The protection almost nobody uses
The Justice Department settled with a towing company over alleged Servicemembers Civil Relief Act violations, and I want to use it to tell you about a law most people have never heard of.
The SCRA may be the strongest consumer protection in American law, and almost nobody uses it. It can cap interest at 6% on debts taken on before service. It can stop a car being repossessed without a court order. It can undo a default judgment entered against someone while they were deployed and never knew they’d been sued.
Here’s the part that gets me. Servicemembers don’t lose these fights because the law is weak. They lose them because nobody ever told them the protection existed, and the protection isn’t automatic — somebody has to invoke it. A 22-year-old at their first duty station does not know to write a letter citing a federal statute, and the finance company is not going to volunteer it.
So if you know someone in uniform, or a parent of someone in uniform, that’s the thing to forward today. Not because they’re in trouble. Because the day they need it is the day it’s too late to go learn it.
Money you might actually be owed — and one you’re not
Top Class Actions listed ten settlements you can claim in August. Open ones this week include $450,000 over Stanford Federal Credit Union NSF fees, $750,000 over iQ Credit Union overdraft fees, $2.4 million over Guitar Center wage and hour violations if you ever worked there, and $750,000 over Strides testosterone gel. Before you spend an evening on a claim form, check that you’re actually in the class — most people aren’t.
Case in point: the Costco email settlement keeps circulating as a “$500 check for everyone,” and when I went through the actual terms the eligible group is far narrower than the posts sharing it suggest. Carry that pattern around: the loud opportunity is usually the small one. And a settlement you don’t qualify for is the perfect setup for the follow-on scam — someone emailing to “verify your banking details” for a payout that was never coming. No legitimate settlement administrator asks for your bank login.
Things to check this week
Honda recalled over 325,000 Odyssey minivans over a rearview camera malfunction. Recalls are free to fix and cost you nothing but a phone call, so check your VIN. The Bradford-Scott data breach settlement also has a live claim window.
Claims worth knowing about, all still unproven
A class action alleges Uber misclassifies its drivers as independent contractors — if you drive gig, that one is about whether your costs are really yours. Others say Google shared user data with Temu and Baidu, claim Walmart collected customers’ voiceprints and separately that its Great Value chia seeds contain mold, accuse Home Depot of selling customer data, say Macy’s ran a deceptive furniture protection plan, claim Stanley Black & Decker ran a tariff pricing scheme, and allege unpaid wages at FedEx, Kroger, UPS and Home Depot. Honda faces separate claims over peeling white paint and a defective Odyssey starting system, and consumers have sued Taylor Farms and Taco Bell over a cyclospora outbreak. Allegations, not findings — but each one is a filing you can read yourself at the link.
Worth noting one that went the other way: the Meta class actions alleging a pump-and-dump ad scheme were dismissed. Not every claim survives, which is exactly why I label them claims.
The door most people don’t know they have
According to the federal court docket index, in the seven days ending today at least 214 federal cases were filed naming the three big credit bureaus — 145 against Equifax, 40 against Experian, 29 against TransUnion, with the busiest single day being Friday, when the index shows Equifax named 39 times. A filed case is an accusation, not a finding: none of these has been decided, and the count tells you how often people are going to court over credit reporting, not that anyone did anything wrong. I say “at least” and mean it twice over: the federal docket takes a week or two to finish indexing, so the recent days are undercounted, and this is federal court only. The Fair Credit Reporting Act says one of these claims can be brought in a United States district court “or in any other court of competent jurisdiction” — 15 U.S.C. §1681p — which means state courts too, and I have no window into those at all. So the real figure isn’t 214. It’s 214 that I can see.
Be clear about what that number is, though: a filed lawsuit is an accusation, not a finding. None of these has been decided. What the count tells you is how often ordinary people are going to court over credit reporting — not that anyone has been found to have done anything wrong.
And they are ordinary people, one at a time, not one big class action. Childs in Northern Texas, Hilton and Anderson in Northern Georgia, McKinney in Southern Georgia, Taico in Northern Illinois. The filings cluster by district: Equifax draws them in Northern Georgia and Eastern Michigan, Experian in Central California, TransUnion in Northern Illinois.
Why you care: when a bureau reports something wrong about you and won’t fix it after you dispute it, that is a federal claim, and the fee-shifting provisions are why a consumer attorney will take it without asking you for money up front. Pull your reports free at annualcreditreport.com — the real one, the site the government requires. Read them. Dispute what’s wrong in writing and keep the proof. If the error survives their investigation, find a consumer attorney through the National Association of Consumer Advocates.
If you want to see what one of these actually looks like from the inside, I publish the complaints in full — Watts v. Youth Financial Literacy Foundation, Harris v. LVNV Funding, Horan v. Portfolio Recovery Associates, and Hurt v. Transworld Systems among them.
If one of these is happening to you right now
I write these separately, and on purpose they don’t go out in the daily email — they aren’t news, they’re the thing you need at two in the morning when it’s already happening. Several went up in the last week and nobody on my daily list has seen them. A judgment lien was filed against my house. A title loan company took my car. I got an ambulance bill I can’t pay. Debts piled up while I was in the hospital. My court-ordered restitution was turned over to a collection agency.
Two others from this week are worth your time even if none of the above is you. The Ninth Circuit issued its final ruling in Sweet v. McMahon, confirming automatic discharge for 170,000 more borrowers, and I went through what American Express just told the SEC about facing an enforcement action. And day 27 of my $1,000 AI investing experiment went up today: the market had its best day of the run, my AI sat still, and it is now behind the index. I report it either way.
That’s the short version of everything. The longer version — my own writing, one subject at a time — goes out weekday mornings in the Weekday Briefing, free. Breadth here, depth there.
If this was useful, forward it to the one person you know who needs it.
— Steve