Fraud victim 'not hopeful' for refund after Trump wrecks consumer protection agency
Agency charged with protecting consumers drops high-profile fraud cases, leaving victims in limbo.
By Marcus Baram for Capital & Main
On Jan. 16, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ordered the operator of digital payment provider Cash App to pay $175 million for failing to protect consumers from fraud, including $120 million in refunds and a $55 million penalty to the agency’s victims relief fund.
Four days later, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the nation’s 47th president. Within a week and a half, the new administration fired CFPB director Rohit Chopra, shuttered the agency’s headquarters and sent employees home.
Since early February, several of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s high-profile cases against banks including Capital One, Wells Fargo and Bank of America have been dropped. And the status of its remaining enforcement actions and settlements remains in limbo. In late March, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking the CFPB’s closure by the Trump administration. Overall, since its founding in 2010, the agency has returned more than $21 billion to consumers, ranging from veterans to student borrowers defrauded by unscrupulous banks and predatory lenders.
Meanwhile, Cash App’s victims have been left hanging, still waiting for their money.
Among them is Terry Ouverson, a 73-year-old retiree living with his wife in Spotsylvania, Virginia.
They were the victims of fraudsters who scammed them out of $45,000 on Cash App and PayPal last year. Ouverson said they were saving that money to pay for work to finish the basement of their home. Recently, he said he was refunded about $8,000 out of $11,000 owed him by PayPal.
But he’s not optimistic about getting the money owed him by CashApp, though he filed a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in October 2024.
“I am not the least bit hopeful that Cash App will actually come through on this,” he told Capital & Main, explaining that the company ignored his repeated complaints until the agency got involved.
And Ouverson said that the erosion of the CFPB has probably doomed any chances of a refund.
“Because the enforcement of CFPB has gone away, there’s no incentive for CashApp to do something. With that gone, I don’t see them doing anything or doing anything in any kind of timely manner.”
Neither the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau nor Cash App responded to Capital & Main’s request for comment.
Ouverson feels that DOGE — Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — is less about efficiency and more about “the destruction of government,” noting that the role of the CFPB is especially crucial as companies make it difficult to contact them with complaints.
“Given that it is so easy in the digital age for these companies to hide behind digital walls,” if it were not for the agency, “there’s nothing to really compel them to deal with consumers in a fair way.”