Meet the law that stands up to credit fraud

At least once a week, if you walk around campus past midnight, you might see a girl walking up to the Price School of Public Policy with her thermos of tea in her hand. She’ll stop and sit down on the wire bench across from the building, looking up at its flashy front door with the two thick columns proudly bearing the school’s name. It’s become a little ritual for her after three semesters — it reminds her of why she came here. About the conversations she loves to have in its classrooms; about where she might go as a journalist; a future lawyer; a policymaker — a person.

And, as cheesy as it sounds, one day that girl turned on her heel and got hit with an idea to spread that dialogue around campus. It’s me (hard guess, I know), so to you I say, “Welcome to ‘Public Disclosure’” — the column to get to know our government better, straight from the pen of an overzealous but very proud public policy major.

That school, its professors and the classmates that inspired this column is by far the thing I count on the most at USC. When everything else in my life is a dumpster fire of smothered-over anger issues, a Swedish Fish addiction and a painful amount of romantic naïvete, they’re what make me get up in the morning.

That school is the place that’s shown me the truth about policies, laws and protections that our government affords us — many that rarely get publicized or explained well enough by broadcast networks for people to debate and discuss.

And I’ve decided that you shouldn’t have to be a Price major to be equipped with this knowledge — the hundreds of millions of people who will flock to my articles, especially you, deserve to know about them. If universities like ours are supposed to be bastions of learning — in addition to being a nursery for unregulated alcoholism — well then, damn it, we shouldn’t keep the former to ourselves! There’s too much at stake.

Call me a fangirl, bored, a policy wonk or a person who’d like to turn this whole country’s political discourse into her “Government and Business” classroom — where we’re all filled with awareness and understanding about how a local, state or federal law can actually help protect real people. And perhaps, some thoughts on how we can build on them to make it better.

So, keep an open mind, and challenge your most basic assumptions. I’ll throw in some jokes as well.

The 1974 Fair Credit Billing Act

With the economy ranking as the top issue facing our country for most adults, credit and personal finance is a great place to start broadening our knowledge — and to be aware of an important legal protection. Gen Z consumers in the United States are the most credit active than anywhere else in the world, with 66% of us having some sort of active financial product and about 50% of us having at least one credit card.

For most, including myself, that little three-ish-by-two-ish rectangle sitting in our wallets is the first common credit experience we’ll have, as well as a gateway drug to buying Squishmallows and Lego Botanicals off of Amazon in staggering amounts.

Of course, implicit in an economy with 191 million Americans having at least one credit card, there’s going to be foul play — with younger generations like millennials actually more likely to report losing money to fraud than people 40 and over. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the year 2021 alone saw over 2.8 million people become the victim of fraud — and I’d wager that you or someone you know might be one of them.

But the 1974 Fair Credit Billing Act is one of our most important safeguards when it comes to being internet-mugged and identity-jacked, because of a great provision: If you challenge a large unauthorized purchase, wrong charge amount, inaccurate statement, or even an undelivered or unacceptable good within 60 days on an open-end (something you can draw on repeatedly with no fixed end date) credit account, you are only liable for up to $50 of the damage.

Bottom line — if you take extra care to skim your bill for an error every month before you hopefully pay your balance, you are entitled to get that investigated and fixed by your bank. Even further, while that error is being investigated by your creditor, the law also stops them from taking action to negatively affect your credit standing.

While it might take a while for your credit score to realign from a mistake, it should never be adversely affected by that phishing email scam that you fell for — even though that guy probably didn’t need your social security number just to give you a premium membership to ILoveXxXWomAn.com. You live and you learn.

CJ Haddad is a junior writing about local, state and federal laws we use in our daily lives. She is also an associate managing editor at the Daily Trojan. Her column, “Public Disclosure,” runs every other Thursday.