A financial giant accused of debanking a gun store is facing increasing pressure over allegations it targeted conservative customers.
Consumers’ Research, a conservative organization, launched a “woke alert” campaign targeting Capital One on Thursday. Last week, The Daily Wire reported on a lawsuit filed by a Maryland gun store suing Capital One after claiming it blocked it from using its payment platform after identifying it as participating in a “prohibited industry.”
The lawsuit from the Rockville-based United Gun Shop says it received messages in 2025 and 2026 from Capital One and Melio Payments suggesting that they could not work with the firearms industry. The messages came after the gun store attempted to use Capital One’s payment platform, administered by Melio Payments, for multiple business-related transactions and bill payments.
“Capital One has been caught debanking law-abiding citizens again. It apparently isn’t enough for Capital One to fund and promote racist DEI, climate activism, and extreme transgender policies; the company is also debanking its own customers simply for holding views outside leftist ideology,” Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild told The Daily Wire.
The “woke alert” from Consumers’ Research pointed to a lawsuit filed by the Trump organization accusing Capital One of cancelling more than 300 of the company’s accounts in 2021 after President Donald Trump’s first term ended.
This lawsuit was noted in a recent financial filing from Capital One, noting it was dealing with “a civil lawsuit filed by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and several affiliated corporate entities against Capital One.”
Additionally, the filing noted that it was “responding to demands and requests from various federal agencies” regarding “fair access to banking,” prompted by an executive order from Trump directing “government agencies to review financial institutions’ policies and practices for providing, maintaining, or discontinuing financial products or services to certain clients or potential clients.”
Capital One is one of the nine major financial entities being probed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
The “woke alert” flagged other gun industry owners who complained they had services cut off by Capital One, including the owner of a silencer company, who testified that he was unable to use their banking services to sell federally regulated suppressors.
A previous version of the company’s corporate terms of service contained a provision saying that “ammunition, firearms, or firearm parts or related accessories” were prohibited payments for corporate accounts. That provision has since been removed from the current terms of service.
Capital One has a history of pushing corporate activism, including announcing a $200 million investment back in October 2020 into “growth in underserved communities,” focusing on “black and Latinx” communities.
“From law-abiding gun sellers to President Donald Trump’s own family, conservative Americans are being disgracefully treated like criminals because of Capital One’s discriminatory policies,” Hild said. “Every consumer needs to know that ‘woke’ is what’s in Capital One’s wallet.”
