topic Illinois - American Express Class Action Settlement in Credit Cards

Illinois - American Express Class Action Settlement

AndrewF — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 03:24:08 GMT

Illinois - American Express Class Action Settlement

American Express has settled a class action lawsuit.

If you lived in Illinois and used a non-rewards, no annual fee credit card in Illinois during the covered time period of January 29, 2016, to June 1, 2022, and had no American Express cards during that time, they might owe you some money.

American Express was alleged to have violated state consumer protection and antitrust laws by having contracts that prevented merchants from steering cardholders to credit cards that were cheaper to process, and thereby causing prices to go up for everyone who was not using a rewards credit card.

(Debit card users don't qualify, you must have had a non-rewards credit card and have used it during the time period)

Who knew that me and the spouse having had a Capital One Platinum and no AmEx back then would get us some money?

Re: Illinois - American Express Class Action Settlement

Varsity_Lu — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:50:35 GMT

Congrats. Enjoy your $3.47 check. If you read the fine print, the lawyers are taking $8 mil of the $17.5 payout. And then the fund administrators will take a cut which will be several million I'm sure. That won't leave much in the hopper for the people and I suspect that the Chicago crime/fraud machine will find plenty of claims to file. But hey, it's something.

Sticking it to the man!

Re: Illinois - American Express Class Action Settlement

AndrewF — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 23:08:39 GMT

@Varsity_Lu wrote:
Congrats. Enjoy your $3.47 check. If you read the fine print, the lawyers are taking $8 mil of the $17.5 payout. And then the fund administrators will take a cut which will be several million I'm sure. That won't leave much in the hopper for the people and I suspect that the Chicago crime/fraud machine will find plenty of claims to file. But hey, it's something.

Sticking it to the man!

You never can tell with class actions.

I've had them say I'd get like $200 and then opened the check and it was for $1262.

I've had plenty of things like that and Illinois has great privacy laws. Some of the biggest checks I've opened were several for over $700 each regarding companies violating BIPA.

And then sometimes you get another one for $40-50 later if they had money left.

My advice is sign up for all of them you're eligible for and find out what you get, and if they violated the rights of anyone else in your household have them file a claim too.

A lot of BIPA checks affected my spouse too, so we got twice as much.

I've gotten one Christmas bonus at workplaces ever, and it was a $10 gift card to Kroger in 2002.

Might as well have been the jelly of the month club, the gift that keeps on giving. 😂

At least class actions put money in my pocket.