The Setup: A Company That Smelled Opportunity in a Disaster

Before March 2020, Zaappaaz was a low-profile Houston-area company selling customized wristbands, lanyards, and keychains. Nothing remarkable about it. Then COVID-19 hit the United States, and everything changed. Within weeks, personal protective equipment became one of the most desperately needed commodities on Earth. Hospitals were running out of masks. Nursing home workers were improvising protection from garbage bags. Ordinary people were watching news footage of overwhelmed emergency rooms and trying to figure out how to keep their families safe.

Zaappaaz saw a market. The company pivoted rapidly to selling PPE: face masks, KN95 respirators, face shields, gloves, hand sanitizer, and no-touch thermometers. Its websites, promotional emails, and customer service representatives made sweeping guarantees about shipping speed. The exact language is in the court record: “GUARANTEED TO SHIP TODAY.” “IN STOCK—SHIPS SAME DAY.” “ALL PRODUCTS IN STOCK READY TO SHIP.” “ALL OF THESE PRODUCTS ARE FULLY IN STOCK, READY TO SHIP SAME DAY AND DELIVER IN 24 HOURS.”

Those were lies. The FTC’s investigation and the subsequent federal court findings establish that by April 2020, Zaappaaz had no reasonable basis to believe it could ship products within the time frames it was advertising. The company had previously operated as a drop-shipper, relying on a China-based vendor to actually stock and ship its products. When new legal restrictions in China and new FedEx shipping policies disrupted that model, Zaappaaz transitioned to shipping inventory to a Texas warehouse. But the transition was chaotic, and the company continued to advertise same-day and 24-hour shipping to hundreds of thousands of customers who were buying in good faith during a public health crisis.

The numbers document the scale of the deception. From March through December 2020, Zaappaaz processed tens of thousands of PPE orders. More than 50,000 of those orders, representing 59.5% of the total, were shipped late. Thousands of others were never shipped at all: Zaappaaz’s own records show no delivery or shipment information for 4.6% of its PPE orders. In some cases, the company shipped different products from what customers had ordered. And when customers tried to cancel and get their money back, Zaappaaz typically denied those requests.

Complaints to the company rocketed from zero in January 2020 to 820 in April 2020 alone. Complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau of Greater Houston and South Texas, with the Missouri Attorney General, and with the FTC itself all spiked sharply at the same moment Zaappaaz entered the PPE market. The FTC’s review of these external complaints recorded only 2 in March 2020, then 38 in April, 23 in May, and 15 in June, with the dominant complaint category being failure to ship as promised and refusal to provide refunds. None of this stopped Zaappaaz from continuing to take new orders with the same false promises.

The FTC filed suit in August 2020. The case worked its way through the federal courts for years. The district court ultimately found Zaappaaz and its owner, Azim Makanojiya, liable for violations of both the FTC Act and the Merchandise Rule (officially the Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule, or MITOR). The court permanently enjoined Zaappaaz from advertising or selling PPE, from making misrepresentations about any product, and from further Merchandise Rule violations. It also ordered a total monetary judgment of $37,549,472.14. Zaappaaz is now in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the monetary judgment should not stand. The FTC’s appellate brief, filed November 18, 2024, systematically dismantles each of those arguments.

By The Numbers: The Scale of the Fraud

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Cannot Fully Measure

The $37.5 million judgment is a legal accounting. It is a sum of line items: net revenue, undelivered orders, late-shipped merchandise, shipping surcharges. But court records are also full of something else entirely. They contain the names and declarations of actual people: workers, caregivers, essential employees who were trying to do their jobs during one of the most frightening periods in recent American history. What happened to them is not abstract. The federal court record makes it specific, and those specifics deserve to be read in full.

Amy Russell works at St. Louis University. In the early spring of 2020, she was the person responsible for sourcing personal protective equipment for university police officers. She searched the internet because there were, in her own words, “no local sources with available PPE.” She found Zaappaaz, saw the same-day shipping guarantees, confirmed availability via a live chat with a company representative, and purchased 500 face shields and 250 gowns for $6,103.13, including $360.63 specifically for one-day expedited shipping, with guaranteed delivery by April 3, 2020. The items did not arrive. She complained repeatedly and asked for a cancellation and refund. Zaappaaz refused. After she escalated the matter to the Missouri Attorney General, Zaappaaz promised at minimum to refund the expedited shipping charges. It never did. Those police officers went unprotected while Zaappaaz held their money.

Carol and Larry Faber were trying to protect their daughter, who was both a nurse and immunocompromised. That means she was at elevated risk of severe illness from COVID-19 while simultaneously being required to report to a hospital every day as healthcare systems strained under the surge. The Fabers reached out to multiple companies looking for masks, goggles, and face shields. Other companies “either did not have PPE in stock or could not deliver them quickly.” Zaappaaz had the items, offered same-day shipping, and guaranteed a delivery date. A company representative confirmed this by phone. The Fabers ordered 500 KN95 masks, 10 pairs of goggles, and 10 face shields for $4,776.73, including $431.93 in rush shipping. The items did not arrive by April 3, 2020. The Fabers kept contacting Zaappaaz. Zaappaaz kept refusing refunds. They ultimately got their money back only because PayPal intervened on their behalf. Zaappaaz never voluntarily returned a single dollar to this family who was trying to keep a vulnerable nurse alive.

Susan Alimonti was sourcing face shields for a moving company, trying to protect workers who had no choice but to keep going into people’s homes during the pandemic. She paid $52.91 for expedited shipping with a delivery guarantee of April 7, 2020. The products did not arrive. She tried to cancel. Zaappaaz told her she could not cancel or receive a refund. The products eventually appeared three weeks late. By that point, she had already bought face shields from another vendor because she had no way of knowing whether Zaappaaz’s shipment would ever show up. She paid twice. Zaappaaz promised to refund the rush shipping charges. It did not.

Mechelle Braswell works at a peanut shelling plant. The FTC’s brief notes that her company needed disposable gloves and no-touch thermometers “as soon as possible to check employee temperatures as they entered the plant.” This was a real-world health screening protocol. Without the thermometers, the plant could not implement basic COVID-19 screening for workers who could not do their jobs remotely. Braswell bought three thermometers and two boxes of gloves for $334.94, including $28.99 for one-day expedited shipping on one thermometer. The shipment arrived nearly five weeks late. When it did, it contained only one of the three thermometers she had ordered. The other two thermometers she had paid for simply did not exist in the package. She never received a refund for the undelivered items. The district court record shows she complained repeatedly; Zaappaaz refused every time. A peanut shelling plant paid for pandemic safety equipment for its hourly workers. Zaappaaz took the money and delivered neither the goods nor the compensation it owed.

These are the named cases. The court record also points to others: Rhiannon Guevin, Andrew Li, Gary Hendricks, Jason Pierson, and hundreds of unnamed customers whose complaints flooded into Zaappaaz, into the Better Business Bureau, and into state and federal enforcement agencies. One customer complaint preserved in the record captures the feeling precisely: “I ONLY placed the order from [Zaappaaz] because the wipes were ‘in stock’—these days, most other companies don’t have this product in stock, nor do they imply that they do. I would never have placed the order in the first place, now I am hostage to your company’s delay in delivering on a product that you[] said was available.” Another customer, ordering for a hospital, wrote: “Our hospital needs this ASAP.” That is the register of harm that no dollar figure fully captures: the weight of responsibility these people were carrying, the impossible circumstances they were navigating, and the specific, deliberate way Zaappaaz exploited their desperation at the worst possible moment.

Legal Receipts: What The Court Record Actually Says

These are direct quotations and direct factual findings from the FTC’s appellate brief (Case No. 24-20234) and the underlying district court record. Nothing here is paraphrased. Read the source document yourself.

“Appellants Zaappaaz, L.L.C., and Azim Makanojiya (collectively, ‘Zaappaaz’) flagrantly violated these requirements, cheating consumers out of as much as $37.5 million during a national emergency.”

FTC Appellate Brief, Introduction, p. 1 (Case No. 24-20234, filed Nov. 18, 2024)

“In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans were desperate to obtain personal protective equipment (‘PPE’) like face masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer. Zaappaaz sought to capitalize on that demand by selling PPE on its websites with claims like ‘GUARANTEED TO SHIP TODAY’ and ‘IN STOCK—SHIPS SAME DAY.'”

FTC Appellate Brief, Introduction, p. 1

“Zaappaaz knew that it could not meet its shipping promises due to logistical and supply chain problems. Almost 60% of PPE orders were shipped late. Many orders arrived weeks after the promised delivery date, by which time some buyers had already purchased PPE elsewhere. Others were never delivered at all. Zaappaaz never offered customers the refund-or-consent option required by the Merchandise Rule. Nor did Zaappaaz cancel orders and provide refunds when orders did not ship on time—in fact it routinely refused customer requests for cancellation and refunds.”

FTC Appellate Brief, Introduction, pp. 1-2

“From March to December 2020, over 50,000 PPE orders—59.5% of the total—were shipped late. Sometimes Zaappaaz shipped different products than what customers had ordered. And many orders were never delivered at all; Zaappaaz’s records show no delivery or shipment information for 4.6% of its PPE orders.”

FTC Appellate Brief, Statement of the Case, p. 8 (ROA.6718-21)

“When dissatisfied customers contacted the company seeking to cancel their orders and get a refund, Zaappaaz typically denied those requests.”

FTC Appellate Brief, Statement of the Case, p. 8 (ROA.6718)

“Customer complaints to the company increased from zero in January 2020 to 820 in April 2020.”

FTC Appellate Brief, Statement of the Case, p. 11 (ROA.6716)

“Zaappaaz ‘took advantage of consumers’ desperation to quickly obtain scarce PPE at the onset of a global pandemic with false promises of fast, risk-free PPE deliveries when speed of delivery was of the essence to consumers.’ Zaappaaz ‘knowingly disseminated false advertising about shipping times and then failed to ship most PPE orders on time, if at all.’ It also failed to provide the refund-or-consent option required by the Merchandise Rule and routinely denied refunds to customers who requested them. This conduct continued even past the entry of the stipulated preliminary injunction.”

FTC Appellate Brief, Statement of the Case, pp. 17-18 (ROA.6725), quoting district court Findings of Fact

“The court further held that an injunction was warranted because the violations were not isolated, Zaappaaz acted with a high degree of scienter, it offered no assurances against future wrongdoing, it failed to recognize the wrongful nature of its actions, and its business was ongoing and presented ample opportunities for future violations.”

FTC Appellate Brief, Statement of the Case, p. 18 (ROA.6726-27)

“Customers who purchased PPE from Zaappaaz expecting same-day shipping but who received their orders late are entitled to full refunds because Zaappaaz’s false statements tainted their purchasing decisions. Particularly given the widespread need for immediate delivery of PPE in March through December 2020, if customers had been told the truth about Zaappaaz’s shipping timelines, they may not have purchased PPE from Zaappaaz.”

FTC Appellate Brief, Statement of the Case, p. 19 (ROA.6731), quoting district court Conclusions of Law

“I specifically ordered from [Zaappaaz] because the website says that the antibacterial wipes are ‘IN STOCK—READY TO SHIP.’ I ONLY placed the order from [Zaappaaz] because the wipes were ‘in stock’—these days, most other companies don’t have this product in stock, nor do they imply that they do. I would never have placed the order in the first place, now I am hostage to your company’s delay in delivering on a product that you[] said was available.”

Customer complaint email, cited in FTC Appellate Brief, Argument Section I.B.1, p. 32 (ROA.3390)

“Our hospital needs this ASAP. We were told that you did have them in stock and would ship April 3rd…. This is a matter than needs resolution NOW.”

Customer complaint email, cited in FTC Appellate Brief, Argument Section I.B.1, p. 32 (ROA.3476)

“[A] shipping delay is ‘unacceptable because when I log into your website it tells me that these thermometers are in ‘stock and that they will ship within 24 hours’. These need to be shipped out immediately.'”

Customer complaint email, cited in FTC Appellate Brief, Argument Section I.B.1, p. 32 (ROA.3489)

“The Rule obviously cannot permit a seller who (1) fails to ship as required and (2) in addition violates the Rule’s requirement of an offer to the buyer to cancel the order to retain any benefits from the transaction.”

Mail Order Merchandise Rule, 40 Fed. Reg. 51582, 51592 (Nov. 5, 1975), quoted in FTC Appellate Brief, Argument Section II.A, p. 54

“The fraud in the selling, not the value of the thing sold is what entitles consumers…to full refunds.”

FTC v. Figgie Int’l, 994 F.2d 595, 606 (9th Cir. 1993), quoted in FTC Appellate Brief, Argument Section II.B, p. 56

“To require proof of each individual consumer’s reliance on a defendant’s misrepresentations would be an onerous task with the potential to frustrate the purpose of the FTC’s statutory mandate.”

FTC v. BlueHippo Funding, LLC, 762 F.3d 238, 244 (2d Cir. 2014), quoted in FTC Appellate Brief, Argument Section I.B.2, p. 35

“Because it was ‘crucial that we get PPE quickly to protect our officers,’ and there were ‘no local sources with available PPE,’ Ms. Russell searched the Internet and came across a Zaappaaz website advertising that products were in stock and would ship within 24 hours…’Based on these representations and the fact that PPE would be shipped within 24 hours,’ Ms. Russell purchased 500 face shields and 250 gowns for $6103.13, including $360.63 for one-day shipping, with delivery guaranteed by April 3, 2020.”

FTC Appellate Brief, Statement of the Case, pp. 8-9 (ROA.2446)

“The shipment arrived nearly five weeks late, by which time Ms. Braswell had ordered thermometers from another company. The shipment was also incomplete, containing only one of the three thermometers she had ordered. Ms. Braswell never received a refund for the undelivered products.”

FTC Appellate Brief, Statement of the Case, p. 11 (ROA.2419)

Societal Impact Mapping: Three Systems Zaappaaz Damaged

Environmental Degradation

The environmental costs embedded in this fraud are real and quantifiable, even if they do not appear as a line item in a court judgment. Zaappaaz operated initially as a drop-shipper relying on a China-based vendor. When that model collapsed under new legal restrictions and FedEx policy changes, the company pivoted to shipping bulk inventory to a Texas warehouse before redistributing to individual customers. This created a two-stage supply chain where there had previously been one. Every redundant shipment: PPE from China to Texas, and then from Texas to tens of thousands of individual addresses across the United States, carried a carbon cost that would never have existed if the company had simply been honest about its inventory and shipping capacity.

Beyond the double-shipping problem, the fraud generated an enormous volume of secondary shipping activity. Thousands of customers who did not receive their orders on time went and bought PPE from other vendors. That means the same demand was, in many cases, fulfilled twice: once by Zaappaaz (eventually, weeks late) and once by a different supplier (to meet the actual urgent need). Both shipments existed because of Zaappaaz’s deception. The court record documents multiple individual cases where this occurred: Susan Alimonti bought face shields from another vendor before Zaappaaz’s belated shipment arrived. Mechelle Braswell purchased replacement thermometers. Amy Russell presumably sourced her police department’s PPE elsewhere after the April 3 deadline passed. Each of these substitute purchases represents additional packaging, additional fuel, additional logistics infrastructure deployed to compensate for Zaappaaz’s lies.

There is also the question of the undelivered goods themselves. Zaappaaz’s records show no delivery or shipment information for 4.6% of its PPE orders. The FTC’s forensic accountant, Rufus Jenkins, calculated this represents $12,241,035.69 in net revenue from products that simply did not exist in the hands of buyers. Where did those goods go? The court record does not specify. But product that is manufactured, partially staged in a supply chain, and then never actually used or delivered still carries the environmental footprint of its production. The pandemic PPE supply chain was itself environmentally costly: single-use plastics, synthetic materials, industrial production at scale. Zaappaaz’s chaotic operations did nothing to mitigate that footprint and likely amplified it through logistical disorder.

Public Health

The public health dimension of this fraud is the most direct and the most disturbing. The court’s own findings are explicit: Zaappaaz’s violations occurred during “a national emergency,” and the company “took advantage of consumers’ desperation to quickly obtain scarce PPE.” The word “desperation” is not rhetorical flourish. It is a factual description of the market conditions in March through December 2020. Hospitals were operating with improvised PPE. Nursing homes were reporting mass deaths. Immunocompromised people like Carol and Larry Faber’s daughter were going to work every day in hospitals without adequate respiratory protection. Essential workers at food processing plants, moving companies, and universities needed equipment immediately.

The delays Zaappaaz imposed had real public health consequences. When Mechelle Braswell’s peanut shelling plant went nearly five weeks without the thermometers needed for employee temperature screening, that screening did not happen. The court record describes a shipment that arrived five weeks late and was also incomplete, containing only one of three thermometers ordered. That gap in screening capacity meant workers entered a shared facility during a period of active community transmission without the most basic public health protection their employer had tried to purchase for them. The harm is not hypothetical. It is the documented, court-verified result of Zaappaaz taking money and not delivering what it promised.

The aggregate public health impact scales with the order volume. Zaappaaz processed tens of thousands of PPE orders during the pandemic. Over 59.5% of those orders were late. In the context of a fast-moving respiratory disease with an exponential spread pattern, delivery timing was not a mere inconvenience. It was the difference between adequate protection and exposure during a period of acute risk. The court record documents consumers who specifically paid rush shipping premiums, ranging from $28.99 to $431.93 per order, to reduce the window of vulnerability. Zaappaaz took those premiums and still did not ship on time. The premiums themselves are documented proof that speed of delivery was not incidental to the transaction. It was the primary thing being purchased. Zaappaaz’s deliberate misrepresentation on exactly that point placed unquantifiable numbers of people at additional health risk during one of the deadliest periods in modern American history.

The court record also notes that Zaappaaz continued its violations even after stipulating to a preliminary injunction. The district court specifically cited this in its findings, stating that the deceptive conduct “continued even past the entry of the stipulated preliminary injunction.” A company that will continue deceptive practices after signing a federal court agreement is not a company that was making honest mistakes under chaotic conditions. It is a company that weighed the cost of compliance against the revenue from continued fraud and chose fraud.

Economic Inequality

The economic damage from Zaappaaz’s conduct did not land evenly. It targeted people who were already in difficult economic positions: essential workers who could not work from home, small businesses that had to stay operational to survive, and institutions like universities and hospitals that were trying to protect workers whose jobs required physical presence. These are not the demographics that have the easiest time absorbing a fraudulent $300 or $5,000 charge. The Faber family spent $4,776.73. Amy Russell spent $6,103.13 of university funds she was responsible for. Mechelle Braswell spent $334.94 at a peanut shelling plant. These were significant expenditures made in good faith, and Zaappaaz refused to return them.

The economic injury was also compounded. Every customer who had to buy PPE a second time because Zaappaaz failed to deliver on schedule paid twice. The court record documents this directly. Susan Alimonti purchased face shields from another vendor. Mechelle Braswell ordered replacement thermometers. Amy Russell’s declaration implies she had to source protection for her police officers through other channels after April 3 came and went. For small businesses and institutional buyers operating on tight budgets during an economic crisis, paying twice for the same essential goods represents a concrete economic blow. For individual consumers, many of whom paid expedited shipping fees ranging from $28.99 to $431.93 specifically because they needed the goods urgently, the refusal to honor even those fees after non-delivery represents an additional transfer of wealth from working people to a company that had already failed to provide what was paid for.

The structure of Zaappaaz’s operations also illuminates the power imbalance at work. The company refused individual refund requests, apparently calculating that most consumers would not have the resources, time, or knowledge to escalate through legal channels. The Fabers ultimately recovered their money only because PayPal intervened. Amy Russell had to contact the Missouri Attorney General’s office. Zaappaaz had promised that AG’s office a refund of at minimum the expedited shipping charges and then still did not pay. The company appears to have operated on the assumption that it could simply wait out the complaints. It took a federal lawsuit and four years of litigation to reach a judgment. The vast majority of consumers who were harmed by this scheme had no realistic path to individual recovery without the FTC acting on their behalf. That is precisely the economic asymmetry that consumer protection law exists to correct, and precisely the dynamic that Zaappaaz exploited.