Lawyers at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd and Florida-based Devine Goodman Rasco & Watts-FitzGerald have filed an antitrust lawsuit claiming that major credit card companies and the nation’s largest banks conspired to shift liability for fraudulent credit card transactions in the US to merchants.
The complaint filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday claims that the move to cards that include electronic chips designed to be more secure—so-called EMV chips—has been plagued by technical glitches and used as cover to illegally shift fraud-protection costs.
Merchants who failed to make an Oct. 1, 2015, deadline to get chip-enabled card reading systems up and running and inspected by third-party certifiers now face liability for fraudulent charges that were previously covered primarily by card issuers. According to the complaint, getting the chip-enabled systems certified has been a “nebulous process that was utterly outside [merchants’] control.”
“Merchants were not consulted about the change, were not permitted to opt out, were not offered any reduction of the interchange fee, the merchant discount fee, the swipe fee—or any other cost of accepting defendants’ credit and charge cards,” the plaintiffs lawyers wrote. “The liability shift was unilaterally imposed to the benefit of defendants, with no compensation, consultation or consideration of any kind made to the class members.”
Full Content: The Recorder
Want more news? Subscribe to CPI’s free daily newsletter for more headlines and updates on antitrust developments around the world.
Featured News
T-Mobile Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over Sprint Merger After Appeal Denied
May 16, 2024 by
CPI
Google Faces Backlash Over Introduction of AI-Generated Summaries in Searches
May 16, 2024 by
CPI
CMA Launches Phase 2 Probe into AlphaTheta’s Acquisition of Serato
May 16, 2024 by
CPI
NFL Executive Escapes Testifying in High-Stakes Trial Over Televised Games
May 16, 2024 by
CPI
EU Consumers Lodge Complaint Against Chinese Retailer Temu Over Content Rules Breach
May 16, 2024 by
CPI
Antitrust Mix by CPI
Antitrust Chronicle® – Ecosystems
May 9, 2024 by
CPI
Mapping Antitrust onto Digital Ecosystems
May 9, 2024 by
CPI
Ecosystems and Competition Law: A Law and Political Economy Approach
May 9, 2024 by
CPI
Ecosystem Theories of Harm: What is Beyond the Buzzword?
May 9, 2024 by
CPI
Open Ecosystems: Benefits, Challenges, and Implications for Antitrust
May 9, 2024 by
CPI