The 60-day fraud window most bank customers don't know exists

According to WXYZ-TV, a woman named Dorothy Bush lost more than $1,100 to unauthorized bank charges, and her bank was not required to reimburse most of it. The charges themselves were not complicated. An unauthorized $78 monthly cell phone charge drained her checking account for a year and a half before she noticed.

The bank did not fail to protect her in the way people usually mean that. It followed the law. Under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, a bank only has to cover fraud reported within 60 days of the statement that shows it. Bush's bank told her it would only reimburse charges from the past 60 days, even though the fraud stretched back eighteen months.

The clock starts on the statement, not on the theft

The EFTA's protection is built around a deadline that has nothing to do with when the fraud started. It starts the moment a statement is issued showing the charge, whether or not anyone reads that statement. Karen Bennett, senior consumer banking reporter at Bankrate, explained the mechanics to WXYZ-TV: notify the bank within 60 days and liability is capped at $500; wait longer and the bank is no longer required to investigate at all, meaning the customer likely absorbs the full loss.

This is the part of the system that puts the burden back on the customer. The law protects people who catch fraud quickly. It does very little for people who do not look. Bush had switched from paper statements to electronic ones, and she said that change made the charge harder to spot. "I would have noticed it the first month, but I don't get a paper statement, and it's really hard to find what's gone on, what charges have gone in, on the website," she said.

The coverage itself is narrower than most people assume. The EFTA applies to debit card transactions, ATM withdrawals, direct deposits and peer-to-peer transfers like Zelle or Venmo. It does not apply to paper checks, wire transfers, prepaid cards, or credit cards, which fall under a separate law entirely. A person assuming one set of protections covers every kind of account activity is very likely wrong.

What the deadline assumes

The 60-day rule assumes a customer is checking statements regularly enough to catch a problem inside that window. Bush's case shows what happens when that assumption does not hold: a switch to electronic statements, a busy website, and eighteen months pass before a negative balance forces a look. The fraud did not escalate because the bank was careless. It escalated because nobody was checking, and the law's deadline had already started counting down before anyone knew there was something to count.

Bankrate's advice, carried in the same report, is to report even a small unauthorized charge immediately, since a thief left undetected keeps taking more. Bush's own conclusion was blunter: she called the experience her own undoing, for not looking closer at charges she could no longer recover.