JPMorgan Chase’s Rap Sheet
(Highlights)
April 21, 2011, JPMorgan Chase agreed to settle a civil lawsuit and pay $56 million to settle claims that it overcharged members of the military service on their mortgages in violation of the Service Members Civil Relief Act and the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008.
February 7, 2012, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $110 million to settle consumer litigation that claimed it overcharged customers for overdraft fees.
February 9, 2012, JPMorgan Chase reaches an agreement with the OCC to pay $113 million for unsafe and unsound mortgage servicing and foreclosure practices.
August 10, 2012, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $1.2 billion to settle claims that it, along with other banks, conspired to set the price of credit and debit card fees.
November 16, 2012, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $296.9 million to the SEC to settle claims that it misstated information about the delinquency status of its residential mortgage portfolio.
July 2013, a unit of JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $410 million to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to settle claims of bidding manipulation of California and Midwest electricity markets.
September 19, 2013, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $80 million in combined fines to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and $309 million in refunds to customers whom the bank billed for credit monitoring services that the bank never provided.
September 19, 2013, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $920 million to U.S. and U.K. regulators for its unsafe and unsound banking practices in using bank depositors’ money to trade in derivatives in London. It lost at least $6.2 billion in the trades. This was known as the “London Whale” scandal.
November 15, 2013, JPMorgan Chase announced that it had agreed to pay $4.5 billion to settle claims by private investors that it defrauded them in mortgage-backed securities.
November 19, 2013, JPMorgan agreed to pay $13 billion to settle claims by the Department of Justice; the FDIC; the Federal Housing Finance Agency; and various State Attorneys General over its fraudulent practices with respect to mortgage-backed securities. JPMorgan acknowledged it made serious misrepresentations to the public.
December 4, 2013, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay 79.9 million Euros to settle claims of the European Commission relating to illegal rigging of benchmark interest rates.
In December 2013, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $22.1 million to settle claims that the bank imposed expensive and unnecessary flood insurance on homeowners whose mortgages the bank serviced.
January 7, 2014 the U.S. Department of Justice charged JPMorgan Chase with two criminal counts for its banking conduct in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme. The bank admitted to the charges; agreed to pay $1.7 billion to a Madoff victim fund and agreed to a Deferred Prosecution Agreement.
May 20, 2015, JPMorgan Chase pleaded guilty to one criminal count brought by the U.S. Department of Justice for its role with other banks in rigging the foreign exchange market. The bank agreed to a fine of $550 million.
December 18, 2015 the bank agreed to charges by the SEC that it had steered its customers into in-house products where it reaped higher profits without disclosing this conflict to the customer. It paid $267 million to settle these charges.
November 17, 2016 The U.S. Department of Justice fined a Hong Kong subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase $72 million and charged it with bribing Chinese government officials with jobs for their unqualified children in order to get banking deals. The code name for the program inside the bank was “Sons and Daughters.” The bank was given a non-prosecution agreement, which an inside attorney at the bank later charged they had violated by keeping two sets of books for payments to politically-connected individuals.
On January 20, 2017 JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $53 million to settle charges that it had discriminated against minority borrowers by charging them more for a mortgage than white customers.
October 2018 JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $5.3 million to settle U.S. Treasury allegations that “it violated Cuban Assets Control Regulations, Iranian sanctions and Weapons of Mass Destruction sanctions 87 times,” according to Reuters.
December 26, 2018 JPMorgan Chase settled claims with the SEC for $135 million over charges that it had improperly handled thousands of transactions involving the shares of foreign companies.
May 16, 2019, JPMorgan Chase settled charges for 228.8 million Euros with the European Commission that it rigged the foreign exchange market. (Other banks were also fined.)
September 16, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two current and one former precious metals traders at JPMorgan Chase for turning the precious metals desk at the bank into a “racketeering” enterprise.
September 29, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice brings two counts of wire fraud against JPMorgan Chase involving “tens of thousands of episodes of unlawful trading in the markets for precious metals futures contracts, and the second involving thousands of episodes of unlawful trading in the markets for U.S. Treasury futures contracts and in the secondary (cash) market for U.S. Treasury notes and bonds.” The bank admits to the charges and agrees to pay $920 million in fines and restitution to various regulators.
December 17, 2021, the securities unit of JPMorgan Chase admits its traders and their supervisors were using personal communications devices to conduct company business. The firm failed to record and retain messages from these devices as required under the law. These violations occurred despite similar conduct in the bank’s participation in the rigging of the foreign exchange market, where traders used unauthorized electronic chat rooms, called “The Cartel” and “The Mafia.” That case brought a criminal felony charge against the bank by the Justice Department in May of 2015. In the current case, the SEC fined the firm $125 million.
September 29, 2023 The CFTC charges that over a period of five years, spanning 2017 to 2022, JPMorgan Chase Bank and two of its units “failed to report, or failed to correctly report” more than 40 million derivative transactions. The fine to this five-count felon was a paltry $15 million in total for the three JPMorgan units, meaning it cost this recidivist bank just 37 ½ cents per law violation.
