Article

From nudge to notice: What India's dark pattern orders mean for digital business

Naresh Pareek, Abhishek Nair and Shravan Kalluri · Bar & Bench Free Intermediate India

A September 2026 review by lawyers at Lex Consult of the dark-pattern cases the Central Consumer Protection Authority has acted on, with what each one did wrong.

  • Cases include Zepto (basket sneaking and drip pricing), FirstCry (GST added at checkout on tax-inclusive prices), PharmEasy, BookMyShow and IndiGo
  • About ₹20 lakh in penalties across seven platforms, individual fines between ₹1 lakh and ₹7 lakh
  • Keep optional add-ons unticked, show every charge before commitment, and make cancelling no harder than signing up
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The question it answers

  1. Which checkout tricks count as dark patterns under India's consumer protection rules?

Read with it

  1. Storyboard18's June 2025 report on the consumer authority's advisory asking e-commerce platforms to audit their own interfaces... Storyboard18 Article CCPA warns e-comm firms over 'dark patterns'; self-audit within 3 months Storyboard18
  2. A plain explainer, published on the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy's blog, of the Central Consumer Protection Authority's 2023... Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy Article From Trickery to Transparency: India's New Guidelines on Dark Patterns Ayushi Srivastava and Manu Jalaj
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