The Payment Card Settlement is legitimate, not a scam. It resolves In re Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation, a roughly $5.5 billion court-authorized class action against Visa, Mastercard, and their member banks over interchange fees charged to merchants. That said, the court-approved deadline to file a claim passed on February 4, 2025, so if someone is contacting you now promising to get you paid in exchange for a fee or your bank details, treat that contact as fraudulent even though the underlying case is real.
How To Tell a Real Notice From a Scam
Legitimate class action notices often look like junk mail, and scammers routinely piggyback on real lawsuits to pull personal and financial information out of business owners. A few checks will tell you whether what you received is the genuine article.
The only court-authorized website for this case is paymentcardsettlement.com. Type that address into your browser yourself rather than clicking a link in an email or letter. The case is tracked in the federal court system as MDL No. 1720 and overseen by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Epiq Systems is the court-appointed settlement administrator, reachable at 1-800-625-6440 or info@PaymentCardSettlement.com.
If a notice references a different case name, a different court, or routes you to any website other than paymentcardsettlement.com, it is not from this settlement. Anything asking for upfront payment, requesting sensitive financial information through email, or directing you to an unofficial website should be ignored.
What the Case Is About and Who Was Covered
The lawsuit alleged that Visa, Mastercard, and their member banks conspired to fix interchange fees charged to merchants at artificially high levels. The settlement class covers any person, business, or entity that accepted Visa or Mastercard branded cards in the United States at any time between January 1, 2004, and January 25, 2019.
That fifteen-year window is wide. Business size does not matter, and eligibility is not affected by whether the business later closed or went through bankruptcy. Successor entities and former owners who ran a card-accepting business during the class period also qualified. If your business accepted Visa or Mastercard during those years and you received a notice, the notice is plausibly meant for you.
The Filing Deadline Has Already Passed
The court-approved deadline to submit a claim was February 4, 2025. The settlement website now states plainly: “We cannot guarantee that late claims will be considered.” The opt-out deadline passed even earlier, on July 23, 2019, so merchants who remained in the class but did not file a claim are unlikely to receive any payment from the fund.
If you believe you have an extraordinary reason for missing the deadline, you can try contacting the settlement administrator directly at 1-800-625-6440. This is not a situation where filing late is routine or expected to succeed. For most merchants who did not act before February 2025, this settlement has effectively closed.
If You Already Filed: Checking Status and Payments
Merchants who submitted a claim before the deadline can track its progress through the Merchant Portal on paymentcardsettlement.com. After logging in, the Account Summary page displays authorization status, claim status, and payment status. Any correspondence from the administrator and response deadlines also appear in the portal. If you filed digitally and received a confirmation code at submission, that code confirms the claim was received.
The court approved an initial partial distribution on October 30, 2025, and payments are now going out on a rolling basis to merchants whose claims have been approved. These are partial payments, not the full amount owed to each claimant. Additional distributions will follow, but the timing depends on how quickly remaining claims are processed and whether any legal challenges arise. If you selected a payment method through the Merchant Portal, your funds should arrive by that method. Not receiving a check immediately after approval does not mean something went wrong; the fund covers millions of merchants.
Why Scam Risk Is Higher Now, Not Lower
Throughout this settlement’s history, companies have solicited merchants offering to file claims for them in exchange for 20% to 30% or more of the recovery. The court has issued multiple orders addressing these third-party filing services, and the official notice tells merchants directly that they can file with the claims administrator on their own, free of charge, and contact class counsel for help with the claim form at no cost.
Now that the filing window is closed, be more skeptical, not less. A company claiming it can still slip you into a closed settlement for a fee is almost certainly running a scam. Legitimate communications come only from Epiq Systems, the court, or class counsel, and they will reference MDL No. 1720, the Eastern District of New York, and paymentcardsettlement.com. Anyone asking you to pay to receive your settlement money, to confirm your bank account by email, or to log in through an unfamiliar site is not working for the court. If you are unsure about something you received, call the administrator at 1-800-625-6440 and ask before you respond.