JPMorgan Chase

JPMorgan Chase has accumulated more than $40 billion in fines and settlements since 2000, according to ViolationTracker, across 284 enforcement records spanning securities fraud, market manipulation, money laundering failures, and consumer abuses. The bank's $13 billion settlement with the Department of Justice in 2013 over fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — including those originated by Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual — was at the time the largest civil settlement with a single entity in American history. In 2020, the CFTC imposed a $920 million penalty, the largest in the agency's history, after JPMorgan traders in New York, London, and Singapore spent nearly a decade spoofing hundreds of thousands of orders in precious metals and U.S. Treasury markets. The bank paid more than $2 billion in penalties for Bank Secrecy Act violations tied to its failure to report suspicious activity flowing through accounts held by Bernard Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme ran undetected for decades. The London Whale debacle cost the bank over $6 billion in trading losses and $920 million in regulatory fines after a single derivatives desk in London accumulated outsized, concealed positions.

In 2023, JPMorgan agreed to pay $290 million to survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse and a further $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands, resolving claims that the bank maintained Epstein's accounts despite years of internal red flags about the source and nature of his transactions. The Federal Reserve fined the bank $98.2 million in 2024 for inadequate surveillance of trading activity across its own desks and client accounts. The pattern is not a handful of isolated incidents but a recurring institutional posture: violations spanning spoofing, mortgage fraud, sanctions evasion, consumer fee abuses, and failures of anti-money-laundering controls, with new enforcement actions arriving almost every year.