CMA fines: fake deals, pre-ticked extras and a hidden joining fee

CMA fines are now something the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority hands out itself, without asking a court first. Since April 2025 it can fine a business up to 10% of its global turnover, or £300,000 if that’s more, for breaking consumer law. On 14 October 2026 it fined three businesses £6 million in total: Wayfair, Appliances Direct and Gold’s Gym. All three admitted breaking the law and settled. The practices were deals that said they’d end and didn’t, paid extras already ticked for the customer, and a joining fee left out of the price.

This post covers how the CMA’s new powers work and what a fine is made of. Then the three cases, from the CMA’s own case pages and the one decision it has published in full. Then the two rules behind them, on pre-ticked boxes and on countdown timers, what the cases have in common, and a check you can run on your own shop from a phone.

How CMA fines work under the DMCC Act

The CMA’s consumer protection powers changed when the consumer parts of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force on 6 April 2025. Before that, the CMA had to take a business to court. Now, as its guidance puts it, it can decide whether a business has broken the law and impose penalties on its own. The business can still appeal to the courts, within 60 days.

A case runs in three steps. The CMA opens it and publishes a case page naming the business. If it thinks the law was broken, it sends a provisional infringement notice and hears the reply. Its final decision is the final infringement notice, which sets the penalty and any directions, such as refunds.

Here’s what the money side looks like, from the same guidance and the CMA’s November 2025 release:

What happened	Most the CMA can fine
Breaking consumer law	10% of global turnover or £300,000, whichever is greater
Not following the CMA’s directions	5% of global turnover or £150,000, plus daily penalties
Not answering an information notice, or giving false information	1% of global turnover, plus daily penalties

A business that settles can get up to 40% off its penalty, or up to 25% if it settles after the provisional notice. In exchange it admits it broke the law, stops, accepts a shorter process and gives up its appeal. Wayfair, Appliances Direct and Gold’s Gym all settled early and all got the full 40%.

These three come from the first batch. On 18 November 2025 the CMA named eight businesses in its first cases under the new powers: StubHub, viagogo, AA Driving School, BSM Driving School, Gold’s Gym, Wayfair, Appliances Direct and Marks Electrical. It also sent advisory letters to 100 other businesses. Counting from the CMA’s pages, seven of the eight now have a final decision. The AA and BSM decision came in April, Marks Electrical and StubHub in June, and these three in October. The viagogo case page still says the investigation is ongoing, and nothing has been found against it.

If a letter from the CMA ever lands on your desk, call a lawyer. The CMA’s own guidance suggests it.

The three cases of 14 October 2026

Business	What the CMA found	What the customer saw
Wayfair	Time-limited offers that weren’t	“Daily Deals”, 24-hour “Flash Deals”, countdown timers, then the same price or lower after the deadline
Appliances Direct	Paid extras opted in by default, and limited-time discounts that kept coming back	Removal or installation already added to the order; the same discount codes in countdown banners over many days
Gold’s Gym	The joining fee missing from the total price	A membership price first, the joining fee later or in small print

Wayfair: deals that were still there the next day

The Wayfair CMA case is about deadlines. Wayfair advertised products as “Daily Deals” and 24-hour “Flash Deals”, with countdown timers and lines like “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow”. That’s false urgency in its plainest form, because the CMA found that many products remained available at the same price or lower after the stated deadline – so the time-limited offer was false.

A fake sale can carry a real discount. Here the false part was the deadline, and the CMA said people could have felt pressure to buy quickly so as not to lose out.

The case page has the dates. The CMA opened the investigation on 17 November 2025 and gave its final infringement notice on 12 October 2026, with a penalty of £4.8 million after the 40% reduction. Wayfair agreed not to appeal. The full notice isn’t published yet.

Appliances Direct: extras already ticked, codes that came back

Appliances Direct is the trading name of Buy It Direct Ltd. The CMA found two things on its site.

First, customers were automatically opted into one or both of two paid services: “Remove & Recycle Your Old Appliance” and “Installation on Delivery”. The release calls them pre-ticked checkboxes. You had to spot the extra to get rid of it.

Second, pop-up countdown banners on some product pages offered discounts of £10 to £25 for a limited time. But the CMA found that the same discount codes appeared repeatedly over many days. Call them fake discounts if you like, though the money off was real. The “limited time” was the made-up bit.

The case page puts the penalty at £1.2 million, after the 40% reduction, plus around £432,000 in refunds for customers opted in between 6 April 2025 and 17 November 2025. The average payout is £25. The refunds are for the extras. The banners brought a fine but no refund.

Gold’s Gym: a joining fee outside the price

Gold’s Gym (UK) Limited runs Gold’s Gym clubs in London as a franchise. The CMA found it failed to include the joining fee in the total price shown to consumers for their annual and Direct Debit memberships, or showed the total in a way that was unclear and unlikely to be seen.

This is the one case of the three where the CMA has published its final infringement notice, and it’s worth reading for the screenshots alone. In one example from the old site, an annual membership showed as £359.88 on the first three screens. The £50 joining fee appeared separately on one of them. The £409.88 total only arrived at the payment page. Customers typed in their personal details on a screen whose price had no joining fee in it at all. On the monthly plans the joining fee was £10, shown apart from the monthly price.

The notice covers 6 April 2025 to 7 May 2026. It counts 726 affected customers, 49 on annual plans and 677 on Direct Debit. The joining fees came to £9,220, and that’s what goes back: £50 or £10 each.

The penalty arithmetic is in the notice too. Before the CMA weighed proportionality, the penalty stood at over £576,000. The CMA called that disproportionate next to £9,220 in fees and brought it down to £75,000. The 40% settlement discount then took it to £45,000.

The release quotes Hayley Fletcher, the CMA’s Senior Director for Consumer Protection: people should see genuine, accurate prices and offers – and decide for themselves whether they want optional extras. And then: The time is up for this kind of behaviour.

Pre-ticked boxes: why the CMA treats them as a breach

The rule on extras is older than the DMCC Act. The CMA’s release names the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, and regulation 40 is short. A trader can’t charge anything on top of the main price unless the customer gave express consent before the contract. Consent doesn’t count if consent is inferred from the consumer not changing a default option (such as a pre-ticked box on a website). And if the trader took the money anyway, the contract is treated as if it promised to pay it back.

What the DMCC Act changed is who enforces it and how fast. The CMA used its new powers to fine for a 2013 rule.

The CMA’s guidance on extras gives examples on both sides. Gift wrapping for £3 with an unticked box the customer has to tick is fine. So is a round-up donation where the customer has to pick either “Round up” or “No, thanks”. Express delivery added on its own isn’t, and neither is a £1 sample put in every order that the customer has to remove. The guidance is blunt: You can’t use pre-ticked boxes or other forms of automatic opt-in for optional extras.

Appliances Direct wasn’t the first. In June 2026 the CMA fined Marks Electrical for pre-selecting recycling services on large appliances, and the dark patterns examples post has that one.

One thing to keep apart. A pre-ticked box for marketing emails is a different question, about consent to marketing under data protection rules, not about money. The opt in vs opt out post covers that one.

Countdown timers and deals that come back

The urgency rule sits in Schedule 20 of the DMCC Act, the list of practices that are banned outright. Paragraph 7 bans falsely stating that a product, or a price, is only available for a limited time, to push people into deciding straight away. The release says the practice is considered unfair in all circumstances.

So a deal counts as false when the deadline passes and the deal is still there. The CMA’s unfair commercial practices guidance gives the textbook case: When the time runs down, the offer does not in fact end, but continues and the countdown clock restarts. It also says a true deadline is unlikely to be a problem, unless a substantially similar offer appears within a short period. That’s the Appliances Direct pattern. The deadline might pass, but the same code turns up again.

The test is what’s on the page after the clock runs out: the same offer, or a better one. Wayfair’s products stayed at the same price or lower, and that was enough for the CMA.

The CMA had already been here under its old powers. In May 2026 a High Court order confirmed that Emma Sleep had used misleading countdown timers and false high-demand messages. That one went through the courts and ended in undertakings, not a CMA fine.

What the CMA fines have in common

In each one, the customer pays more or decides faster than they chose to. And none of it takes clever engineering. A timer widget and a default left switched on are enough, or a booking system that adds its line at the end.

The CMA counts the money per customer as well as the fine. Appliances Direct’s refunds average £25. Gold’s Gym’s are £50 or £10. The earlier decisions in the drip pricing post, on the AA and BSM driving schools and on StubHub, worked out at around £9 a learner and around £10 a transaction. Refunds follow money taken without a real choice. For Wayfair, whose case was about timing, the release announces a penalty and no refunds.

These are early cases, too. In the Gold’s Gym notice the CMA writes that penalties are likely to be lower in the initial period of the regime, because only conduct after April 2025 counts, so cases cover short periods. It adds that the same proportionality points may not all apply in future cases. Across all its cases under the new powers, the release counts fines of more than £12 million in 18 months and nearly £2.4 million in refunds.

Two things I can’t tell you yet. The full notices for Wayfair and Appliances Direct aren’t published, so how long those deals ran past their deadlines, and how many times the codes came back, is still the CMA’s to say. And viagogo, the eighth name from November, has had no update since June.

Check your deals and checkout from a phone

You don’t need a tool for this. A phone, a notes app and two visits a week apart will do.

1. Open a product with a deal on it: a timer, “ends tonight”, “today only”. Take a screenshot of the price and the deadline.
2. Set a reminder for the morning after the deadline. Open the same page and compare. If the price is the same or lower, the deadline wasn’t one.
3. If a banner offers a discount code, write the code down. Look again next week. If the same code is back with a new countdown, that’s the Appliances Direct pattern.
4. Add a product to the basket and go to checkout. Before you touch anything, read every line in the total and every box. Is any extra already ticked or already added? Installation, removal, insurance, express delivery, a donation?
5. On a membership, booking or sign-up page, note the first price you see. Go all the way to the pay button without paying and compare the two. A joining fee, booking fee or admin fee belongs in the first one.
6. Find the screen where you type your name and email. Is the full price on that screen, plainly, at the size of the other prices?
7. If a plugin, booking system or theme builds your checkout, repeat steps 4 to 6 after every update. It’s your site the customer sees.

Peeky reads your public pages for this. UK-14 is the DMCC Act check: where the first price appears against the total, and whether timers and limited-time claims hold. EU-12 asks the same about countdowns and scarcity messages under EU rules. US-08 covers urgency claims and hidden fees under the FTC Act, for shops that sell into the US.

Questions people ask

Can the CMA issue fines?

Yes. Since the consumer parts of the DMCC Act came into force in April 2025, the CMA can decide for itself that a business has broken consumer law and impose a penalty without going to court first. The business can appeal to the courts within 60 days. On 14 October 2026 it fined Wayfair, Appliances Direct and Gold's Gym.

What are the direct enforcement powers of the CMA?

The CMA can open a case, demand information, issue a provisional and then a final infringement notice, fine the business, and direct it to stop, refund customers or put compliance measures in place. It can also accept undertakings instead of a fine, where the business promises to fix things without admitting liability.

How much can the CMA fine a business for breaking consumer law?

Up to 10% of the business's global turnover or £300,000, whichever is greater. Ignoring the CMA's directions can cost up to 5% or £150,000, plus daily penalties. Real fines sit far below the ceiling. Gold's Gym's ended at £45,000 after the CMA cut it for proportionality and then took 40% off for settling.

Are pre-ticked boxes allowed in the UK?

Not for paid extras. Regulation 40 of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 says an extra payment needs the customer's express consent, and a pre-ticked box doesn't count. If the money was taken anyway, the customer can get it back. A pre-ticked box for marketing emails is a separate question, under data protection rules.

Is a countdown timer on a sale illegal?

A timer that tells the truth is fine. The problem is a deadline that isn't real. The DMCC Act bans falsely saying an offer is available for a limited time to rush people, and the CMA's guidance gives the example of a clock that runs out and restarts. A similar offer coming back soon after can count too.