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Canada (CA) · Module Detail

Canada: Legal & Litigation

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The defining payments litigation is the Canadian credit-card interchange price-fixing class actions against Visa, Mastercard and issuing banks, settled for C$188 million covering merchants who accepted Visa/Mastercard credit cards March 23, 2001 – September 2, 2021, with Visa/Mastercard also agreeing to modify no-surcharge rules. FINTRAC enforcement has sharply escalated, with record AMPs in 2025 against crypto/MSB platforms (Cryptomus C$176.96M; KuCoin C$19.55M).

Standing sub-brief · as of 27 June 2026210 words · last cycle 2026-06-27

Legal & Litigation

Two litigation/enforcement threads define the module. First, a C$188 million class-action settlement resolved credit-card interchange price-fixing claims covering merchants who accepted Visa and Mastercard credit cards between March 23, 2001 and September 2, 2021, with Visa and Mastercard agreeing to modify their no-surcharge rules — underpinning the legal basis for merchant surcharging rights in Canada and connecting to the W4 interchange and Code-of-Conduct regime. Multi-province class actions ran in BC, AB, SK, QC and ON. Second, FINTRAC escalated enforcement with record AMPs: C$19,552,000 against Peken Global (KuCoin) in July 2025, a C$176,960,190 penalty against Xeltox Enterprises (Cryptomus) in October 2025 (the largest ever, for 2,593 instances across six violation categories), and C$536,853.35 against MP Technology Services, a MoonPay subsidiary, in December 2025. These are historical (Jul-Dec 2025) enforcement actions carried as standing-position context with a temporal caveat, not current-week developments; a Cryptomus Federal Court appeal (Nov 2025) is not captured in the underlying research, and the original illicit-finance analysis is routed to FIM.

no periodic updates on record for this sub-brief

Sources and findings (3)
  1. T3https://ca.topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/credit-cards/visa-mastercard-interchange-fees-188m-class-action-settlement/retrieved
  2. T3https://www.branchmacmaster.com/class_actions/redit-card-interchange-fee-price-fixing/retrieved
  3. T2https://www.mondaq.com/canada/money-laundering/1739410/a-line-in-the-sand-fintracs-shift-to-aggressive-aml-enforcementretrieved