The financial news that actually matters
A full refund on Cupcakes and Cashmere three-light floor lamps sold at HomeGoods comes with a condition: the buyer has to cut the cord and photograph the destroyed lamp before Designs Direct pays anything. The Kentucky-based importer will then issue the refund within 15 days, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recall notice…
California has enacted Senate Bill 876, the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, which doubles the penalties insurers face for violating claims-settlement rules during a declared emergency and requires restitution to be paid to policyholders when violations occur. Senator Steve Padilla authored the bill, and Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara backed it. Its provisions begin phasing in on…
A federal judge ruled for the Federal Trade Commission on every count in 2023, an appeals court upheld that ruling in 2026, and in September the company at the center of it agreed to settle the separate administrative case. Corpay, the fuel-card and payments company known in court filings as FleetCor, would pay $100 million…
Nearly 30% of the people who reported losing money to scammers in 2025 told the Federal Trade Commission that the first contact came through social media, and reported losses in that group reached $2.1 billion. The agency repeated the figure on September 24, 2026, when it asked for public comment on whether its impersonation rule…
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said on September 18, 2026 that Operation SNAP Back, a sweep of SNAP-authorized stores in New York City’s five boroughs, led to enforcement actions against 170 retailers. The operation targeted bodegas, convenience stores and grocery stores and rested on hundreds of undercover investigations. The 170 figure is a city count,…
Equifax has agreed to pay $100,000,000 into a non-reversionary settlement fund over a computer coding error that left some consumers’ credit scores and credit attributes different from what they should have been for about three weeks in spring 2022. The settlement administrator’s website sets the deadline to submit a claim at December 28, 2026. The…
Tyson Foods accounts for $85,000,000 of the $117.065 million in proposed pork price-fixing settlements, roughly 73 percent of the total. None of it is final: a federal judge in Minnesota holds a final approval hearing on December 11, 2026, and the money moves only if the deal stands. Consumers who bought pork at grocery stores…
The $2.5 billion Amazon Prime settlement is two different pots of money with two different destinations. The Federal Trade Commission’s order sets a $1 billion civil penalty, which goes to the government, and “up to $1.5 billion” in redress to consumers, a ceiling on what customers can receive rather than a fixed sum. Only the…
About 13.6 percent of the Additional Child Tax Credit dollars the IRS paid out in fiscal year 2025 were improper, a rate that works out to an estimated $4.5 billion, according to a Treasury inspector general report issued July 27, 2026. The credit is the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit, and the estimate…
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced on August 14, 2026 that it would cease the discretionary publication of consumer complaint narratives and data visualizations in its Consumer Complaint Database. The narratives were the written accounts in which consumers described, in their own words, what went wrong with a bank, lender or other financial company. The…