Banking & Credit Cards
How banks, credit cards, and payment systems work. Covers products, rates, fees, regulations, and what consumers need to know to navigate the banking system.
Latest in Banking & Credit Cards
Freeze your child’s credit before a thief does — a minor’s clean Social Security number is a scammer’s favorite, and the freeze is free
A 19-year-old sits down to apply for her first student loan and discovers $14,000 in collections she never opened. A father, acting on a hunch,...
Scammers drain gift cards before you spend them by copying the codes on store racks — buy from behind the counter and check the packaging
A Michigan couple allegedly walked into Meijer stores across Metro Detroit, pulled gift cards off the racks, peeled back the protective stickers, copied the PINs,...
You can stop the preapproved credit offers scammers steal from mailboxes — opting out at OptOutPrescreen is free and cuts your identity-theft risk
A preapproved credit card offer sitting in an unlocked mailbox looks like junk mail to the person who lives there. To a thief walking the...
Most cardholders who simply call and ask get their interest rate lowered — yet almost no one with a 21% APR ever picks up the phone
Imagine knocking $300 or more off your annual credit card interest bill with a single phone call. That is not a hypothetical. Multiple LendingTree surveys...
Your credit card’s annual fee is often negotiable — a quick call asking to waive it or match a retention offer frequently works
Chase charges $550 a year for the Sapphire Reserve. American Express asks $695 for the Platinum Card. Capital One’s Venture X comes in at $395....
A SIM-swap scam can drain your bank account in minutes by hijacking your phone number — a free carrier “port-out PIN” shuts the door
One morning in early 2023, a cryptocurrency investor in the Washington, D.C., area watched their phone signal vanish. Within minutes, a criminal ring had convinced...
A retiree moved her life savings to a “safe account” on a caller’s orders — and lost all $740,000 to scammers posing as her bank and a federal agent
The first call came with a simple warning: your bank account has been compromised. A recently retired woman did what most people would do. She...
A free fraud alert at the three credit bureaus forces lenders to verify your identity before opening anything — and it’s easier than a full freeze
Someone applies for a store credit card using your name, your Social Security number, and an address you have never lived at. Under normal circumstances,...
Companies charging hundreds to “lower” your student loans are selling what the government does free — real help lives at studentaid.gov
A borrower gets a call, a text, or a social-media ad promising lower monthly payments on their federal student loans. The pitch sounds official. The...
Comcast is paying $117.5 million to customers caught in a 2023 data breach — claim $50 with no proof, or up to $10,000 with receipts, by August 14
Nearly 36 million Xfinity customers had their personal data stolen over four days in October 2023, and Comcast is now writing checks to settle the...
AI can clone a relative’s voice from seconds of audio for a fake emergency call — agree on a family code word so you can verify it’s real
The call comes at 11 p.m. A panicked voice on the line sounds exactly like your daughter, down to the slight rasp she gets when...
Switch on real-time transaction alerts and a card lock in your bank’s app — you’ll catch fraud in seconds instead of on next month’s statement
In late May 2026, fraud investigators continue to see the same pattern play out: a thief tests a stolen debit card with a small charge,...
Anyone who got a Fidelity data-breach notice in 2024 can claim up to $5,000 from a settlement — the deadline to file is July 27
Roughly 120,000 Fidelity Investments customers learned in late 2024 that their personal data had been stolen. If you were one of them, a class action...
Check washing is surging — thieves fish envelopes out of USPS mailboxes and rewrite the payee, so pay digitally or use gel-ink pens
In one case that illustrates the human cost, a Rhode Island man stood in federal court earlier this year and admitted he had used a...
Most major card issuers now generate a one-time virtual card number for online checkout — so a breached retailer never sees your real account
In May 2024, Ticketmaster confirmed that hackers had siphoned personal and payment data tied to roughly 560 million customer records. The breach followed a depressingly...
Carrying a $6,000 balance at 21% costs about $1,260 a year in interest — but a 0% balance-transfer card can freeze that interest for up to 21 months
Carrying a $6,000 balance at 21% costs about $1,260 a year in interest – but a 0% balance-transfer card can freeze that interest for up...
You can switch off overdraft coverage so a too-big charge is simply declined — sparing you the $35 fee banks still collect billions on each year
A $7 coffee costs $42 when your checking account is $3 short and your bank decides to cover the difference. That “courtesy” comes with an...
Freezing your credit at all three bureaus is free and stops scammers from opening loans in your name — yet most Americans have never set one up
The Federal Trade Commission received more than one million identity theft reports in 2023 alone, according to its Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book. A significant...
Your bank deposits are insured only up to $250,000 — yet a record amount of Americans’ savings now sits above that line, uninsured if the bank fails
In March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed so fast that customers tried to yank $42 billion in just two days. Roughly 94% of the bank’s...
Anyone whose mortgage was serviced by Lakeview Loan could claim up to $5,000 from a data-breach settlement — the deadline to file is June 22
If Lakeview Loan Servicing, LLC handled your mortgage between late October and early December 2021, your personal and financial data may have been exposed in...