LA Fire Survivor Faces PayPal Impostor Scam
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After escaping the Palisades fire in January of 2025, Ellen doesn't know if she and her husband Steve will have a home to return to. Miraculously, their house is still standing, but it needs extensive cleaning and repairs. They move into an apartment and begin working with insurance and contractors. In March, Steve is diagnosed with cancer and passes away just a few months later. Displaced, stressed out and now grieving her beloved husband, Ellen is caught off guard by a PayPal alert for a charge she doesn't recognize. Soon, the insurance money meant to fix her home is gone.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on The Perfect Scan. |
| 0:04.1 | Said, oh, okay, we will refund this money to you. |
| 0:08.9 | We'll do this to your Wells Fargo account. |
| 0:12.6 | And so they theoretically were going to refund me the $449 only. |
| 0:18.4 | Oops, they made a mistake with the decimal point and it was $44,900. |
| 0:23.6 | Oh, God. |
| 0:24.6 | And then it was up to me to refund them from my bank account. |
| 0:35.6 | Welcome back to the Perfect Scam. |
| 0:40.9 | I'm your host, Bob Sullivan. |
| 0:42.7 | Earthquakes, floods, fires, car accidents, disasters like these can really throw your life |
| 0:50.8 | into chaos. |
| 0:52.7 | After the initial shock, when something terrible happens, there's always |
| 0:56.5 | a mountain of work to be done. It usually involves paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. After a while, |
| 1:04.3 | it feels like you'd sign just about anything to get your life back. That makes disaster victims |
| 1:10.2 | especially vulnerable to criminals, |
| 1:12.6 | and even more so if it's a high-profile disaster, like the Palisades Fire of January 2025. |
| 1:20.6 | So having experienced a bit of evacuation readiness a year or two earlier and knowing that the |
| 1:34.6 | Santa Ana winds are incredibly dangerous in the Santa Monica Mountains. I was keeping an eye out and when I, you know, and I was seeing some smoke |
| 1:49.0 | from the house and I started to get alerts and I went, I walked out to the street and that's |
| 1:57.3 | when I could see the flames and the smoke, |
| 2:01.4 | and it was like, oh my God, this is it. |
| 2:06.6 | That's Ellen Rudolph, who had just finished walking her dog, |
... |
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