Today, as Amazon dealt with a site-wide outage impacting thousands of customers, the District of Columbia attorney general, Karl Racine, filed a lawsuit against the online shopping giant for deceiving its customer base.In a press release, Racine said that Amazon still needs to pay for tricking DC consumers by “stealing” portions of their Amazon Flex delivery driver tips between 2016 and 2019 and “secretly” diverting millions to “reduce its own labor costs and increase profits.”Amazon already paid $61.7 million in restitution to Amazon Flex drivers after the Federal Trade Commission investigated.All of the customer tips at issue were already paid to drivers as part of a settlement last year with the FTC.”Racine’s complaint alleges that Amazon violated DC’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA) by “lying to consumers about whether tips would be fully passed on to Amazon Flex drivers and increase worker compensation.” Because customers received no restitution from the FTC settlement, Racine’s complaint suggests that it’s now up to the court to “send a clear message to employers not to divert tips for their own benefit.”Amazon’s tip-diversion scheme worked by quoting a guaranteed minimum payment to a driver and then offsetting that payment with tips instead of providing tips on top of the minimum payment.Racine’s complaint said this made it so that “a consumer’s ‘tip’ made no difference at all to the driver’s take-home pay,” and drivers only noticed this was happening because “they noticed a decrease in their take-home pay.” The FTC reported the highest amount of tips withheld from a single Amazon Flex driver was “more than $28,000.” The average amount for tips withheld was $422.According to the FTC, Amazon agreed in the 2021 settlement to never misrepresent any driver’s rate of pay or likely income, “how much of their tips will be paid to them,” or “whether the amount paid by a customer is a tip.” The FTC also prohibited Amazon from “making any changes to how a driver’s tips are used as compensation without the driver’s express informed consent.” Amazon must comply with these nationwide orders until 2041."