Companies that have demonstrated themselves as scams

Luma AI — Palo Alto, California

We publish this page based on our own direct, documented experience.

Luma AI (Palo Alto, California) advertised a price of $30 USD for 100 seconds of AI-generated video, then strung us along — repeatedly requiring us to authorize more and more credits to finish that same 100-second job. The platform leans heavily on buzzwords like “dreaming,” “imagining,” “envisioning,” and “crafting,” which are all mental states that an AI system is not capable of having. By the time the job was “finished,” we had been charged roughly $163 USD for what was quoted as a $30 USD job — and the footage itself is unusable: the lighting is wrong and inconsistent between shots, the subject appears in positions she should not be in, one scene shows only the back of her head instead of her face, the lip-sync does not match the audio, and the video flickers and is visually inconsistent throughout.

Even Luma AI's own output implicitly shows the job failed, yet the platform had no trouble billing us far beyond the quoted price. Based on our experience — and the numerous similar complaints we found on forums such as Reddit — it is our view that this platform is engineered to overcharge customers through repeated, escalating credit requests. When we raised the excessive billing with their customer service team, they went completely silent.

We have since filed a chargeback with our credit card company, filed a formal complaint with the California Consumer Protection Agency, and are preparing a complaint with the Palo Alto Police Department. If none of that recovers our money, we intend to pursue Luma AI in court. Our recommendation: this company should be entirely blacklisted, and we are publishing this so others know why.