Release Card Class Action Settlement — Rapid Financial Solutions & Axiom Bank ($4.2M)

Prepaid Release Cards · Claims Open

Current Status

Claims are open. A claim must reach the Settlement Administrator no later than October 12, 2026; no official time of day or timezone is specified for that deadline, so file well ahead of it. There is an earlier date that is easy to miss: October 2, 2026 is the deadline to exclude yourself, to comment on or object to the settlement, and to file a notice of intent to appear. The Court granted preliminary approval on July 2, 2026, certified a Nationwide Class and a Washington Subclass for settlement purposes, approved the class notice and appointed Kroll Settlement Administration LLC as Settlement Administrator. A final approval hearing is scheduled for October 19, 2026 at 2:00 p.m. in Tacoma, Washington. No final approval order has been entered and no payment date had been announced as of August 24, 2026.

What Changed Recently?

The settlement was filed with the Court on July 1, 2026, and on July 2, 2026 the Court preliminarily approved it, certified the two settlement classes, approved the form of notice and appointed the Settlement Administrator. That order is what opened the claim window and put the October 19, 2026 fairness hearing on the calendar. The case is Hall v. Rapid Investments, LLC and Axiom Bank, N.A., No. 3:25-cv-05039-BHS, before Judge Benjamin H. Settle in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Tacoma.

The underlying dispute is about how money gets back to people when they walk out of custody. When someone is booked into a jail, the cash in their pockets is taken and held, and money can accumulate in an inmate trust account while they are inside. On release, they are entitled to have those funds returned. The complaint, filed January 16, 2025, alleges that Rapid Investments, LLC — which does business as Rapid Financial Solutions and as Release Pay — and Axiom Bank, N.A. returned those funds on prepaid debit cards that carried fees, rather than by cash or check, and that people were required to accept the cards. The complaint alleges this violated the federal Electronic Fund Transfer Act, and that it also violated the Washington Consumer Protection Act and amounted to conversion and unjust enrichment for cards issued at Washington facilities.

Rapid and Axiom deny all of it. Both maintain they were not involved in any wrongdoing and are not liable under any federal or state theory, and the Settlement Agreement states expressly that nothing in it may be used as an admission of liability. The Court has not decided who is right. The parties tried and failed to settle at two mediation sessions, on December 3, 2025 and February 12, 2026, and reached this agreement in the discussions that followed.

One fact from the litigation matters directly to what your claim is worth. On or about February 3, 2026, the defendants reloaded $2,138,557.48 in inactivity fees they had already collected back onto class members' release cards. Under the Settlement Agreement, once final approval is granted the defendants have the unconditional right to recoup any of those reloaded funds still sitting on a card. Your claim is insulated from that: inactivity fees are calculated as if the February 3, 2026 reload never happened, so the reload cannot be used to shrink what you are owed.

OCA has covered this corner of the market before. The Numi release card settlement resolved a nearly identical set of claims against a different card issuer, and our investigation into excessive prison and jail fees tracks the broader pattern of charges layered onto people in and leaving custody.

Who Qualifies?

The Court certified two settlement classes on July 2, 2026. The Nationwide Class covers all persons in the United States who were:

• Taken into custody at a jail, correctional facility, detention center, or any other law enforcement facility;