Where price claims turn deceptive

A challenged price claim is usually not a lying problem. It is an arithmetic-and-memory problem with a clock attached. The reference price came from a vendor sheet nobody re-verified, the percentage was typed from gut feel instead of the two numbers on the page, the word "free" quietly absorbed the cost of the thing it is attached to, and in between, every marketer, freelancer, and template held a slightly different mental map of "what we are allowed to say." Nobody decided to bait the regulator. The claim simply stopped being checked — and with promo copy, there is no bounce notice either. A deceptive discount does not announce itself; it surfaces as a charge letter, a platform takedown, or a campaign pulled mid-flight.

The four places the exposure starts

• The invented reference price. "Was $120" is a factual claim about your own pricing history, and it is the single most challenged element in retail promotion. The FTC's Guide Against Deceptive Pricing, §233.1, is blunt about the standard: a former price is deceptive unless the item was openly and actively offered at that price for a reasonable period, in good faith, and not merely put there to show a discount. "Compare at" numbers imported from a supplier's list price without any bona fide market at that number trip the same guide's §233.2 on comparisons to actual prices at which other retailers offer the product. The framing feels safe because the number was printed somewhere — but "printed somewhere" is not "offered by you."
• The discounted arithmetic that never divides. "Save 40%" next to $99 → $79 is not a rounding disagreement; it is a 20% discount wearing a bigger number's clothes. The trade rulebooks treat the quantified claim as its own assertion — the deception policy at 16 CFR Part 251 asks what the claim actually conveys to a reasonable consumer, and a percentage conveys a computation. The mistake is almost never intentional: the percentage is inherited from last season's flyer, the prices are updated, and the claim silently detaches from the math.
• The "free" that is not free. A "free gift with purchase" whose cost was folded into the purchase price, or a "buy one, get one free" where the second unit's margin was loaded onto the first, is exactly the pattern the pricing guide addresses in its §233.3 on "free" offers and what you have to pay to get the "free" thing. The word is doing persuasion work the structure does not support — and the fix is usually a disclosure sentence, not a rewrite of the whole offer.
• Urgency written as inventory. "Only 3 left", "today only", "closing down" are factual claims about stock and timeframes. When the counter resets on refresh and the "final" sale runs every weekend, the copy asserts a scarcity the fulfillment system knows is false. Scarcity claims get challenged from both directions: as pricing-guide issues under the same Part 233 framework, and as deception questions under Part 251's reasonable-consumer standard — the consumer does not see your inventory table; they see your sentence.

Why published guides do not protect you on their own

The rules genuinely are public — the full text of the Guide Against Deceptive Pricing and the deception policy is readable today at eCFR, and the drafting conventions they use are the same "SHOULD / MUST" style documented in RFC 2119. What publication does not do is fit inside a marketer's head at the moment of drafting. Guides are written as standards and conditions; promos are produced as one banner line with a strikethrough number squeezed next to it. The translation layer — "does this claim assert that documented element?" — is where every team actually fails. It is also exactly the layer a mechanical check can own: patterns and arithmetic derived from the published guides, applied the same way on every run.

Why normal review misses it

Pre-launch review reads for the wrong axes. Teams check whether the offer is right, the price is attractive, the creative looks premium. Deceptive-pricing exposure is orthogonal to all three: a banner can be accurate, beautiful, and still carry an inherited "was" number, a percentage detached from its prices, or a "free" with an undisclosed condition. Math makes it worse in a way almost nobody eyeballs: a discount percentage recomputed from rounded display prices differs from the one computed from catalog cents, and EU-style decimal commas ($149,99 → 149.99) silently break mental arithmetic that was trained on thousands-separator commas. And the challenge side compounds the problem — a demand letter cites one sentence from the draft, which is precisely why the check should quote sentences back.

The cost lands later than the mistake

A pulled campaign is the cheap outcome. The expensive sequence looks like this: repeated challenged claims pull the brand into scrutiny that also covers legitimate promotions; the team responds by dropping numbers from the copy entirely — which costs conversion for reasons compliance never required; and somewhere in the sequence a once-clean storefront inherits a reference price it never offered. The tuition is paid as discount fatigue, per the same logic email senders learn about reputation only when opens stop.

What a mechanical pre-check should report

Three things, and only three, to be useful before publishing: which factor the line trips — named from the published guides, not from forum folklore; which sentence trips it — quoted from your draft, so the rewrite is obvious; and how badly — a severity rank that separates "this can end a campaign" from "this is a style preference." Anything more elaborate — compliance scores, regulator-guarantee predictors, auto-publishing — claims certainty nobody has. A tool that promises "FTC-proof" is selling a number, not information.

The mechanical answer is to check every draft against the published factors themselves — reference-price vocabulary, discount arithmetic against the actual price pair, "free" with undisclosed conditions, scarcity and urgency asserted as fact, missing material terms — ranked by how much they raise challenge risk. OfferPrecheck does exactly that: it reads your promo copy against what the pricing guides and the deception policy publish, and reports the lines that carry the risk.

One workflow habit makes the scan worth its cost: pre-check at the moment the draft is finished, not the moment the campaign is scheduled. Drafts drift — a new strikethrough number, a seasonal swap, a percentage inherited from last quarter — and each drift is a fresh copy of the risk, invisible until the challenge. Treating "written" and "checked" as one step keeps the two clocks from diverging, and keeps the audit trail per draft instead of per program.

It reports candidates for review. It is a heuristic pre-check — not a pricing-law certification or legal advice. No historical-price verification, store or ad-account connection, or platform-policy measurement performed.