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On Tuesday, the CFPB sued Capital One, alleging it defrauded customers of $2 billion in interest.
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Its account holders faced a system outage on Wednesday that continued on Friday.
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Shares of Capital One still managed to climb, up nearly 10% on the week.
It’s been a tough week for Capital One, with a lawsuit and system outages coming as other major US banks enjoyed positive headlines on strong fourth-quarter earnings.
On Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued the bank, accusing it of “defrauding” millions of customers out of $2 billion in interest.
The CFPB said the company promised consumers that their 360 Savings Account offered one of the best and highest interest rates, but froze that rate at a low level even as rates rose across the country.
Capital One is said to have created an almost identical product, called 360 Performance Savings, which paid significantly more interest – more than 14 times the 360 Savings rate at one point.
The CFPB said the bank kept 360 savings account customers in the dark about the new product, resulting in billions in lost interest.
“The CFPB is suing Capital One for defrauding families out of billions of dollars in their savings accounts,” Rohit Chopra, the agency’s director, said in a statement. “Banks shouldn’t lure people in with promises they can’t keep.”
In a statement to Business Insider, a spokesperson for the bank said, “We are deeply disappointed to see the CFPB continue its recent pattern of filing lawsuits within the eleventh hour before management changes. We strongly disagree with their claims and will vigorously defend ourselves in court.”
They added: “Our flagship 360 Performance Savings product was widely marketed, including on national television, with the simplest and most transparent terms in the industry.”
Adding to the bank’s woes this week, account holders faced a widespread system outage that began Wednesday and continued Friday. The disruption affected the bank’s ability to process deposits, payments and transfers, including direct deposits.
As of 1:00 PM ET on Friday, there were more than 3,000 reports of outages on the Downdetector website, mostly about problems with deposits.
Capital One said the outage was the result of a technical problem with one of its service providers.
“We are working closely with our provider to resolve this issue and restore processing as soon as possible,” the company said in an email to customers on Thursday. “We expect services to gradually return to normal throughout today and most issues to be resolved by Friday morning.”
