Apple and Goldman Sachs Fined Millions For Misleading Apple Card Holders

Goldman Sachs and Apple will 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.

Shocked

[Bahbus]

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:

[battingly]

"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

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:

[quonset]

And yet, they are the most highly valued company on the planet.

Re:

[AvitarX]

Really?

My last laptop was a MacBook pro with boot camp because of the hardware (it was the first gen retina display, it was a few years before anything else like it came out).

I currently use a MacBook pro and kept the OS this time since I've gotten used to their BSD environment.

Their phones pretty consistently seem pretty great too, but I use android since I like the whatever they call apps for your domain now and assume it integrates better with Android.

Goldman Sachs is losing their shirts on

[BigFire]

Apple card deal. They may be master of the universe in their lane of financial industry, but they sucks at making money at retail credit card.

Uhh... so

[sentiblue]

I've been screwed and I didn't even know?

A previously hidden reason?

[Flexagon]

So, is this incoming mess one of the not-yet-announced reasons that Goldman has been recently trying [reuters.com] to drop Apple's credit card, and Apple's been looking for another suitor, along with previously disclosed problems with actually making a credit card business out of this? In other words, did Goldman see this coming and tried to exit from the deal in hopes of avoiding it?

Should lose ALL profits, and then add the penalty.

[OneOfMany07]

Why be 'good' when you can just claim you're sorry and pocket the extra profits? I hate this world.

Apple should pull the plug

[hdyoung]

They’ve got a ton of strengths, but financials is clearly not one of them. Apparently, they failed to make the jump between handling a customer complaint about flappy-bird and handling a customer issue with a credit transaction. One of these things is a lot more serious than the other.

They should pull the plug before this damages their reputation. Apple banks on their solid reputation. “financial mismanagement of customer money” is NOT a good look. Apple card was a good idea, but it