What gets fact-checked
Our fact-check covers every claim that, if wrong, would cause a reader to make a different financial decision. That includes:
- Every dollar figure, APR, fee, and loan term on any cost table or example
- Every statute citation (state code section, U.S.C., C.F.R.) and the substance attributed to that statute
- Every regulator name, contact, and complaint-portal URL
- Every state legal status (allowed, banned, restricted) for payday lending
- Every quoted statement or attributed claim
- Every third-party data point (Pew, Census, CFPB complaint data, FDIC, NCUA, NFCC)
Editorial opinion (e.g., "we believe payday loans should be the last resort") is clearly labeled and not fact-checked the same way; sources behind any opinion are still required.
Three-step process
- Step 1 — Claim extraction. Before publication, the fact-checker reads the draft and extracts every claim listed above into a structured worksheet. Each claim gets a row with the claim, the source the author cited, and a "verified / not verified / dispute" status.
- Step 2 — Primary-source verification. The fact-checker independently pulls the cited source. The author's source can be Tier-1 or Tier-2 (see source hierarchy in editorial policy); if the author cited a Tier-3 or Tier-4 source the fact-checker tries to upgrade it to Tier-1 or Tier-2. Every claim must trace back to a primary regulator, statute, or government dataset.
- Step 3 — Reviewer cross-check. The second editorial reviewer (a different credentialed person than the author) spot-checks 20% of the fact-checker's verifications and signs off in writing. Any unverifiable claim must be removed, softened, or labeled as the speaker's claim before the page ships.
Primary-source list
This is not exhaustive, but it covers the bulk of Quick Cash's fact-check work:
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — rulemakings, supervisory highlights, consumer complaint database, payday lending market reports
- State Attorneys General — enforcement actions, consent decrees, official guidance
- State banking and consumer-finance regulators — for payday/installment rules and complaint portals; Texas OCCC is the canonical example
- State legislative codes and session laws — accessed via official state legislature websites, not third-party aggregators
- U.S. Department of Defense — Military Lending Act guidance, MLA database for covered-borrower verification
- FDIC and NCUA — call reports, small-dollar lending guidance, PAL rules
- U.S. Census — income, poverty, unbanked/underbanked tables
- Federal Reserve — Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), bank-fee data
- Pew Charitable Trusts small-dollar lending project — peer-reviewed research
- National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) — high-cost lending and rate-evasion reporting
- Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) — fee and APR research
- NFCC, AFCPE — credit-counseling sector data
Fact-checker training
Quick Cash fact-checkers complete the following before they can verify a published page:
- A 10-hour internal training on the source hierarchy, the worksheet workflow, and how to read a state statute citation
- A supervised verification of three previously published pages, with a senior editor checking each verification line by line
- A written commitment to the editorial integrity agreement, including the rule that the fact-checker has no financial relationship with covered lenders
- Annual recertification covering the prior year's statute and rule changes
Review cycle
Every page is fact-checked again on a recurring schedule even if no edits have been made:
- Money pages
- Re-checked every 6 months. Any APR cap or fee structure change in any covered state triggers an immediate re-check.
- State hubs
- Re-checked every 6 months and on any legislative session result. A state-law change triggers a same-week update.
- City pages
- Re-checked every 12 months and on any city-ordinance change.
- Learn library
- Re-checked every 12 months.
- Research
- The annual cost index is fully re-checked as part of the new edition; underlying datasets are re-pulled.
Disputes and reader-flagged errors
If a reader flags a fact, we treat it as a presumed problem until verified. The fact-checker pulls the original source within 48 hours. If the claim cannot be supported, we issue a correction, log it in the public corrections log, and date-stamp the page. If the reader was right, we credit them by name (with permission) in the log entry.
What we explicitly do not do
To make the standard above legible, here is what fact-checking at Quick Cash never looks like. We do not rely on a single competitor article as the basis for a claim. We do not "verify" a number by re-finding it on another aggregator or news site that itself didn't cite a primary source. We do not paraphrase statutes from memory or from AI-generated summaries; the fact-checker reads the statute. We do not allow lender-provided statistics to stand as fact about industry-wide behavior — those are clearly labeled as the lender's own claim and corroborated against regulator data wherever possible.
Rules of thumb our fact-checkers follow
- Round numbers are red flags. "Approximately 12 million Americans" is a sentence that probably needs a Tier-1 source. Round numbers tend to be paraphrased from secondary sources.
- State laws change every legislative session. A statute citation that worked last year may not work this year. Default to re-pulling.
- Use the regulator's own complaint portal as the canonical URL. Do not link to a state regulator's home page when a specific complaint or contact URL exists.
- If two reputable Tier-1 sources disagree, surface the disagreement. Pick one number for the body text and footnote the alternative so the reader can see we know there is dispute.
- Lender-disclosed APR ranges are claims, not facts. Always cite "per the lender's published rate sheet" or "per the lender's TILA disclosure."
Contact
To flag a fact for verification: [email protected]. For broader editorial questions: [email protected]. Or use our send-feedback form.