The timeline, from court records and published case reporting. In 2016, merchants brought a class action (the Kao litigation) alleging CardConnect assessed unauthorized fees; per subsequent filings, the court limited the company to the charges identified in the merchant agreement and held that unsolicited, unilateral changes to contract terms were unenforceable. In 2017, merchants filed again over the same architecture, and in 2021 CardConnect agreed to pay $7.65 million to settle, in a resolution approved by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania that included court-ordered restrictions on the fees CardConnect could charge going forward. Then, in July 2024, a Pennsylvania medical practice filed a new proposed class action in the same district (case 2:24-cv-03034), alleging that CardConnect resumed charging undisclosed fees, including a $200 “Annual Membership Fee” introduced in February 2024, in violation of the merchant agreement and the prior court orders. The complaint’s own words: despite orders limiting CardConnect to the fees it identifies in the Merchant Agreement, “CardConnect has not changed its practices.” A 2025 class action filed in Texas adds allegations that the company placed holds on merchant funds without adequate notice and provided no meaningful process for releasing them. All of it is allegation until adjudicated. But three generations of the same lawsuit, with a settlement and court-ordered fee restrictions in the middle, is a documented pattern with no equal anywhere else on this board.

No FTC actions, state attorney general enforcement, or card network fines against CardConnect were located, and those subcategories score accordingly. The class action subcategory scores zero, the only such score we have issued: the 2016 Kao litigation, the 2017 action settled for $7.65 million with court-ordered fee restrictions, the 2024 action alleging violation of those orders, and the 2025 Texas hold litigation together form a continuous, decade-long litigation record on the company’s core pricing conduct. Allegations remain allegations; the settlement is not an admission; and the pattern of filings is itself the documented fact we score.

The lowest score this category has produced on this board, for a fee architecture that has been litigated three times and, per the documented record, kept running:

The complaint themes map one-to-one onto the litigation, which is the point: hidden fees, post-cancellation billing, and funds. On funds: the 2025 Texas class action’s hold allegations sit atop documented individual accounts of an eight-year established business flagged over its own annual Black Friday sale, a merchant of twenty-five years reporting $2,760 owed for months, three-month waits for funding, and unauthorized ACH debits appearing since 2018 under the descriptor “Merchant Bank,” the statement-camouflage pattern readers know from our EVO and Paysafe ratings. Resolution points are retained because the company responds on the BBB, now under Fiserv’s signature, and documented courtesy refunds have issued; the same record shows a refund followed within a day by a fresh unauthorized charge, which is not resolution. It is rotation.

Partial credit where earned: some pricing is actually published on the company’s website, a rarity this series has rewarded elsewhere, and the corporate parent’s public disclosure applies. The deductions: the litigated allegation that the published price and the binding price live in two different documents, which makes disclosure a display rather than a term; and a brand lattice, CardConnect, CardPointe, First Data, Fiserv, Clover, Payeezy, plus resellers under their own names, that the complaint record shows leaves merchants unable to identify who is billing them, including one business that discovered charges from a company it had never heard of. A first-party note, labeled as such under Rule 9 of our methodology: weAudit’s own statement-analysis tooling required specific calibration for CardConnect’s statement dialect, in which certain fees are presented with inverted signs. When professional audit software needs custom handling to read your statements correctly, the merchant reading them alone has no chance.

Is CardConnect a good processor? Based on the documented record, CardConnect scored 34 out of 100 under the published weAudit Rating Methodology, a band reserved for companies whose record warrants extreme caution: three generations of class litigation over unauthorized fees, a $7.65 million settlement with court-ordered fee restrictions, a 2024 suit alleging those orders are being violated, and a fee architecture built on a Program Guide merchants say they never received. The CardPointe technology is capable; the documented conduct is what the score measures.

A 34 is the deepest score this board has issued, and the countermeasures are unusually specific because the litigation has already mapped the mechanism. Three things to do this week: