A narrowly divided Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) has filed a misguided lawsuit against Walmart regarding money transfer services that the Company offers to consumers. Here’s what you need to know about the lawsuit:
Since Walmart began offering our customers flat, low fee money transfer services at our stores, the company has saved consumers—particularly the unbanked and underbanked— an estimated $6 billion in fees by bringing important competition to the money transfer industry.
Walmart has a robust anti-fraud program to help stop third-party criminals who try to use money transfer services to commit fraud, and only a miniscule number of transactions are even alleged to be fraudulent. In fact, Walmart has stopped hundreds of thousands of suspicious transactions totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
Despite Walmart’s anti-fraud programs, the FTC is trying to blame the Company for actions by third parties, including fraud the FTC has already acknowledged was caused by another company—while that company was under federal government oversight through a compliance monitor, and during a period when that company’s own fraud prevention system had failed.
This civil lawsuit is factually misguided and legally flawed. In fact, it was approved by the FTC by the narrowest of margins after Chair Lina Khan refused Walmart the due process of hearing directly from the company, and then the Department of Justice refused to take this…
