The door most people don’t know they have
If a credit bureau has something wrong on your file and won’t fix it, you are not stuck with it. You can sue them. Ordinary people do this constantly — it just never makes the news, so almost nobody realizes it’s an option.
In the last week alone, federal courts took in at least 137 new suits naming Equifax, 32 naming Experian, and 29 naming Trans Union. I want to be careful about that number, because being careful is the whole point of this letter: those are federal filings only, and the federal docket system takes a week or two to finish indexing, so the real total is higher — possibly much higher. FCRA claims can also be filed in state court, which I don’t monitor at all. Treat it as a floor, not a count.
What matters isn’t the arithmetic. It’s that the door exists and it’s ordinary. If you’ve disputed an error in writing, kept your proof, and the bureau still won’t correct it, that is exactly the situation these people were in.
I publish the actual complaints so you can read what a real one looks like instead of taking my word for it — Terrell v. LVNV Funding, Hurt v. Transworld Systems, and Fitzgerald v. Midland Credit Management are good places to start.
Money you might actually be owed — and one you’re not
Equifax has agreed to pay $2.2 million over allegations it reported some people’s collection accounts twice. Here’s the part the headlines are leaving out, and it’s the reason I wrote this up properly today: you almost certainly cannot claim it. Filing requires a Notice ID starting with “EQB” and a PIN printed on a letter Equifax mailed in August or September 2022, to roughly 37,000 people. If that letter never came, there’s no path in, and anyone charging you a fee to “help” you file is running a scam. The deadline is September 1. Here’s who actually qualifies and what the rest of us should do instead.
Oppenheimer & Co. has agreed to pay $70 million to settle allegations it underpaid interest on customers’ idle cash in its Advantage Bank Deposit Program. It denies any wrongdoing. If you held cash there between March 2022 and May 2026, the claim deadline is September 17. But the reason I covered it is much bigger than the claim: a cash sweep is the quietest fee in finance — it isn’t a charge on your statement, it’s interest you never earned, so there’s no line item to notice. Go look at what your own brokerage pays on your idle cash today. If it starts with a zero, move it.
Two more open right now, both other people’s reporting, both worth a look if they touch you: Flagstar’s 2021 data breaches, where documented losses can be claimed until August 11 (Times of India), and a roundup of ten settlements you can claim this month from Top Class Actions.
And one I already had to talk people down from: the Costco email settlement is not a nationwide $500 check.
Things to check this week
Honda is recalling more than 325,000 Odyssey minivans over a rearview camera malfunction, per Top Class Actions. Recalls are free to fix and people ignore them for years.
If you bank with a credit union, two overdraft and NSF fee settlements opened — $450,000 at Stanford Federal Credit Union and $750,000 at iQ Credit Union. Small money individually. Worth two minutes if you’re a member.
Claims worth knowing about, all still unproven
These are allegations other outlets are reporting. Nobody has proven any of them, and I’m passing them along as claims, not findings.
Equifax, Experian, Synchrony and Midland were sued over credit report errors. Home Depot faces a privacy class action over the alleged sale of customer data, and Google was hit with a class action alleging user data was shared with Temu and Baidu. Macy’s faces a class action over an allegedly deceptive furniture protection plan — protection plans are one of the most reliably bad deals in retail, lawsuit or no lawsuit. And Uber is facing a class action claiming it misclassifies drivers as independent contractors, which matters to anyone whose budget depends on gig income.
The one to warn someone about
The Justice Department settled with a towing company over alleged violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, reported by JD Supra. If you or someone in your family is on active duty, the SCRA gives real protections — interest rate caps, limits on repossession and foreclosure without a court order — and almost nobody invokes them, because almost nobody knows they’re there. Tell the servicemember in your life. That one’s free.
One more thing
If you’re reading this, you already get more than most people do about how this stuff works. My longer pieces — the crisis guides, the court cases, the debunks — go out in the Weekday Briefing on getoutofdebt.org, and everything I write is free.
If any single item in here would help someone you know, forward it to them. That’s the whole distribution plan.
— Steve