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On Tuesday, the CFPB sued Capital One, alleging it cheated customers out of $2 billion in interest.
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Its account holders faced a system outage on Wednesday that continued into Friday.
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Capital One shares have still managed to climb, with the stock up by almost 10% for the week.
It’s been a tough week for Capital One, with a lawsuit and system outage hitting back-to-back as other big US banks enjoyed positive headlines about stellar fourth-quarter earnings.
On Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued the bank, accusing it of “cheating” millions of customers out of $2 billion in interest.
The CFPB said the company promised consumers that its 360 Savings account provided one of the best and highest interest rates but froze that rate at a low level even as rates rose around the country.
It said Capital One created a nearly identical product, called 360 Performance Savings, that paid out significantly more in interest — more than 14 times the 360 Savings rate at one point.
The CFPB said the bank kept customers with 360 Savings accounts in the dark about the new product, resulting in the billions in lost interest payments.
“The CFPB is suing Capital One for cheating families out of billions of dollars on their savings accounts,” Rohit Chopra, the agency’s director, said in a statement. “Banks should not be baiting people with promises they can’t live up to.”
In a statement to Business Insider, a spokesperson for the bank said: “We are deeply disappointed to see the CFPB continue its recent pattern of filing eleventh-hour lawsuits ahead of a change in administration. We strongly disagree with their claims and will vigorously defend ourselves in court.”
They added, “Our flagship 360 Performance Savings product was marketed widely, including on national television, with the simplest and most transparent terms in the industry.”
Adding to the bank’s troubles this week, account holders faced a widespread system outage starting on Wednesday and continuing into Friday. The disruption affected the bank’s ability to process deposits, payments, and transfers, including direct deposits.
At about 1 p.m. ET on Friday, there were more than 3,000 outage reports on the website Downdetector, mostly about issues with deposits.
Capital One said the outage was a result of a technical issue with one of its service providers.
“We’re working closely with our provider to resolve this issue and restore processing as quickly as possible,” the company said in an email to customers on Thursday. “We expect services to gradually begin to return to normal throughout today and the majority of issues to be resolved by Friday morning.”