JPMorgan Chase & Co. recently reached a $166 million settlement with attorney generals from 47 states and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over claims involving debt-collection practices brought to light by Kyros Law whistleblower Linda Almonte. The biggest bank within the United States agreed to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, penalties and consumer restitution.
Chase agreed to a $166 million payout that includes a fine of $30 million to the Office of the Comptroller of Currency and $50 million to consumers.
The settlement against JPMorgan stemmed from a whistleblower action by former JPMorgan Chase & Co. assistant vice president Linda Almonte, represented by Kyros Law. Almonte outlined how the company misrepresented the value of many bad accounts it was trying to sell. She also claimed that judgments on many accounts were not fully documented, were “robo signed,” and that Chase lacked proof that the judgments actually existed.
As a result of Almonte’s whistleblower action, the Office of the Comptroller of Currency found that Chase attached debt to the wrong consumers, continued adding interest and fees on charged off accounts while pursuing judgments, used “robo-signing” to issue documents that had deceptive information and pursued collection of discharged debts.
“In many cases, Chase stacked the deck against consumers by pursuing or unleashing collections cases where the listed debt was the wrong amount, tied to the wrong person or even discharged,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the participants of this settlement, said in a statement. “This settlement requires new safeguards to protect Chase consumers.”