Federal Investigators Secretly Shopped at Dollar General With Credit Cards — Every Single Trip Ended the Same Way

On a Friday in January, a shopper walked into a Dollar General in Cleveland, Ohio, filled a basket with 58 items and paid with a credit card. Nothing about the trip looked unusual.

Except the shopper worked for the federal government, and the receipt was evidence.

Thirteen of those 58 items rang up at a different price from the one on the label. Eight of them cost more. That January 16 visit is the first of several undercover buys laid out in a 95-page lawsuit the Federal Trade Commission and 20 states filed against Dollar General on Oct. 26. Regulators say what their investigators found was no fluke. Dollar General says nothing could be further from the truth. And some of the complaint’s most telling pages have been blacked out.

The Shoppers Who Weren’t Really Shopping

Between January 16 and April 1, FTC investigators made undercover purchases at Dollar General stores in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Maryland, according to the complaint, filed in federal court in Tennessee. They paid with credit cards every time.

“Every single undercover purchase resulted in Dollar General charging more at the register than the price advertised for multiple products,” the complaint says.

In Springfield, Missouri, 6 of 59 items rang up wrong. In Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, it was 6 of 60. In Baltimore, 5 of 59 — and every one of those five was an overcharge. After netting out the few undercharges, the four trips cost investigators an extra $3.25, $4.07, $2.60 and $3.65.

Small numbers. According to the lawsuit, that is the whole problem.

“Run Out of Money Before the Month Runs Out”

Dollar General runs more than 20,000 stores. Roughly 80% of them sit in towns of 20,000 people or fewer, and about three in four Americans live within five miles of one, the complaint says. Households earning $35,000 a year or less bring in 60% of the company’s revenue.

The filing quotes the chain’s own CEO describing those core customers as people who “run[] out of money before the month runs out” and lean on $1 items to balance their budgets.

From January 2023 through March 2026, the complaint says, Dollar General logged at least 29,265 customer complaints filed under a category called “Did Not Honor Marked Price” — from every one of the 48 states where it operates. The examples read like a grocery list: eggs marked $5.10 that rang up at $6.35 in Ohio. Twinkies on the shelf at $2.50 and on the receipt at $3.50 in Alabama. Three six-packs of Coca-Cola advertised in the paper for $11, rung up at $18 in Texas.

In Nephi, Utah, Meagan Harmon told The Salt Lake Tribune she once spotted a toy marked $6. “I got to the register, and it was like $12,” she said. An employee fixed it. Some shoppers, the complaint says, may never notice at all.

Ten Failed Inspections in a Row

State inspectors had been finding the same thing for years.

Most states fail a store when more than 2% of the items checked are priced wrong, the complaint notes. Dollar General stores failed more than 45% of pricing inspections in Utah between January 2023 and April 2026, the complaint says, and the Nephi store failed 15 of 19 — including ten in a row. In Kansas, the chain failed over 39% of inspections, and one store failed 44 times. In early 2026, 53% of New Mexico’s inspections ended in failure. At one store in Glasgow, Kentucky, 20 of 50 items were priced wrong, and every single error was an overcharge.

The company has paid before. Since 2019 it has settled seven pricing cases with six states for more than $6 million, according to the complaint.

“It was essentially a crime committed, 25 cents at a time,” Marc Dann, a former Ohio attorney general whose firm has sued the chain in class actions, told Fortune.

What’s Behind the Black Bars

The public version of the complaint is redacted in key places. Paragraphs describing Dollar General’s own internal price audits from 2019 to 2026 are blacked out, numbers and all. So is a December 2025 email the complaint says the CEO wrote after The Guardian published an investigation into dollar-store overcharges. The lawsuit prints the article’s headline, then hides what the CEO said about it.

The filing also makes a claim most shoppers would never think about: that the checkout itself is part of the problem. During one FTC buy, it says, the screen listing each item and price faced only the employee, while the investigator could see just a small display with abbreviated descriptions.

Alongside the FTC Act, regulators also invoked the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a federal law that bars using false statements to obtain a customer’s financial information. The complaint ties it to the moment of payment: after seeing the false prices, it says, shoppers hand over credit cards, debit cards and checks carrying their bank details.

“A price tag is a promise,” Utah Attorney General Derek Brown said. “The Complaint alleges Dollar General broke that promise thousands of times.”

Dollar General rejects all of it. “The lawsuit filed today by the Federal Trade Commission and several states suggests that we have abandoned our mission and willfully disregarded the affordability needs of our customers. Nothing could be further from the truth,” the company said, according to Fortune.

The company says its goal is “100% accuracy between shelf and register prices in every store,” that “occasional price discrepancies can occur,” and that employees are trained to make it right. It told the Tribune it handed over more than 200,000 documents and 350 gigabytes of data on an “unusually accelerated timeline,” and told Fortune the FTC’s settlement demand was far out of proportion to any realistic estimate of overcharges. It has promised to “defend this litigation vigorously.” None of the allegations have been proven in court.

What Dollar General Shoppers Can Do Now

• Who is suing: the FTC plus Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin.
• Is there a refund? Not yet. The lawsuit asks the court to order restitution and penalties, but there is no claims process, and nothing has been decided.
• At the register: watch each price as it scans, and check your receipt before you leave the store — many complaints in the lawsuit came from shoppers who only noticed at home.
• If the price is higher than the shelf or ad: ask for the marked price. The complaint says company policy requires employees to honor the lowest price, and settlements in Colorado and Pennsylvania require stores there to post signs saying so.
• To report a problem: contact your state attorney general’s consumer protection office or the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

In Nephi, the town whose Dollar General failed ten inspections in a row, Aubrey Messick told the Tribune her family can no longer afford a full shopping trip — just “a few loaves of bread, some eggs and some milk.” The overcharges in this lawsuit are measured in quarters and dimes. For the shoppers it describes, quarters and dimes are the budget.