Consumer Apps · Finance/Tax · Private litigation
H&R Block
Headline
A class action filed against H&R Block, Meta, AND Google invokes the federal RICO Act — the law originally built to prosecute organized crime…
Not independently verified. Verification status: Unverified - heuristic first draft. Publish state: draft unverified.
A class action filed against H&R Block, Meta, AND Google invokes the federal RICO Act — the law originally built to prosecute organized crime — alleging the three companies worked together to illegally harvest and share people's actual TAX DATA (income, deductions, filing details) without consent. Separately, a mass-arbitration investigation alleges H&R Block's website secretly shared customers' financial information with Facebook through embedded tracking tools. And the same 'if you try to downgrade to a cheaper product, we wipe your entered data and make you start over' design already documented for H&R Block elsewhere in this tracker means even customers who tried to avoid this exact privacy exposure by switching plans could be penalized with lost work for trying.
- Severity
- Evidence tierUnassigned
- Claims confirmed
- Last verified2026-08-04
Case status. Private litigation; no sources are on file yet, so no legal tier is assigned.
Primary source. None recorded — Unverified - heuristic first draft.
Terms
Arbitration
Not independently confirmed this pass — standard binding arbitration + class action waiver expected.
Data sharing
Not itemized separately from the FTC finding below.
Fees and billing
$7 MILLION FTC SETTLEMENT (final order Jan 8, 2025, following a Feb 2024 complaint; consent order, not a liability finding): the FTC alleged H&R Block engaged in unfair/deceptive practices by making customers who wanted to DOWNGRADE to a cheaper product contact customer service unnecessarily, and then, once the downgrade succeeded, WIPING THEIR PREVIOUSLY ENTERED TAX DATA — forcing them to start over from scratch. The FTC alleged this data-wiping penalty led some customers to just stick with the more expensive product rather than lose their work, effectively trapping them in an upsell. H&R Block must stop this data-wiping-on-downgrade practice by 2026 and must now disclose either the percentage of taxpayers eligible for its 'free' products or state plainly that most taxpayers don't qualify.
Contacts
Privacy contact. Not recorded.
Legal notice. Not verified this pass. If publicly traded: SEC Form 10-K cover page gives the official corporate address; the Secretary of State business-entity search in the state of incorporation gives the registered agent, which must accept service. If private: the state registered agent is usually the only reliable route.
Mailing address. Not recorded.
Evidence
No claims have been itemized for this row yet.
No sources are on file for this row yet.
Source vault
Link status: Candidate - not yet fetched
| Document | Last fetch | |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy policy hrblock.com/online-tax-filing/privacy.html | Not fetched yet | NO (HTML only) |
| Terms of service hrblock.com/online-tax-filing/legal.html | Not fetched yet | NO (HTML only) |
| Website No URL recorded | Not fetched yet | — |
| Primary source No URL recorded Verification: Unverified - heuristic first draft | Not fetched yet | — |
Enforcement
No enforcement actions are linked to this row.
State statute
No HQ state on file, so no state statute applies by headquarters.