It’s a scheme made famous by a nearly 30-year-old episode of the sitcom Seinfeld.
Hoping to earn a quick buck, two characters load a mail truck full of soda bottles and beer cans purchased with a redeemable 5-cent deposit in New York, before traveling to Michigan, where they can be recycled for 10 cents apiece. With few thousand cans, they calculate, the trip will earn a decent profit. In the end, the plan fell apart.
But after Connecticut raised the value of its own bottle deposits to 10 cents in 2024, officials say, they were caught off guard by a flood of such fraudulent returns coming in from out of state. Redemption rates have reached 97%, and some beverage distributors have reported millions of dollars in losses as a result of having to pay out for excess returns of their products.
Senate Bill 299, would increase fines for violating the bottle bill law from $50 to $500 on a…
CLICK HERE to read the FULL CT moves to crack down on bottle redemption fraud – CT Mirror article.
Treat every unsolicited “urgent” communication from a bank or government agency as a potential “Vishing” or “Smishing” attack, regardless of how official the branding or phone number appears.