Woman loses life savings to scam, then faces major taxes

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]First you get angry and then you yell and you scream and then you want to cry.

[00:00:05]It's like really do I still have to deal with this?

[00:00:08]>> One mistake in a long life is one she cannot escape. And it all started with a single click.

[00:00:16]>> I clicked a button and my screen froze and went black and said there's been a security breach. With a single click, Barb Putnham was caught in an elaborate scam. One that swindled her of more than $300,000, >> which was most of my retirement savings that I had.

[00:00:40]>> It's been 2 years since and she spent that time rebuilding >> so that I have an some safety net for myself. Slowly and steadily, she felt more and more stable >> until last November. And I come home from Thanksgiving and there's a letter from Social Security.

[00:01:00]>> The letter says in 2026 her Medicare cost is skyrocketing. It basically says because you made so much money last year, you have to pay an additional $400 and some odd dollars toward your Medicare.

[00:01:18]In the scam, the thieves talked Barb into selling her stocks. So, her tax return looks like she cashed in big time. The consequences were swift and dramatic. First, the IRS, thinking she made a ton of money, came after her. So then I'm faced with having to pay $54,000 worth of taxes on money that had been stolen.

[00:01:42]>> She fought back and eventually was able to classify it as a loss. But the Social Security Administration did not get that memo. And now with this letter, she's again having to push back. She says Social Security looked at just one line of her tax returns, earned income. But when you look at my full taxes, it was a total loss in 2024.

[00:02:06]>> Instead of the standard $22 Medicare premium, now she must pay $446, plus another $83 for prescriptions.

[00:02:18]That's an 89% increase, nearly $4,000 more a year. She says it's not just financially painful, it's retraumatizing.

[00:02:30]You know, this is real. This is real trauma. It's a very, very long pathway to healing.

[00:02:34]>> When Barb went in person to a social security office to try to explain her situation, she was turned away.

[00:02:42]>> They want you to deal with it all online or mail them things, >> which is almost ironic with what you've been through cuz probably the last thing you want to do right now is go online after all of this and try to deal with sensitive information, right?

[00:02:55]>> Yeah. I it just it's it's crazy making.

[00:02:59]She appealed. Two months later, the feds denied it. She did not have a qualifying life-changing event.

[00:03:06]>> How can you not say that under these circumstances that that's not a significant enough of a loss?

[00:03:13]>> King Five reached out to the Social Security Administration. They replied saying, "Due to privacy concerns, we're unable to discuss this case.

[00:03:22]>> There's not a consciousness about the impact of those decisions on real people's lives. What the heck?

[00:03:28]>> She says until they make changes, victims will be paying the price.

[00:03:33]>> It has totally altered my life. You know, it's just shameful. Really, it's shameful. The system shouldn't be this way.

[00:03:45]>> And we've done several stories now on Barb and that scam that stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from her because it shows the impact does not end with the initial crime. It can follow victims for years.

[00:03:58]>> It is so heartbreaking because we remember the initial stories about Barb and her losing all that money a couple of years ago. She's not the only victim, is she? So, do we have a sense of how many people out there who have been victimized like she has? Yeah, I mean it has to be thousands if not more. And that number has to be growing as well because the Federal Trade Commission recently reported fraud losses among older Americans have jumped from around $600 million in 2020 to $2.4 billion billion in 2024. So imagine where we are now in 2026. And that number um they believe is even higher because a lot of cases go under reportported because you know people are embarrassed or they don't want to come forward with it.

[00:04:39]>> It's just so frustrating. Yeah, heartbreaking.

[00:04:41]>> Andy, thank you. Thanks.

[00:04:42]>> Well, you can see a lot more from the King Five investigators streaming right now on the King Five app. It's free to download for your phone and for your