14 Halloween financial horror stories
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7. Phantom puppy
I was online trying to buy my autistic son an English bulldog. He loves them. Two scammers tried to get me to send them $150 for the dogs to Nigeria and Cameroon. I talked them down to $100. Luckily my boyfriend said he saw that online scams came from those areas, and we picked up on it before it was too late. Now my son is brokenhearted.

I'm a single parent of four, so $100 was a lot for me. I will not look at or buy a dog online again -- it broke our hearts. Someone needs to stop them now!

8. Lifeless interest rate
It didn't curdle my blood but it curled my toes ...

On Feb. 2, 2007, I had a little over $2,100 (I'm glad that was all) on deposit in a "Werewolf Bank Online Money Market Plus" account with an APR of 4.5 percent. Shortly thereafter, "Vampire Bank" acquired "Werewolf Bank." On Feb. 12, I checked online to see what new benefits accrued to depositors with this financial giant at the helm.

I found that my new High Performance Money Market account now paid a whopping APR of 0.04 percent, less than one-hundredth of the previous yield -- and with no notice of the change, of course. Boo! Their representative said they were sorry to lose me as a customer.

(Of course it wasn't technically a scam, because money market accounts are subject to rate changes without notice, but it was rather sleazy. Thank goodness for Bankrate.com.)

9. Taken for a magic carpet ride
We were building a house in Massachusetts and we gave a rug company, a reputable business that we had worked with before, a $2,000 deposit for carpet for the entire house.

The owner proceeded to call me for a couple of weeks asking for more money up front, as the carpet manufacturer was requesting more money. A red flag went up after about the third call. We refused to give him any more money before the carpet was delivered and installed. Much to our surprise, we never got our carpet.

While we were waiting for the carpet, we picked up the local newspaper one morning to discover that the owner had overdosed on drugs and died. There went our $2,000 deposit, and, luckily, we had not given him more, despite his attempts.

In addition, we had stored an oriental rug at his place of business that had been in the family for years. Luckily, we found our oriental rug still in storage. That in itself was a miracle, as he had liquidated most of his carpets and the ones in storage also. But we were still out our $2,000 deposit.