FleetCor Technologies, the fuel-card company now operating as Corpay, has agreed with its chief executive to pay $100 million to resolve a Federal Trade Commission case built on years of unauthorized billing. The case traces back to a 2019 lawsuit accusing the company of charging fees that its customers, overwhelmingly small businesses running vehicle fleets, never knowingly agreed to pay. A federal court already found the company liable on every count; a separate administrative settlement now determines how much of that harm gets paid back, and on what terms.
The Fees FleetCor Never Disclosed
The FTC’s original complaint said FleetCor imposed a broad array of fees that customers did not know about and had not agreed to pay, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars across tens of thousands of accounts. The company often waited several billing cycles before it began charging a given fee, a delay the agency said made the charge harder to notice once it finally appeared. Invoices did not disclose that fees were being applied at all, pushing customers to dig through separate account management reports to find them, and even those reports buried many charges among unrelated information or left them out entirely. FleetCor also assessed late fees against customers who had paid on time, and against some it had itself prevented from paying on time, while separately overstating the gas savings, fraud protections and card benefits it advertised. The complaint also said cards marketed under FleetCor’s “Fuelman” brand as “fuel only” products let cardholders buy anything sold at a fueling location, snacks and beer included, another gap between the advertising and the product’s fine print.
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Two Legal Tracks Converge on One Number
FleetCor’s liability actually runs through two separate legal tracks that only now converge on a single figure. The FTC sued FleetCor and Clarke in federal court in December 2019, seeking an injunction and monetary relief under Section 13(b) of the FTC Act. In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in AMG Capital Management v. FTC that Section 13(b) does not let the agency obtain monetary redress in federal court at all, only injunctions. To preserve its ability to get money back to FleetCor’s customers, the FTC opened a parallel administrative case against the same company and its chief executive that August, built on the identical fee practices already being litigated in Georgia. The $100 million now on the table comes from that administrative track, not from the court case that established liability in the first place.
From a 2022 Judgment to a 2026 Appeals Ruling
In the court case, a federal district judge granted the FTC summary judgment against FleetCor and Clarke on every count in August 2022 and entered a permanent injunction in June 2023, barring the company from billing any charge without a customer’s express informed consent, from hiding material fee terms behind a hyperlink, and from making deceptive claims about savings or fees. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that injunction against FleetCor in January 2026 and upheld the company’s liability on all five original counts. Clarke’s personal liability held on every count but one; the appeals court vacated the injunction against him individually and sent that single count back to the district court.
A Proposed Order Still Awaiting Public Comment
The newly announced settlement requires FleetCor and Clarke to pay the $100 million to the Commission within eight days of the order’s effective date, with the money placed in a fund the Commission will use for consumer redress. Under the order, FleetCor must supply the Commission with the customer account information needed to identify who is owed money, rather than requiring each affected business to file a claim on its own. The commission’s vote to accept the settlement was 1-0-1, with Chairman Andrew Ferguson recused and Commissioner Mark Meador voting to accept it, and the agreement still needs to be published in the Federal Register and held open for thirty days of public comment before the Commission decides whether to make it final. The order is also written to run twenty years once it does take effect, the standard term for an FTC consent decree, so any violation during that window would draw a penalty on top of, not instead of, the redress payment itself.
What Fee Creep Means for Small Business and Retirement Budgets
Older Americans run a disproportionate share of the small delivery, trucking, landscaping and courier businesses that depend on fleet fuel cards to keep vehicles moving, which puts fee creep like FleetCor’s directly against retirement-stage cash flow. The FTC’s own account of how the fees were disclosed, buried inside secondary account reports or left off billing statements altogether, mirrors a pattern that shows up in bank, subscription and card-fee complaints from older account holders every year: a charge that is technically visible somewhere, but never plainly stated where a customer would naturally look. FleetCor’s redress has not started, and the FTC’s public list of active refund programs does not yet include the company, because the payment is still tied to a proposed order rather than a final judgment. Once that order does take final effect, any future violation of it carries a civil penalty of up to $53,088 for each offense, the standard maximum the FTC attaches to a consent order once it carries the force of law.
The Paperwork Gap Between a Settlement and a Payment
A big federal settlement figure makes headlines, but it says nothing about which business receives a check, how large that check will be, or what a legitimate notice looks like once a redress fund actually opens. FleetCor’s own case shows how long that gap can run: a complaint filed in 2019 took years and a parallel legal track to produce a number, and the redress phase has not begun. Business owners and account holders touched by any settlement, not only this one, are largely left to sort a real notice from a scam letter on their own.
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This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.
Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
