Category: Scams & Your Rights
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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…
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Dodge is recalling 74,578 Durangos for spoilers that can fly off, its third try at one defect
Nearly 75,000 Dodge Durango SUVs are heading back to dealers for a rear spoiler that can detach while the vehicle is moving, and this is not the first time Stellantis has tried to fix this specific part. Federal regulators confirm it is the third recall campaign tied to the same underlying defect since 2021, a…
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The Supreme Court left Verizon’s $46.9 million fine for selling customer location data in place
Verizon’s last legal option to avoid paying a $46.9 million federal fine over its handling of customer location data has run out, at least for now. The Supreme Court’s move keeps a multi-year enforcement fight over how carriers sold real-time location data to third parties fully resolved in the government’s favor, though the money in…
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A Charlotte woman owes $1,623,983 after billing Medicaid for therapy and drug tests that never happened
A Charlotte woman was sentenced on August 27 to 48 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $1,623,983.08 in restitution after submitting years of fraudulent bills to North Carolina’s Medicaid program for psychotherapy sessions and drug tests that were never actually performed. Crystal Sherrell Jackson, 40, pleaded guilty in March 2026 to health care…
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A hospice operator admitted billing Medicare $2.2 million for patients who were not dying
An Orange County woman pleaded guilty on August 27 to a federal health care fraud charge for submitting more than $2.2 million in false Medicare claims for hospice care that patients who were not actually dying should never have received. Lynn Galbraith, 60, of Anaheim, admitted in her plea agreement that she billed Medicare for…
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A mail carrier stole 171 checks worth over $1 million off her route
Customers along one Smyrna, Georgia mail route started noticing something wasn’t right long before federal investigators showed up. Checks were going missing, and complaints piled up until the U.S. Postal Service’s own watchdog agency started watching the route itself. What they found was a mail carrier who had been quietly diverting the neighborhood’s checks for…
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Adults under 50 reported Social Security scam losses more often than older adults for a third straight quarter
For three straight quarters of fiscal year 2026, adults younger than 50 have reported losing money to Social Security-related scams more often than adults 50 and older, according to the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General. The finding comes from the OIG’s Issue 20 Quarterly Scam Update, published August 25, 2026, and it…
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A financial adviser owes $2,037,103 after moving a 75-year-old client’s savings to gambling websites
Eric James Stone spent about three years building a relationship with a 75-year-old woman who trusted him with her money because of the title on his business card. By the time federal investigators finished tracing where that money went, Stone had moved her through more than 600 separate transactions, and most of what she sent…
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A jury convicted a Las Vegas man who took $24 million from 400 investors by claiming the FDIC insured it
A Las Vegas jury needed nine days of testimony to reach a conclusion federal investigators had been building toward for years: Brent Kovar’s cryptocurrency company was never going to make good on the $24 million he had collected from hundreds of ordinary investors. On August 24, jurors found Kovar guilty of wire fraud, mail fraud…
