Dive Brief:

• MoneyGram International agreed to pay a $250,000 civil penalty and to submit to a three-year period of compliance monitoring to settle New York Attorney General allegations that it mishandled consumers’ remittance transfers, violating federal consumer protection laws. As part of the settlement approved Monday by a federal judge, the AG also cited MoneyGram for failing to investigate errors and complaints.
• The settlement resolves an April 2022 civil lawsuit filed in federal court in New York City by the state and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which withdrew as a plaintiff in April 2025. “MoneyGram failed to follow the law for years, sometimes leaving its customers in the dark about where their money went,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said Monday in a press release.
• “We are pleased to bring full closure to this legacy matter, which dates back years and involved no harm to consumers,” MoneyGram General Counsel Cory Feinberg said in a statement emailed by the company. Dallas-based MoneyGram did not admit nor deny the lawsuit allegations as part of the settlement.

Dive Insight:

New York and the CFPB sued MoneyGram over alleged violations of the Remittance Transfer Rule, which the federal agency implemented in October 2013 for remittance transfers. Such remittances are typically made by people sending funds to family members or friends in another country.

In April, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla granted the bureau’s request to withdraw as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, one of several enforcement actions the federal agency abandoned this year under Acting Director Russell Vought as he seeks to reduce the CFPB’s mission and staffing.

The rule – stemming from the 2010 Consumer Financial Protection Act – required that consumers receive more information about the pricing and timing of their transfers, and offered remedies for transfer errors, along with new recordkeeping mandates.

MoneyGram also failed to “timely make remittance transfers available to recipients or to timely make refunds available to senders” and “unnecessarily delayed transactions,” according to the complaint. The rule requires money transmitters to investigate consumer complaints about errors and determine within 90 days whether an error has occurred.

Since 2015, MoneyGram said it has invested about $800 million to improve its system and processes.

MoneyGram says its cross-border payment network handles money transfers in about 200 countries and 450,000 retail locations, processing around $200 billion annually.

In June 2023, private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners completed a $1.8 billion acquisition of MoneyGram. Since his appointment as CEO last year, Anthony Soohoo has been pursuing a digital overhaul of the company that has been in business for 80-plus years.