Attorney general assistant offers tips to area lawyers

When suing somebody for fraud, it's important to get the name right.

That was just one of the tips an assistant with the Missouri attorney general's office shared at a luncheon Friday at Dexter Bar-B-Que with the Cape Girardeau County Bar Association.

Special chief counsel Erv Switzer said attorneys filing fraud cases should include the name of the person behind a misrepresentation, not just the company.

"That gives you a much better chance of collecting on a court judgment than if you just file against the business," he said.

Switzer advised spring is a time when scammers target homeowners by either never completing projects or use shoddy materials. In response, his office drafted the Home Improvement Fraud Act, recently introduced in the Senate, to demand contractors be bonded if they require a deposit of at least 25 percent.

"Our office never seems to have a shortage of consumer protection cases," he said. "It seems the perpetrators are never short on imagination to come up with new ideas."

He described various deceptions scammers use to get victims to send money, including mailing phony newspaper or magazine advertisements with a Post-it note, signed with an initial, usually "J," and including a message like, "We need this, order it ASAP." Switzer himself nearly fell victim to such a scam selling printer toner cartridges, he said.

Switzer also described why his office filed a suit Thursday against the makers of Hydroxycut for misrepresenting safety concerns of ephedra and the effectiveness of their product.

"There is no living person who can safely take this," he said.