It’s your money. Here’s what you actually need to know about today.
Nobody applies for an FTC refund — which is exactly how you spot the scam
There is an entire genre of “are you owed money from the FTC?” content floating around, and it has the thing backwards. The Federal Trade Commission does not run a lost-and-found that you go rummaging through. When it wins or settles a case, it pays people out of that case’s own file, using the company’s own customer records — your name, your purchase, the address or the account the company already had for you. It mails a check or drops the money straight into your bank. There is no application. There is no public claim form. There is nothing for a stranger to sign you up for.
Turn that around and you get the most useful sentence I can hand you today: anyone who asks you to apply for an FTC refund, or to pay a fee to receive one, is running a scam. The FTC puts it in its own boilerplate on these announcements — “The FTC never asks you to pay money to get a refund.” Not a processing fee, not taxes, not a gift card, not a wire, not “just cover the postage.” Never. If the request came to you, the request is the con.
Here is what actually went out in July, so the shape is concrete rather than theoretical. The FTC sent more than $2.7 million to 62,893 gig workers it says were harmed by Handy Technologies, and returned more than $672,000 to 9,419 people over what the agency alleges was Trend Deploy’s deceptive marketing of COVID-era protective equipment that never showed up. Both of those went out as paper checks. Two more moved as automatic Zelle payments requiring nothing at all from the recipient — AH Media Group and Ring.
So if you were one of those customers or one of those workers, the whole to-do list is this: watch your mail, watch your bank, and cash the check. That last part is not filler. Those checks must be cashed within 90 days, that deadline is real, and money nobody cashes goes back. I have watched people leave a legitimate check sitting on the kitchen counter because it looked too much like the junk mail sitting next to it. And if you weren’t one of those customers, there is genuinely nothing to do — which is itself the useful fact, because it means every “claim your FTC money” pitch that finds you is someone else’s business model, not yours.
The one to warn someone about
New York’s attorney general has put out an alert about a scam that ends with somebody handing over gold bars, and I want you to read the whole sequence, because every step of it sounds reasonable to the person living through it. It starts with a fake security pop-up on a computer. The victim calls the number and grants remote access to “fix” it. The stranger on the other end then shows them manufactured evidence that their bank and brokerage accounts have been compromised. A second scammer joins, posing as law enforcement, and delivers the pitch: your money is not safe in the bank, and you need to convert it into something that holds value. The victim withdraws their savings, buys gold bars from a real, legitimate dealer — which makes the whole thing feel legitimate too — and hands the gold to a courier claiming to be a federal agent. The alert says the NYPD and Attorney General Letitia James’s office have investigated more than 100 of these cases over two years, with losses topping $100 million. That is the New York count only. Nothing about the method is confined to New York, and the people running it do not care what state you live in.
Pennsylvania’s attorney general is warning about the same costume in a cheaper outfit. The caller ID is spoofed to show a real sheriff’s office number. The caller says there is a warrant out for you over missed jury duty or a hearing you failed to attend, and that you can clear it by posting “bond” right now — by gift card, by wire, or by feeding cash into a Bitcoin ATM. It is the identical script: fabricated authority, manufactured urgency, and a payment method that cannot be reversed.
Here is the tell that covers both of them, and every version of this that has not been invented yet. No real agency — not the FBI, not the Treasury, not a sheriff’s office, not your bank’s fraud department — will ever tell you to move your money somewhere else to keep it safe. That instruction has no legitimate version. There is no scenario in which the correct response to “your accounts have been compromised” is “withdraw everything and hand it to me.” Teach that one sentence to the person in your life who would be too embarrassed to call you mid-scam, because embarrassment is the mechanism that keeps these going.
Claims worth knowing about, all still unproven
Two items today, and I am going to be careful with both, because the distance between “somebody filed something” and “somebody owes you money” is where most people get taken a second time.
First, attorneys are investigating whether Comenity Capital Bank sent prerecorded “tax refund” voicemails to the cell phones of people who never had an account with it. Comenity is the issuer sitting behind more than 150 store-branded credit cards, now part of Bread Financial, which is why a name most people have never chosen still ends up on their statements. Read this next part twice: that is a law-firm investigation. There is no certified class, no settlement, and no claim form. Do not go looking for one, and do not believe anyone who tells you they have one. The only thing that exists today is a law firm’s intake page, and submitting your details to a law firm is not the same thing as being owed money. What is worth carrying away is the law underneath it. The federal robocall statute sets damages at $500 per call, and up to $1,500 per call if a court finds the violation was willful. That is why the junk voicemail you delete without thinking is occasionally worth more than the thing it was advertising — and why it is worth keeping a screenshot of the ones that arrive on a cell phone you never gave out.
Second, a federal judge has allowed a lawsuit over military lending protections against Bank of America to move forward. A magistrate judge had recommended throwing that claim out; the district judge declined to adopt that recommendation and kept the claim alive while dismissing other counts. I am deliberately not putting a rate figure in front of you, because the secondary write-ups disagree about which statutory cap the surviving claim actually rests on, and I have not read the order myself. What I can tell you plainly is what this ruling is and is not. It is a decision at the motion-to-dismiss stage, which means the allegations are allowed to proceed and be tested. It is not a finding that anyone broke the law, and it may never become one. The useful background is the part that has nothing to do with this case: active-duty servicemembers and their dependents carry interest-rate and credit protections that most of them never invoke, usually because nobody ever told them the protections existed. If that is your household, that is worth an hour of your attention this month regardless of how one lawsuit turns out.
If one of these is happening to you right now
I write these separately from the news, and by design they never go out in the daily email — they are evergreen, not timely, which means that if you are on my Weekday Briefing list you have still never seen a single one of them. That is the whole reason this section exists. Each one is the thing you need at two in the morning when it is already happening, and each has a first move that is better than the obvious one.
If you are falling behind on your Chapter 13 payments, there are options long before dismissal and the timing matters enormously. If you already paid a debt and a collector says you still owe it, do not pay it twice to make the calls stop — that is the expensive instinct. If your parent died in a nursing home and they say you owe the bill, whether that is true depends on something you probably signed years ago and have never re-read. If Social Security says you were overpaid and wants it all back, there are three separate remedies most people never ask for. If someone opened accounts in your name and collectors are now calling you, the order you do things in decides how long this follows you around. And if someone charged your elderly parent over the phone for something they never wanted, there is a specific sequence that works and a window that closes — which ties directly to the two alerts above, since the people running those scams are hunting for exactly that household.
Before you go
This list is the wide view: more items, shorter takes, everything I think you should know today. If you want the other shape, my free GOOD Weekday Briefing lands on weekday mornings and takes one thing all the way down instead of ten things quickly. Breadth here, depth there. Different jobs, and plenty of people read both.
And if any of this was worth your time, forward it to the one person you know who needs it — the relative who would fall for the pop-up, the friend paying a collector on a debt they already settled, the servicemember who has no idea what protections they have. I write it down so it can be passed along. That is the entire point.
— Steve