The majority of people discard their ATM receipts. Really, there’s no reason to. You enter your PIN, take out your money, put the card in your pocket, and continue. The tiny fee that appears at the bottom, which can be $2, $3.50, or even more, hardly makes an impression. But it adds up over the course of months and years. It’s also possible that those fees were more than just inconvenient for a very long time. They might have been the result of an illegal deal between some of the biggest names in American banking, according to a significant class action lawsuit.
A $67 million settlement has been reached by JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America to settle allegations that they conspired to inflate surcharge fees assessed to consumers who used out-of-network ATMs. The surcharges in question are applicable to a particular and typical situation: you have a card from one bank, but you take out cash from the ATM of another bank. This case is all about that fee, the one that flashes on the ATM screen before you confirm the transaction.
Anyone who used a card issued by another U.S. financial institution to pay an unreimbursed surcharge at a bank ATM between October 1, 2007, and November 12, 2021, is covered by the settlement. That’s fourteen years. Furthermore, clients of the three defendant banks are not the only ones covered. There’s a good chance you’re covered if you used a card issued by someone else to pay a surcharge to any bank that is a member of the Visa or Mastercard ATM network and you were never reimbursed.
We should take a moment to consider that timeline. Fees from millions of transactions over a period of fourteen years, collected in secret. For their part, the banks have not acknowledged any misconduct. That is typical in settlements such as this one, and it doesn’t necessarily imply that the accusations were unfounded. It indicates that both parties agreed that a settlement was preferable to a drawn-out trial. However, no institution is willing to part with $67 million lightly.
In addition to the larger settlement, Bank of America has agreed to pay $2.25 million to settle a more focused complaint about 7-Eleven ATMs. In that lawsuit, the bank allegedly billed customers twice for a single action by charging them several out-of-network fees for a single balance inquiry at ATMs inside 7-Eleven locations. The period that is impacted is May 1, 2018, through November 16, 2021. To be included, current Bank of America account holders are not required to submit any paperwork. It is necessary for former clients to submit a claim form via the settlement website.
The fact that both cases arrived at the same time is telling. In consumer finance, ATM fees have long held a peculiar position: they are small enough to be ignored on an individual basis, but they are large enough collectively to incite genuine animosity. On occasion, banks have justified them as essential cost recovery. However, the shrug becomes more difficult to defend when the structure of those fees is the focus of coordinated litigation involving the biggest financial institutions in the nation.
If you received an email regarding the $67 million settlement and weren’t sure how to interpret it, the message is genuine. It is a court-mandated notice that identifies potential beneficiaries based on bank records. Even if you do nothing, ignoring it still has an impact on your legal rights. The actual payout per person depends on the number of valid claimants, as the settlement fund will be distributed proportionately among them.
This settlement serves as a reminder that small, routine charges aren’t always as standard as they seem, regardless of whether the individual checks end up being $5 or $50. They occasionally merit a second glance.
