It’s your money. Here’s what you actually need to know about today.
The fee you can probably get back without waiting on a lawsuit
Two settlements surfaced this week over the same thing. iQ Credit Union agreed to $750,000 over its overdraft fee practices, and Stanford Federal Credit Union agreed to a smaller amount over NSF fees. Neither institution has admitted doing anything wrong — a settlement isn’t a finding.
Skip the names for a second, because the names are the least useful part. Look at what the lawyers went after.
The first practice is re-presentment. A payment bounces, your bank charges you a fee, the merchant automatically sends it through again, and you get charged a second fee on the same transaction. Sometimes a third. One purchase, three fees, and nothing you did in between. The second practice is charging an overdraft fee on a day your account showed a positive available balance — the number the app told you you had was not the number they charged you against.
Here’s why this is worth ten minutes of your evening rather than a shrug: almost every bank and credit union in the country did some version of this. Two of them settled this week. The rest didn’t, and you do not need a class action to ask for your money back.
I ran a credit counseling organization and I watched people bleed out $35 at a time on this exact mechanism. It wasn’t the mortgage that broke them. It was the fee that took them $35 further under, which caused the next thing to bounce, which cost $35 more.
So do this. Pull the last twelve months of statements — twenty-four if your bank lets you. Highlight every NSF, returned-item and overdraft fee. Then look for two patterns. One: more than one fee attached to the same merchant and the same amount within a few days. That’s a re-presentment stack. Two: a fee charged on a day your available balance was positive.
Then call and ask for reversal in specific terms, because a specific ask gets a different answer than a general one. Not “can you help me out.” Say: I’m requesting reversal of these specific fees as multiple fees charged on a single re-presented item. Please note the request in my account and tell me who reviews fee disputes. Naming the practice tells the person on the phone you know what it is, and it puts a note in a file somebody else can read.
If you were an iQ or Stanford member during a class period, one more thing — update your address with both the institution and the settlement administrator. Payouts get mailed to the last address on file, which is exactly how former members end up with nothing. And never pay anybody a fee to file a claim for you. Claim forms are free.
Last thing, and it’s the one that matters most. If overdraft fees are a monthly event rather than an accident, the fee isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom of a cash-flow gap, and clawing back $105 doesn’t close it.
What you haven’t seen if you’re only on the daily list
Some of what I publish never goes out in the daily email — the crisis guides are deliberately held back, because they aren’t news. They’re what you need at two in the morning when it’s already happening.
A debt collector won’t validate the debt but won’t stop calling is the one people get wrong most often, because the silence feels like a dead end when it’s actually leverage. My court-ordered restitution was turned over to a collection agency covers a debt that behaves differently from every other debt you have, and people apply the wrong playbook to it. And debts piled up while I was in the hospital — the situation where doing nothing for six weeks was completely reasonable and the consequences arrive anyway.
Two more that did go out but are easy to miss. The Ninth Circuit issued its final ruling in Sweet v. McMahon, confirming automatic discharge for a large group of borrowers. And what American Express just told the SEC about facing an AML enforcement action — companies disclose things to their investors that they never put in a press release, and their own filings are a better source than their marketing.
Money you might actually be owed
The one with a real deadline first. Reports say eligible people have until August 11 to claim documented losses of up to $25,000 from a proposed $31.5 million Flagstar settlement covering the bank’s 2021 breaches, which affected roughly 2.2 million people. That’s five days. Check the official administrator site before you trust any figure in a news write-up, including that one.
Also open: Equifax customers have about a month left to claim from a $2.2 million settlement over duplicate debt reporting — I wrote up who’s actually eligible, because the headline is much broader than the class. Plus $14 million over Costco sales emails and $1.25 million over Farmers Insurance robocalls.
Before you spend an evening on any claim form, confirm you’re in the class. Most people reading a settlement headline aren’t, and that’s the whole trick of a loud number.
Things to check this week
Honda is recalling over 325,000 Odyssey vans over a rearview camera malfunction. Recalls are free to fix and cost you a phone call, which is precisely why people skip them.
Claims worth knowing about, all still unproven
Somebody’s allegation in a filing, not a finding. I link them so you can read them and decide for yourself.
A class action claims Home Depot sold customer data, and another claims Macy’s furniture protection plans are deceptive — worth reading if you’ve ever been offered a protection plan at a register, which is everyone. Uber is accused of misclassifying drivers as independent contractors, which matters well beyond Uber if any part of your income is gig work. And Equifax, Experian, Synchrony and Midland were sued together over credit report errors.
The one to warn someone about
A federal complaint has been filed against a debt settlement company — BRONSTIN v. United Debt Settlement, LLC. Allegations only; no court has found liability.
I flag these every time, and here is why. The person most likely to sign up with a debt settlement company is the person least able to absorb it going wrong, and they are almost never the person reading a court docket. If you know somebody currently enrolled in one, that’s the forward.
What people are actually suing over
I publish complaints in full so you can read the allegations in the plaintiff’s own words rather than somebody’s summary of them.
New this week: Collins v. New Era Lending, where the plaintiff alleges the company sent telemarketing calls and texts to a number registered on the National Do Not Call Registry without consent. Also Terrell v. LVNV Funding and Watts v. Youth Financial Literacy Foundation. No court has found liability in any of them.
Read one even if the company means nothing to you. A complaint is the best free education there is in what a collector is not allowed to do — and if the same thing has happened to you, you’re looking at the template for saying so.
The scale of it, since people ask
In the week to August 6, counting out of the public federal docket record myself for my debt lawsuit archive, I found roughly 124 new suits naming Equifax, 31 naming Experian and 24 naming Trans Union. The busiest single day was July 31.
Two honest limits on those numbers, because they only mean something with the limits attached. They are federal only — the Fair Credit Reporting Act lets people sue in state court too, and I don’t monitor state courts at all, so the real number is higher by an unknown amount. And federal dockets take one to two weeks to finish indexing, so the most recent days are undercounted and the figure moves between readings. Treat all three as a floor, not a total.
Even as a floor, it tells you something worth knowing: disputing a credit report error is not a rare or eccentric thing to do. Several thousand people a year take it all the way to federal court.
One more thing
This is the digest — breadth here. The GOOD Weekday Briefing is the daily one, where the depth goes and where new guides land first. Different list, different job.
If one thing in here was useful, forward it to the person you thought of while you were reading it. That’s the whole distribution plan.
— Steve