Major Bank Loses Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars

Bank of America has just been slapped with $225 million fine by federal regulators after they alleged that there were many shortcomings in how Bank of America handled their jobless benefits in midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Fox, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) claimed that Bank of America improperly froze prepaid cards for thousands of people who were looking for jobless benefits while the pandemic was going on.

Bank of America was working with dozens of U.S. states to distribute prepaid jobless benefit debt cards. Problems arose however when the bank’s automatic fraud filter triggered and left cardholders with frozen accounts.

Federal regulators then said the bank made it very hard for people to unfreeze their cards and they had to spend hours doing so.

CFPB Director Rohit Chopra explained, “Taxpayers relied on banks to distribute needed funds to families and small businesses to rescue the economy from collapse when the pandemic hit. Bank of America failed to live up to its legal obligations. And when it got overwhelmed, instead of stepping up, it stepped back.”