In November 2025 I bought $1600 worth of FSA approved products from Costco to try and use my funds before they expired. However, I ended up returning $1500 of the merchandise because I found a better use for the funds than a bunch of random supplies.
Fast forward to April 2026 I receive a phone call from a random number stating they are Costco and that a charge from November never went through so I owe them $1500. I told the agent it sounded like a scam so they said they would send me an email to verify with me the legitimacy or call me back. This never happened, they never followed up. I went to the Costco warehouse proactively to clarify this issue and the gentleman at customer service told me there was nothing noted and it was likely a scam.
The next time I went shopping at Costco I wasn’t able to checkout because they put a hold on my account. Turns out it wasn’t a scam and it took Costco nearly 6 months to make contact with the customer. They claim they called me once in Jan (I was abroad) and once in Feb (I checked my missed calls and voicemails but there was none).
Since they make contact with me on 4/30/2026 I have been in contact with my healthyequity FSA representatives multiple times. Each time getting told to wait 5-7 business days. Finally FSA figured out that the since there was no official charge the system connected it to the “closest thing” which was a charge from 2024. Therefore the credit front Costco got transferred straight to an expired account that I never had access to. Healthy equity is making me jump through hoops to get money back to Costco that never belonged to them. And Costco has sent this amount to collections to ruin my credit score within 6 weeks of contacting me. The mishandling of all this is outrageous and has given me alot of anxiety. With all the phone calls I have made no one seems to have the authority to help me.
Location: San Francisco, CA