Bring the Card

Talking Real Money - Investing Talk

Don McDonald

Education, Investing, Business, How To

4.5 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tom welcomes consumer advocate Herb Weisbaum (ConsumerMan) to talk through the rising headaches of modern travel and everyday scams. Herb shares a recent Delta Airlines ordeal where he was nearly stranded overseas because he didn’t have the exact credit card used to purchase his ticket months earlier — a policy he and others say is poorly disclosed and inconsistently enforced. The conversation expands to robocall loan scams, fake toll violation texts, and AI-boosted fraud that’s becoming harder to spot. Herb offers practical steps on how to avoid getting trapped, plus early holiday shopping advice as tariffs and supply issues push prices up. A lively, useful consumer-protection episode. 0:10 Tom introduces Herb Weisbaum and today’s consumer-focused discussion 1:14 Tom’s Heathrow airline mess and why travelers feel powerless 2:08 Herb’s far worse Delta experience: denied boarding without original credit card 3:44 Calling a neighbor at 3am to photograph the card and save the trip 5:13 Delta’s justification: “We’re protecting you from fraud” 6:20 Why airlines can mistreat travelers and get away with it 7:04 U.S. vs. EU passenger rights and compensation differences 8:32 Text scams: fake unpaid toll notices are surging 9:46 The new wave of “pre-approved loan” robocall scams 10:48 AI makes scam messages grammatically perfect and harder to detect 11:04 Slow down, don’t engage, verify before responding 12:20 Let unknown calls go to voicemail to avoid social pressure 14:07 Holiday shopping preview: tariffs, supply constraints, scarcity in decor and toys 15:55 Black Friday all season long—price tracking and refund requests 16:27 Brief detour into kid gifts, backpacks, and questionable plush monsters 17:21 Checkbook.org and ConsumerMan resources for unbiased help 18:17 Herb’s love of model trains and signing off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Tom. Welcome to Talking Real Money here every single day to help you do better with your money, your finances, your emotions, and make it put money in its place. That's how I like to look at it.
0:22.7	So today a little different tact. We're going to be talking about some consumer issues that we've
0:26.9	seen have come up. And to help us do that, he just came, what's with the cape? He's got a cape on.
0:33.3	He looks, he's superhero. It's consumer man, Herb Weissbaum.
0:39.3	Join us here in the Talking Real Money Studios.
0:40.3	Hello, Tom.
0:41.8	You look amazing.
0:44.0	You know what the dry cleaning bills are to clean that cape?
0:45.2	I can't even imagine. I can't even imagine.
0:45.9	You used to see him on television.
0:47.5	You still, you're still on radio, television.
0:51.2	And of course, checkbook.org, you can read all this stuff there. So take advantage of all that.
0:56.7	And he's been kind enough to be on the podcast, be part of retirement, et cetera, et cetera. So, but
1:00.4	there's always these issues. So I'll give you my background with the airline industry, which has had a
1:04.8	couple of unhappy conclusions. Last summer, I went to Europe and coming back at Heathrow Airport and waiting for British Airways to fly us to Seattle.
1:17.2	And they told us, uh, the planes, they made up something.
1:20.9	You're going to get on a couple hours late for this.
1:22.5	This is.
1:22.8	Okay, fine.
1:23.3	So we finally get on the plane about two and a half hours late.
1:25.5	Fine.
1:25.7	That's fine.
	...

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