Legal issues and news

Suncoast Credit Union moved from one-time identity checks to monitoring members for the life of the account. It says fraud losses fell more than a third.

The $110 million settlement, which was mapped out last fall, requires Wells Fargo to establish a $100 million fund to provide downpayment and closing-cost assistance to eligible borrowers who live in or plan to buy a home in certain low- and moderate-income census tracts.

In a move seen to bolster his 2028 presidential run, California Governor Gavin Newsom named Rohit Chopra, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to lead a new oversight agency; a Pine Bluff, Arkansas, bank employee was sentenced to 36 months in federal prison for bank theft; a Fairfax, Virginia, security administrator has been charged with allegedly stealing more than $6.6 million from his employer; and more in this week's banking news roundup.

Columbia caught the attacker still inside its systems on Dec. 19, three days before the access window closed, then took four months to notify customers.

As Americans lose more money to scams every year, the nation's largest bank has made a major investment in anti-fraud efforts.

Parker Group unexpectedly ceased operating last week, then filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy a few days later as sponsor banks and customers were left scrambling.

Banking groups that sued the state of Illinois over its law barring banks from charging interchange fees on taxes and tips cheered an appeals court ruling remanding the law to a lower court and vowed to keep the law going into effect, which is slated for July 1.

The opinion that supports national banks' ability to avoid paying interest on certain mortgage accounts in New York is unlikely to be the last word.

The Securities and Exchange Commission initially offered $179.5 million to Michael Bacon, who provided key information to the government about Wells Fargo's fake-accounts scandal. But shortly after SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins took office, the amount was sharply reduced.

An April 20 bankruptcy filing accuses Kfir Gavrieli of recruiting friends, family and his synagogue to sign sham contracts that inflated Aspiration's revenue.

Fincen just proposed the most significant reform to AML compliance in a generation, but its reporting forms are still broken. A handful of key changes would meaningfully reduce compliance burden without reducing investigative value.

Plaintiffs say Team 313 stole Social Security numbers and IDs. Chime says no data left its systems. None of the suits has its own evidence.

The litigants, with some of the industry's deepest pockets, may be filing the rare cases to flag and potentially punish bad brokers, one expert said.

San Diego County Credit Union won a court ruling that should help in its effort to get out of its deal to merge with a local competitor. A lawyer for SDCCU said he believes the judge's decision "signals the end of any merger between the two institutions."

The case exposes a systemic risk for banks: incident-response and ransomware-negotiation firms receive sensitive breach details that a corrupted insider can sell back to the attackers.

As judges have shown in other recent cases involving UBS and Stifel, firms have a high bar to clear if they want an arbitration award vacated.

New York extracted $5 million and a broker registration from Uphold over its promotion of CredEarn, a yield product whose issuer collapsed in 2020.

A federal judge harshly criticized the settlement of a civil suit between the Department of Justice and a Texas land developer.