⛑️Consumer Rescue presents🛟

Tales from Consumer Advocacy Land

Real stories. Real rescues. Real advice.

Happy sunny Sunday, friends 🩷!

Are you ready for some tales from Consumer Advocacy Land? Let’s jump right in.

If you plan to rent a car this summer, you’ll find our first featured article particularly alarming. A Hertz customer’s rental car broke down on his road trip from Spain to Portugal last July. The company sent roadside assistance to tow the vehicle and dropped the driver and his son off at a hotel.

That should have been the end of the story. But it wasn’t.

Later — much later — Hertz sent a $9,000 demand to the customer to pay for a replacement engine. The car rental giant claimed a mechanic had discovered the wrong gas in the car, a full five months after it was towed away.

Find out what my investigation uncovered and what happened to that $9,000 repair bill after the rental car customer contacted Consumer Rescue.

Then over at The Points Guy, I’ll tell you about the travel scams to watch out for as you plan your 2026 summer vacation.

And I have some popular articles you may have missed the first time around:

Finally, at the bottom of the newsletter, I'll tell you why both of my daughters needed rescuing this week in today's edition of Life, Lately.

Enjoy!

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For our new subscribers, I should mention that this section of the newsletter is where I take you behind the scenes in my (mis)adventures preparing to sell my house after nearly 27 years while simultaneously running Consumer Rescue, investigating and mediating tons of consumer problems each week, and writing my columns for various outlets. 🤪

As you might guess, I don’t have a lot of free time at the moment. So you can imagine that unexpected emergencies brought to me by my adult daughters can really throw a wrench in my schedule. Thankfully neither of these situations were true emergencies — (no one was in danger) however, one was considerably, more serious than the other. Both led me to spending hours of my day on unexpected tasks that could have easily been avoided.

Earlier this month, my oldest daughter finished her first year of law school. Yay! 🎉 Her summer internship begins tomorrow.

Unfortunately, she didn’t read all the instructions that she received with her employment letter — until a few days ago. Prior to starting her new job, she needed to come to the office where she’ll be working in New York City and bring her original birth certificate.

My daughter called me in a panic from Costa Rica where she has been on a girls trip with her friend celebrating the end of their first year of law school. She needed me to find her birth certificate and get it to New York by today. But there was a big problem with that request — I packed everything from her bedroom into the storage POD that had been sitting in my driveway for weeks.

Last week, the POD was taken away to the main storage area — 50 miles from my house.

So I scrambled to figure out how to get an immediate, certified copy of her original birth certificate. I learned that it's possible by going to the Department of Health in the town where you're born. I abandoned my plans for the day and took the 30-minute drive to Princeton where my daughters were born.

I used this mishap as an excuse to take a walk through the town, which, if you’re not familiar with Princeton, it is a beautiful place for a stroll. So I got some exercise, fresh air, and Ava got her birth certificate.

Mission accomplished.

But then just as I was congratulating myself on averting that crisis, my younger daughter called me in a considerably worse situation. She was crying and it was hard to understand what she was telling me. When I was able to piece together the story, one thing became clear to me: My daughter doesn’t read my columns.

🤬Amelie had just become the victim of a $2,000 Zelle scam on the street in Philadelphia.

I’ve been writing about Zelle for years and I’ve warned my girls about all the scams associated with that app. But I hadn’t heard about this one before.

Here’s the Reader’s Digest version: She was waiting on the street to meet a friend when a group of boys who looked like children approached her. They told her they were collecting donations to keep kids off the streets by encouraging them to get involved in sports instead. The ringleader asked her if she could donate just $1 to their cause and he even showed her a website for the supposed charity.

When she told them she didn’t have cash, they told her to send her donation through Zelle.

Amelie is a very kind and sensitive soul and is too trusting… way too trusting. When these little criminals asked her to hand over her phone so they could give her their Zelle number, she did. They quickly switched the amount from $1 to $2,000, sent it to themselves and then shut her phone off before handing it back. They were long gone by the time she realized she’s been robbed of all the money she had earned this year working part-time as she finished her senior year at Temple. She was devastated.

I spoke to our executive contact at Zelle and he told me this is a common scam that targets younger people on the street.

I will, of course, be writing an article about her experience to warn others about this scam. But I’m not going to leave you with a cliff hanger here. Amelie got extremely lucky. Because the scammers were greedy and tried to empty her entire account, Bank of America blocked the transaction. Had they only taken a few hundred dollars it probably would have gone through.

Amelie learned a very important lesson about trusting strangers on the street asking for donations. Luckily, that lesson didn’t cost her $2,000.

… and that’s how Life, Lately looks this week.

Until next time 😃

Don't forget! Consumer Rescue is just a click away. One of us is always here to answer your questions. 

Of course, you can always reach me at [email protected]