Update
The case One William Street Capital Master Fund Ltd. et al. v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. et al, discussed in this article, was dismissed in a one-page order by the court in the Southern District of New York on the same day the article was published. The court said it will explain its reasoning in a full order to follow.
Investors in subprime auto asset-backed securities (ABS) have had more than a decade to study the wave of litigation that followed the collapse of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities, assess the theories that generated billions in recoveries, and refine strategies in the event they incurred losses of their own. Now, the collapse of Tricolor Auto, a used-car dealer and subprime auto lender whose “buy here, pay here” dealerships served Hispanic communities in Texas, Arizona, and California, has given the investors the opportunity to put those strategies to the test, and even go a step further.
In the newly filed suit, One William Street Capital Master Fund Ltd. et al. v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. et al., No. 1:26-cv-01622 (S.D.N.Y. filed Feb. 26, 2026), noteholders who claim they lost hundreds of millions on allegedly fraudulent securitizations have paired conventional fraud claims against the deal underwriters with a novel theory that attacks the subprime auto deal structure itself.
The novel claims, brought under the Delaware and Texas Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Acts, target the warehouse lenders that funded Tricolor’s loans to consumers – JPMorgan Chase Bank, Barclays Bank, and Fifth Third Bank – alleging the ordinary flow of funds in the securitization constituted a voidable transfer. The claims are based on two features of the deal that were not prevalent in RMBS: the warehouse SPV’s role as the direct seller of receivables to the securitization trust, and the dual role of the defendant banks as both warehouse lenders and securitization underwriters.