New York probes Robinhood, Fomo over credit-card memecoin purchases

  • Robinhood Wallet and Fomo allow credit-card memecoin buys via Crossmint without checkout KYC.
  • Visa and Mastercard tests used MCC 5815 digital-goods coding, unlocking ordinary card rewards.
  • Chase filed a Visa complaint; New York’s attorney general is investigating the flow.

Robinhood Wallet and social trading app Fomo let users buy memecoins such as dogwifhat with credit cards via Apple Pay or Google Pay through Crossmint, without a separate KYC form at checkout, delivering tokens straight to wallets. Tested Visa and Mastercard purchases posted as merchant category code 5815 for online books, films and music rather than crypto categories 6012 or 6051 with a required quasi-cash flag, so ordinary points and cashback applied. Chase says the wrong code was used under its rewards rules excluding cash-like and cryptocurrency spending and has taken the case to Visa. Crossmint defends the path under securities law, limiting the product to memecoins it treats as meme-born collectibles and barring stablecoins, citing 2025 SEC staff views that typical meme coins can be akin to collectibles and a March interpretive release that named WIF beside CryptoPunks; Visa’s rulebook grants no such exception. New York Attorney General Letitia James is reviewing the setup after prior actions including a $45 million Block Cash App resolution and suits against Coinbase and Gemini over prediction markets. WIF traded near $0.19, about $197 million in market value, barely moved by the dispute, while a viral Artificial Inu loss claim was traced by traders to a price-tracker misread rather than a confirmed $20 million wipeout.

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