New York, Nov. 14, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Claim Form Deadline: January 22, 2025
What’s the $197.5M ATM Surcharge Fees Class Action Settlement About?
A total $264.24 million class action lawsuit has been settled, including a new $197.5 million settlement with Visa and MasterCard over ATM surcharges and fees that allegedly violated federal consumer protection laws. According to the ATM fee class action lawsuits, consumers were overcharged when withdrawing money from ATMs with surcharges or “intercharge” swipe fees, using their Visa or Mastercard debit cards.
The class action lawsuit alleged that Visa, Mastercard, and other banks violated federal antitrust laws by adopting restraints that inflated ATM surcharges (also called ATM access fees) paid by consumers and businesses.
Visa, MasterCard and the banks involved in this ATM fee class action lawsuit deny these allegations, and the court has not decided who is right. However, the class action settlement is open to claims. There was a previous settlement for near $66 million with JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and other large United States banks.
This class action lawsuit alleges that Visa, MasterCard, and their member banks violated antitrust laws and charged merchants excessive fees for accepting credit and debit card payments. Specifically:
- The class action lawsuit claims Visa and MasterCard, along with member banks, set interchange fees (also called “swipe fees”) at artificially high levels.
- The ATM class action lawsuit alleges Visa and MasterCard imposed and enforced rules that limited merchants from steering customers to other payment methods, including no-surcharge rules, no-discounting rules, and honor-all-cards rules.
- According to the class action lawsuit, these unfair business practices allegedly insulated Visa and Mastercard from competitive pressure to lower interchange fees, thus making more money from consumers.
What is the Total Settlement Amount?
The total settlement amount is $264.24 million. This includes $197.5 million from Visa and Mastercard. The previous ATM surcharge settlement was for $66.74 million. The breakdown of the settlment fund is as follows:
- Visa has agreed to pay $104.6 million.
- Mastercard has agreed to pay out $92.8 million.
How Do I Qualify For a Payout?
You may qualify if you paid a surcharge to withdraw cash from a bank ATM in the United States between October 1, 2007, and July 26, 2024. You are not included if all your surcharged ATM transactions were reimbursed or conducted on cards issued by financial institutions outside the United States.
If you previously filed a claim and received payment, you may not need to do anything to receive payment from the new settlement – your information should already be on file with the ATM class action settlement admiinstrators. A stated exception to this is may be in the case that you paid any more qualifying ATM fees (according to the class action notice) after you submitted your previous ATM class action claim and were not reimbursed for those fees.
How Do I Find Class Action Settlements?
Find all the latest class actions you can qualify for by getting notified of new lawsuits as soon as they are open to claims on OpenClassActions.com.
How Much Can I Get Paid?
If you haven’t filed a valid claim before, you must submit a timely, valid claim now to get a payment. Each claim will be eligible for a proportional share the ATM class action settlement fund, based on the total number of valid claims. Since the payment amount depends on how many claims are approved, it’s impossible to know beforehand exactly how much each payment will be.
What is the Deadline to a Claim?
If you didn’t file a claim in the previous ATM surcharge class action settlements, you must submit a claim no later than January 22, 2025 in order to get paid from the $197,500,000 class action settlement with MasterCard and Visa. Learn more about how to file a claim and to see if you might qualify on OpenClassActions.com.