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Fiascos and Fixes
The Consumer Rescue team often receives pleas for help from readers who have been victimized by a scam. The articles here serve as cautionary tales to alert potential victims so that they can avoid falling victim to a similar scam.
As she searched for a new job, love suddenly was in the air — or so Karen C. thought. But behind the inappropriate emails she received from her recruiter with carefully typed romantic promises lurked a scammer weaving a web of deceit.
Karen couldn’t believe her luck. She thought she had found a dream job and a romantic partner, but the reality was much, much different.
There’s a new scam coming to your home phone. Aggressive, fake customer service agents are on duty, demanding payment for Keto supplements you didn’t order.
I learned about this bizarre scam firsthand when a pushy, fast-talking woman called me to deliver an ultimatum. She told me that her company, Keto Supplements, wanted me to pay for the diet pills they’d sent me. If I didn’t give her a valid credit card immediately, she said, I would regret it.
A Carnival cruise ship passenger says a beauty shop in Nassau somehow extracted $30,000 from her and her husband during a port stop. They’re the latest victims of the free facial scam to contact me in recent months. But the story she has to tell is much more sinister than the others. She says these bad guys drugged her and then filmed her thanking them and praising their products.
Picture it: A Facebook friend messages you with some fabulous information about a free government grant she discovered. It’s definitely not a scam, she excitedly assures you. She knows this for sure because Federal Express just delivered a check right to her front door!
Verizon customers are being targeted by phone scammers pretending to be helpful agents of the wireless titan. The predators deliver troubling news to their unaware victims and then provide urgent solutions to “fix” the problem.
I know this firsthand because one of these crooks called my Verizon number and tried his scheme on me. As you can imagine, things didn’t go quite as this phone scammer had planned.
Scam call centers are having a moment on the internet, bizarrely appearing in the top search results for many of your consumer questions. Here’s what you need to know about spotting and avoiding these World Wide Web predators.
Could you be accused of causing costly damage to your next rental car even if you didn’t do it? Several hours after returning his Budget rental car Derek Melber found out the answer to that question. That’s when an employee emailed him with the surprising news that the driver’s side window of the vehicle was shattered.
Despite Melber’s best efforts to convince Budget that he didn’t damage the rental car, the company charged him for repairing it.
Melber says it wasn’t him who shattered that window, but he thinks he knows who did. He’s hoping Consumer Rescue can prove the rental agency has wrongly accused him. And of course, he wants Budget to refund the nearly $500 repair charge it billed to his credit card.
But without any proof of what the rental car looked like when Melber returned it, that might be impossible.
Or maybe not. Let’s break this case down.
The coupon offer from Stanley Steemer was attractive: $160 to clean up to eight furnace air ducts. Roberta Cirino thought she was doing a smart thing by responding to the mailing from the well-known cleaning service company. However, what happened next is a homeowner’s nightmare. The job came complete with a shockingly high final invoice and repair bills to fix the damage the Stanley Steemer crew did to her wall.
To add insult to injury, the owner of the franchised location responded to Cirino’s complaints about this “hatchet job” with indifference.
Now Cirino is asking Consumer Rescue to help right this wrong. She would like Stanley Steemer to adjust her bill and pay for the damage to her wall.
That seems like a more than reasonable request. So why hasn’t the company already agreed to correct the problem?
All types of Zelle scams are reported to the Consumer Rescue advocacy team every week. Blindsided victims reach out to us, minutes too late – after they’ve sent their cash to cunning thieves through the instant money transfer app.
And although Zelle scams are a common theme with consumers who fill out our help form, it’s rare to hear from the thieves themselves. In fact, it’s unheard of.
That is, until this week. That’s when a criminal called me posing as a Bank of America executive. He tried his best to scam me into using Zelle to fix a problem he said the bank had detected.
Danger could be lurking at the pumps of your local gas station in the form of a tiny card skimmer. These small, almost invisible devices quickly retrieve and store all of your card’s information as you make your payment. Then the “owner” of this illegal apparatus uses that data to extract whatever funds he can from your account.
Sylvia Powers wishes someone had warned her about gas station skimmers before she swiped her prepaid American Express Bluebird debit card at the pumps. Unfortunately, her education on the topic came in the most unpleasant way – after a skimming device drained all her money from her Bluebird card. But she assumed that American Express would protect her against this fraud.
She assumed wrong.
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© 2025 Consumer Rescue / Michelle Couch-Friedman
