Category: Scams & Your Rights
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Hyundai and Kia owners can claim up to $350 from a $62 million airbag settlement
An airbag that doesn’t deploy in a crash isn’t a minor defect, and that’s the allegation behind a nationwide settlement covering millions of Hyundai and Kia vehicles built over more than a decade. Lawsuits consolidated into multidistrict litigation in California alleged that certain airbag control units, made by ZF-TRW and installed across a range of…
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The FBI warns of a phishing trick that survives a password change
A federal cybersecurity warning issued this week describes a scam that keeps working even after a victim does the one thing security advice always recommends: changing the password. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center says cyber actors have been quietly gaining lasting access to people’s email and messaging accounts by tricking them into approving a…
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The FTC warns veterans about postcards promising money from a savings program that does not exist
Veterans across the country are opening their mailboxes to find postcards promising extra money every month through something called the “Veterans Savings Program.” The Federal Trade Commission wants people to know that program doesn’t exist. It’s a mail-based phishing scheme built to sound official enough that a veteran calls the number printed on the card,…
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The FTC is mailing 9,522 more refund checks from a bogus debt-relief operation
A batch of federal refund checks is landing in mailboxes for people who paid a company called Helping America Group to fix their debt, only to end up worse off. The Federal Trade Commission says it recovered more money from the operation’s defendants and is now sending out a third distribution on top of two…
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A California fund manager took $80 million from 190 investors, many of them retired
Two former executives at a Marin County real estate lending firm are accused of running one of the larger alleged Ponzi-like schemes of the year, and most of the people who put money in were already retired. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges on September 1 against Mark D. Hanf, former CEO of Pacific…
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Chrysler is recalling 844,027 Jeeps, Rams and minivans over a backup camera that can go blank
A federal safety filing now covers more than 844,000 Jeep, Ram, Chrysler and Dodge vehicles because the rearview camera image can fail to appear the moment a driver shifts into reverse. The problem sits in the radio software that puts the picture on the center screen, not in the camera itself, and it can leave…
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A Trans Union settlement pays $100 automatically to people wrongly marked as bankrupt
Roughly 57,000 people had a strange problem on their credit report: a bankruptcy remark attached to one of their accounts, even though no public bankruptcy filing existed anywhere in their name. A class action against Trans Union alleged the credit bureau sold those inaccurate reports to lenders and other third parties for years, and a…
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Kroger pharmacy customers who paid with insurance since 2018 can file a claim through December 21
Every time a shopper hands an insurance card to the pharmacist at a Kroger counter, the price charged is supposed to match what Kroger tells its own customers is the usual and customary cash price for that drug. A federal class action filed in the Southern District of Ohio alleged Kroger broke that promise for…
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The FTC says Amazon secretly overcharged 500,000 small businesses more than $20 billion
Amazon has told the businesses that advertise on its site for more than a decade that they are bidding in fair “second price” auctions, where the winner never pays more than a penny above the next-highest offer. Federal and state regulators say that promise was largely fiction. In a complaint filed August 31, the Federal…
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Doxo will pay $2.1 million over search ads posing as customers’ own bill pages
Typing a company’s name into a search engine to find its bill-pay page sounds like the safe way to handle a utility bill. According to the Federal Trade Commission, doing exactly that with certain searches for years led consumers straight to Doxo, a third-party payment platform that the agency says dressed itself up to look…