A $1,000 Taxi? That’s What Consumer Protections Are For

Last year I was vacationing with some friends when we flagged a cab to our hotel. I was annoyed that the meter seemed to be running fast — $32 to travel three miles seemed excessive, but I handed my credit card to the driver.

The driver blocked my view while he did something, handed the card back to me, and took off. The cab was still within sight when I got a text from my bank asking if I’d approved a $972 charge. I replied “no” and immediately called my bank.

Two months and multiple phone calls and letters later, the bank insisted that I was responsible and refused to correct the charge.

I’m a consumer lawyer. I know that federal law requires the bank to investigate disputes about incorrect charges and to correct errors. I even wrote a long letter full of legalese and got my three friends to submit declarations under penalty of perjury. But just 30 minutes after I uploaded the documents, the bank again denied my dispute.

Banks ignore consumer protection laws all the time. That’s why Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2010 — to have a watchdog that would stand up for ordinary people. If a lawyer like me hit a brick wall trying to work with my bank, what hope does the average family have?

The CFPB regularly goes into big banks like mine, reviews their procedures, and forces them to make changes when they’re not complying with the law. Or at least it did — until the CFPB’s new Trump-appointed leadership shut down this supervision program.

Congress designed the CFPB to allow consumers to submit public complaints, which can end the run-around and force someone to pay attention. The CFPB has sent more than 6.8 million complaints to companies on behalf of wronged consumers since it opened its doors.

But in February, the workers who handle those complaints were either fired or told to stop work. While a lawsuit has temporarily stopped the firings, continued disruptions and uncertainties have caused a major backlog in complaints. And this May, the CFPB hinted it might remove public access to complaint data.

When complaints pile up, the CFPB can bring enforcement actions. In December, it opened one against Bank of America, Chase, and the other owners of Zelle — the person-to-person payment system used by thousands of banks — after users lost more than $870 million to fraud.

But under the new administration, the CFPB has dismissed that case.

The CFPB also issued rules last year to reduce fees for people hit with inflation and stagnant wages. They reduced credit card late fees from $32 to $8, cut big bank overdraft fees from $35 to $5, and stopped banks from charging you more for a mortgage or a credit card because you got sick and have medical debt on your credit report.

But in April, a federal judge in Texas threw out the credit card late fees rule after the CFPB refused to defend it — and the CFPB has joined with the banks and credit bureaus in asking the same judge to scrap the medical debt rule. Now President Trump has signed a resolution to overturn the overdraft fee rule too, gutting a lifeline for families struggling to make it living paycheck-to-paycheck.

The CFPB gets results for people who need relief the most. The CFPB has returned more than $21 billion to over 250 million consumers. But President Trump called the CFPB “a very important thing to get rid of,” and his allies in Congress have proposed slashing CFPB funding by nearly 70 percent.

Most people can’t take on big banks by themselves. In a world where we’re at the mercy of big corporations that ignore the law, exploit struggling families, and make profits at our expense, we need the CFPB on our side.

This piece was originally published on our sister site OtherWords.org.