Episode: 4365
Title: HPR4365: Mint to Rocket Money and Scammers 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4365/hpr4365.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 23:43:09

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4365 for Friday 25 April 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Mint to Rocket Money and Scammers.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Operator Talks about my move from Mint to Rocket money and me getting
scammed basically.
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host Operator.
Today we're going to be talking about Mint, the company that got acquired by Intuit,
I think Rocket money and possibly Monarch, but I didn't mess with Monarch.
There's another one called YNAB, so this is tracking your spending, you know, management
of all that.
So this was a long time ago when Mint, not Mint Mobile, but Mint the company that does
tracking for your stuff, they were owned by Intuit, I think, and then like one of those
gross credit monitoring companies bought them and they said, oh, we're changing, we're
switching over, you know, get ready, send me a dollar or whatever.
And finally, I said, all right, I need to do this and get a switch to over.
Now when I looked around, I asked and I saw that people use in Rocket money, in YAB and
Monarch.
Now I had all, I had looked at Rocket money because they, you know, negotiate your bill for
trying to get you a better bill on your cable internet, whatever.
And the reason they do that is they get kind of a kickback.
So if they save, you know, $300 on your bill, they take like a certain amount, they
kick a cut of it and I don't know what the minimum amount is, but before I messed up,
so they ended up getting like, you know, $80 or something like that, a fair chunk of
it.
So, initially, they said, you know, from, come from Rocket money, they're like, oh, we'll
transfer everything over, don't trust anyone.
Do your own backups of your transaction history because I lost probably six, six years,
ten years of transaction history coming from Mint because I did not back up my transaction
history.
Please, for the love of God, do it, find out what your caps are.
You know, all these platforms, things like Delta only keeps so much history.
Most people only keep like two, three years of history, even though it's in their databases
and everybody's been sold 15,000 times over, you can't even access your own data that
I know is in their data stores.
But that's besides the point.
Back up your own stuff, especially your transaction history because it's great for kind
of modeling that over time when you're trying to do investments or trying to figure out
where you're at and where you've come from.
So I mistakenly thought they're like, hey, we'll set everything up, we'll, you know,
transfer everything over, you don't have to do anything.
It's all, well, what they said, what they, what I didn't know is they weren't talking
about the transaction history.
They were just talking about pulling in the authentication stuff and pulling in like everything
but the password.
Well, I could do that.
That's not a big deal.
I can copy and paste, you know, user names or whatever from one platform to the other.
I thought they were talking about bringing in my transactions.
So I lost transactions moving to rocket money.
Never looked at Monarch or the other one, well, hey, baby, close, easy.
They were able to save me, you know, say $85 or $300, I'm going to say $85 on my cable
bill and I gave them a large chunk of that and kind of mistakenly didn't really realize
it.
And I said, okay, well, they hadn't actually changed my bill yet.
So if my bill doesn't change, I'm going to be pretty upset that they took, you know, an
$85 chunk out of something that, you know, that actually hasn't changed.
And luckily, within about a week or two, I did see the credit on my account and then
I've been seeing the credit and then every year they do it and then they try to ask
you, you know, oh, we'll give me however much percentage.
And it's a little weird and they're kind of sketchy about it.
You know, I don't mind paying for service and I knew this was kind of coming.
But with these guys, I mean, all of them, they probably sell your data anyways.
So I'm not really trying to pay anything outside of the bare minimum because most of these
people are just awful.
And you know, something comes out in the news about them being breached or whatever.
So I also sign up for a service called Delimi that will, in theory, get your information
out of data brokers.
I don't know how true that is and if that's even really a thing.
But it does seem to work and I do actually did a sample of checking to see if I could find
myself on some of these platforms and I couldn't, which made some sense and they actually
give you links to your own data and say, hey, here's your data on this platform, you know,
and of course, you go to the platform and it's like send me $0.50 or $0.25 to get access
to the full phone number or whatever, so you're like, the last word to just the phone number
or something.
So it is, you know, it does show you that you can look at these and then come back and
say, yep, that link is not there anymore and it doesn't work.
So it does work whether or not, you know, it's a drop in the bucket compared to, you
know, the other ones that that's been, you know, put on some other platform and sold
between a hundred times over, I don't know.
But anyways, I will log in, log in to rocket money here and it's weird because they have
rocket mortgage.
So if you try to log in, your auto complete thing will take you to a dashboard for rocket
mortgage.com and that's not what I am.
I'm rocket money.com.
So then I have to go back and say rocket account and nope, it takes me back to rocket
mortgage.
So there's a rocket money.
So I have to go to rocket money and then click record money.com and then I click log
in and I'm already logged in so I get redirected to app.rocket money.com is the site I'm supposed
to have.
Now, there's a lot of features missing from here in Mint.
They want you to pay for premium whatever go premium.
They already took money from me.
I don't really know where that information would be, but they got kind of shifted with
me and I wasn't really super, super happy about the way they did that.
So there are some features in here like you can do manual routing or automated rounding.
So if something comes in with a certain string, for example, spectrum, I want to go be renamed
to fun and entertainment instead of bills, whatever.
You can either put your other investments or have 401Ks in here and there's a bunch
of stuff missing actually.
Mind that worth is not in here at all.
So that's missing which, oh, this feature is only available to premium members.
I swear I had everything in here as far as, oh, okay, that's a big number.
So yeah, everything is in here, but you know, if you do want to do like net worth, that's
a premium feature.
You get budgets, you can do spending is good.
The reoccurring is actually the cool part.
Now, I actually picked up two couple of things, audiobooks.com was charging me and I fixed
that through PayPal and then I found out somebody else was auto-charging me and I fixed that
and I realized this actually led to me to going through PayPal and completely nuking every
single entity in PayPal.
Now, the way PayPal works and everybody wants you to use PayPal because, and what I figured
this out, and maybe everybody already knew this, is once you set up payment with PayPal,
they can pull money out of your account whenever they feel like it.
So I have, I had a web host that I paid for like a month and at some point in time they
pulled out like a yearly charge of like a domain name or a website or whatever and it was
through like a host touch and host touch hadn't charged me since like 2016 and then they
charged me in like 2023 or 2024 and I'm like, well for what?
And I can't even find out what you guys even charged me for because I can't even log into
the account because it doesn't even exist.
So I had a hard time tracking that down and of course come to find out again it came
through PayPal.
So what I found out with PayPal is that once you've added that entity to your PayPal, it
doesn't matter what you do, you can put, you know, when you put a new credit card in there
as long as you keep everything up to date, they can pull money out of wherever they want
to put out and it's like, it's under, it's closed hidden and it's buried but it's hidden
in there and buried and you can remove all the merchants from your account and just have
a PayPal account.
Now, once I got bamboozled out of $16 a month for, I don't know, it's like, it was like
six months with audiobooks, there's actually a law now that's like a one click cancellation
law so they can't get you audiobooks.com got me and Amazon, audio got me on the whole
like, are you sure you want to cancel, are you sure you want to not cancel today and
receive seven more months of premium access now for not ever, ever?
So they call it like some kind of zero click law, I send it out to everybody that I know
my friends and family, everybody in IT and they came back and, you know, asked me if I
had been compromised or something but the idea was, let's see if I can find it.
The law is, I don't know, still can't find it, not REI, this is very old stuff but
anyways, there's a law against it that they're just going to go and act next year or something
so if you click cancel, you'll actually have to cancel that account and they won't have
to click through and click through and accidentally have six more months of whatever.
So again, going back to the reoccurring is actually a nice feature, it's free, it's
whatever and I don't know how much they saved me in my billing.
I want to say I'm paying $55 a month for internet, $57 a month, $55 give or take, it was
$54 and it just increasingly goes up, it went up a dollar and they do this for the end
of time so this bill seems high and you can say learn more and then you can upload your
bill and whatever.
So you know, $55 is pretty low for what speed internet I'm getting, I don't know, anything
around that area is fine, you start getting into the 70s and I think I was paying $80 a month
or something ridiculous for just basic internet and they negotiated that down for me, I went
back and said hey, can you, I call Comcast originally and they're like no, we can't help
you, we're not going to give you your money back but we can't give you the service you've
been paying for for the past six months which is W your speed, how can you do that?
So you sign away your rights and all that stuff and I thought I was going to be smart
and set up automatic notifications for anything that said charter and if it was over a single
dollar, I would get a notification as well, they changed the light on, I'm just back to
them and that's my own fault for not looking at my bills and auto checking stuff.
So I was assuming that I would catch that and I think they got me for like four months.
But anyways, considering everything else, we're pretty tight on the money and good to go
from there but I use it to kind of go through and look at my payments and see who I've
paid money to and keep an eye out for fees and international transfer fees and things
like that.
But go into your PayPal, remove all your providers and even remove your credit cards and any
payment information.
I think my PayPal right now, I'm actually waiting to hear back from a faults, a faults
whatever.
I'm the count and then I'm probably going to close out my PayPal because I've been kind
of shiftily screwed by them and I haven't really received any money very much from it
at all or use it much at all and it used to be a thing to send your friends and family
money and why I have no friends and most of my friends actually have cash on them now
a days anyways or we'll split it with a card whatever, but back in the day it was nice
to be able to send money and whatever, my wife still uses it and she can use her own freaking
PayPal for all I care because I'm not doing this, I'm not using PayPal anymore, they've
kind of rubbed me the wrong way and it's my own fault for not checking my own stuff
but that's kind of my review for where I've been for tracking, spending and things like
that and your mileage may vary but give something a try, there's also probably local versions
of that because everybody has an API so you might could actually build your own, I don't
know what options there are available but you're basically giving API access to your bank
stuff and they can pull down transaction data but they can't you know, move money
or anything like that as far as I know, anyways that's pretty much it, take a DC.
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