Loan Scam

One young woman wanted to secure a loan from an online source.  As she was considered a high risk, it was difficult for her to get the money from conventional sources.  She went online and found a business in Baltimore that just so happened to specialize in high risk loans.

She happily completed the application complete with private Social Security numbers.  She was very excited to have been approved for the loan and was told the money would be coming soon.  She was then asked to make monthly payments as collateral and then the scammers topped up the account with fees. 

Becoming suspicious when the money was not forthcoming, she contacted local law enforcement.
 
Mystery Shopper Scam

Another savvy consumer became wise when he got an invitation to become a “Mystery Shopper”.  A legitimate business where companies higher a ‘secret shopper’ to pose as a customer to record how customer service and products are displayed and then report back to the corporation.  Recording things like how long before you were acknowledged, how long you have to wait in line and if they check in the lower rack of the shopping buggy can be assessed.

This scam however, was no such thing.  In a legitimate situation you do the analysis and then submit the review and any receipts before getting paid.  This was not the case.  And this sceptical person was given a check for $2,980.00 to do a $100 shop at a variety of retailers, fill out an evaluation and then mail it back.  The second step in the scam was to wire $2,000 via Western Union to a New York bank to check to see if Western Union was conducting themselves in a proper fashion.  This is what prompted the consumer to involve the police and shut them down. 

Some Mystery Shopper scammers are even developing relationships by establishing trust through a series of smaller paid audits before asking for the larger Western Union transfer.  The big hole is that once you pass on the money you are on the hook for it. 

Remember that if it is “too good to be true, it usually is”.

Consumers Beware – This is The Holiday Scam Season was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

One of the first things we noted involved the special service deal. Some of the items that appeared to be included in the special were in fact, not included at all and we were changed separately for parts. The receipt also claimed that several services had been performed but in reality, they were not. For example, when we arrived home, we noticed a rear brake light was out on the car. According to the receipt, the service technician checked all of the lights. We also noticed that the complimentary vacuum service we usually received was noted on the receipt as being declined by the customer, which was not the case. There were other things that were just wrong. We are not the complaining type but we took issue with the manager because so much seemed to be incorrect.

While the manager listened, in the end he did nothing more than pull a technician from a job in progress to have him vacuum the front floor of the car. Not only was it unnecessary, it was really embarrassing and we left still unsatisfied with a normally pleasant experience. When we have had our vehicles serviced at the same location in the past, we never thought twice to look at the receipt and make certain everything we paid for was completed. Now, we wonder about all the times in the past. Was it a case of one shotty employee to lazy to do the job right or it is the norm to just breeze through a computer service record?

Sadly, when we feel comfortable with a person or a place, we tend to let our guard down and that’s when we get taken advantage of. Regardless how much your respect the company or the person, you should always make it a point to protect yourself. Don’t get too comfortable and take for granted that things are always on the up and up. Just check to be sure everything is right before you leave and double check whenever you still have unanswered questions.

VERIFY SERVICES ARE COMPLETE BEFORE YOU MAKE THE PAYMENT was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

Think about it. A shopping cart allows you to carry around more items in the store than you would have otherwise been able to. Since you have the capability to carry more stuff around the store, you usually end up taking a lot more stuff with you and spending money that you otherweise wouldn’t have on things you simply do not need. How many times have you been in a grocery store just to get a few things and then you didn’t get one or two of the less important items or an extra 12 pack of pop because you just couldn’t carry all of it? Not having a shopping cart subconciosuly forces us to only buy the most important things that we need at the current moment.

 If we go to a big box store and intend to purchase quite a few things for groceries or around the house, we tend to buy the things that were on our lists as well as a few other things that would be nice to have or make life a bit more convenient, even though we really don’t need them. We casually throw items in the cart because the bills going to be pretty big anway, so what’s the harm in one or two more items?

In some cases, using a shopping cart is inevitable, say if your purchasing groceries for a week for a family of four. In the case that you are a single person only buying groceries for yourself for the week, consider making it a rule for yourself only to carry a basket isntead of a cart. You will be able to fit more than enoug food in the basket to feed you for a week, and that way you won’t be tempted to purchase a bunch of junk food, soda and beer because you won’t be able to carry it to the counter. I’ve put this into practice in my own life for almost 6 months now and have never spent more than $30 each week on groceries.

If you do not absolutely need a shopping cart for your trek to the store, don’t take one. If you have to purchase a lot of items in the store, come up with a list before hand and resolve only to purchase on the list. This way you will be less tempted to make an impulse purchase or two. By limiting the amount we carry, we will be much less tempted to pickup other items that we quite frankly do not really need.

How Shopping Carts are Stealing Money From Your Wallet was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

Recently Consumer Reports did an extensive write-up of the value of purchasing a warranty for high-definition televisions. Previously Consumer Reports was neutral toward extended warranties on some electronics purchases, but in their December issue they issued a resounding statement that HDTVs are extremely reliable and there’s just no reason to get the extended warranty. Their report states that there’s only a 3% chance that any given HDTV will need a repair during the first 3 years of ownership.

When the salesperson prompts you abuot an extended warranty, they’ll give you an amazingly smooth and convincing presentation to get you to take it, but just say no, no, and no. Many stores require their sales persons to get three objections from the customer before they leave you alone about it. Some have gotten so bad that salespeople will tell you the item is out of stock so that they can have the inventory to sell someone who will purchase a highly-profitable extended warranty.

Consumer Reports also researched the quality of high definition televisions and found that Panasonic is the most reliable brand for LCD and Plasma televisions. They found that Dells are the most likely to need repair! They also reported that the top two selling brands of HDTVs are Vizio and Olevia They make many 32” and 37” LCD’s at very inexpensive prices. They work well with HDTV over the air or HD cable services like Time Warner Digital Cable.

Don’t Buy a Warranty on Your Next HDTV Purchase was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

According to the Arizona Republic, both the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission have been receiving complains at a much higher rate about fraudulent business opportunities being advertised. In response to the increased number of scams being pitched, the FTC launched a program called “FAL$E HOPE$” in an attempt to protect investors from being scammed.

These pitches are frequently advertised in local newspapers and on the internet. They will come with all sorts of promises about the money you can make and very little detail as to how that money is supposed to be made. Some of the scam artists are even pitching their “business plans” in high-scale places such as hotel ballrooms in an attempt to make you believe that they have gained some sort of wealth from their “system.”

If you were to respond to one of these advertisements, you and a number of other potential victims would be invited to a presentation of the alleged business system or investment strategy. If you actually attended one of the meetings, you would find yourself in the middle of a pep-rally. There would be a lot of excitement and very little substance.

If you find yourself hearing a pitch that just sounds absolutely amazing, head on over to eBay and search for the name of the company. You might be able to find the same material being sold to you for just pennies on the dollar. These are often protest auctions from people who got ripped off by the company and don’t want anyone else to suffer their fate.

Don’t get pulled into one of these “business opportunities.” If the idea or system was extremely profitable, the people pitching them would be making use of the system to make money, not trying to sell the idea to other people!

Business Scams Heat Up as Economy Cools Down was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

Local governments see out-of-town travelers, especially those who are there for business, as major targets for taxation. These people who are traveling have no say in what taxes they have to pay and they won’t be around long enough to do anything about it, so they’re just stuck paying the high taxes. Cities and counties frequently charge taxes on a per-room basis for hotels, taxes on car rentals, and taxes on other services that are frequently used by travelers. Local governments know that voters are much less likely to revolt on a tax for people who do not live in their locality, so they gouge travelers whenever they pass through.

Hotels are another frequent offender of charging extra fees on top of what the room supposedly “costs” to stay in. Before you book your room, make sure to check and see if there are any daily facility fees that you have to pay. When shopping for a hotel room, do as much comparison to see what the actual cost will be as possible. Expedia’s hotel room search service does a good job at including the miscellaneous fees that hotels tend to add on.

Airlines will frequently charge you a passenger facility charge or PFC that’s a big cost. Terminals will sometimes charge you for passing through their halls, and Congress approved it. There are also charges for federal security service, charges per flight segments, and the list goes on. The pricing that you see for a ticket will be very disingenuous, so when you think you are getting the best deal, you might be getting ripped-off.

Air Ports, Hotels and Local Governments Charging Out of Control Junk Fees and Taxes to Travelers was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

The reason most people don’t give other people cash and rather give them gift cards is because they want the person receiving the gift card to use the money on themselves as something special, and not just let those funds disappear into their regular spending money. If you want to give them money to explicitly spend on themselves for fun, then do it, but don’t do it in the form of a gift card. Get creative about it. Attach a letter telling them why gift cards are terrible, terrible things and tell them to spend the money on themselves and request a report on how much fun they had spending it. It might not be the best gift idea in the world, but it sure is better handing out a gift card!

When you buy someone a gift card, you are sending them a message that you know how to manage their money better than they are, and should be able to decide which store they spend the money you give them at. It might surprise you, but not every goes to the same restaurants and retailers that you do. In fact, gift cards are never even used. That doesn’t even count the gift cards that are used but only half the balance ever gets eaten up and then it just sits in a drawer somewhere while the balance slowly declines over-time thanks to inactivity fees which are completely junk fees. Chances are they’ll be hit with all sorts of other fees which are designed to suck money off the balance of the card.

There’s only one time when it makes sense to use a gift card, and that’s when you’re given a discount on it. Since a lot of people realized that gift cards are total junk, many restaurants have been offering gift-cards at a discounted rate. You might be able to get a $25 gift-card for just $20.00. In this case it makes sense to get a gift-card if you know that you’re going to make use of it. It’s essentially free money, but that’s the only time it makes sense to ever purchase a gift-card, otherwise you’re just putting un-needed restrictions on your money!

Gift Cards are the Worst Possible Present to Buy Someone This Christmas was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

For the uninitiated, Quixtar is a marketing company which markets products for affiliate companies by using a massive network of individuals, called individual business operators (IBOs), who are recruited by other individuals who are IBOs. Each business operator which refers another member to the company receives a bounty on the sales of the person that they refer. You’ll often see these pitched at convention centers in hotels. There’s nothing wrong with the business model itself, however some of the higher-up IBOs make much more money on selling motivational and sales-training material than they actually do in Quixtar sales, and many IBOs use inflated numbers and misrepresentations of the company to get new IBOs to sign up.

I first became suspicious of this campaign when I started my new blog called American Entrepreneurship. It’s a new blog so the traffic it is receiving is relatively low. I wrote a couple of articles about Quixtar which did not portray the company in a very positive light, and although there were only 50 unique visitors the entire day it was posted, it somehow had 3 comments, all which portrayed my arguments as disingenuous and incorrect. I took a look further at my tracking statistics through StatCounter.com and reviewed the referring URLs, or the sites that my readers were at before they clicked through to my site, and found that these Quixtar supporters have created a web-application which searches for new articles about Quixtar so that they can quickly respond to any new article which comes out and does not portray them in an extremely positive light.

My tracking software also told me the day that I wrote that article I received 17 unique visitors from Google’s Blog Search which all were looking for articles about Quixtar and IBOs. Receiving that many visitors from Google is a common occurrence, but on a relatively new site it should maybe be 2 or 3 a day, and certainly not all using the same keywords to search by.

No one can be sure what the extent of this information warfare campaign is yet, but it is happening. Articles written about Quixtar in a negative light are always criticized in the comment and often company supporters will write articles on pro-Quixtar blogs such as TheTruthAboutQuixtar.com that attempt to rip-apart articles and authors which do not support their message.

Quixtar Supporters Caught in Active Information Warfare and Propaganda Campaign was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

Honda is selling their 2008 Honda Civic Sedan for $15,010 MSRP. The hybrid version of that vehicle, the ’08 Civic Hybrid Sedan retails for $22,600. For that extra $7,600 dollars, you’ll get an extra 11 miles per gallon of fuel economy. You might think that going from 34 MPG to 45 MPG would make a big difference, but the reality is that you would only use 72 more gallons of gasoline per year in the non-hybrid. If you were to drive an average of 10,000 miles per year and gasoline was at a fixed price of $3.00 a gallon, you would have to drive your new civic hybrid for a whopping 35 years before the cost would break even!

Out of all of the oil that the United States uses, it imports 58% of it from foreign countries. That’s a whopping 12 million barrels of oil imported each day. You can get around 18 useable gallons of gasoline from each barrel. The rest of that oil is used to create heating oil and other oil based products. That means we’re importing 78.8 billion gallons of gasoline each year. The 72 gallons that you would save a year are a drop in a very large bucket. Even if 1 million Americans chose a hybrid for their next vehicle, it would only decrease foreign oil dependency by less than 1%.

Switching to hybrid cars is not going to do anything particularly amazing to help the environment and won’t even be a drop in the bucket when it comes to reducing foreign oil dependence. Buying one won’t do your pocketbook any favors either. Until the technology develops to a point where the price between a hybrid model and a traditional gasoline engine becomes much lower, purchasing a hybrid vehicle just isn’t worth it.

Hybrid Cars are a Rip-Off and the People Who Buy Them Can’t Do Math. was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

There are no state or federal laws which require the leasing company to tell you the effective interest rate you are paying on your vehicle, and often times you are paying much more than you need to. With a traditional loan you could simply refinance it if you were stuck in a bad loan. It turns out that you can do the same thing with car leases if you have reasonably good credit. You will likely be able to refinance your lease, end up paying less on a monthly basis and even get out of the lease earlier. If you have a credit score of 720 or above and have a car lease, checking into refinancing your lease is definitely worthwhile.

There’s a website specifically designed to help people out in this situation. LowerMyLease.com will help you figure out whether or not it makes sense for you to refinance your lease and help you get the loan to make that happen.

They have a guide on their website which discusses the process:

1. Call your current lender and ask them for your current payoff without sales tax.
2. Check the current odometer reading on the vehicle, and pull out your original window sticker for the vehicle. It’s most probably in the glove box or with your orginal lease contract.
3. To find out your new payment options, select your vehicle and enter the current payoff amount and mileage.
4. If you find a new payment or term you like, then submit your credit application and get pre-approved. Here are some things to consider when re-leasing:
o A lower payment for any selected term
o The same payment for a shorter term
o A lower residual value which gives you more options during and at the end of the lease
5. We’ll re-write your lease with the new lease program you selected. The leases offered on LowerMyLease.com are from national financial institutions that you may already be doing business with.
6. New lease contracts are printed and sent to you for review.
7. Upon your approval, sign and overnight them back to us in the envelope provided.
8. We pay off your current lease and your new re-lease begins!

LowerMyLease.com has come up with a great service to help you get a better deal on the lease that you’re stuck in. It won’t always be a better deal, but it’s definitely worth checking into if you drive a leased vehicle.

Stuck in a Car Lease? Refinance and Save Big. was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

It turns out that razor blades do not get dull because we use them to shave! So why do razor blades get dull? It’s actually because of the moisture in the shaving cream and the water that we make use of that makes them dull. We shave with a razor, rinse it off, put it back in its case, and go on with life. Each time we use it more water collects on the razor blade, causing oxidation and thus a microscopic form of rusting which causes the blade to become dull.

It only makes sense that if we make a point to dry off our razor blades after making use of them that they will last much longer. Simply dry off your razor blade with a towel after making use of it or better yet a blow-dryer to be sure to remove all moisture. Your razor blades will go from being dull after just a few days to staying sharp for several months.

In my personal experience, I’ve found that I can usually get a razor blade to last for our five months ago while remaining reasonably usable. Consumer advocate Clark Howard once discussed how he blots his 17 cent razor blades with a towel to try them and that a single blade has lasted him for almost a year!

Don’t let Gillette and Schick keep ripping you off. By drying your razor blades after each use with a towel or a razor you can easily reduce the amount of money you pay in razor blades to $5.00 a year!

Gillette and Schick are Ripping You Off. Never Pay for another Razor Again. was created by and is property of American Consumer News.