The financial news that actually matters
Farmers insurance agents have agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle claims that they placed telemarketing calls to people who had registered on the National Do Not Call Registry or who had asked the company to stop calling. The deadline for affected consumers to file a claim is September 14. The settlement puts a dollar…
Millions of Amazon Prime subscribers have until July 27 to claim refunds of up to $51 each from a $1.5 billion fund the Federal Trade Commission forced Amazon to create. The fund is part of a $2.5 billion settlement the FTC reached with Amazon over allegations that the company used deceptive enrollment tactics and made…
Most non-spouse heirs who inherited an IRA after December 31, 2019, face a hard deadline: the entire account must be emptied by the end of the tenth calendar year following the original owner’s death. That rule, enacted through the SECURE Act as Division O of Public Law 116-94, replaced the old “stretch IRA” strategy that…
Most Americans who file a federal tax return will never hear from an IRS examiner. For filers with total positive income below $200,000, the odds of an audit are roughly one in 1,000. Cross the $500,000 threshold, and the rate jumps to about one in 30. That gap, documented across multiple federal oversight reports, reflects…
Benjamin Paul Wiener, a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, resident, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on 29 counts tied to an alleged cryptocurrency fraud scheme that caused approximately $20 million in investor losses across three states. The charges span wire fraud, money laundering, bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft, a combination that signals…
A federal grand jury in the Northern District of Texas indicted Damien Moran, 36, of Dallas on 10 counts of wire fraud for allegedly running a precious-metals scheme that drained retirement savings from more than 100 victims, most of them elderly or near retirement age. The indictment, dated May 20, 2026, follows a civil enforcement…
Anyone who opens a checking account to collect a $3,000 bonus will find that the bank treats the payment as interest income and files a Form 1099-INT with the IRS. The bonus is not a gift in the casual sense. It is taxable, it is reported, and it can catch account holders off guard when…
Thousands of small importers that already won approval for refunds on tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court still have not received a dollar, even as the federal government has disbursed roughly $86 billion to other claimants. Of the 8,384 approved refund claims sitting unpaid, a disproportionate share belong to smaller firms that lack the…
Bank customers who overdraw their accounts on a one-time debit card purchase are once again facing fees near $27 per incident, even as total industry overdraft revenue sits well below its pre-pandemic peak. The tension between those two facts points to a gap most account holders can close themselves: federal rules allow consumers to revoke…
Americans handed over a record $920 million to scammers pretending to be government officials in 2025, up from $789 million the year before. The figures, released by the Federal Trade Commission, sit inside a broader $3.5 billion wave of imposter-scam losses reported last year. That jump arrived even after the agency finalized a rule in…