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payment goes. By law payments must be applied to If you lose your card or have a spurious charge, like
regular and promotional balances in a certain order. fraud, call the bank right away. The bank will close
There’s a way to work it, but you must read the fine the card and ship you a new one. You will have to
print. re-enter your re-occurring charges. That’s better
than leaving it out there for the fraud actors to keep
INFORMATION SECURITY ringing up the balance.
Sign up for messages that email or text you when If you have a dispute, put it in writing to keep your
certain amounts are charged. Then you’ll be one rights. Telephoning may be easier but writing it
of the first to know if you get hacked. If you find down and mailing it in or faxing it will make it
a purchase you did not make, tell the bank right easier for the bank to understand your problem.
away. If your phone gets stolen and it has access to Because there’s nothing quite like playing telephone
your bank on it, tell the bank right away to reduce when you have a problem, and one agent tells the
the damage to your finances. If you are hacked next agent and so on and so on.
or scammed, report it to the FBI, which you can
do online at a government web site. And put a INDUSTRY LINGO
password on your phone because no one ever plans
to have their phone stolen. It is insurance. Speaking of vocabulary, Automatic Payment is not
the same as Bill pay. One is a pull and the other a
Note that reporting a fraud is different from push. A credit card can pull money from a paying
reporting a dispute. A fraud occurs when there is account. Bill pay on the other hand is a third party
a spurious charge that you don’t recognize from a company, who will push money from the sending
company you have never done business with. A account over to pay your credit card or other bill.
Dispute is for a charge you did not authorize yet There is also a way to “write” a check by calling
from a company you have done business with in the in, sometimes called a check-by-phone or ACH
past. For example, if the phone company charges (Automated Clearing House).
you twice for the same service, it’s a dispute rather
than a fraud. The industry has gone away from Joint accounts. No
more Primary and Secondary owners. Now there are
VOICES! | WINTER 2024 17
