Catch up on the latest stories from the Elliott Report

UPS broke my flowerpots and now it’s stonewalling my refund. Can the A-Team help?
Linda Takvorian paid $377 to have two ceramic planters packed, insured and shipped from Massachusetts to California. One arrived shattered. A UPS Store employee promised a full refund within eight weeks, then was fired for giving bad information, leaving the store to offer $100 because the claim window had closed.

How useless extras are driving up your airfare
Phil Lockwood tracked every piece of garbage his family of five generated on a San Francisco to Manila flight and finished the trip with 17 plastic cups, five half-eaten sandwiches and five amenity kits, four of them torn open and abandoned. Research from the in-flight technology company Moment puts the share of passengers who prefer their own devices at 97%, and the seatback screens nobody asked for still add weight, fuel cost and a control box where your bag used to go.

Where’s the line between a consumer complaint — and crazy?
One reader filed more than 100 submissions on our help form in about a week, naming Apple, Chase, Equifax, Uber, Coca-Cola and FedEx, and asked for $8.4 million nearly every time. The form takes 30 to 50 requests a day, and sorting a frustrated customer from someone in distress turns out to be harder than three decades in this work would suggest.

“Debanked” by your frequent flier program? You should have rights
Ari and Shanna Nachison each held more than 550,000 American AAdvantage miles when the airline closed their accounts and cited only “the general AAdvantage program conditions,” without saying which ones. A bank that closes your account owes you a written reason within 30 days, while the Supreme Court has told frequent fliers their remedy is to go find a better program.

In Germany’s Black Forest, winter isn’t a sure thing anymore
Achim Laber has been a ranger at Feldberg Nature Reserve for 36 years, and the mountain has now gone four straight Christmas holidays without snow on slopes that used to hold it from November through April. Its lift operator is expanding snowmaking to buy more seasons, while a resort at similar elevation across the French border has already set a date to stop skiing altogether.

Is there a way out of this Amazon account recovery black hole?
Henry Dickson’s iPad was bricked during an update, and when he reinstalled the Amazon app, the login asked him to approve a notification on the device he couldn’t reach. Amazon’s identity recovery page required him to sign in before uploading a driver’s license, a dozen representatives sent him the same broken link, and he lost access to his Prime benefits and his entire Kindle library.

Help! A three-hour delay returning my rental car cost me $650!
George Meyer paid $670 for a 27-day Europcar rental in France on a voucher that promised unlimited mileage, then hit traffic on the way back to Charles de Gaulle and reached the counter three hours late. The delay pushed the rental to 28 days, which under EU rules puts it in a different category with a 3,750-kilometer cap, and Europcar billed him $650 for the extra distance.

Anzhela Fatkhutdinova was talked into entering someone else’s Apple Account during what she thought was a remote copywriting interview, and her iPhone 12 Pro came back locked. Her son, the named buyer on the receipt, asked Apple to remove the Activation Lock and had the request refused in three days, with no written reason and no route to appeal. What does a legitimate owner do next? Here’s our team’s advice on Backchannel.

Behind this line: the travel booking app and the timeshare operation the FTC named in its report to Congress, why the dollar losses are climbing five times faster than the complaints, and the five habits that keep you out of next year’s edition.

A Members Only story like this runs in every issue, along with Backchannel and the vault.