News: 0175311331

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Apple and Goldman Sachs Fined Millions For Misleading Apple Card Holders

(Wednesday October 23, 2024 @05:22PM (msmash) from the reputational-damage dept.)


Goldman Sachs and Apple will [1]pay $89 million in penalties and customer refunds over widespread service failures and deceptive practices in their joint Apple Card venture, U.S. consumer watchdog CFPB said on Wednesday.

The agency found Goldman mishandled credit card disputes while Apple failed to forward thousands of customer complaints. Both companies deceived users about interest-free payment plans for Apple devices, affecting hundreds of thousands of cardholders since the card's 2019 launch. Goldman must pay $64.8 million in fines and refunds, while Apple faces a $25 million penalty. The bank is now barred from issuing new credit cards without regulatory approval.



[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/23/24277710/apple-goldman-sachs-cfpb-fine-charge-disputes-system



Shocked (Score:3)

by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

You mean to say that a private business with no experience running a credit service teaming up with an investment bank, rather than an actual, normal bank, that has no experience in handling normal consumers...was a disaster of an idea?!

Re: (Score:2)

by battingly ( 5065477 )

"Disaster"? There's a problem that they definitely need to be penalized for, yes, but AppleCard is pretty successful. It's hard to see how the term "Disaster" applies.

By the way, this kind of consumer protection is likely to be a thing of the past come January. We'll all have to start getting used to a more predatory environment.

Outside of the aesthetics (Score:2)

by rsilvergun ( 571051 )

Apple's products are surprisingly half assed. With PCs their competitor is Microsoft so we get used to comparing them to something that's much, much worse and they get a pass. And on the Phone Android is just a wild wild west.

But toe to toe with other, better established and run companies yeah, they're going to come up way, _way_ short.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later?
Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that
never comes again. San Fransisco in the middle sixties was a very special time
and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long
run... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the
Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could
strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we
were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't
need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting
-- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest
of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go
up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes
you can almost ___see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave
finally broke and rolled back.
-- Hunter S. Thompson