Ohio AG warns about scams

Among the issues that keep Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray busy, two of the biggest are home foreclosures and consumer scams. Both, Cordray said during a visit to Athens Thursday, are hitting Athens County right along with the rest of the state.

"œWe have a home-foreclosure crisis in the state of Ohio, and it continues to unfold," Cordray said during a public informational meeting.

The AG noted that for the 14th straight year in 2009, Ohio saw a record number of home foreclosures; he compared the crisis to "œthe plague of locusts in the Bible."

Through its "Holding Wall Street Accountable" project, Cordray's office is suing the big investment firms that appear to have committed the worst misbehavior in the handling of mortgage debt.

He said his agency is also pushing for more support from the U.S. Treasury and federal regulators, to pressure lenders to negotiate deals that allow homeowners to stay in their homes, while allowing lenders to salvage some of their bad debt.

So far, he complained, many big mortgage firms, who raked in money during the housing bubble without much effort, have been eager to benefit from taxpayer-funded bail-outs, but reluctant to make any serious effort to work out deals with homeowners.

"They've never done any hard work as (mortgage) servicers; they've just done easy work," he alleged. "They have been abysmal, in my view, in their performance."

While the AG's office has sued three big mortgage firms so far, Cordray suggested it would be more effective to put pressure on the financial industry from the top.

"It's a pretty poor way to proceed, just filing a lawsuit," he said.

Susan Choe, who works in the consumer protection division of Cordray's office, said that since 1995, Athens County has seen approximately an 800 percent increase in foreclosures. Cordray has committed his office to providing assistance for homeowners facing foreclosure, she added.

Choe noted that while most of the consumer fraud complaints her office handles deal with automobiles, it also receives many dealing with mortgage-related scams. For those who believe they've been victimized, the office provides a toll-free phone number (800-282-0515), which Choe promised will be answered by "a real live human being." Consumers can also file complaints at www.SpeakOutOhio.gov.

She urged Ohioans to take advantage of the service, which she said also will help the AG's office do a better job.

"I really want to encourage folks to file complaints," Choe said, noting that the agency uses the complaints to track the frequency of different types of scams, and to decide "who to sue" to try to stop them.

In 2009, she said, the AG's office filed 31 lawsuits over consumer-protection issues, most related to foreclosure-protection scams.

She said Save the Dream Ohio, a multi-agency program aimed at helping those facing foreclosure, has referred more than 24,000 homeowners to parties who can provide assistance such as legal aid services.

Jennifer Day of the AG's office urged citizens who have been victims of crime to apply for payments from the state's Victims of Crime compensation fund, which currently contains about $12 million. (She also stressed that none of this came from taxes; it is supplied by sources including court costs and drivers-license re-instatement fees.)

Day said the AG is authorized to pay up to $50,000 per claim, which makes Ohio "one of the higher states in the country" for compensation levels. The state receives about 8,000 claims per year, she reported, with many related to assault, sexual abuse, domestic violence or homicide.

The fund can pay crime victims for a variety of damages, including lost wages, medical bills, burial expenses in the case of homicides, and even crime-scene cleanup, Day noted.

Other services the AG can provide, according to Day, include a robo-dialed phone alert to tell a crime victim when a perpetrator's status in the corrections system changes "“ for example, if an inmate is paroled from prison.

Another area of interest for the agency, she said, is "cyber-bullying" and "sexting," in which juveniles use Internet connections to intimidate peers, or cell phones to send sexually oriented text and images about themselves to other juveniles.

Though older online predators' victimizing of children gets more publicity, Day said, her agency sees more instances of juveniles victimizing other juveniles. "A lot of kids are bullying each other," she reported.

Responding to an audience question about contractor registration, Cordray said he would like to see the state require all contractors to be certified, but doesn't know if it's "realistic" to expect the General Assembly is to pass such legislation.

Choe warned that on the Internet, "we're seeing a lot of phishing" "“ a scam in which the perpetrator sends an e-mail masquerading as a trustworthy party, and tries to obtain personal information such as passwords.

She said these tend to increase around any holiday, and warned audience members that if they get a St. Patrick's Day-themed e-mail from someone they don't recognize, "don't click on it."

The Athens Area Chamber of Commerce was among a number of chambers nationwide that were left holding worthless gift certificates when the Dayton-based CertifiChecks, Inc., announced in February 2009 that it was going out of business, and wouldn't redeem any more certificates.

Cordray's office sued the company, but the lawsuit was put on hold when CertifiChecks filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection two months later.

Some chambers, not including the one in Athens, have joined the bankruptcy action as creditors. Cordray said the local chamber could do the same, "and maybe they should." He added, however, that when the Certifichecks bankruptcy is settled, there may be very little money left to satisfy these smaller creditors. "Unfortunately, there may not be much there," he said.