SEC Fines JPMorgan $4M For “Accidentally” Deleting 47M Customer Records

Key Points:

• The Securities and Exchange Commission fined JPMorgan Chase for accidentally deleting 47 million emails.
• The emails contain most of the bank’s business records authorized under SEC rules to keep for at least three years.
• JPMorgan also did not deny or admit wrongdoing, noting that the incident happened accidentally.

JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, has fallen victim to the SEC crackdown. The bank on Thursday received a $4 million fine from the regulator for accidentally and permanently deleting nearly 47 million emails. These emails belong to the retail banking group, and most of them are known to contain business records.

The specific deleted records took the form of tens of millions of employee emails. Furthermore, the initial report on the fine noted that these emails act as business records capture, “the largest U.S. bank was required under SEC rules to keep for three years.”

Under SEC guidance, JPMorgan is obligated to retain such records for at least three years before destruction. However, emails from January 1 to April 23, 2018, were deleted in 2019 from 8,700 mailboxes.

JPMorgan also did not deny or admit wrongdoing, noting that the incident happened accidentally. The bank has decided to adopt its email encryption process to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future following the civil settlement.

According to the SEC, the bank failed to delete some communications from the 1970s and 1980s. Failure to do so, however, led the bank to contact an external provider that was managing JPMorgan’s email archive, which, by mistake, deleted the emails in 2019.

Furthermore, the report indicated that JP Morgan can now not comply with “at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory probes to comply with subpoenas and document requests for communications that had been permanently deleted.”

The SEC has been closely targeting securities law violators for some time now, more common in the crypto space than in the TradFi market. The most recent crackdown has hit the world’s two largest cryptocurrency exchanges – Binance and Coinbase.

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