This Week in Debt: Settlement Cash, Fed Myths, Scam Alerts

Full Episode Transcript

Steve Rhode: Hey there, it’s Steve Rhode, the old, original Get Out of Debt guy. Welcome to the podcast. I’m calling this one This Week in Debt. If you’re a regular listener, you’ve already noticed something different. Damon’s not here.

And no, we didn’t have a falling out. No, Damon’s off doing Damon things, actually what Damon does best, which is sitting on the phone with real people one at a time, giving them great advice and helping them figure out their situation. That’s what he does. And that’s what you never hear on the show. But I thought today we’d try something new.

I’m calling it This Week in Debt. It’s about 20 minutes. I’m going to catch you up on everything that happened this past week that touches your wallet. The money sitting on the table with your name on it, the story, the headlines got backwards, the scam making the rounds, and the piece of viral debt advice that’s half right and half damn dangerous. So here’s the deal I’ll make with you up front.

If anything in this episode sounds like your life, not just interesting, but your life, don’t just take notes. Go to damonday.com, D-A-M-O-N-D-A-Y.com and get on the phone for free with Damon. Calls free. I don’t make a dime when you talk to him. I sell nothing and I give free advice.

That’s the whole point of this site. All right, grab your coffee or your favorite beverage and here’s your week. First segment, money on the table. These are settlements that were in the news this week where ordinary people, maybe even you, are owed something and I want to walk through them carefully because with every one of these, there’s a right way and a wrong way to get your money. Number one, Amazon, yes, Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion, billion with a B, to settle federal trade commission allegations that it tricked people into prime subscriptions and then made canceling deliberately hard.

They called the design tricks dark patterns, a signup button that’s easy to hit by accident and a cancellation maze buried several confusing clicks deep. It’s the largest consumer redress settlement in FTC history. And here’s what matters to you. If you signed up for Amazon prime between June 23, 2019 and June 23, 2025 and you barely used it or you tried to cancel and couldn’t figure out how to, well, you may be owed $51 but you have to file a claim. Nobody’s going to mail it to you automatically and the deadline is July 27th.

That’s just weeks away. So filing takes a few minutes and it’s free, free. If you want your 51 bucks, go to the FTC’s own refund page and follow their link to the official claim site. I’ve got the direct link in a post on getoutofdebt.org and please hear this part. Never ever, ever, ever pay anyone to file a settlement claim for you.

The moment a settlement makes headlines, the scam sites bloom like freaking weeds. The website or caller wants a fee to process your Amazon claim. That’s not a helper. That’s a predator. Now I know what some of you are thinking, 51 bucks, Steve, really?

Well here’s what I’ve watched over and over since I started doing this work in 1994. Unclaimed settlement money doesn’t come back to you. It stays with the company or gets split among the people who did bother to file. The five minutes it takes to file is the best hourly wage you’ll earn this week, I promise. Number two, lemonade insurance.

If you ever got car insurance or quote from lemonade, even if you never bought a policy, listen up. A class action alleged that their online quote platform exposed the driver’s license numbers of more than 190,000 people over roughly 17 months between April 2023 and September 2024. So lemonade agreed to a $10.5 million settlement. If you got a breach notification letter, you can claim up to $10,000 for documented losses, a cash payment and three years of free credit monitoring. The deadline is September 8th and the official site is LemonadeDataDisclosureSettlement.com.

Again there’s a link in my post on getoutofdebt.org. And here’s the pattern, I want you to burn into your brain. Data breach settlements go massively unclaimed because everyone assumes they would have heard about it. But you wouldn’t have because the letter came months ago and probably hit the recycling bin with those old grocery flyers we all get. All right, number three, and this one’s different, GameTime, the ticket app.

There’s a $2.74 million settlement over service fees that weren’t properly disclosed to California buyers. But here’s the part almost nobody is reporting correctly. There’s no claim form. If you bought tickets through GameTime in California between April 2018 and May 2025, you’re in the class automatically. What you’ll get is a credit voucher, oh joy, 15% of the fees you paid, $5 minimum, not a check.

It only got preliminary approval in May, so it isn’t even here yet. So why am I telling you about it? Because the headlines are already getting twisted into file your claim now for cash. And somewhere out there someone is building a website to charge you to file a claim for a form that just simply doesn’t exist. The only thing worth doing is making sure GameTime has your current email address.

That’s it. One more lesson. This week a settlement window closed. Tyson and Cargill agreed to pay $87.5 million over allegations they conspired to keep beef prices high. And if you bought beef at the grocery store between 2014 and 2019, you could have filed, no receipts needed, five minutes, free money.

But that deadline was June 30th, it’s gone. So I’m not telling you that to rub it in. I’m telling you because that’s exactly why this episode exists. These windows open and close quietly all the time and somebody has to be watching. I guess that’s my job now.

Alright, the big story. And it’s one where the headlines and the truth went in completely opposite directions. On July 1st, the new Fed chairman, Kevin Walsh, Warsh, sorry Kevin, stood up at a central banking forum in Portugal and said that inflation is, quote, too high. Too bad he didn’t say too damn high. And he declined to signal a rate cut for July.

Same morning, the June private payroll numbers came in soft, 98,000 jobs added, when the economists expected about 120,000. Now the crowd heard weak jobs and concluded rate cuts are coming, relief is on the way. But hang on, maybe you heard that too. Maybe you’re counting on it. Here’s what the headlines buried.

The Fed’s own June projections, the famous dot plot, where each Fed official marks down where they think rates are headed. It flipped. The median policymaker now expects rates to end 2026 higher than they are today, higher, not lower, higher. And 17 of the 18 officials see inflation risk tilted to the upside. Rates have been parked at 3.5% to 3.75% since December.

And that’s been by unanimous vote meeting after meeting. And why am I spending four minutes on the Federal Reserve on a debt show? Well, because I’ve been watching the Fed relationship with consumer debt since the early 1990s, including a cycle that ran me into my own bankruptcy. And I’ve seen this exact movie, people carrying variable rate debt, credit cards at 25, 29% or more telling themselves, I’ll deal with this when the rates come down. I mean, sure, rating, waiting is a plan.

It’s just a plan built entirely on hope and wishes. And right now it’s hope the Fed’s own numbers don’t support. So if you’re carrying high rate credit card debt, the math is the math today. It doesn’t get better while you wait. It compounds.

That is math wrapped in emotion. And the emotional move here is wait, hope, hang on. It’s quietly making the math worse every month. Now, let me be honest about what I’m not saying, because panic is as expensive as denial. And I’m not telling you to raid your retirement account to pay down cards.

Never ever do that. Your 401k is protected money and protecting your future comes first in my book. I’m not telling you to drain your emergency savings to zero either. No, that cushion is what keeps a car repair from becoming a payday loan. If the only way to attack the debt is to strip yourself bare, that’s not a payoff plan.

That’s a setup for the next crisis. What I am saying is stop making the Fed will save me with lower interest rates your plan. Make a real one on today’s numbers. So what does a real plan look like? Well, that depends entirely on your situation, your income, your assets, what kind of debt, how far behind, what kind of cereal you eat in the morning.

There’s no one answer. Anyone that gives you one answer without asking questions first is selling you something. In a post on the get out of debt dot org site, I walk through the honest options. But if you’re sitting here with variable rate debt right now, genuinely unsure whether your next move is a balance transfer, a payoff plan or something bigger. That’s that’s a Damon conversation.

D.A.M.O.N.D.A.Y.com. Free call. He’ll ask you the questions the headlines can’t. All right, segment three, scam watch. And this week is one I need to share with you and your parents, actually your grandparents, your friends, everyone.

There’s a belief out there that goes nobody could fake being my family member on the phone. I know my own granddaughter’s grandson’s voice, and I’d have to tell you. That’s a myth flat out. Researchers at Microsoft demonstrated back in twenty twenty three that I could clone a person’s voice, the pitch, the pacing, the little hesitations from as little as three freaking seconds of audio, three seconds. From a birthday video on Instagram, a voicemail, a clip from a school event, someone posted on Facebook.

That’s all it takes these days. And many of the cloning tools are free. So. Here’s how the scam runs, a scammer scrapes a few seconds of your grandchild’s voice from social media, then the phone rings at grandma’s house and it’s him. It sounds exactly like him.

He’s crying. He’s been in an accident. Please help. He’s been arrested. He needs bail money right now.

Please don’t tell mom. The urgency is the weapon, the voice is just the key that unlocks your trust. The FBI’s twenty twenty five Internet crime report documented over five million dollars in losses from these AI voice clone distress scams. And that’s just what got reported. Nobody wants to admit they fell for it and feel like a fool.

Now, here’s the good news, and I love this part. The defense that actually works isn’t technology. You don’t need a new app. Are you ready for this? All you need is a family code word.

Sit down at dinner, pick a word or phrase your family would never say by accident and then agree. If anyone ever calls in an emergency asking for money, you ask for the code word. A real grandchild knows it. An AI clone doesn’t. That’s it.

That’s simple. That’s the whole defense. And it costs nothing. Of course, if your code word is Ebenezer Scrooge. Well, maybe you want to pick a different one.

The FTC has warned about these scams explicitly, and every claim I just made is linked to a primary source in the post. When the episode ends, call your folks, call your friends, set up a code word today. Maybe you should set the code word. Oh, crap. Anyway, segment five.

Before we wrap, I call this one. They said what? Where I take a piece of advice going around social media and separate the part that protects you from the part that can wreck you. This week’s viral wisdom all over TikTok and the comment sections. You never have to pay a debt collector.

Just ignore them or tell them I don’t consent and the debt goes away. My verdict. Well, half true. And the half they leave out can cost you your paycheck. Here’s the the true half.

And it’s genuinely powerful, which is exactly why people believe the whole thing under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. When a collector first contacts you, you do have the right to dispute the debt in writing within 30 days. And once you do, the collector has to pause, not stop, pause collection until they mail you the proof you actually owe it. And a lot of that junk debt, while the old account sold and resold for pennies on the dollar, it can’t actually be validated. And the paperwork’s gone or they’ll just send you a fake validation.

Anyway, the debt that’s too old past the statute of limitations can’t be won in court. And those rights are real. Now, the half that gets people hurt, a real current debt does not vanish because you ignored the phone calls. And I do not consent is not a spell. There are no magic phrases.

Here’s the trap door. If the collector sues you and you ignore the court summons because, hey, you were told you never have to deal with the collectors on TikTok or the collector wins automatically, it’s called a default judgment. And most people never fight those suits and they get default judgments and they lose. They didn’t have to. And a judgment changes everything.

Now they can garnish your wages, money comes out of your paycheck before you ever see it. So I actually published a full emergency guide this week for people who just discovered a default judgment was entered against them. If that’s you, it’s on the site. Get out of debt dot org. And there are things that you can still do if you act now.

But the one rule I want you to walk away with is this. You can ignore collectors calls. You can never, ever ignore a court summons. That single piece of paper outranks every video on TikTok. All right, that’s your weekend debt.

Money on the table from Amazon and Lemonade with real deadlines. A voucher from Game Time you don’t have to lift a finger for. Federal Reserve that just told you the rate cut rescue may not be coming. So make your plan on today’s math. A three-second voice cloning scam your family can beat with one code word and viral collector advice.

That’s half shield, half trapdoor. Oh, and one more thing I’m having entirely too much fun with. Earlier this summer, I gave an AI bot 1,000 real dollars and told him to trade it like a pro. And I’m publishing its decisions every single day on the site. And Damon invested 1,000 bucks in a Dow index fund.

And we’re comparing what the results are. Every trade, every reason, wins and losses, nothing hidden. As I record this a week and a half in, the AI is a hair ahead of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. And it’s done that mostly by refusing to buy anything. There’s a lesson about patience in there.

Most human investors pay dearly to learn. Follow along at getoutofdebt.org. You can subscribe to the daily email. Now, the important part. If something in this episode landed in your gut, the garnishment, the variable rate debt you’ve been waiting out, the collector letters in the drawer, please, don’t let this just be a podcast you listen to.

Make a free call. Talk to Damon. He’s the guy I trust. I’ve known him for 20 plus years. He’s the co-host of this show.

And there’s a reason why he’s the co-host. I trust him. I don’t get paid when you call him. I sell nothing on my site. No products, no leads, no referral fees.

It’s just me. And I’ve been doing this since 1994 because I’ve been where you are. I’ve walked in your shoes. I filed bankruptcy myself in 1990. I came out the other side.

And if you’re not ready for a phone call, but you got a question rattling around, maybe it’s two in the morning and the worry won’t let you sleep. Come to getoutofdebt.org and hit me up through my Ask Steve chat. It’s there 24 hours a day. It’s free. Nobody’s going to ask you for a phone number, email address, try to sell you anything.

Just ask your question. One more thing. Stories like this in this episode break every single day and the deadlines don’t wait for a podcast. So if you want to know what’s happening right now, subscribe to the daily email getoutofdebt.org. That’s how you never miss the next claim window.

And why do I keep saying that? Because after doing this since 1994, I can tell you the debt relief world runs on one fuel, your fear. And fear is what gets people to pay a stranger to file a free settlement claim. Fear is what makes grandma wire the bail money. Fear is what keeps you frozen, waiting on a rate cut instead of making a plan.

Debt is math wrapped in emotion and every predator in this business makes their living on the emotion side of that equation. The antidote isn’t courage. It’s information. And that’s what this show is for. And listen, everything I’ve shared today is input, not instructions.

You’re the only one who knows your full situation and you’re the one who gets to decide what serves your future best. My job is to make sure you decide with all the information. Hey, if this format was useful, tell me. You can visit getoutofdebt.org. Ask Steve.

Chat is right at the top. Just say, hey, I like this week in debt. And more importantly, maybe forward it to one person who needs it. Somebody you know who has an unused prime membership or a parent who answers every phone call or a drawer full of collector letters. This episode might be worth real money to them.

Damon will be back in the next episode. Until then, you are not your freaking debt. I’m Steve Rhode, the Get Out Debt Guy. Take care of yourselves. See ya.