With 15 paid and volunteer staff, the center this year had opened almost 4,000 complaints and recovered more than $932,000 for consumers by mid-December.
NANCY HICKS/Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, January 4, 2009 12:00 am
Several years ago police pounded on her door, looking for Morgan Rogers, who was wanted for passing fraudulent checks.
Someone who looked something like Rogers, someone who was using Rogers’ lost driver’s license, had been cashing bogus paychecks at a local bar.
While the real Rogers was proving she was not the bogus, identity-stealing criminal, while she was having her picture shot, her fingerprints taken, Rogers told the officers about the help available at the Attorney General’s Consumer Affairs Mediation Center where she works.
And Rogers picked up a new piece of advice from this experience: if you lose your driver’s license, don’t just get a replacement. Get a different driver’s license number.
Rogers is now the executive director of the mediation center, with 15 paid and volunteer staff who this year had opened almost 4,000 complaints and recovered more than $932,000 for consumers by mid-December.
This is the place where the Attorney General’s office can be most directly helpful to the average Nebraskan, said Attorney General Jon Bruning. It works directly with the consumer trying to resolve problems and educate, according to Bruning.
The mediation center helps consumers avoid scams. The center will check out telephone numbers and help determine if an offer is a scam. Old favorites, like the Canadian lottery, foreign sweepstakes, and mystery shopper scams (where the victim cashes a check and rates the customer service experience), continue to entice victims.
“Remember, if they ask for money to get the money you have won, it is a scam,” said Rogers.
The center staff also mediates billing disputes between consumers and businesses. More than half the calls the center receives deal with billing and service disputes.
To use the center, there has to be a Nebraska connection. Either the business is in Nebraska or the consumer lives in the state, Rogers said.
Rogers uses a hospital metaphor to describe how the center works. The mediation center is like the emergency room, where they will patch you up if possible and send you to a specialist (the attorneys upstairs) if there is a good basis for a consumer-related lawsuit.
The staff has been able to work out problems from removing an erroneous credit-related report to getting some money back from the roofing company that never returned. And they can sometimes resolve really big problems. Rogers remembers the man who lost his home to a fire and was living in his truck cab while waiting, waiting, waiting for his insurance company to pay up.
It took several months but the man called her with gratitude as the truck carrying parts of his modular home arrived.
Not every dispute is resolved. But the consumer does have a better chance with the power of the Attorney General’s office behind them, Rogers said.
The mediation center staff are able to talk with credit reporting agencies by telephone, when consumers are often unable to talk with a person. The mediators have been helping a number of senior consumers who are confounded by the telephone call center set up to order $40 coupons for the DTV converter box. (You’ll need a converter box in February if you use an antennae and don’t have a new television set.)
You cannot talk to a live person at the toll-free number set up to order the converter box coupons. “They pulled humans off that line six months ago,” said Rogers.
And the federal DTV call center computer equipment doesn’t always recognize a dorm number, an apartment complex number or even a rural route box number, said Rogers.
“We are running into a lot of angry, elderly people who get on the automated line, can’t talk to a person and then the system says they can’t order a coupon,” Rogers said.
The mediation center staff can walk a person through that automated call for a DTV converter box coupon. And in some cases the staff can make the call for the consumer, she said.
Reach Nancy Hicks at 473-7250 or nhicks@journalstar.com.