Scam texts claiming you owe money for an unpaid toll have exploded, helping drive government-impersonation scams up about 40 percent over the past year. The messages look official, threaten late fees or license consequences, and include a link to “pay now.” They are fake, and the rule that defeats them is absolute: no real toll…

Older Americans lost close to $8 billion to scams in the most recent federal tally, with the average senior victim out around $40,000 — a devastating sum for anyone, and often a retirement’s worth of savings for someone on a fixed income. The losses are driven by a handful of predictable schemes, and the single…

A federal grand jury returned an indictment on June 18. An arraignment followed the next month in Binghamton, New York, before a magistrate judge, and on July 28 the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York announced the charges. Zvonko Klapan, 68, of Liverpool, New York, faces multiple counts of wire fraud,…

About $920 million. That is what people reported losing to government impersonators during 2025, according to data the Federal Trade Commission published on June 15 of this year, up from roughly $789 million the year before. The figure sits inside a larger one: $3.5 billion reported lost last year to imposter scams of every kind,…

Nothing puts the money back. When a skimmer copies a SNAP EBT card and the account is drained, no federal authority exists to replace what was taken, and the card in the household’s pocket still carries the same magnetic stripe the thief read. Both of those gaps are stated plainly on the agency’s own page,…

More than 800 mostly retail investors across the United States, many of them retirees, put over $74 million into eleven private funds that offered a stake in companies before those companies went public, according to a complaint the Securities and Exchange Commission filed on August 14, 2026. The agency says those investors were reached by…

In 2022 a credit union in Columbus, Indiana fired its branch manager after discovering she had forged customer signatures on banking documents. Shortly after the termination, a client contacted the credit union about unauthorized transactions in her father’s account. The internal investigation that followed confirmed both the forged signatures and withdrawals made without permission, and…

An FTC alert explains brushing scams: an unordered package validates a delivery so a seller can post fake reviews, and a QR code inside may lead to a phishing site.

A federal court has temporarily shut down a credit repair operation the Federal Trade Commission says collected close to $200 million from people trying to fix their credit. The allegation that stands out is not about the money. It is that the operation allegedly filed identity theft reports with the federal government in customers’ names,…

Investors in a Florida real estate company were told their money was backed by a portfolio worth as much as $450 million. It did not exist. Neither, in a meaningful sense, did the man they thought was running things — the person directing the account had been in federal custody since 2020, serving a sentence…