Back in April I told you this money wasn’t coming to you. For a few of you, I was wrong.
In April the government opened a portal to refund $166 billion in tariffs the Supreme Court ruled were collected illegally, and I wrote that the money wasn’t yours. That was right, and it still is for almost everybody — the refunds go to the importer of record, which is the company that actually paid the duty at the border. But I flagged one narrow exception at the time: if you personally ordered something from overseas and paid the duty yourself, you were the importer of record. That was the small print. Today it’s the story. The AP reported this morning that FedEx and UPS, which acted as customs brokers on millions of personal parcels, have started passing those refunds back to the people who paid them. FedEx says it’s returning $800 million. UPS paid $5 billion in tariffs on behalf of clients and is working through the government’s reimbursement now, which it expects to take one to three months. You don’t have to apply — the money goes straight back to the card or bank account that paid it — but FedEx will let you check by entering a tracking number on its site, and if you bought something from abroad in the last two years and paid a duty charge at the door, that is five minutes well spent. Now the part I don’t want you to miss, because it’s the same lesson as April: the overwhelming majority of the roughly $100 billion refunded so far went to businesses, and the AP reports that retailers including Amazon, Best Buy and Costco who received refunds mostly aren’t the importer of record on the goods you bought from them, and expect to put the money into price reductions rather than sending anyone a check. Maybe they will. Watch the shelf, not the press release.
Money you might actually be owed — and this one has a real deadline
Here’s a company you’ve almost certainly never heard of that may be holding your Social Security number. 700Credit is the credit-check vendor sitting behind more than 21,000 car, RV, boat and motorcycle dealerships — when a dealer runs your credit or does a soft pull while you’re kicking tires, it often runs through them. In October 2025 someone got into their dealer portal with stolen credentials, and about 5.8 million people had some combination of name, address, date of birth and Social Security number exposed. There’s now a $17.5 million settlement. If you got a notice letter, you can claim up to $2,500 for documented losses, or take roughly $50 with no proof at all, plus two years of credit monitoring that activates with a code on your notice. The claim deadline is September 22, 2026, and the final approval hearing is October 7. One caution: an earlier hearing date of December 15 is still floating around on some sites — the court moved it, so don’t pace yourself against the old one. 700Credit denies any wrongdoing and no court has found otherwise. I’ll say the quiet part anyway: you never chose this company, you never signed anything with them, and they had your Social Security number because you test-drove a car.
Worth checking if you bought a phone
Two people have filed separate class actions against ABC Phones of North Carolina, which does business as Victra — one of the biggest Verizon authorized retailers in the country. To be precise about who’s being sued: it’s Victra, not Verizon. The complaints allege that intruders got into Victra’s systems around April 22 of this year and that people weren’t told until about July, and that the company skipped basic protections like encryption. One plaintiff says Social Security numbers and financial account details were exposed; the other adds dates of birth and driver’s license numbers. None of this is proven — these are brand-new complaints, nobody has answered them, and there’s no settlement to claim. I’m flagging it now so that if a letter turns up, you already know what it’s about.
Claims worth knowing about, every one still unproven
A pattern I want you to notice: the collection law firms are getting sued, not just the collectors. Stone Canyon Law took two separate proposed class actions in a single day this week, and there are new consumer-credit complaints against Chuhak & Tecson and Andreu, Palma, Lavin & Solis — all of them law firms doing collection work. People assume the lawyer on the letterhead is somehow above the rules that bind a collection agency. They are not; a law firm collecting debts is a debt collector, with the same obligations. Also newly filed: a complaint against Ascendium Education Solutions, one of the largest federal student loan servicers, and one against United Debt Settlement. The complaints aren’t public yet, so I’m not going to guess what’s in them — I’ll tell you when I can read them myself.
The one to warn someone about
New York’s attorney general is suing what it says was a veterans’ charity that allegedly took donations meant for former service members and spent them on the people running it. If you give to veterans’ causes — and a lot of you do, especially around this time of year — this is the moment to spend two minutes before the next donation rather than two years regretting one. Any legitimate charity will show you its filings without being asked, and both the New York AG’s office and your own state’s charities bureau keep searchable registries. The tell in almost every case like this is emotional pressure on the phone with no paperwork to follow.
If you want to know what the people collecting your debt tell their investors
One from my own desk that the daily email didn’t carry. Encore Capital owns Midland Credit Management, and it is the largest buyer of charged-off consumer debt in the country — if an old account of yours got sold, there’s a real chance they own it. They just filed with the SEC and described a record debt-buying quarter. I read the filing, because what these companies tell Wall Street is a different document from what they tell you. When a debt buyer is buying at record volume, that’s not an abstraction — it means more accounts changing hands, more letters going out, and more people getting contacted about balances they thought were long finished.
Before you go
This is the fast daily sweep. If you want any one of these worked all the way through, one topic at a time, that’s the GOOD Weekday Briefing, and it’s free.
And if you know somebody who ordered something from overseas in the last couple of years and paid a customs charge on it — forward this to them. Most people have no idea that money is moving, and nobody is going to call them about it.
— Steve