J.P. Morgan Chase Settles Lawsuit Over High Credit Card Crypto Charges
- The original complaint was looking to have J.P. Morgan Chase refund all wrongfully made charges, and pay $1 million in statutory damages.
- Even though we have no details of the settlement, we do know that all parties now have 75 days to submit their stipulations of settlement.
J.P. Morgan offices in Canary Wharf in London on November 1, 2013. Shutterstock
A J.P. Morgan Chase lawsuit, which accused the bank of overcharging customers that bought cryptocurrencies with its credit card, has been settled out of court.
Plaintiff Brady Tucker first brought the lawsuit against Chase in April 2018, when he complained that the bank had charged him more than the regular amount of $160 in fees and interest when purchasing crypto from Coinbase with his credit card in. Tucker accused the bank of violating its cardholder terms of service by not informing its clients about a change it has done to its cryptocurrency purchase policy in January 2018.
He accused the bank of not informing its customers for ten days, after crypto purchases began to be treated as “cash advances”, which have higher fees, and that the bank has violated the Truth in Lending Act. In July 2018 the bank sought a dismissal of the case, which resulted in Tucker filing an amended complaint alongside fellow plaintiffs Ryan Hilton and Stanton Smith.
The original complaint filed by the plaintiffs, which claimed to represent potentially thousands of J.P. Morgan Chase cardholders affected by the unannounced changes, sought to have the bank fully refund all wrongfully made charges, and pay $1 million in statutory damages. Even though details of the settlement were not disclosed, all parties now have 75 days to submit their stipulations of settlement.
Like many other U.S. consumer banks, in February 2018 J.P. Morgan banned the purchasing of cryptocurrency with their credit cards. Even though the ban still remains in place, J.P. Morgan has already started client trials of its “JPM Coin” cryptocurrency, which aims to speed up and improve inter-company remittance.
Last year, the bank also helped the Monetary Authority of Singapore in developing a blockchain-based multi-currency payment system. The prototype was designed to “provide interfaces for other blockchain networks to connect and integrate seamlessly”, as to enable payments denominated in different currencies to be completed on the same network.
- Launched in 2020, the bank’s permissioned blockchain-based value transfer system, called JPM Coin, now handles around $1 billion in daily transactions.
- The bank’s global head of payments said they now plan to widen the usage of the coin, and possibly create a “more retail version” of the token.
The corporate sign in front of the JP Morgan Chase & Co office building on Park Avenue, New York City, October 29, 2016. Felix Lipov/Shutterstock
- The Monetary Authority of Singapore successfully completed a cross-currency transaction using DeFi technology as part of its Project Guardian initiative.
- Singapore’s DBS Bank, Japan’s SBI Digital, and J.P. Morgan all participated in the trials that were conducted on the Polygon blockchain.
- Called Project Guardian, the new MAS pilot will be led by financial heavyweights J.P. Morgan, DBS Bank, and Marketnode.
- The first pilot of the project will explore DeFi applications in wholesale funding markets through the creation of liquidity pool of tokenized bonds and deposits.