Your Fuel Card Charged a Late Fee on a Bill You Paid on Time. That Just Cost FleetCor $100 Million.

If you run a business with trucks in it, go pull the last year of fuel card statements. The reason the Federal Trade Commission just pulled $100 million out of FleetCor is sitting somewhere in those line items.

On September 17, FleetCor Technologies, now called Corpay, and its chief executive Ronald Clarke agreed to pay $100 million into a fund for the business customers the agency says got worked over. Nobody rushed into this. The FTC sued in 2019. A federal district court granted summary judgment for the agency on all counts in 2023. An appeals court upheld that judgment on all counts this year. Seven years to get to the check.

The mechanics are worth studying even if you’ve never carried one of their cards.

Start with the late fees. The FTC says FleetCor “charged late fees to customers who had either paid on time or were prevented by FleetCor from paying on time.” Read that second half twice. It isn’t a billing error. It describes a system where the company’s own process blocks the payment and then bills you for the delay.

Then the timing trick, which is the part to actually learn from. The company concealed fees by waiting several billing cycles after account setup before it started assessing them, keeping them off the regular invoice, and burying the terms. That is not sloppiness. A fee that lands in month one gets a phone call. The same fee in month four gets filed.

And the whole thing was sold on savings at the pump. Christopher Mufarrige, who runs the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, put it plainly: FleetCor “deceived its small business customers by promising fuel savings that never materialized, while unfairly charging them hidden and unauthorized fees.”

Here’s why this is worth an hour of your week rather than a shrug. Fuel card fees are small and frequent, which is exactly the shape of charge a busy owner stops reading. Say you spend $6,000 a month on diesel across a handful of trucks. Two percent in fees you never agreed to is $120 a month, $1,440 a year, sitting inside an invoice you approve on autopilot. That’s a truck payment.

So audit it. Take twelve months of statements, add up every line that isn’t fuel or tax, and divide by what you actually spent on fuel. Now you have a percentage instead of a feeling. If it surprises you, call your program and ask for each fee by name, what triggers it, and where it was disclosed when you signed. Ask for that in writing.

Going forward the order bars the company from billing any charge without the customer’s express informed consent and clear, unavoidable information about it, and from hiding material information behind a hyperlink. Future violations run $53,088 apiece, according to reporting on the settlement.

As for getting paid, slow down. The order is not final: the terms go into the Federal Register, a 30-day comment window opens, then the commissioners vote. The FTC has not announced who qualifies, how much anyone gets, or when. Keep your statements, check ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds yourself rather than waiting for a call, and remember how these rounds usually run: the agency mails or deposits money without asking you to pay for the privilege, the way it is doing right now in the $225 million Amway case.

Anyone who phones offering to unlock your FleetCor settlement for a fee is running a second scam on top of the first one.

While the statements are out, remember the fuel price is the bigger line. The four moves that actually cut a fuel bill don’t involve anybody’s card program.

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