You realize your passport is about to expire with a trip six weeks out, and panic does the rest of the decision-making for you — you click the first official-looking result and hand over a card number before you’ve really thought it through. A company accused of posing as the U.S. State Department is alleged to have been counting on exactly that moment, and the FTC is now suing over it.
What the FTC’s complaint alleges
The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against GovAssist LLC, Entry LLC, and their owner, Scott Zuckerman. The agency alleges the companies ran the websites GovAssist.com, Entry.com, and IVS.us in a way designed to make customers believe they were dealing with the federal government, or a provider authorized by it. They were neither, according to the complaint.
How customers allegedly got there: the FTC says the companies bought Google search ads that placed their sites at the top of results for searches like “apply for a new passport” — the exact phrase someone in that six-weeks-before-the-trip panic would type.
What the sites allegedly promised to deliver
Once a visitor landed on the site, the complaint alleges they were led to believe the company could directly issue a U.S. passport — something no private company can actually do. In practice, the FTC says many customers received little more than a completed application form, the same one the State Department provides for free on its own website.
That gap between what was implied and what was delivered is the core of the FTC’s case: not that the service did nothing at all, but that it charged for something customers believed was official government processing when it wasn’t.
The price that was advertised, and the price the FTC says customers actually paid
The complaint alleges the companies advertised a starting price of $89, prominently displayed, while downplaying that the State Department’s own separate fee would come on top of it. The FTC says the lowest price customers actually paid was $119, plus a $29 shipping charge — $148 before any government fee at all.
What that gap represents: an advertised price nearly 40% lower than what the agency says customers were actually charged, before the real government cost even entered the picture. That kind of spread is exactly the pattern the FTC’s pricing-disclosure rules exist to catch.
The turnaround promise the FTC says couldn’t be kept
The companies allegedly promised expedited passports in as little as three to four business days — faster, the complaint says, than the fastest option the State Department itself actually offers. A private company reselling a government process can’t outrun the government’s own timeline for issuing that document, which is the specific claim the FTC is challenging here.
Alongside the turnaround claims, the complaint alleges the companies promoted an “excellent” rating built largely on fake reviews posted to Trustpilot. That’s a separate allegation from the pricing and impersonation claims, but one the FTC says worked together with them to make the sites look more legitimate than they were.
The owner’s history with a different FTC case
Scott Zuckerman, who the FTC says owns and controls both GovAssist and Entry, is separately subject to a final FTC administrative order from an earlier, unrelated case. That case involved Support King LLC, a company tied to stalkerware — software used to secretly monitor another person’s device. That earlier case ended in a data-privacy order against him.
The two cases involve entirely different allegations and different underlying conduct. The connection worth noting is procedural: this isn’t the first time Zuckerman has been the subject of an FTC enforcement action, though the current passport case stands on its own set of allegations.
Where the case goes from here
The FTC filed its complaint in federal court in the District of Puerto Rico, after the Commission voted 2-0 to authorize it. Everything described in this article is, at this stage, an allegation the agency has made in a civil complaint — not a finding a court has made or a fact the defendants have admitted.
The companies and Zuckerman will have the opportunity to respond to the complaint in court. Nothing about this case has been resolved yet, and the FTC’s filing represents the opening of the case, not its conclusion.
Before you pay for a passport service
This article reports what a federal agency has alleged in a lawsuit — it isn’t a recommendation about any specific company, and this site isn’t in a position to tell you which passport service to use. What the complaint does illustrate clearly: the actual State Department application is free on its own website, travel.state.gov, and any company charging to “process” or “expedite” it is a separate, private service layered on top of that government process, not the government itself.
A passport site that doesn’t look or read like a .gov address is worth a second glance before you type in a credit card number, regardless of how official the ad that led you there looked.
The bottom line
An alleged $89 price that the FTC says became $148, a turnaround promise the agency says the State Department itself can’t match, and reviews the complaint calls largely fake — that’s the shape of the case the FTC just filed. None of it is settled yet; it’s the start of a lawsuit, not the end of one.
If you’re renewing a passport soon, the free government application is the baseline everything else gets compared against. Whatever a private service adds on top of that, it’s worth knowing the difference before you pay for it.