The Federal Trade Commission announced settlements with two payment processors in the first week of September 2026, four days apart. On September 4th, a large Canada based processor agreed to pay $4.85 million and accept new merchant screening obligations to resolve claims that it kept processing for an offshore technical support scam and for other merchants it should have turned away. On September 8th, a smaller Arizona based processor that specializes in high risk merchants agreed to pay $12 million and a permanent ban on several categories of merchants, after the Commission alleged it opened more than a thousand accounts for shell companies fronting for unauthorized billing schemes. The two orders match each other almost term for term. Both still need a judge’s signature.
Two in a week is a sharp change of pace. Since 2023 the Commission has brought exactly one payment processor case a year, in April of 2023, May of 2024, and June of 2025, and before that the last real push was in 2020. For most of that time the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was the federal agency the payments industry watched. With the Bureau largely sidelined under the current administration, the Commission appears to have taken the file back, and the matching orders read like a deliberate message rather than a coincidence of timing.
The message is in a statement the Commission’s leadership released with the first settlement. It says the Commission now sees payment processor enforcement as its best way to reach foreign scam operations it cannot sue directly, because the processor is the domestic company that gives those operations access to American cardholders. It also takes a legal position the agency has never taken before. A processor is liable for unfair payment processing only if it knew, should have known, or consciously avoided knowing that a merchant was breaking the law. A bad merchant slipping through is not enough. The catch is that the Commission will treat a processor as knowing whatever it would have found had it done the underwriting and monitoring the card networks already require. The card network rules are now the yardstick. Other firms have treated these cases as more of the same. I think the knowledge standard is the real development.
For payment processors, payment facilitators, and money transmitters that onboard merchants, the takeaway is simple. Written policies only help if they are followed. In the first case the processor had policies that would have kept the merchants out, and those policies became the Commission’s best evidence once it alleged they were ignored because the business was profitable. Show the file, not just the program.