“Wait...am I in trouble?” Inside the Call That Unraveled This Month's $50M Class Action Lawsuit Against Revolve & Its Influencers

“Wait…am I in trouble?”

Her panic wasn’t audible.
She said it flat. Muted.

But it was palpable (to me).
She said it like a 9-volt battery had just replaced her tongue. I could feel it.
Because I’ve been there.

That moment when the body short circuits before the mind catches up.
When a question lands too close to your spine.

Her voice didn’t rise.
But her silence did.
That kind of stretching pause that vibrates at a frequency outside the audible range,
but inside the physical range of someone who’s been exactly where she was.

What followed wasn’t a business advisory session.
It was co-regulation through rupture and repair.
It was me de-escalating an influencer’s nervous system
by gently orienting her to reality,
and reassuring her:

🚩 Red Flag: Bella makes most of her income as an influencer and didn’t know she could personally face up to $43k per non-compliant post, under the FTC’s final ban enacted in October 2024 (official notice linked here).

[INHALE]

Before reading about this $50M Revolve lawsuit filed last week (and talking it out with me on this call)…

She didn’t know a brand like Revolve would know the law,
know the financial penalties they could incur for breaking it,
and still choose not to require the disclosures the FTC mandates.

Hell, she didn’t even know what “FTC” stood for.

She assumed big brands followed the rules.
That if she was gifted a cute outfit, it didn’t count as payment.
That casually mentioning it in a post didn’t make it a legally binding ad.

So no. She didn’t always tag “#ad” in her post captions.
Especially when her drafts were approved without it. So…
why would she?

To be honest, she’d never read an influencer marketing compliance / legal policy in full.

Bella never developed her own “compliance risk” radar.
Why would she?
“Influencer compliance” has never even been a thing…right?

It is.

Until now, she mostly copied what she saw on her feed.
The posts that performed best never had disclosures up front.
She figured if everyone was doing it, she could too.
Brands carried advertising rule risks, right?
“I just have to pay my taxes.”
She figured the bigger the brand, the safer the collab…

She understood that looking authentic is the assignment.

What she didn’t know was that
the gap between <authentic> and <looking authentic> 
is where lawsuits are born,
against brands and influencers like her.

And brands have always known that.

Wait…what?

Also. She didn’t realize that every single past post = retroactive exposure
and that deleting live posts doesn’t delete the risk.
It just makes her look worse.
Btw the clock’s been ticking since October 2024.
(The FTC ban, remember?)

Oh sh*t.

She starts running through names in her head.
People who knew. Could’ve told her. Should’ve. Didn’t.
Before her friend’s name showed up in a lawsuit.
Before I (some stranger) had to be the one to spell it out for her.

And now the pang of fear...
involuntarily morphs into betrayal.

[EXHALE]

Internal CEO Memo: April 22, 2025

Referencing: SwayID CEO April 21, 2025 Off-the-Record Call With a Friend of Influencer(s) Sued in the April 11, 2025 $50M Class Action Lawsuit Filing.

Negreanu v. Revolve Group, Inc., et al., 2:25-cv-03186 (C.D. Cal.).

Call Participants:

• “Bella”: A fashion influencer with over 1M followers. Not named in the lawsuit herself, but her friend was—and the case has been blowing up in their group chats. (Name anonymized for public memo)

• Kaeya: Founder, SwayID (“influencer marketing compliance layer so class action lawsuits don’t stick”)

Core Insight From Call: 

What happens when an influencer realizes she may have been intentionally kept in the dark by the very brands she works with because undisclosed influencer posts tend to perform better, and the brand makes more money…while she gets left holding the legal risk?

Bella’s story wasn’t shocking to me.
Because sadly, it’s standard.

What Bella Described:

• No real onboarding. No compliance training. No briefings.

• No clarity on what counts as a paid endorsement or the consequences of getting it wrong.

• Instructions like:

• She was literally praised once for not tagging a post with “#ad.”

That wasn’t an oversight.
That was the model.

⚖️ What Is This Revolve Lawsuit About?

On April 11, 2025, a $50 million class action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court. The plaintiff, Ligia Negreanu, is suing Revolve Group, Inc., several of its related fashion brands, and a slate of influencers.

She claims:

• Influencers posted paid content but hid or skipped required disclosures like “#ad” or “Paid Partnership.”

• Revolve paid influencers with money, luxury trips, and gifts but didn’t require them to disclose it.

• As a result, consumers were misled into thinking these were genuine, unpaid endorsements.

• Over 1 million customer transactions may have been affected by this deception.

Why This Matters:

This isn’t just about Revolve.
It’s about a systemic design in influencer marketing that:

• Rewards non-compliance because it drives higher sales,

• Leaves creators untrained and unprotected,

• And quietly offloads the legal risk onto them when things go wrong.

Bella didn’t sign up to be legally exposed.
She just didn’t know the system was built that way.

Diagnostic: How Brands Like Revolve Engineer Influencer Risk Through Information Asymmetry

Every brand does this whether they know it or not…

This isn’t an accident.

It’s precision-engineered ambiguity and it scales beautifully for brands who can afford to carelessly churn and burn through creators to make more and more money...until someone like me comes along and cuts through with clarity.

Not every brand cuts corners on compliance.
But Revolve did—and they got caught.

So did Celsius and many others.

The common thread?
Legal ambiguity scales.
It protects brands who treat FTC penalties as the cost of doing business.
And it leaves creators holding the fallout.

This lawsuit doesn’t prove all brands are reckless.
But it proves something more dangerous:

Legal risk is silently engineered into the system—and creators are the first to bleed.

Which means: If you're not standardizing compliance, you're scaling liability.

It’s time for a structural intervention.

Intervention: A New Standard That Holds Up Under Legal Pressure

If ambiguity is the design flaw, then standardization is the fix.

SwayID isn’t a bandaid. It’s a teachable, repeatable process that rewires how creator marketing is operationalized—before content ever goes live.

Because chaos is not a workflow. And vibes don’t hold up in court.

3 STEPS. ZERO EXCUSES.

This is what it looks like to embed compliance into the behavior—
not just the contract.

What This Means for Creators

The FTC isn’t sending you warnings anymore.
They’re sending you invoices, $43K+ per non-compliant post.

Violations won’t just cost you money.
It could cost you your reputation.
And that stain follows you.
Even if you switch niches, change your handle, or go private.

A public FTC citation doesn’t just say, “You broke the rules.”
It says: “You can’t be trusted.”
And once that’s out there, it’s nearly impossible to reverse.

What’s worse?
Most creators who get fined or named in a lawsuit didn’t even know they were breaking the law.

But by then, that doesn’t matter.
No one cares.

The scariest part is that the FTC is not the one you should be afraid of.
Angry Agatha is…

Cover your 🍑

How SwayID Shields Creators and Brands—Before the Lawsuits Hit

Class action lawyers see SwayID = bad payout odds = no case.

Your + SwayID = a Teflon layer covering your creator marketing workflows →
Deceptive ad lawsuit threats don’t stick.

⚠️ Let’s be clear:

SwayID is not a lawyer. It supports your lawyer(s).
(No self-respecting person thinks software = legal representation.)

SwayID does not guarantee you won’t get fined or sued.
It helps minimize your exposure, with receipts.
The brand–creator workflow is human. We can't control action. But log it.

SwayID is not a “set it and forget it” compliance solution.
(No self-respecting person thinks they can buy ripped abs without training.)

SwayID is for professionals:
people who care about their name, their longevity, and their blindspots.

It’s a behavioral compliance layer
for serious brands and creators working with UGC and influencer content.
It embeds defensibility into the workflow—
so compliance isn’t something you remember.
It’s a habit you prove.

What SwayID Doesn’t Do:

We don’t make compliance easy.
We make it easier—with intelligent assist baked into your workflow.

We don’t make it cheap.
We make it cheaper—by preventing the $50M problem before it finds you.

We don’t make it fast.
We make it faster—by replacing chaos with a single, unified system that holds up.

What SwayID Is Not:

❌ Just a plugin you forget after onboarding
❌ Just a doc generator producing policies that don’t get read
❌ Just a compliance scanner for your influencer posts

That “just a” mentality is how:

– Brands get lazy
– Creators stay ignorant
– Lawsuits bury you

That “just a” mentality reveals the brands, agencies, and creators that you CANNOT work with.

How SwayID Works:

Two-Portals:
→ Brands issue FTC-compliant policies and workflow training
→ Creators complete it, upload content, and receive timestamped compliance receipts

Built-In Compliance Workflow:
→ Creators learn what qualifies as a “material connection”
→ SwayID prompts structured, compliant tagging before content goes live

Receipts That Hold Up:
→ If regulators, law firms, or auditors come knocking—both sides have proof
→ No scrambling. No memory. No excuses.

Trust Is the Real Compliance Layer

Why trust SwayID?

Because it’s built by people who care.
Not entrepreneur tourists.
Not checkbox chasers, AI hype-riders, or founders copying the startup of the month.
Not teams optimizing for exits over outcomes.

SwayID was built by a founder and team who nearly didn’t survive the fallout—
and built the product they needed when no one was left to protect them.

Trust me.
In a world where AI can spin up a product overnight—
where illegal avatar influencer posts are flooding TikTok and getting flagged—
there’s only one thing that separates protection from exposure:

Trust.
Lived experience.
Moral clarity.
And the motivation behind the people building the solution.

You don’t need a prettier dashboard.
You need proof.

The real moat isn’t AI.
It’s not “rock solid contracts”.
It’s not faster onboarding or better brand deals.

The real moat is trust.

And trust can’t be synthesized.
It takes root in people who’ve actually been through it,
who had no safety net,
and who learned that good-faith effort doesn’t matter unless you can prove it.

The most trusted tool is the one built by someone who had to in order to survive.
Everything else is noise.

Kaeya