The financial news that actually matters
Companies that promise to erase credit-card balances for pennies on the dollar are a fixture of late-night television and the robocalls that flood retirees’ phones. What many of those pitches leave out is a basic legal fact that protects the very people they target. A for-profit debt-relief company that charges a fee before it has…
Most investment fraud has to overcome a stranger’s suspicion. Affinity fraud does the opposite: it starts with trust already in place. The con artist is a fellow congregant, a member of the same social club, a familiar face from the community center, and that shared bond does the work that a cold pitch never could….
A self-directed IRA sounds like an ordinary retirement account with more freedom, and for a disciplined investor it can be. But the word “custodian” on the statement does something dangerous inside a retiree’s mind: it implies that a financial institution has looked at the investment and judged it sound. It has not. That gap between…
A variable annuity is built to be held for a long time, and the contract enforces that design with a penalty for leaving early. That penalty, known as a surrender charge, can reach into the thousands of dollars and can apply for the better part of a decade after the annuity is bought. For a…
Moving a 401(k) or IRA into gold is perfectly legal, and for some savers a modest allocation to precious metals is a defensible choice. The danger is rarely the metal itself. It is the way many gold-IRA deals are priced: layers of commissions, coin markups, and recurring account fees that can strip tens of thousands…
A single bank can insure far more than $250,000 for one household, and the reason lies entirely in how federal deposit insurance is structured. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation applies its coverage limit separately to each account ownership category, which means the same person can be insured several times over at one institution. For a…
Workers who signed up to clean homes and run errands through the app Handy, expecting the paydays its ads promised, are now receiving checks from the Federal Trade Commission after regulators concluded those earnings claims did not hold up. The agency says it is returning more than $2.7 million to people who worked on the…
Two former TD Bank employees who used their positions inside the bank to move and steal money have been sentenced to federal prison, one for helping a laundering network push hundreds of millions of dollars in criminal cash through customer accounts. The Justice Department announced the sentences in mid-July 2026, describing insiders who turned the…
A Minnesota man who filed a stream of fraudulent federal tax returns will spend 30 months in prison and owes $1.18 million in restitution for a refund scheme that leaned on stolen personal details and invented income. The sentence, entered in July 2026, closes a case built on 115 false returns that together claimed roughly…
AssuranceAmerica, a nonstandard auto insurer that reaches customers through thousands of independent agents, has confirmed a data breach that exposed the personal records of nearly seven million people. The company told state regulators that the stolen files included driver’s license numbers, names, contact details and automobile-policy information. For older drivers on fixed incomes, the exposure…