Cleo reviews: complaints & concerns

• Repeat charges: Dozens report double or ongoing subscription debits—even after canceling or deleting their account—and refunds are rare.
• Tiny advances: Many say their limit drops from a few hundred to $20-$40 after on-time repayment or they never qualify at all despite steady income.
• Buggy app: Frequent “waiting for connection” loops, crashes after updates, and code-4 card errors block logins, bank links, repayments and withdrawals.
• Stacked fees: Users gripe that a $14.99 (or $5.99) membership is required before seeing any cash, then each split advance carries another $6-$9 express fee.
• No support: Help is mostly an AI bot; requests for humans get hours-long waits or copy-paste replies, leaving issues like missing deposits and address verification unresolved.

We dug through roughly 80 recent “scam”-tagged reviews for Cleo and saw the same pattern over and over: you hand over a $5–$38 subscription fee first, then discover you’re only eligible for a tiny $20–$30 advance (or nothing at all). Reviewers say that’s when the real headaches begin.

Complaints pile up about surprise express-transfer fees, repeat withdrawals every few days, charges continuing after cancelation, and a chatbot that won’t connect you to a human. Some users report Cleo yanked hundreds straight from linked bank accounts or kept subscription money while blocking access to advances.

A smaller but loud group worries about data misuse—lost deposits, hacked cards, even talk of a pending class-action over “illegal” fees. Taken together, the reports suggest a real risk of paying upfront and then fighting to get either the promised cash or a refund.

We found six overdraft-related complaints, mostly about Cleo pulling money earlier than agreed or tacking on surprise fees.

One user says $510 was taken a week early and a random $539 later; others report repayments hitting before payday and stacked subscription charges that pushed their accounts into the red.

Another review notes that after repaying $625 on time, the next offer dropped to $130, forcing them to scramble for cash just to dodge more bank fees, and several people say customer support ghosted them when they tried to sort it out.

In March 2025 the FTC sued Cleo for overstating how much cash you could get, claiming faster funding while tucking $3.99–$9.99 “express” fees into the fine print, hiding subscription terms, and making cancellations almost impossible. Cleo settled the next day, agreeing to a $17 million refund program, clear fee disclosures, and a hassle-free cancellation process; a federal court locked those promises in on April 1. BBB files from September–October 2025 show users still griping about withheld advances, surprise fees, unauthorized charges, and even questionable credit-reporting entries.