Home > News

Feel Let Down by Apple, Goldman Sachs? CFPB Can Help

By Laura Tucker
Apple Goldman Sachs Fined Apple Card

Apple Credit has been around a while, with it expanding in the past few years to also include the AppleCard, created with Goldman Sachs. Of course, it can help customers buy Apple products. While it would seem on the outside like it’s all working well, some people with the Apple Card aren’t so happy. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has stepped in and ordered both Apple and Goldman Sachs to pay nearly $90 million in penalties altogether.

Consumer Dispute with Apple and Goldman Sachs

First and foremost, consumers felt misled about interest-free options when buying Apple devices with the Apple Card. There was indeed interest, and buying the Apple products with Apple Card was not interest-free financing.

I have to say that I can see why it may seem like an attractive offer and how that could be confusing. I recently financed an +iPhone 16. There were several options. Financing through Apple (through a separate bank) seemed to be the same price as financing it with the Apple Card. I don’t have the Card, so I financed it through Apple, but I can see why people could get confused.

Apple Goldman Sachs Apple Card Monthly Installments

The CFPB is also looking into how Goldman Sachs handled fraud and refunds in relation to the Apple Card. It all resulted in incorrect credit reports for customers and charge disputes that went unresolved.

The CFPB director, Rohit Chopra, believes Goldman Sachs didn’t properly handle customer disputes when they came up. He also said they didn’t follow federal requirements to look into and resolve the issues in a timely manner. The Apple Card wasn’t completely ready, the board at Goldman Sachs was told, and still decided to move forward.

Good to know: If you want to steer clear of credit cards, try one of these virtual credit cards or a single-use credit card number.

Apple and Goldman Sachs Must Pay

The CFPB has now ordered Apple and Goldman Sachs to pay penalties for the way they handled the Apple Card and the business. Apple was fined $25 million, and Goldman Sachs was fined $45 million. The bank must also refund $19.8 million to customers.

That’s a lot of money, but perhaps the most pertinent part of the punishment is that Goldman Sachs is not allowed to offer any new credit cards other than the Apple Card. If they intend to, they most provide a plan to federal regulators to prove they will follow the law this time.

Apple Goldman Sachs Apple Card Payment

A Goldman Sachs spokesman, Nick Carcaterra, said that Apple Card was “one of the most consumer-friendly credit cards.” He added that they worked to address the challenges with it and that the issues have been addressed with customers.
It’s hard to say they’re the most consumer friendly when they’ve been fined for the way they handled their customer relations.

An Apple spokeswoman said the company worked with Goldman Sachs to address the issues and help affected customers years ago. The company disagrees with the CFPB about their conduct, but they have reached an agreement.

Goldman Sachs is poised to leave its cooperation with Apple’s credit cards, and it also sold its General Motors credit cards to Barclays.

Nothing has been said about how any of this will affect the Apple Card, but if I was thinking of getting one, I definitely wouldn’t be now. If you’re thinking of getting a new credit card, check your credit score for free on one of these websites.

Image credit: Apple. Screenshot by Laura Tucker.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.