Category: Scams & Your Rights
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The Federal Trade Commission pulled its car dealer fee rule and its ban on non-compete agreements in the same action
One federal notice erased two very different protections on the same day. On February 12, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission published a single Federal Register action that withdrew its rule against hidden car-dealer fees and struck its ban on employer non-compete agreements from the federal code. Both rules had already spent more than a year…
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The rule requiring companies to make cancelling as easy as signing up is dead and has not come back
Subscription and membership plans that renew automatically got a lot harder to escape cleanly when a federal court threw out the rule meant to fix that problem. The Federal Trade Commission’s amended Negative Option Rule, which would have forced sellers to make cancelling at least as easy as signing up, never took effect. More than…
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Federal prosecutors say two lab executives billed Medicare $13.7 million for tests pitched at church health fairs and senior living communities
Federal prosecutors in Atlanta filed a civil fraud complaint on September 17, 2026, accusing two former executives of a Georgia clinical laboratory of causing Medicare to pay roughly $13.7 million for genetic and respiratory tests that were solicited at church health fairs, religious conferences and senior living communities rather than ordered by a treating doctor.…
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Every refund check the Federal Trade Commission mails stops being cashable 90 days after it is issued
A check from the Federal Trade Commission looks like a straightforward refund sitting in the mailbox, but it comes with a printed expiration date almost nobody reads twice. Every consumer redress check the agency mails carries an instruction that it must be cashed within 90 days of the date it was issued, and once that…
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People who used between 11 and 20 Prime benefits in a year were left out of Amazon’s earlier refunds
Amazon customers who used more than 10 Prime perks in a single year — fast shipping, Prime Video, Prime Music, grocery discounts and the rest — collected nothing when the company’s first rounds of refund checks went out under its 2025 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. A federal court this week signed off on…
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Federal replacement of stolen food stamp benefits ended in December 2024, and no state issues chip cards
Thousands of SNAP households who watched their monthly grocery money vanish to a card-skimming scheme built their recovery plan around a federal repayment rule that quietly expired in December 2024. Congress has not brought that authority back since, which means anyone skimmed after that date is depending on whatever their own state chooses to do,…
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The Federal Trade Commission raised the maximum Amazon Prime refund from $51 to $200, and a new round of automatic payments begins October 1
Amazon customers who signed up for Prime without meaning to — or who got stuck trying to cancel — are about to see a bigger check than the settlement first promised. A federal court in Seattle approved a revised payout plan this month that lifts the ceiling on what any one customer can collect from…
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The IRS says it found more than 600 social media accounts impersonating the agency
A profile picture built around the agency’s own eagle seal, a fabricated case number, and a link promising a stalled refund: that is the anatomy of the fake account the Internal Revenue Service says it has been tracking by the hundreds. In its newest annual scam list, the agency counted more than 600 social media…
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The FTC is sending AT&T throttling refunds by Zelle, and says it never asks anyone to send money to get one
A Zelle deposit landing in a bank account this month, tagged with a note about a decade-old wireless plan, is not a phishing attempt for one specific group of former AT&T customers. The Federal Trade Commission confirmed it is now sending Zelle payments to people who were mailed a refund check or offered a PayPal…
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NHTSA’s recall data portal lets owners search manufacturer recall filings and quarterly recall-status reports by vehicle.
NHTSA maintains a public recall-data portal that goes beyond the mail notice from an automaker. Its datasets and APIs page lets a visitor search recall information by a vehicle’s model year, make and model, and it provides downloadable manufacturer recall filings and quarterly recall-status reports. For a household, the money angle is straightforward but should…