MasterCard is facing a GBP 19 billion lawsuit after inflating processing fees overseas for 16 years. This follows the European Union’s court ruling, made in 2014, that deemed the company’s cross boarder transaction processing fees illegal and unfair.
Instead of having individual consumers filing their own lawsuits, there will be a collective class action lawsuit, which will include all UK consumers who have been affected by MasterCard. Walter Merrick, a lawyer who is leading the class action, will be writing up the draft and intends to file the lawsuit under the new Consumer Rights Act of 2015 by September this year. The class action suit could see 40 million British consumers, regardless of whether they were MasterCard users, receiving more than GBP 450 each.
