of these features. We really only have two plans. We have what we call the executive plan, And then we have what we call the enterprise plan. The enterprise plan, which is really cool, is for you to actually plug our software into your sales call systems. So if you have a sales team, a bunch of people doing sales calls, that is the number one area the FTC is focusing on right now because they have a lot of rights to regulate sales call violations. So it’s like all the cases coming out are all by telesales. But we can monitor and audit every single call, every single rep.

Give you factual scores on how well that call was, a score per rep, and reports on that rep and the most common mistakes they’re making. And here, within the next few months, we’re going to have an alert system. So every time that rep makes a certain type of mistake, instead of you having to sit there and spot-check and listen to calls, our system will listen to every call and send you alerts and summaries of what’s going on. So, that is the enterprise feature. That’s really the main feature right now that we’re separating on. So you can come in for as little as $100 a month.

We have companies right now that are getting ready to spend upwards of $10,000 a month with us, depending on how they will use it.

Gotcha. And back when you spent 20 to $25,000 a month on your compliance, $100 a month looks like a bargain.

Absolutely. Look, my legal bills now are probably down to $1,000 a month, if that is $500 to $1,000 max. And that’s just because sometimes there are questions, contextual stuff. It’s like, well, the software said this is a problem. I don’t really think this is a problem. What do you think, Greg? And what makes Greg really happy is that it’s not reducing the lawyer’s billable hours at all.

The big Fortune 500 companies all get hit by the FTC and seem to live to fight another day, but smaller businesses that would be 50 million or below have been able to take the hit and continue thriving. Share on X

What it’s allowing lawyers to do is that most lawyers don’t know this, but most compliance attorneys don’t actually want to sit there and read your copy and mark things for hours. They like to go out there and defend their clients, and lawyers make their real money in actually defending clients who have been hit by the regulators. So, what this is actually doing is allowing attorneys to take on more clients. So, we’ve built and are about ready to launch a complete attorney version in a couple of months.

Co-branded version that attorneys can use with their clients. So now an attorney can take something that was taking them hours or days, have it done instantly, and layer on their expertise. So they go from something like a webinar taking them 15 hours to review to now an hour. So they’re able to spin that back to the client, get more back and forth, and take on more clients. The amount they make goes up. The amount of work they do on the things they don’t like goes way down. So it’s a tool for them as well.

Yeah. Great. Cool. So, let’s return to your experience and what happened. You said that a lot of the FTC battles put companies out of business unless they’re like Fortune 500, or at least that seems to be the impetus or the culture at the FTC, so let’s put the offending company out of business. Did you almost go out of business?

Hell yeah. Multiple times. So here’s what happened with our business. We were in a unique situation. So a lot of people, you can imagine this. So, I had a dream in my life to sell my company by the time I was 40. So when this lawsuit came, I was 38, almost 39. So, I got delivered the subpoena on May 20th, 2022. My wife delivered our first baby on April 21st, 2022. So it was literally just less than a month that we had just had a baby. I was back to work three days. It was my third day back to work. It was a Friday.  The other crazy thing was that my birthday was coming up on June 14th. And so I would be 39. So, it was gonna be exactly a year from the day that I wanted to have my company sold. Well, I was in the final stages of getting my company acquired. So I was six to seven weeks away from getting the company acquired, maybe eight.

So I was so in love with the idea of being a father, and it was burned out on the business, and the company acquisition was definitely happening because we were done through due diligence. I decided that on my birthday, I would announce that I was stepping down as CEO, and I would name my right hand as CEO, who would be the CEO of the company once they got acquired. So I was like, I want to do the promotion, not them. It was all just like a Cinderella story. It was going to be perfect. Right. And so I get this notice.

And it absolutely just destroyed everything. I like the fact that I knew the acquisition was gone. I knew the ability for me to step down was gone. And like being a very present father for a year was now gonna be a battle, right? So I got the notice on Friday, and by Thursday of the following week, I’d laid off 80 % of the team. By Monday morning, I shut the business down.

Now, let’s talk about that. People say the FTC forced you to shut down? No, not at all. When they sent me the investigative document, it was a confidential process. There’s no publicity about it. If I chose to be quiet, I could have kept it so that I, my lawyer, and the FTC know. And that would be perfectly legal. But it’s hard to do because you have to start drumming up all this material. My team will find out and all. But I was in the publishing business.

So 80 % of our revenue came from me publishing other people, other experts, such as Daymond John, Robert Kiyosaki, Les Brown, Bob Proctor, and many other people and many big brands. So imagine that I’m publishing you, and by the way, my nature and my belief in integrity is that I would never, ever, ever go through something like this and not tell you, especially if I feel like it could impact you. So I know.

Friday happens at four o’clock, so I take the weekend to talk to attorneys and digest it. Monday morning, I called my team in at nine o’clock. We met, and we shut it all down. And it’s still an emotional thing to talk about because we were gonna do 40 million that year. We shut down a 40 million-a-year company that was doing about 20%. We’re gonna make eight million in profit that year. I had worked for 20 years to perfect how to do that. I built one of the hardest types of businesses, which is a publishing company.

We had the best of the best employees handpicked and painstakingly placed where they were. I finally got the business to a point where I could step out of it. The dream was happening. Our customers were happy, and the business was happy. I’ve serviced over 200,000 customers. I’ve never once received a legal notice. Forget being sued. I haven’t even received a legal demand letter with a lawyer’s letterhead on it from a customer. Like we’ve been good. We’ve done good, been good. Knowing that we were shutting it all down was difficult. Still, I had to shut the business down because before I spoke to the experts and got on the phone and told them that I was under investigation, I wanted to be able to tell them that I was already protecting them. 

Thankfully, my brand has stayed. People still love me, my partners and network are strong, and my customers are returning.

Because obviously, if I get on the phone with you, Stephan, if I am publishing you and I get on the phone, what’s the first thing you’re gonna tell me? “Hey man, can we turn off those ads with my face, name, and likeness? Because I don’t want this to bleed over to me.” So, that represented 80 % of my business. So I had to shut it down just because that was the right thing to do.

And so had I not been in that business, and there’s a lot of businesses that are, you know, I know of a company right now that’s under investigation and getting sued, and they haven’t shut down at all. I mean, they’ve probably slowed down a few things, but what they did is they were able to carve off a division. That’s the problematic division. The other division isn’t. So they’re going to fare much better through this. In our situation, it was catastrophic. Thank God we had built up a war chest of cash.

But, Stephan, we have almost gone bankrupt multiple times over the last couple of years. And by no means am I trying to insinuate that we’re floating amazingly even now. It’s taken time. It’s going to take; we kind of started all over again. Thankfully, my brand has stayed. People still love me. My partners, the network, and everyone’s there. My customers are coming back. 

This didn’t damage me from a PR perspective because everyone knows who I really am. People in the industry know me, and they don’t need the words written in a press release by a federal regulator to define who I am. And so that’s been one of the blessings of this, and it is to see how people have supported me through it. So we’ll come back 100%. I’m not gonna go anywhere. We’ll make it back. We’ll be one of the success stories that comes back after all of this. But, man, I wouldn’t wish this upon my worst enemy. I just wouldn’t. It was hard.

And yet, do you see this as a gift, like a blessing?

Suppose I can put the future on a cat two years from now. And the answer to that question is yes. But it’s very difficult to say yes. Because when you say that, then I think about the massive amounts of pain that I’ve been through over the last couple of years, and it’s like, I can’t call that a gift. But it is. Think a few things right now. 

First of all, I got this new mission. And so many people told me, they’re like, “Don’t do it, man. No one’s going to give a crap. No one wants to learn about FTC compliance. You’re going from this amazing thing that you talk about and teach to teaching compliance.” And I was like, “Yeah, you’re right. I believe you. But I got to do it. It’s my calling. I got to get the book out. At least I got to put the book out just so people know the rules.” 

And then I’ll go off and do something different. Know Stephan, I have used to joke for a long time. I had this joke. I have it on the record. It’s so crazy.I was like, I think I’m gonna quit and just go buy a bunch of Subway franchises.

And then I used to joke and say, “Well, I wonder if the FTC will just come to sue me because my sandwiches won’t look like the kinds on the poster.” Misrepresentation. Do you know that a class action lawsuit was filed against the subway two days ago? I was just laughing. I wonder if one of my listeners got this idea and put it out there. But I went through all of the things. And so I’ve been handed this new mission.

When I started putting it out there, it was a wildfire. I’ve never had a product that converts better to cold traffic than this book. I’ve never had webinars where I barely pitched, and people are buying the academy or the software and just running towards it. We’ve built this huge movement and people that just are, and I get notes every day, every day, and I’m not exaggerating, every day I get somebody or the other. Last night, I had one.

When I started sharing this message, it spread like wildfire. This book is the first product that’s really converting well with cold traffic.

I’m sure I’ll get one today. I get physical notes signed by people thanking me and saying I’ve had multiple people say you’re doing God’s work. I’m just teaching FTC compliance, but I’ve had multiple people say that’s right. I’m like, I was in business for 20-plus years. I have actually helped some people become millionaires. I have helped people show them how to become entrepreneurs and how people with their affiliate businesses get traffic and build their offers, and I’ve never gotten this much. Thanks. I’ve never gotten this much gratitude. I’ve never gotten this much excitement. I’ve never gotten this much community. 

So, in so many ways, I’m glad I’m not marketing how I used to. That I’ve seen the light on. I love compliant marketing. I think it is an absolute gift to us as marketers. Think once you see it, deploy it, use it, and do it correctly; your quality of customer goes up, and your stress level goes up. I mean, it’s great. So yes, it is a gift. I give such a long answer to this because it’s tough, right?

So, I’m working on a book right now. Well, I will wait until the story is finished, so maybe in a couple of years. But the idea of the book I’ve been working on is that I won’t give the title because I like the title, but the subtitle is How to Turn Your Greatest Tragedy into Your Greatest Victory. And so, in that regard, I do think it has been a gift.

Yeah. Well, that’s a great way to look at it. And, you know, my spiritual beliefs are that we chose and volunteered for all the big hardships that we went through in our lives before we came into this incarnation.

So, let’s talk about some of the next actions our listeners can take. So you have, for example, a free download I got from, I don’t know, some post that you did on Facebook or something, A Marketers Guide to an FTC Demand Letter. And is that something that you still have available for free that maybe our listeners could download?

Yeah.

I don’t have it anywhere on our site, but you’re welcome to give it. No problem whatsoever. And so that document kind of walks people through what a typical demand letter looks like. So that’s meant to give you a purview into the FTC’s mind. What are the kinds of things that they’re looking at? What gets them tickled enough to put something in an official letter they send you demanding, know, substantiation or more information on?

I think a great next step I’ll tell you right now is to get the book, and just so people don’t think I’m trying to sell and make money here, I want to be very clear. We’ve sold 3,500 copies of this book. I’m negative. We’ve lost money on it, and I don’t care. I am 100 % sure at some point. We will profit and make money on it, and that’s great. The digital version of the book is $7. It’s $10 for the shipped-to-you version. If you’re in the US, the $10 version also costs me almost 13 bucks now.

So we’re losing money when we ship it to you. It’s okay, no problem, right? I say get this book because it is the knowledge of an attorney who’s been doing marketing compliance for 20 years, who has been in literally hundreds of hours, if at this point not over thousands of hours of meetings with the FTC, which is very important. Look, it’s one thing to get an attorney to read section five of the Federal Trade Commission Act and try to give you advice on what to do with marketing. You can have ChatGPT do that for you if you want.

But for example, my entire case came down to four words being said on a sales call. The next thing I’m about to say, I can’t substantiate, but my attorney told me that had these four words not been on our sales calls, he thinks my case would have been thrown out. I would have never had any issues. Do I believe that? I don’t think so. I would probably still have to pay something, but my case would have been far better. The four words are: what is your goal?

Four words, what is your goal?

There isn’t a damn place online; there isn’t a single Google search you’re going to do that the press release from the FTC or any form of a statement from the FTC that says what your goal is not allowed by the FTC. They call it goal setting. Look up goal setting and see if there’s ever been any public statement by the FTC about the words goal setting. No. Well, wait a minute, that’s not fair. Greg, my co-author of this book, the attorney, he called that out three months into the case. 

Within hours of me bringing him into the case, he’s looking through my marketing material, listening to a call, goes, “Found it. Your whole case is going to come down to this.” “This is ridiculous, dude. This is the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard.” He’s like, “All right, I’m just telling you.” Sure enough, it took another 12 months, and millions of dollars later, that’s what it came down to. Do you know why? Goal setting is considered an implied earnings claim.

I love compliant marketing—it’s truly a gift for us as marketers.

They don’t talk specifically about goal setting because they say, “You should know. We talk a lot about implied earnings claims. So you should understand that”. The only way you’ll get that difference is to talk to an attorney with years of FTC compliance knowledge. This is a big thing I did not understand. The attorney I had was a compliance attorney who would represent me against many different government authorities.

And that attorney also went on the record with me on the phone saying, “My god, I didn’t know that. You can’t say what it is”. I said,” What the hell did I pay you for?” Right? So I took the knowledge of Greg Christiansen, which is incredible and practical, on the job, and then I wrote the words that are in the book. And why is that important? Because I’m a traditionally trained copywriter.

So there’s no legalese; it’s easy to understand. It’s got stories and examples, and it’s fun to read. So many people have told me that they’ve been able to read the book in one sitting. Many people have also said they can’t read it in one sitting because it gets overwhelming, and then they get upset and have to put it down and come back. We’ve heard many people say that they love the book just for its readability. So you want to understand the rules, get familiar, and read the book. From there, you’re going to find your threads to pull and go down, and we have a lot of other resources. The other resource I’ll tell you as a next step if you really want to understand is come check out our podcast.

We have a podcast on YouTube and on dontsaythat.com and click over to the podcast. We’ve now got 45-ish episodes published. And we go deep into a lot of topics. And we keep you up to date. There was just an incident that happened today that I am 100 % sure we’re going to talk about in the next episode. So, within a seven-day window of something happening at the FTC or any kind of marketing compliance law, we do an episode. And we let you know so that you’re aware of it.

Those are some of the resources people need. And then if you want to check out the software, we actually have a free scan feature. So, you can scan up to 5,000 words for free and get a score to see if your copy is good or bad. From there, if you want a more detailed review, you pay $100 a month or $1,000 a year. And that’s at Complily.com. Whether you want to learn or let the software give you some feedback or whatever, we’ve got a bunch of resources for you to be able to get more compliant.

Yeah, that’s great. So, let’s talk about the stages of the FTC process and how ruthless it can get.

So the way it works, and remember, every case is different. So, I’ll talk about my case and try to highlight some of the differences. There are really two main routes, okay? They could take other routes, too, but there are two main ones. One is the investigative route, and one is the lawsuit route. And I guess let’s say there are routes. So, one, they issue a CID. That is a Civil Investigative Demand Letter. It’s a subpoena.

So, during that time, it’s confidential. They don’t freeze your assets. They just say, “Hey, you have to deliver us a bunch of stuff.” At that point, you’re pretty much guilty. They’ve been looking at you. They feel like they have a case. Most of the time, they’re not going to let you go. But you live to fight another day. You can defend yourself and do your best to get the fine down, negotiate, and all that jazz. The second scenario is that they sue you. They just come in. You get delivered a lawsuit right out.

But they don’t do an asset freeze. The third case is what they call a TRO, or a temporary restraining order. And that is a complete shutdown of your business and a complete confiscation of all your assets, personal and business. Everything. All investment accounts, all real estate, all properties, just everything. A judge will then determine a stipend that you will be given out of your own money to live.

So suddenly, buying groceries, paying mortgages, and buying health insurance gets tough. So those are the three scenarios. I was in the first one. Thank God. So, an investigative demand letter comes. They’ll typically give you like 10 days. Just to give you an idea, it took us exactly 10 months to fulfill the demands in that letter that they gave us 10 days. So they’re pretty much expecting you’re going to get an attorney. The attorney’s going to call and say, “I need an extension.” So, the back and forth begins. And over the course of those months, I did not talk to them ever, not once. It’s my attorneys talking to them. You start submitting, right? 

So they give you extensions but say, “Hey, we need to see progress.” Like keep submitting stuff, keep uploading stuff, keep uploading stuff. And they’re reviewing it. So they assigned, in our case, I think there were two investigators assigned. So, as we submit stuff, the investigators are looking at it. The investigators then report to the attorneys. There were two attorneys at the FTC. There was a lead; then there was someone, I think, sorry, three. A lead and then two attorneys reporting to them. So, a pretty good sizable team is going after us.

And we’d sometimes go weeks without hearing from them. I actually think we went as many as two and a half months without hearing from them. And then all of sudden, boom, one day they come. They saw something; they wanted more of something. So they’ll keep asking. We want more of this, and we want more of that. And you pretty much have to say yes. We pushed back on some things. They wanted some things, so we just said “No.” And then they’re all, “We’ll take you to court.” And it’s like, you got to say, “Okay, well then take me to court. I’m not giving you that. You don’t need that. We’re giving you everything else. We’re cooperating, but that’s overreach.”

So, you and your lawyer determine what that is. You just go back and forth, answer their questions, and submit material until you get to a point where you say, “Hey, listen, I have now submitted everything that I have access to.” You don’t have to; you’re not required to go way out of your way to find the answers or the documents they want. So if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. So, if you have it, you have to turn it over. So it’s like, I’ve gone out of my way. I’ve found whatever I could find, I’ve found, I’m done. This is the best way for me to answer your demand letter. I’m done. They’ll have you sign something that says I’m done.

That’s when they usually go away for a while. So they went silent on us for months because they’re processing and coming up with their next steps. In my case, what was unique in recent times, not unique at a macro level, but in recent times, what was unique about it was that they let me come in and speak to them and address them. Since COVID, they’ve been forcing companies to do that virtually over Zoom. But I actually got a chance to drive to DC, and I live 40 minutes away, and basically do a 45-minute presentation in front of them during which a really funny story happened. 

So right when we finished, and we submitted all our material to them when we were done, and we signed off, I signed an affidavit saying to my best knowledge I’ve given everything; my attorney said, “Can we please come to speak to you, my client would like to present to you.” They said, “Sure,” so we did; we went and spoke to them. Then they went silent for a while, and then a few months later, they sent us their first version of the complaint letter that they would be filing in court. And they said, “Do you want to negotiate? Do you want to settle?” We said “Yes.” They said, “Okay, great. We want 100 % of all your telesales. We want $14 million.” “No, thank you.” They’re like, “Great. Then we want to see all your financials. We want to see every penny you have to your name.” “No, thank you.” And then we got stuck on that. So we negotiated back and forth for a while on that. Eventually, I had to give, and you will have to give on that. So, I had to do a full disclosure of all my financials.

And this negotiation can take months. And ours did. We were pushing back quite a bit. They want a sizable portion of your liquidity. And that’s something people don’t understand. So it’s not necessarily everything you have, but what’s liquid? They don’t want to be on a 10-year payment plan with you. So what can we get today? Can we just be done with it and move on? I was not settling. Multiple times, I honestly was like, you know what? Screw this from principle matter only. 

At this point, I did feel like I was just being mistreated, if I’m being honest. You, I felt like I was getting far more than I deserved. Now, I accept that there were definitely mistakes made, 100%. I see that now. I didn’t understand it, but I see it. So, I wasn’t saying by any means that I should walk away without anything. But I felt like, man, they’re really, I mean, my fines are far above the fines Lyft has paid recently. Lyft, being a multi-billion dollar company, paid less for its issues. Meanwhile, some people were fraudulent and paid less than I was. 

So that was like, I was telling my attorneys every third day, I’d like, “You know what, I think we should go to court.” And they wanted to settle. I could tell that they wanted it too. So then they started to play some hands. They did a couple of moves, and I was like, “That’s a level show right there. Like that is, we’re playing like that, and it worked.”

They made a couple of moves. I was like, “I don’t want to mess with this. Let’s go settle.” And then we settled. So the whole thing took 18 months from when they sent me the demand letter to when the judge signed off on the agreement. So, it works because they will still sue you if you come to a settlement agreement with them. So, I’m technically still sued by the FTC. But they sue you in court and immediately on the second hand. So, on one hand, it gives the court the lawsuit. The other hand gives the settlement.

It’s an instant settlement. And they just wait for the judge to sign off. And then they issue a poetic press release about you. And then your job is to survive that. And I did. And thank God. And it was awesome. And I didn’t know that a year later, they issued another press release about you once they were ready to disseminate the money you gave them. And I was like, I didn’t know that one was coming. And then, now I’m on a tenure I jokingly call parole.

So for 10 years, I have to report every year once a year. I have to give them a full shakedown of everything I’m doing every October. So, I just did mine. I did my first years. It wasn’t too bad. I just have to disclose where I live. Here’s my recent contact information, and here are all the companies that I’m involved in and what I’m doing. So, as long as I’m not messing around, I hope not to hear from them anymore.

Wow, that’s a lot. So you said there’s a funny story of something that happened in DC at their offices when you came there to present.

It’s funny, but it’s also spiritual to me. It’s one of the moments I remember. So, Stephan, when I was going through this case, at this point, when I went in to present to them, it’s been about 12 months; I was beaten up. I had been in a cage with a 4,000-pound gorilla, and I was still standing. And you know, they have this way, not they as the FTC, just lawyers, lawyers in general have this way of turning things, right? Like they just like, you do something, you say something, and they like to twist it and present it back to you. Like, “whoa, how’d you just make that evil?” “Like what? No, it’s not what I meant.”  I was dealing with that on like a weekly basis for a year. 

So, at some point, you start to question yourself. And so what started bothering me months into it was me questioning who I was. “Sh*t, are they right? Like, am I a horrible human? Was I out here hurting many people who didn’t know it? Am I a scammer? Am I like that other company and the person they’ve taken down?”  And as that was going through my mind, that was probably the hardest part of dealing with that because it’s so far away from who I am, who I ever wanted to be, and who I’ve ever looked at myself as. I was grappling with that. 

So, generating the PowerPoint presentation that I went in to do at the FTC was cathartic. That was helpful because it helped remind me of all of the good that they never ask about, right? All the factual data-driven good that we’ve done and who we are. So anyway, I’m walking into the FTC’s office. I’m in my own head. The way it works is that they have a beautiful building. It’s you walking in, and it’s almost like a kind of TSA. You go through that hole, take everything out, and they pat you down. Now, you walk into the main corridor, but there are different divisions. The FTC is this way, and I think they have a couple of other agencies in different directions. So now, when you want to get into the FTC wing, another security guard is there. So the doors are locked, you knock on the door, and they open it. 

It was God reminding me I’m not defined by others, that I’ve done good, and that many have impacted by me.

So, as I have my two lawyers with me and my team with me, I’m walking behind everybody as we walk in. The main security guard is sitting behind the desk. So I was kind of behind everybody, and as everybody kind of cleared, he looks at me, the security guard, and he goes, “Anik?” And I turn, and I’m like, I look at him, and he goes, “Holy sh*t, is that you?” And I’m like. “Yeah,” he goes, “What are you doing here?” And I didn’t have a reaction except to kind of just like point to the sign above his head, which said Federal Trade Commission. I just kind of pointed. And he goes, literally his reaction, I’ll never forget. He’s like, “Man.Damn.” And so my lawyer runs up to him. He’s like, “How do you know my client?” And he’s like, “I’ve followed Anik for years. I love you. Man, I’ve been following your stuff for so long. You are so inspirational.”

He goes to me, like, “I’ve never bought any of your courses, but you have such great free stuff that I just couldn’t consume all of that.” And that was one of my slides, and my presentation was about how we do a lot of reach out and public service to the industry. I don’t know what to call public service, but we do a lot of free content. You don’t have to pay us to get help from us. And I was talking. I was kind of in shock. I wish I had taken a picture with him and got his name.

I was in shock, right? And the attorney starts talking to him. And in the meantime, their attorney comes down. So, this would be the main person responsible for our case from the FTC side. Comes down to get us. It’s like an awkward elevator ride, by the way. But he comes down to get us. And my attorney jumps on. He’s like, “Hey, look at this guy. You know, your own security guard in your building. He’s a fan of this client.” And security guard’s like, “Yeah, he’s amazing.” 

That attorney had no face, like he’s a poker face, and didn’t react or anything. It’s okay, whatever. We get in the elevator, go up, and it feels like a forever ride. Kind of a bunch of us, one of their attorneys and like eight of us, quiet. And all of that attorney, the FTC attorney just goes, “Well, that’s a first.” And it had been some such time between the incident and when he said that we were like, “What?” Like we had forgotten, we’re like, “What’s a first?”

He goes, that, what just happened in the lobby, that’s a first. When I left the place and left the building, the security guard came running up to me. He’s like, “Hey, man, you know what? Seeing you here today, I’m going to take this as a sign. I’m going to buy your course tonight.” And I laughed, and I said, “I took it down.”

And he got so upset. He’s like, “Man,” and he said something. I don’t remember the exact words, but I thought what I heard, and my team said that’s what they were, too. I thought what he said is they’ve ruined everything. It’s what we thought he said. I don’t remember it. It’s what I thought he said. And that’s the point at which I should have gone back, taken a picture with him or whatever, and really memorialized that moment because it was so important to me. I’ll tell you why it was so important to me. I left that presentation smiling, and he had such a big part to do with it because I feel like God put him there at that perfect time to remind me that, like I imagine, I positively impacted a person in that building. 

Change your mindset. Change your life.

So it was just God kind of reminding me that I am not who they’re defining me to be, that I have done a lot of good, and that many people have impacted me. That was a pivotal moment for me to help repair myself and boost me to go back out and fight again because I was in a dark place coming into that, personally just questioning who I was.

Yeah. What pops up for me when you tell the story is that that guy was an angel. That was his assignment to be there at that moment. An angel in human form will give you that perspective shift. 

I got a similar sort of inside or sense of that with another guest on my other podcast on my personal development podcast, Garrain Jones. And Garrain was talking about how he had hit rock bottom; he was living in his car, and a homeless person came and knocked on his window for money. He rolled his window down and said, “What, you have more money than I do,” is Garrain’s answer to the homeless man. He screams at Garrain, saying, “Change your mindset, change your life,” and walked away. Those words changed everything for Garrain. And when Garrain shared that story, I was like, that was an angel. That was absolutely an angel. Yeah, really cool.

Yeah, it’s one of the stories I can vividly remember. I have a visual memory of that moment. It stands out from a lot of my memories.

Amazing. Well, it’s a great way to end this episode. So, if our listener wants to learn more, we’ve already laid out some great suggestions for them. Get your book, for example, is a great one. Listen to your podcast. If they want to follow you on social media, where are you most active?

Yeah, I’m most active on Facebook. So, on Facebook, just look up Anik Singal and follow my personal profile. It’s got about 45,000 followers. That’s where I post a lot. If you get the book, we have a group called FTC Compliance Connect, and it’s free for any of the book readers. And I’m pretty active there; I’m just kind of talking about this stuff. I’ve been getting much more active on LinkedIn right now. So, if you go to LinkedIn, Anik Singal, you can also reach me there.

Awesome. Then, the websites are dontsaythat.com and complily.com. 

 Yes, sir.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Anik. This was really inspiring, actually. I was not sure how this would go because we haven’t had a compliance-focused episode yet on MarketingSpeak. But yeah, this was actually very inspiring.

Thank you, man. Thank you for having me, and thank you for giving me an opportunity to spread the message and make more people aware of the fact that they need to get their marketing compliant and that it’s nothing to mess around with. So thank you, Stephan, for everything you do. And it’s been an honor to be here. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. And thank you, listener. Now, get out there and do something good in the world and make sure you’re compliant at the same time. This is your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Always have a compliance attorney review my marketing materials. Investing in legal expertise upfront is far less expensive than dealing with compliance issues later.

Build a strong customer support system to handle complaints effectively. Aim for 24/7 coverage with multiple teams across different time zones.

Monitor and maintain low refund and chargeback rates. Implement clear, customer-friendly refund policies and document everything meticulously.

Keep detailed records of all marketing materials and customer communications. Create organized filing systems with reliable backup procedures.

Stay updated with current FTC regulations through reliable resources. Ignorance of the rules is never an acceptable excuse – staying informed is my responsibility as a business owner.

Implement a compliance monitoring system for all marketing content.

Regular reviews of all content before publication, including social media posts, email campaigns, and sales scripts, can save me from major headaches later.

Maintain a substantiation bank for all marketing claims. Think of this as your marketing insurance policy. 

Monitor affiliate marketing compliance closely. Create crystal-clear guidelines for affiliate marketing and implement robust approval processes.

Track and address customer reviews across all platforms. Respond promptly and professionally to all feedback, especially negative reviews.

Get my marketing materials reviewed before publishing, especially webinars. Train my content creators on compliance requirements and implement feedback systems to catch potential issues before they become problems.

Make the most of Anik Singal’s expertise and ongoing insights by connecting through his most active channels: Facebook and LinkedIn. 

About Anik Singal

Anik Singal is a recognized entrepreneur and marketing coach worldwide. He has sold over $100M worth of digital products and over 250,000 physical products and has written multiple best-sellers. Anik has earned a reputation for being one of the Top copywriters and information marketers EVER! After years of success, Anik went through a battle with the FTC that lasted over 12+ months. Through all this, he decided to make it his new mission to help entrepreneurs and marketers understand the rules of compliant marketing so that what happened to him never happened to them. Anik has 2 MILLION+ followers across social media that he supports through his valuable and proven content.