On Veterans Day, we honor the men and women who have served in the nation’s Armed Forces. If you’re considering donating to help veterans, make sure the charity or nonprofit you select is reputable. Read more →

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Friday establishing a Department of Financial Protection and Innovation to protect consumers from financial predators and abusive business practices. “While the federal government is getting out of the financial protection business, California is leaning into it,” Newsom said. Read more →

Most Americans are still concerned about the spread of covid-19 in their communities – and they expect the pandemic to continue to be a concern into 2021, a Consumer Reports survey shows. A majority of Americans – 78 percent – remain concerned about the continued spread of covid in their area over the next month. Read more →

Online Training Academy hyped a “patented” training program that promised to help people earn “big money” by paying big money to OTA for trainings costing as much as $50,000. OTA’s lavish earnings claims often came with encouragement for people to go into debt to pay for OTA’s trainings. Read more →

The College Board appears to be in violation of its own policies on protecting the privacy of college students, Consumer Reports found in an investigation.   The College Board is sending personally identifiable student information to major technology companies and ad platforms including Adobe, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Snapchat, and Yahoo, according to researchers at Consumer Reports’ Digital Lab. “College-bound students don’t have any choice but to transact with the College Board – which is what makes these findings so concerning,” said Ben Moskowitz, director of the Digital Lab at Consumer Reports. Read more →

My raspberry patch is producing well this year as it often does. However, my daughter and her family aren’t visiting during the summer like they usually do. The result? I’m the only one eating raspberries, so I’ve frozen 18 pints and one quart of my favorite berries so far. Read more →

Students at colleges and universities are being targeted by a work-at-home employment scam through emails that appear to be sent from a college or university. The scammers obtain personal information from the student while posing as a college or university representative. They convince students to cash counterfeit checks and send them the money. Read more →

It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Young people and parents need to be aware of online scams targeting minors. Just like adults, scammers target kids through online platforms, such as apps, games, and social networking websites. Young people are often attractive targets for scammers because they may have unused Social Security numbers, don’t generally check their credit reports, and are used to sharing information online. Scammers may pose as someone else in order to get young online users to voluntarily share information. Read more →

A Trump administration rule that denies loan relief to many students cheated by their schools is deeply flawed and should be overturned, Public Citizen and the Project on Predatory Student Lending told a court Tuesday. The groups represent student borrowers in a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Education’s new “partial relief” rule. The rule details how the department will decide whether and how much relief to give borrowers who have demonstrated that they were cheated by the schools they attended. Under the rule, most borrowers whose claims are approved receive only partial or no relief on their student-loan debt. The lead plaintiff, Sammia Pratt, attended a Corinthian-owned Everest school in Florida for accounting, based on the false promise that she’d be able to transfer credits to the University of Central Florida. Read more →

If you’re a college students, you’re probably not on campus. However, scammers are still trying to find you. You or your friends may have received an email saying it’s from the Financial Department of your university. It tells you to click on a link to get a message about your covid-19 economic stimulus check – and it needs to be opened through a portal link requiring your university login. Don’t do it, said Ari Lazarus, consumer education specialist for the Federal Trade Commission, because it’s a phishing scam. If you click to “log in,” you could be giving your user name, password, or other personal information to scammers, while possibly downloading malware onto your device. How can you spot and avoid scams like these? Lazarus advises before you click on a link or share any of your sensitive information: Read more →