Legal issues and news

The National Rifle Association bagged a key victory in a case against a former top New York state official. The high court's ruling could make it harder for regulators to discourage financial institutions from doing business with specific industries.

In this month's roundup of top tech news: A firsthand look at the impact of Zelle fraud, the Supreme Court upholds the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's funding, Walmart's split from Capital One and more.

In this month's roundup of top banking news: a Supreme Court ruling on CFPB funding, TD Bank's money laundering woes, an FDIC workplace probe reveals a culture of misconduct and more.

Shan Hanes, who led Heartland Tri-State Bank in Kansas until it failed last year, pleaded guilty to one count of embezzlement by a bank officer. He now faces up to 30 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 8.

The Supreme Court decided to rule narrowly in Cantero v. Bank of America, N.A., sending the case back to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit with instructions to perform a more nuanced analysis on whether a New York escrow law unfairly discriminates against national banks.

A federal judge in Texas is locked in a back-and-forth with an appeals court over whether the industry's challenge to a cap on credit card late fees should be moved to Washington, D.C.

Early Warning, which operates the payment network, says the rate of reported fraud is less than a tenth of one percent. Yet stories of consumers who have fallen victim to scams and lost money as a result abound. 

Executives at the Toronto-based bank said last year that they planned to add 150 branches in the United States. But when pressed on Thursday, they could not say how much they'll scale back their ambitions due to investigations over TD's anti-money laundering practices.

Executives from JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are expected to get grilled in Congress this summer over victims of Zelle scams who don't get reimbursed. A Senate panel has spent much of the last year examining fraud on the bank-owned payments network.

It is increasingly clear that joining a risk consortium is the best defense banks have against fraudsters who are increasingly powered by artificial intelligence.

The payday loan industry is looking to extend its years-long legal fight with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It's planning to ask a federal appeals court to revisit a ruling that upheld a proposed limit on how often payday lenders can try to pull money from their customers' accounts.

Executives at the Canadian bank, which recently took a major provision for potential fines, say they're working to shore up anti-money laundering controls. At the same time, they're preparing employees and investors for an expensive slog as they work to satisfy U.S. officials.

The Supreme Court issued an opinion Thursday morning that was unequivocal in its view that Congress is constitutionally empowered to fund agencies with open-ended and indirect funding mechanisms, overruling a 5th Circuit opinion from 2022 that found that executive branches must be subject to direct Congressional appropriations.

The small business lender's bankrupt shell has agreed to pay up to $120 million in connection with allegations that its verification processes for Paycheck Protection Program loan applications were faulty. The government argued that Kabbage reaped larger fees by enabling fraudulently inflated loans.

A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's credit card late fee rule, pausing it from being implemented days before it was meant to go live.

After a California woman spent more than a decade obtaining reparations for Nazi plundering of her family's belongings, the money disappeared from her bank account. Her saga highlights a gap in fraud cases between what consumers expect from their banks and what those banks are in a position to deliver.

A veteran Canadian bank analyst says Toronto-Dominion Bank's role in an alleged money-laundering scheme has made the "worst-case scenario" more likely — a huge fine for the lender and years of restrictions on its U.S. growth.

Gary Farro's testimony focused on both the banking activity of Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney who paid $130,000 to an adult film actress in 2016, and First Republic Bank's due diligence work.

Toronto-Dominion failed to submit suspicious-transaction reports in cases where it was reasonable to suspect the transfers were tied to money laundering or terrorist financing, along with other violations, according to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is considering new rules covering the collection and sale of some consumer data. If it's not careful, the agency could be inadvertently assisting identity thieves.