A man visited a car wash in Illinois, paid for one wash, and walked away without agreeing to anything else — then watched True Blue Car Wash drain $40 from his account every single month for the next eight months, ignoring three separate written cancellation requests, until he was forced to beg his bank to block the charges.

The Playbook: How a Car Wash Became a Subscription Trap

Private Equity Brought the Subscription Model. Corporate Greed Built the Trap.

True Blue Car Wash LLC is a Delaware company headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. It operates over 70 car wash locations across Illinois, Indiana, Texas, and Arizona under two brands: Rainstorm Car Wash and Clean Freak Car Wash. In 2022, Canadian multinational Alimentation Couche-Tard — the corporation behind the Circle-K gas station empire — acquired True Blue, which at that point already had more than 170,000 fast-pass subscriber members.

The car wash subscription boom wasn’t accidental. Private equity firms poured money into the industry precisely because unlimited monthly-fee models generate predictable, recurring revenue. The complaint directly cites industry research documenting that companies recognized “the real money is in the inertia” — meaning the profits come from customers who forget they’re subscribed, can’t figure out how to cancel, or give up trying.

True Blue built its entire membership operation around exploiting that inertia. The lawsuit alleges a company-wide, systematic policy across all 70-plus locations: enroll as many customers as possible, disclose as little as possible, and make cancellation as painful as possible. This was the design. This was the training. This was the business model.

The Sign-Up Scheme: You Didn’t Agree to This

At physical locations, True Blue employees were trained to take customers’ payment cards and process transactions on their behalf — without a kiosk interaction and without delivering required disclosures. The complaint alleges employees were specifically trained to omit the auto-renewal nature of the membership, the cancellation process, and the fact that a promotional low price would spike dramatically after just one or two months.

Online, the signup flow fares no better. True Blue’s websites for both Rainstorm and Clean Freak present membership pricing without clearly and conspicuously disclosing that the membership auto-renews each month until cancelled. The cancellation procedure is absent from the checkout flow entirely. The complaint states plainly: “Defendant’s websites are void of these required disclosures.”

One named plaintiff, Monte Connors, was told his membership cost $9.99. He was not told that price was a one-month promotional rate. The following month and every month after, True Blue charged his debit card $40 ($40 per month — the cost of about 13 gallons of gas, drained automatically without consent). He never agreed to $40. He was never told $40 was coming.

The Price-Hike Trap: What They Quoted Was Never the Real Price

The promotional discount scheme compounds the initial deception. True Blue regularly offered low introductory prices to hook customers — $9.99 for the first month, for instance — while training employees to say nothing about the price increase that followed. The complaint alleges the price typically jumped to the company’s most expensive tier after just one or two months, without any prior disclosure of what that new price would be.

Plaintiff Melissa Millsaps signed up at a Rainstorm location in Hammond, Indiana. Her membership auto-renewed “at a higher price than was disclosed to her.” She was never told what the post-promotional price would be when she signed up. That information was intentionally withheld per company policy and training.

The Cancellation Labyrinth: Designed to Fail You

The Website Is a Trap, and That Was the Point

When a customer decides they want out, True Blue’s website doesn’t offer a “Cancel” button. There are no instructions on the site describing how to cancel. Instead, customers must independently discover a “Manage My Membership” button, click it, navigate to a dropdown menu, locate a hidden “Cancel Membership” option buried in a list, and then fill out a form requiring an email address, phone number, or barcode — information many customers never provided, or can’t recall. The complaint describes this as “a classic dark pattern intended to confuse and mislead customers.”

And here’s the gut punch: even completing that entire multi-step process doesn’t cancel the membership. It only sends a cancellation request ticket to True Blue. The company must then act on it. The complaint documents that True Blue routinely did not act on it — and kept charging customers anyway.

The FTC itself addressed this exact type of behavior in its September 2022 report “Bringing Dark Patterns to Light,” citing companies that “rejected any cancellation attempt” and “required consumers to navigate a difficult-to-find, lengthy, and confusing cancellation path on the website.” The FTC’s 2024 “Click-to-Cancel Rule” was designed to make these practices illegal. True Blue’s system is precisely the kind of scheme that rule targets.

In-Person Cancellation: Also a Dead End

Customers who gave up on the website and drove back to the physical location fared no better. True Blue employees at car wash locations regularly refused to process cancellations in person, telling customers to cancel online — directing them back to the broken digital maze they’d just escaped from. The complaint alleges this is standard company policy.

When employees did verbally acknowledge a cancellation, the charges continued regardless. The system was never updated. The billing engine kept running. Plaintiff Millsaps had to go back to the Hammond, Indiana location three separate times — and was billed for months after each visit — before her membership was finally stopped.

The Illinois Automatic Contract Renewal Act (IACRA) specifically requires that companies provide a “cost-effective, timely, and easy-to-use mechanism for cancellation.” True Blue’s obstacle course of hidden dropdown menus, unreturned requests, and deflecting employees is the legal opposite of that requirement.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Dollar Amounts Don’t Capture

Monte Connors: Three Emails, Eight Months, One Bank Stop Payment

Monte Connors visited a Rainstorm Car Wash in Belleville, Illinois on July 3, 2023. He intended to buy one car wash. A company employee took his debit card and processed a transaction. Connors was told — and only told — that this was a membership for $9.99. No disclosure about auto-renewal. No disclosure that $9.99 was a promotional price. No disclosure that starting the very next month, $40 would leave his account automatically, every 30 days, until he made it stop.

Connors sent his first cancellation email on October 3, 2023. True Blue ignored it. He sent another on January 3, 2024, specifically noting he had already cancelled three months prior. True Blue ignored it. He sent a third on February 4, 2024. True Blue charged his card again on March 20, 2024. He had to file a formal stop-payment request with his bank — a significant, time-consuming, stressful action most people have never had to take — just to stop a car wash company from taking money he never authorized. To this day, he has received no refund.

What the court filing captures in dollar terms: approximately $249.99 total in charges ($249.99 — the equivalent of more than six weeks of groceries for one person), five unauthorized post-cancellation charges, and zero dollars returned. What the filing cannot fully capture: the anxiety of watching your bank account drained month after month after month by a company that acknowledged your emails and did nothing. The powerlessness of that experience belongs in this ledger.

Dominique Dean: Billed for a Service He Never Agreed To

Dominique Dean went to a Rainstorm location in Bloomington, Illinois in July 2023 to buy a single car wash. He handed over his debit card. A True Blue employee enrolled him in an auto-renewing monthly membership without telling him that’s what was happening. Dean believed he was purchasing one wash. He gave his billing information for one transaction. True Blue used that information to set up ongoing recurring charges without his consent.

When Dean realized what was happening — his account draining every month for a membership he never wanted — he went back to the car wash location and asked an employee to cancel it. The employee told him the system wasn’t working. Dean continued to be billed. He eventually had to cancel the debit card entirely to stop the charges. His bank card — his access to his own money — became collateral damage in True Blue’s billing scheme. He has received no refund.

This is the part of the story that no settlement amount will fully address. Dean didn’t just lose money. He lost the use of a payment card. He had to navigate the hassle of updating his card information across every service and vendor linked to that account. All of it because a car wash employee followed company training and signed him up for something without telling him.

Melissa Millsaps: Three Trips, Three Cancellations, Two Months of Charges After the Last One

Melissa Millsaps signed up at a Rainstorm location in Hammond, Indiana in 2023. She asked how to cancel at sign-up. She was told: go to the website. Within a month, she tried. The website’s cancellation process defeated her. She drove back to the physical location. The employee refused to cancel in person and sent her back to the website. She stood her ground and demanded the cancellation happen immediately. An employee told her it was done.

It was not done. Her membership auto-renewed at a higher price than she had ever been told. She returned to the Hammond location. Again, she demanded cancellation. True Blue billed her for at least two more months after that second in-person request. She returned a third time. Only after this third visit did her membership actually stop. Three trips to a car wash to accomplish something a company is legally required to make easy, timely, and cost-free. She has received no refund for the unauthorized charges.

Raja Bellani: Cancelled in Person, Billed Two Days Later

Raja Bellani, a Texas resident, signed up for a month of free car washes at a Clean Freak location in Collins County in August 2024. On September 23, 2024, he went to the Clean Freak location in person and cancelled his membership directly. Two days later — on September 25, 2024 — True Blue charged his credit card $34.99 ($34.99 — the cost of filling a gas tank for many Americans) in an auto-renewal transaction. He had not authorized any charge after his cancellation. Like the others, he cancelled his card to stop it. He has received no refund.

Legal Receipts: Straight From the Complaint

“Customers who visit the Defendant’s physical car wash locations are regularly signed up for automatically renewing car wash memberships without their knowledge or consent. Specifically, customers that fall prey to Defendant’s scheme believe they are only purchasing a single car wash but are instead enrolled in a car wash membership by Defendant.” — Class Action Complaint, paragraph 4

“Upon information and belief, Defendant intentionally trains employees to sign up as many customers for memberships as possible. As a result, Defendant fails to provide clear and conspicuous disclosures that its memberships will automatically renew at its physical locations. Nor does Defendant clearly and conspicuously disclose to customers at its physical locations how they can cancel their memberships.” — Class Action Complaint, paragraph 38

“Defendant also violates these laws by failing to disclose clearly and conspicuously how to cancel the membership at the time of signup, and by failing to disclose that the price of the membership will automatically increase without the customers’ consent after a trial period.” — Class Action Complaint, paragraph 7

“Defendant engages in a systematic practice of refusing to cancel memberships when customers formally request cancellation and charging members after they have requested their memberships be cancelled.” — Class Action Complaint, paragraph 52

“Defendant has unjustly retained a benefit in the form of improper membership fees to the detriment of Plaintiffs and the members of the Classes. Defendant has retained this benefit through its fee maximization scheme, and such retention violates fundamental principles of justice, equity, and good conscience.” — Class Action Complaint, paragraphs 205-206

“Defendant’s violations were willful and were done as part of a scheme, artifice, or device with intent to defraud or mislead, and therefore are incurable deceptive acts under the [Indiana] DCSA.” — Class Action Complaint, paragraph 178

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Gets Hurt and How

Economic Inequality: This Scheme Targets the People Who Can Least Afford It

True Blue’s scheme weaponizes debit cards against working-class consumers. The complaint documents that multiple named plaintiffs — not credit card users who can dispute charges with relative ease, but debit card holders — were the direct targets. When True Blue drains a debit card, that money is gone immediately from a checking account. It can trigger overdraft fees. It can leave someone short for rent, groceries, or utilities before they even realize what happened.

The $9.99-to-$40 bait-and-switch is particularly predatory against people living on tight budgets. A customer who can comfortably afford a one-time $9.99 car wash may have no margin for a surprise $40 monthly charge. The promotional price is designed to clear the psychological barrier of the initial decision; the hidden price hike arrives the following month when the customer has already moved on and isn’t watching their account closely. That is the mechanism. That is the target.

The lawsuit documents that at the time Couche-Tard purchased True Blue, the company had over 170,000 subscriber members. If even a fraction of those members were enrolled without proper consent or trapped by opaque cancellation processes, the aggregate financial extraction from ordinary consumers is staggering. The complaint estimates the class in the thousands and puts the amount in controversy at over $5,000,000 ($5 million — enough to cover a month of groceries for more than 2,700 families). That money came from wallets that could feel it.

The complaint also documents that both Rainstorm and Clean Freak brands carry an “F” rating from the Better Business Bureau — the lowest possible score. That rating is the visible tip of a much larger iceberg: thousands of working people who didn’t understand they were in a subscription, couldn’t navigate the cancellation process, and simply gave up and kept paying. The ones who gave up and kept paying are not in this lawsuit. They’re still being charged.

The broader economic context matters here. Private equity’s colonization of the car wash industry created a business model structurally incentivized to maximize subscription lock-in and minimize churn. True Blue is not an accident or an outlier — it is the logical end product of a financial system that views ordinary consumers as revenue streams to be optimized, not people to be served honestly. The complaint explicitly cites industry research advising companies that “where the recurring nature of the service, billing practices, or cancellation process is unclear or complicated, consumers may lose interest but be too harried to take the extra step of canceling.” They didn’t stumble into this. They read the research and built the system accordingly.

Public Health: The Stress Economy of Being Financially Trapped

The Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act — one of the statutes cited in the complaint — explicitly allows consumers to seek damages for “mental anguish,” not just economic loss. That language exists because lawmakers recognized that financial fraud causes measurable psychological harm. The experience of watching unauthorized charges appear on your account month after month, of sending cancellation emails and being ignored, of making repeated trips to a physical location and being turned away, produces chronic low-grade stress that the complaint captures in detail across four individual plaintiff accounts.

Mental anguish is a real, documented harm. Financial stress is one of the leading contributors to anxiety, sleep disruption, and deteriorating mental health outcomes across all demographics. True Blue’s scheme did not just steal money. It created months of financial uncertainty, eroded trust in consumer institutions, and forced multiple individuals to take defensive actions — cancelling bank cards, filing stop-payment requests, making repeated confrontational visits to a business — that consumed time, energy, and emotional bandwidth that working people cannot get back.

Plaintiff Bellani’s Texas sub-class specifically seeks damages for mental anguish alongside economic damages. The complaint characterizes True Blue’s actions as “unconscionable” — taking advantage of consumers’ “lack of knowledge, ability, experience, or capacity to a grossly unfair degree.” That standard exists in Texas law precisely because the harm of being deceived and trapped is understood to extend beyond the dollar amount on a bank statement.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now?

The Corporation Behind the Corporation

True Blue Car Wash LLC is a Delaware limited liability company. Its sole member — the entity that owns it — is Alimentation Couche-Tard, Inc., a Canadian multinational corporation whose U.S. headquarters is in Arizona. Couche-Tard operates the Circle-K brand globally. The next time you see a Circle-K logo on a Rainstorm or Clean Freak car wash, you’re looking at the parent company of the entity named in this lawsuit.

Named Parties

The four named plaintiffs are Monte Connors (Illinois), Dominique Dean (Illinois), Melissa Millsaps (Indiana), and Raja Bellani (Texas). They are suing True Blue Car Wash LLC on behalf of potentially thousands of class members across three states.

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