Baltimore’s fight with Agora tests the limits of its new consumer protection powers

Liz Vayda’s dad called her with an opportunity he didn’t want to pass up. Could he borrow $8,000 for a limited-time offer he’d just gotten emailed about?

“It would be really good if we could cash in on it,” she recalled him saying. For Vayda, a small-business owner in Baltimore, the call was the first clue that her dad might not be making sound choices with his money as he got older.

His bank statements would later reveal many paid newsletter subscriptions, according to documents reviewed by The Banner, with charges ranging from $41 to $1,500.

Vayda’s dad, a former engineer who was always looking for ways to make money fast, had been paying for investment tips from The Oxford Club, Manward Press and InvestorPlace, among others. All are linked to the Mount Vernon-based publishing company Agora and another Baltimore company, MarketWise, which has extensive ties to Agora but is publicly traded and only partially owned by Agora’s holding company.

Liz Vayda and her brother, Dan, estimate their dad spent at least $15,000 on investment and financial products sold by Agora and MarketWise affiliates. When they asked their dad, they realized he thought he had been buying actual stocks, rather than investment advice about stocks.

Baltimore filed a sweeping consumer protection lawsuit against Agora in June, alleging that the company and its affiliates target older adults and trap them with recurring fees and a difficult-to-navigate refund process. It’s one of the city’s latest legal actions against big businesses, including betting site DraftKings and short-term lending app MoneyLion. The suits follow a law signed by Mayor Brandon Scott in 2023, granting the city’s Law Department new powers to enforce consumer protections.

Agora is the first local company to face a consumer protection lawsuit from the city. (MarketWise is also a defendant.) The lawsuit may hinge on proving that the companies’ far-flung newsletters and emails have reached — and harmed — Baltimore families like the Vaydas.

“The city’s complaint … does not identify a single Baltimore City resident impacted by any defendant’s trade practices,” Agora’s lawyers wrote in court papers, asking for the case to be dismissed. The Vaydas are not part of the city’s lawsuit and were reached by The Banner independently.

The Banner agreed not to name the Vaydas’ 82-year-old father to protect his privacy. He is now in an assisted-living facility in Massachusetts, near his son, and has been diagnosed with dementia.

In an email, Agora confirmed that the Vaydas’ dad was a customer for six years beginning in 2017, but said that he spent only about $4,300 in that time and received more than $1,800 in refunds.

“Agora strongly rejects any suggestion that our marketing efforts could be described as predatory,” the company said. “The fact is a company built on unhappy customers does not survive for nearly five decades or grow to serve millions of people around the world.”

MarketWise did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s difficult to quantify how many customers may have been affected by the practices Baltimore outlines in its lawsuit against Agora. The city’s lawsuit claims that the company has more than 3 million paid subscribers and revenues topping half a billion dollars, but says little about local victims of the company’s practices. Baltimore’s outside attorneys posted a callout on social media asking any consumers who have been “injured by Agora’s practices” to get in touch.

Agora’s lawyers said in recent court filings that the lawsuit strays far beyond what Baltimore can legally enforce. Baltimore’s consumer protection ordinance limits its protections to city residents and does not allow for the regulation of businesses beyond the city’s borders, the company’s attorneys wrote.

“Instead of suing multinational corporations supplying goods to the city, [the Law Department] now sues the city’s own homegrown businesses with out-of-City consumer bases,” the company’s attorneys wrote. “In so doing, the city weaponizes its local Consumer Protection Ordinance to seek to regulate a global business.”

Baltimore City Solicitor Ebony Thompson said in written responses that Agora and its affiliates, like every other business in Baltimore, are required to comply with the city’s consumer protection ordinance, which prohibits unfair, abusive or deceptive trade practices.

Thompson said the city began investigating Agora following a 2025 Forbes article about the company’s business practices, including its use of an “octopus” model that involves creating many shifting companies and products to drive internal competition and evade legal scrutiny by making it difficult to parse who is ultimately responsible for the business.

“Everyone is subject to the laws of the city and that includes all businesses, no matter their size or footprint,” Thompson said. “We will not allow profiting off of the backs of vulnerable consumers in contravention of the law.”

The city is seeking three possible outcomes: financial penalties against Agora for violating the city ordinance, compensation for customers who were harmed by the companies’ business practices, and a court injunction forcing the companies to bring their practices in line with the city’s consumer protection law.

Agora argued that the city does not have the authority to seek such extensive penalties and that a one-year statute of limitations blocks many of Baltimore’s claims.

Baltimore’s lawsuit is just the latest consumer protection action against Agora-linked companies. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission accused Agora affiliates in a lawsuit of tricking older adults with “extravagant promises” of miracle health cures and free money from the government.

The lawsuit revealed how the companies’ business practices had affected consumers across the country.

A retired New York City police detective called Agora Financial in 2017 to follow up on an online ad he’d seen for a new treatment that would cure pancreatic cancer, according to court records. His wife was dying of the disease, and he wanted to know which pharmaceutical company had the cure.

A company representative told him he’d find the information if he paid $2,500 for a newsletter called Agora Seven Figures. The retiree paid, but never found what he was looking for. His wife died the following year, and Agora Financial never refunded his money, he said in an affidavit.

A year later, the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives began receiving unusual letters from older adults asking to be added to a list of people who would get “Congressional Checks” in the mail.

“I would love to receive the extra income,” one woman wrote. “Thank you for listening to an old lady.”

There was no such thing as a Congressional Checks program, according to the FTC lawsuit. It was an invention of Agora Financial. The companies ultimately settled with the FTC for $2 million.

As Liz Vayda and her brother Dan worked to untangle their dad’s finances, they noticed that the email newsletters he received looked remarkably similar in their content and layout, though they seemed to come from different companies.

“It didn’t dawn on me until much later on that they were part of a bigger umbrella,” Dan Vayda said.

Their dad wanted to pass down a lifetime subscription he’d purchased so that his children would someday be able to benefit from the stock picks recommended by Agora-linked companies. Baltimore’s lawsuit claims these “lifetime” subscriptions are deceptive, requiring surprise maintenance fees and ending when the publication gets discontinued.

Dan Vayda was able to get some of the money refunded when he called within three months of the original purchase. He didn’t contest some older charges. Now he’s focused on figuring out how to pay for his dad’s increasingly expensive care in assisted living.

Liz Vayda said her dad’s predicament is emblematic of how older adults are often left to fend for themselves in the United States. For people who don’t have children or other loved ones to look out for them, there’s little standing in the way of companies that want to extract profit from susceptible customers, she said.

“There’s a reason why these kinds of companies exist and have these ways of marketing to the elderly, and it’s because they’re very successful at it,” she said. “It’s a thriving industry.”

Madeleine O’Neill is a freelance reporter in Baltimore.