Articles Posted in Unfair and Deceptive Practices

Alabama seniors, in particular, are facing a danger of misleading statements about annuities. Annuities are contracts where an insurance company promises to make regular payments to you in exchange for premiums that you pay. Sometimes the time period of getting paid is a fixed number of years (i.e. “$2,000 per month for ten years”) and sometimes its as long as you live.

Here is the problem: there are unscrupulous agents who will use unfair pressure and lies to convince Alabama consumers (mainly seniors) to buy products that are more risky that promised or otherwise inappropriate.

Click here to read the warnings issued by the NASD on investments in general and for the specific warning regarding annuities and seniors.

Last week the FTC settled claims with debt settlement or debt elimination companies who had misled many consumers. Read here to find out more about this and to protect yourself. We often get contacted by people who are getting sued and they are shocked because they were working with one of these debt elimination companies. These companies can’t prevent a creditor or debt collector/debt buyer from suing you so be careful in dealing with these debt elimination companies.

Another resource for you is to join our Facebook Fan Page – Alabama Consumer Protection Attorneys where we share useful information about the same types of issues that we cover in this blog.

This one caught us off guard that a major store would do this:

The Connecticut Attorney General has announced a lawsuit against Best Buy in regards to a secret internal website that is identical from their public website except for the prices. Consumerist has received reports of this website being used to attempt to trick our readers as recently as March 19, 2007.

Customers coming into the store looking for prices they saw at home on the public website were told that the sale had ended and were shown a separate internal website that reflected different in-store prices. The customers were led to believe that they were looking at the same website they accessed at home.

Alabama consumers are pressured into buying extended warranty agreements when buying cars. This recent post by Ronald Burdge shows why that may not be a good idea.

Extended warranties have been one of the highest profit customer ripoffs ever seen in the auto industry. Worse yet, with little regulation, they are likely to stay that way. So, what can you do to avoid being ripped off by one?

First, don’t buy one. Everyone in the industry knows that the profits are high and the payout is low. No matter what they are wanting to charge you, the odds are that over half that money is pure profit to the car dealer. And if the warranty company’s name isn’t the same as an auto manufacturer, then you can bet that the profit margin is even higher, probably at least 60 percent and more likely 75 percent of the price is pure profit.

On the Consumer Law and Policy Blog there is an interesting reference to an paper being prepared by Mark Cohen of Vanderbilt. This caught my eye for two reasons:

First, the paper points out the problems of auto dealers getting a quote for say, eight percent, but telling the customer the bank approved them for ten percent. The dealer keeps the spread. Professor Cohen argues this impacts minorities in particular.

Secondly, we have hired Professor Cohen in several multi million dollar truck wreck cases as an economist and he is perhaps the most credible and knowledgeable expert witness we have ever used. He truly knows his stuff.