Zelle, the payments app you likely use primarily to send rent to your landlord, is at the center of a lawsuit announced Friday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
The CFPB is suing the fintech firm Early Warning Services — the bank-owned company that runs Zelle — as well as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, claiming that customers of the banks lost more than $870 million over Zelle’s seven-year existence.
A statement from the CFPB said Zelle and the banks failed “to protect consumers from widespread fraud on America’s most widely available peer-to-peer payment network,” claiming Zelle was rushed to market “to compete against growing payment apps such as Venmo and CashApp, without implementing effective consumer safeguards.”
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“The nation’s largest banks felt threatened by competing payment apps, so they rushed to put out Zelle,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in the statement. “By their failing to put in place proper safeguards, Zelle became a gold mine for fraudsters, while often leaving victims to fend for themselves.”
A Senate report over the summer noted that the banks reimbursed just 38 percent of fraud claims on Zelle. Banks often don’t pay for claims by noting that customers were scammed into making authorized payments, which the banks aren’t required to reimburse, CNBC reported.
“The banks failed to fix glaring flaws in their systems even as hundreds of thousands of customers filed complaints about fraud,” Chopra told reporters on Friday, via CNBC. “The banks knew their customers were having their money stolen, but since they weren’t bearing the cost of these losses themselves, they dragged their feet on fixing the problems.”
The banks and Zelle, meanwhile, have pushed back against the suit, with Early Warning Services calling it “meritless” and a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson telling The Hill it was “a last ditch effort in pursuit of [the CFPB’s] political agenda”
