JPMorgan Chase Back On Lawsuit Blitz vs Credit Card Users

In 2021, as the pandemic gripped the nation, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon offered to help customers weather the crisis by taking a temporary pause on mortgage, auto, and credit card payments, Patrick Rucker reported for the Capitol Forum and ProPublica.

Photo Insert: JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon

Chase had stopped pursuing credit card lawsuits in 2011, in the wake of the last major economic downturn, after regulators found that the company was filing tens of thousands of flimsy suits, sometimes overstating what customers owed.

Rather than being backed by extensive billing records to document the debts, according to the regulators, the suits were typically filed with a short affidavit from one of a half-dozen Chase employees in one office in San Antonio who vouched for the accuracy of the bank’s information in thousands of suits.

Chase “filed lawsuits and obtained judgments against consumers using deceptive affidavits and other documents that were prepared without following required procedures,” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concluded in 2015.

At times, Chase employees signed affidavits “without personal knowledge of the signer, a practice commonly referred to as ‘robo-signing.’” According to the CFPB’s findings, there were mistakes in about 10% of cases Chase won and the judgments “contained erroneous amounts that were greater than what the consumers legally owed.”

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