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Your Fiasco Fixer
The News and Alerts category at Consumer Rescue exposes scams consumers may encounter. Each article tells the gripping story of individuals who have fallen victim to a scam and also includes tips and practical guidance to help others avoid falling victim.
Here, you’ll find stories about bewildered consumers who lost significant amounts of money to scams. From car rental gift card scams to phone scammers posing as customer service agents to Zelle scams and more. These articles are not just cautionary tales. These are detailed, real-life accounts highlighting the tactics used by scammers to make readers more aware and vigilant.
Medicare beneficiaries are about to get bombarded by confusing TV commercials that will run heavily from now until December. If you do what the ads say, you might regret it later.
So what’s behind this Medicare advertisement blitz? It’s designed to get you to change who provides your Medicare coverage.
Before you do any more online shopping, you’ll want to read about the scam that just ensnared Susan Leipholtz. She paid an online “merchant” $129 through PayPal and received absolutely nothing in return. But getting blindsided by the internet thief wasn’t nearly as shocking as what happened next. That’s when Capital One sided with the scammer in her credit card dispute.
According to the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services, Medicare loses $60 billion annually to fraud, scams, waste, and abuse.
Scammers are counting on your confusion about Medicare’s complex rules so you go along with their fraudulent schemes.
The lost money is bad enough. But some of those Medicare scams can harm you personally. Read on for important tips so that you won’t fall for Medicare scams and contribute to this problem.
Robinhood, the online millennial-focused brokerage site, brags that “Investing is simple here.” That sounded great to Bryan Bryan when he was looking for an easy way to invest some cash. So, he followed the onscreen prompts, transferred $2,400 into his Robinhood account and prepared to make his first transaction.
Of course, as is true with any investment, Bryan knew there would be some risk involved. But what actually happened, he never saw coming. That simple investment he hoped to make turned into an instant nightmare. Robinhood accepted his money, immediately froze his account, and refused to explain why.
That was four months ago.
What would you do if a stranger suddenly sent you a Zelle payment by mistake and then urgently demanded its return? In one unusual case, an unexpected detail later surfaced: the sender had previously appeared on National Geographic’s Locked Up Abroad. That revelation made an already tense situation even more complicated, as both parties feared they were being scammed.
If you receive an unsolicited job offer from Walmart that involves shopping and getting paid big bucks to do it, it’s certainly a scam. But when Michele Turner received such an invitation, she was sure she had found the perfect way to make some extra cash. Unfortunately for her, there was a thief on the other end of that email who was about to reel Michele into an expensive mystery shopper scam. And the only person about to make some extra cash was that predator.
Now Michele is hoping that our advocacy team can help retrieve the over $1,100 she lost during this fiasco. But how?
Here come the eBay gift card scammers — and just in time to steal your cash before the holidays. But the Consumer Rescue team is here too, warning you about these swindlers so you can avoid their trap.
We’ve received many pleas for help from distraught victims of various eBay gift card scams during the past year. They’ve lost hundreds and even thousands of dollars to this scheme. These consumers all want the same thing: to retrieve their stolen money from the anonymous predators who tricked them.
But is there any possible way to do that?
Could you get banned from PayPal with your money locked inside? Unfortunately, for many former users wondering how to get their cash released, the answer is “yes.”
If a stranger sends you money by mistake, do you have any obligation to give it back? If so, how do you do it without exposing yourself to a scam? And if you transfer money to the wrong person using Zelle, is there any possible way to fix your mistake?
These are not uncommon dilemmas faced by users of cash apps like Zelle and Venmo in 2022. Along with the increasing popularity and convenience of instant money transfer services came a dramatic rise in pricey user errors. Unfortunately, our attempts to investigate and resolve many of these cases have exposed some disturbing flaws in the programs.
Minh Tran is just one of the many desperate Zelle users who’ve recently asked our team for help. In his case, a stranger’s mistake set off a frustrating and confusing chain of events that almost cost him $360.
Could a cash app mistake eventually escalate to violence? Based on some of the emotionally charged pleas for help our team has received lately, it seems possible. And after you hear the details of Brian Yu’s recent money transfer fiasco, I think you’ll agree.
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© 2026 Consumer Rescue / Michelle Couch-Friedman
