Consumer Affairs continued to help County residents resolve complaints against businesses and report a slew of scams, many of which were tailored for the pandemic.

Car sales and repairs, always a top problem area for consumers, continued to be a major source of complaints against businesses in 2021. County residents also reported trouble with home-repair contractors and retail purchases. In all, Consumer Affairs received 200 complaints against businesses in 2021, resulting in $32,914 being returned to consumers in the form of refunds and forgiven fees and charges.

Consumer Affairs fielded more than 1,700 inquiries from residents. Of those, 1,185 were scam reports. Scammers posed as government agencies or police or pretended to be well-known companies to gain people’s trust and money. The leading single type of government imposter scam involved calls warning people about a bogus problem with their Social Security or Medicare accounts.

Business imposter scams were also high, with scammers pretending to be well-known companies such as Amazon. Business imposters warned people of unauthorized charges on their accounts to trick them into making payments. Residents also struggled to respond to widespread unemployment frauds in which scammers used their identities obtain pandemic unemployment benefits. Robocalls were the primary way scammers contacted residents, but close to 10 percent of residents reported they stumbled into scams while conducting online searches for companies or services.

In an effort to combat costly long-term frauds, Scam Squad, the County’s multidisciplinary senior financial fraud task force, hosted a statewide training on romance and sweepstakes scams. Researchers from AARP (a Scam Squad member) and the FINRA Investor Education Foundation presented new research into the factors that make people vulnerable to repeated or long-term cons. Although Scam Squad meetings are usually restricted to members, Consumer Affairs opened the event to law enforcement agencies across the state. Consumer Affairs expects these emerging findings will help Scam Squad members create better strategies for extracting victims from long-term, high-loss frauds.

Consumer Affairs Director Sheryl Harris was awarded the FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award for her work in founding and organizing Scam Squad. The FBI noted Scam Squad’s work throughout the pandemic was “vital to law enforcement and community partners exposing the latest trends in scams, especially related to the COVID-19 national pandemic.”