Deghi's countdown timer never ran out — the discount renewed itself. Italy fined it €2M

For two years, from January 2024 to the end of December 2025, Italian online retailer Deghi advertised discounts on its site deghi.it with countdown timers — limited-time offers, buy now or miss out. Except the limit never arrived: when a countdown expired, the offer automatically renewed on the same economic terms and a new countdown began. The pressure was simulated; the deadline did not exist.

Italy's competition authority AGCM ruled this a misleading commercial practice, framing it explicitly in the language of interface design: a dark pattern exploiting the 'scarcity heuristic' — the psychological tendency to value an offer more when it is wrongly believed to be expiring. The authority said the countdown timers misrepresented the prices and discounts of numerous products sold as on promotion.

On 25 June 2026 AGCM announced a €2 million fine on Deghi S.p.A. (case PS13027). The decision treats a countdown that always restarts as a form of false advertising — fake urgency, the authority reasoned, misleads consumers about prices and discounts as surely as a false number would.