The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide

Watch out for Memorial Day schemes that target members of the military and their families and supporters

Memorial Day is a time to honor those who serve and remember those who have died in war. But, it’s also become a time for scammers to target those who are serving or have served their nation, especially elderly veterans.

The Better Business Bureau is urging consumers and donors to be on the lookout for deals that seem too good to be true and for disreputable charities.

“Military personnel are targeted for a few reasons: they get a steady paycheck, they tend to be young, they move around a lot, if they’re deployed they may not be watching their finances/personal info closely, everything in the military revolves around their social security number, so it’s easy for them to have their identity stolen,” Coleen Smith, executive director of the BBB Education Foundation, said in a statement.

To avoid problems, visit www.give.org to verify a charity before donating and be on the lookout for these common scams:

Scams that target military personnel:

• Fraudulent investors try to convince veterans to transfer their assets into an irrevocable trust.
• Callers pose as the Veterans Administration and request military personnel to update credit card, bank, or other financial records with the VA.
• Scammers pose as government contractors recruiting veterans and ask for a copy of the job applicants’ passport.
• Companies specifically target military for services they could get for free or less expensively elsewhere.
• Ads offer “instant approval” military loans – “no credit check,” “all ranks approved” – that can have high interest rates and hidden fees.
• Ads offer military discounts and incentives online on housing and then cheat service personnel out of their security deposit.

Scams that target military supporters

• Scammers try to sell services such as security systems to spouses of deployed military personnel by saying the service member ordered it to protect his or her family.
• People sell stolen vehicles at a low price and claim to be soldiers who need to sell quickly because they’ve been deployed.
• Individuals pose on online dating services as a lonely service member in a remote part of Iraq or Afghanistan, and ask for money to be wired to a third party for some emergency.

The BBB advises service members, veterans, and all consumers never to give personal identification information – Social Security, bank account, military identification, or credit card numbers – to anyone who contacts you by phone or e-mail, and to be wary of any solicitations that involve purchasing something or transferring money.

Consumers can check out businesses and charities at www.bbb.org.

For more information, visit www.bbb.org/us/military-line.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

Most states don’t protect patients from substandard physicians, citizens’ group study shows

Most states, including one of the largest – Florida – aren’t living up to their obligations to protect consumers from doctors who are practicing substandard medicine, in part because of budget cuts, according to Public Citizen’s annual ranking of state medical boards.

This information is important to baby boomer consumers because older adults receive a large porportion of medical care in America.

“Action must be taken, legislatively and through public pressure on medical boards themselves, to increase the amount of discipline, and thus, the amount of patient protection,” Sidney Wolfe, M.D., director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, said in a statement. “Ensuring that medical boards are adequately funded is an important prerequisite to achieving this, especially because doctors’ licensing fees, intended to fund medical board functions, are sometimes taken to fund other state functions, which has recently occurred in California.”

South Carolina was the worst state when it came to disciplining doctors, and, along with Minnesota and Wisconsin, has consistently been among the bottom 10 states for each of the past nine Public Citizen rankings.

Connecticut has been in the bottom 10 for each of the past six rankings. For the fourth time in a row, Florida is among the 10 states with the lowest rates of serious disciplinary actions even though it’s beginning to improve.

Other large states, such as Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, have been in the bottom half of state rankings for all nine rankings and California has been in the bottom half for the past six rankings.

 “One likely reason for some medical boards’ declining rate of discipline is tighter state budgets,” Wolfe said. “The ability of certain states to rapidly increase or decrease their rankings, even when calculated based on three-year averages, can only be due to changes in practices and staffing at the board level. The prevalence of physicians eligible for discipline cannot possibly change so rapidly.”

Public Citizen’s analysis of medical board data from all states and the District of Columbia found that the rate at which doctors are disciplined by state medical boards has declined significantly over the past seven years, and some of the worst states have been consistently poor performers.

Nationally, in 2011, state medical boards took 3.06 serious actions per 1,000 physicians – up slightly, 3 percent, from last year but still down 18 percent from the peak rate of discipline in 2004 of 3.72 per 1,000 physicians.

The worst state is South Carolina with Washington, D.C. next. Minnesota, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Nevada, New Jersey, and Florida make up the rest of the ten worst boards.

Wyoming was the best state when it came to disciplining doctors, taking 6.79 serious actions per 1,000 physicians, a rate five times higher than South Carolina. Three states – Alaska, Ohio, and Oklahoma – have been in the top 10 for all nine rankings.

Only one of the nation’s 15 most populous states, Ohio, is represented among those 10 states with the highest disciplinary rates. The best states when it comes to doctor discipline, in order, are Wyoming, Louisiana, Ohio, Delaware, New Mexico, Nebraska, Alaska, Oklahoma, Washington, and West Virginia.

The annual rankings are based on data from the Federation of State Medical Boards, specifically on the number of serious disciplinary actions taken against doctors in 2009-2011.

Boards are likely to do a better job disciplining physicians, according to Public Citizen, if the boards:

• Receive adequate funding – all money from license fees going to fund board activities instead of going into the state treasury for general purposes.
• Have adequate staffing.
• Engage in proactive investigations, rather than only reacting to complaints.
• Use all available/reliable data from other sources such as Medicare and Medicaid sanctions, hospital sanctions, and malpractice payouts.
• Have excellent leadership.
• Have independence from state medical societies.
• Are independent from other parts of the state government.
• Use a reasonable legal framework for disciplining doctors, the “preponderance of the evidence” rather than “beyond reasonable doubt” or “clear and convincing evidence” as the legal standard for discipline.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

Recall of the Week: Kennedy International folding step stools due to fall hazard

By Rita R. Robison

13-inch folding step stools

Kennedy International is recalling about 1.6 million folding step stools in the United States and 64,000 in Canada.

The folding step stools can break or collapse unexpectedly when in use, posing a fall hazard to consumers, the company and U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a joint statement.

Kennedy International is aware of at least 15 reports of incidents involving step stools cracking or breaking, including three reports of injuries to consumers using the stools. Injuries included two reports of back injuries and one report of a fractured leg.

9-inch folding step stools

The recall involves 9-inch and 13-inch Kennedy International folding step stools. The step stools are plastic and have a handle for carrying the stools when they’re folded.

The style number is 3575 for the 9-inch and 3576 for the 13-inch step stools. The style number is printed on a sticker on one of the legs of the stool. "Kennedy Home Collection" is also printed on a label on some of the stools.

They were sold in blue, green, gray, red, purple, pink, orange, turquoise, aqua, white, plum, orchid, emerald, sapphire, sangria, ocean, sage, fuchsia, lime, and color combinations.

Manufactured in China, the step stools were sold at HomeGoods, Marshalls, TJ Maxx, and other retailers nationwide from January 2010 through January 2012. The price was $8 to $12.

Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled step stools and contact Kennedy International to receive a full refund, the company and commission advise.

For additional information, contact Kennedy International toll-free at (855) 270-8301 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET Monday through Friday or visit the firm's website at www.kennedy-intl.com.

For details on other recalls, see www.recalls.gov.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

FTC charges company put more than $70 billion in bogus phone charges on consumers’ bills

By Rita R. Robison

The Federal Trade Commission is charging that the nation's largest third-party billing company placed more than $70 million in bogus "cramming" charges on consumers' phone bills in violation of a previous court order. The FTC is asking a federal court to make the company pay more than $52.6 million, the total amount that the company billed consumers and failed to refund.

The FTC alleges that Billing Services Group placed charges on nearly 1.2 million telephone lines on behalf of a serial phone crammer. The charges were supposedly for "enhanced services," such as voicemail and streaming video, which consumers never authorized or knew about.

"BSG made it possible for con artists to steal people's hard-earned money by placing charges on phone bills for services they never ordered or used," David Vladeck, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. "Under previous federal court orders, BSG cannot profit from the fraud of others and then deny responsibility for the harm they made possible."

Billing aggregators act as intermediaries between third-party vendors and the local phone companies by contracting to have the local telephone companies collect charges for the vendors' services from consumers. "Cramming" is the placement of unauthorized charges on phone bills.

In a contempt motion, the FTC said BSG failed to investigate either the highly deceptive marketing for the services or whether consumers used them. BSG kept billing for these services despite many complaints from consumers and after major telephone companies refused to do so, the FTC's motion said.

The FTC alleges that by putting the bogus charges on consumers' phone bills, BSG violated the terms of a 1999 settlement with the agency, which prohibits unauthorized billing, misrepresentations to consumers, and billing for vendors who fail to clearly disclose the terms of their services.

The contempt action is the FTC's fourth action on extensive cramming by BSG entities. In addition to the 1999 order, the FTC obtained two other cramming orders against BSG companies: Nationwide Connections Inc., which addressed $34.5 million in charges for collect calls that never occurred, and Enhanced Services Billing Inc., which addressed crammed charges for enhanced services.

From 2006 through 2010, BSG illegally billed consumers for nine crammed "enhanced services," including three voicemail services, one streaming video service, two identity theft protection services, two directory assistance services, and one job skills training service, according to the FTC's motion.

The FTC's contempt motion said that BSG billed tens of thousands of consumers for voicemail boxes each month from July 2009 through March 2010, but consumers used only 209 mailboxes during that time. The motion also stated that BSG billed more than 250,000 consumers for a streaming video service, but only 23 total movies were streamed, some of them by the crammers' employees.

Despite overwhelming evidence of cramming, BSG billed consumers more than $30 million for the voicemail services and more than $12 million for the video service, according to the FTC.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

Recall of the Week: Banzai in-ground pool water slides sold by Wal-Mart and Toys R Us due to death, serious neck injuries

By Rita R. Robison

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Toys R Us Inc. are recalling of about 21,000 inflatable Banzai in-ground pool water slides.

During use, the slide can deflate, allowing the user to hit the ground underneath the slide and be injured. The slide is also unstable and can topple over in both still and windy conditions and carries inadequate warnings and instructions, the companies and U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a statement.

The commission is aware that a 29-year-old Colorado mother died in Andover, Mass. after fracturing her neck going down a Banzai in-ground pool water slide which had been placed over the concrete edge of a pool. The victim hit her head at the bottom of the slide because it had partially deflated.

The commission and retailers are aware of two other injuries which have occurred in a similar manner, including a 24-year-old man from Springfield, Mo. who became a quadriplegic and a woman from Allentown, Pa. who fractured her neck.

The recall involves Banzai in-ground pool water slides designed for use with in-ground pools. The vinyl slides have a blue base, yellow sliding mat, and an arch going over the top of the slide. By connecting a hose to the top of the slide, water can be sprayed on its downward slope. The words “Banzai Splash” are printed in a circular blue, orange, and white logo, shaped like a wave on either side of the slide.

The recalled slides, which were manufactured in China by Manley Toys, Ltd, were sold at Wal-Mart and Toys R Us nationwide from January 2005 through June 2009 for about $250. The recalled slides have the barcode number 2675315734 and model number 15734. Both the barcode and model number appear on the original packaging but aren’t on the slide.

The commission urges consumers to immediately stop using the product and return it to the nearest Wal-Mart or Toys R Us for a full refund. Consumers can also cut the two safety warning notices out of the slide and just return that portion.

For additional information from Wal-Mart, call 800-925-6278 between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. CT Monday through Friday, or visit the firm's website at www.walmartstores.com. For additional information from Toys R Us, call 800-869-7787 between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. ET Monday through Saturday and between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday, or visit the firm's website at www.toysrus.com.

For details on other recalls, see www.recalls.gov.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

Better Business Bureau: Check out firms before you buy your Mother’s Day gifts from them

Flowers, candy, gift baskets, jewelry, and spa treatments may be at the top of the Mother’s Day shopping list, but consumers need to be careful.

“Mother’s Day shoppers should be thinking about ‘when’ and ‘where’ to buy, especially with online orders and last-minute purchases,” Robert W.G. Andrew, CEO of Better Business Bureau serving Alaska, Oregon, and Western Washington, said in a statement. “Whether it is days or months in advance – or even after the holiday – BBB can help buyers screen sellers.”

The BBB has had the following inquiries in the last 36 months:

• 6,609 on “Florists – Retail”
• 5,362 on “Candy & Confectionery – Retail”
• 7,785 on “Gift Baskets & Parcels”
• 71,335 on “Jewelers – Retail”
• 9,537 on “Day Spas”

Smart start: Search retailers, shops, and other services on bbb.org.

Online orders: Review guarantees, shipping policies, delivery dates, and charges on “rushed” orders. Provide contact information so companies can confirm shipping status.

Store shopping: Inspect products thoroughly and keep track of all purchase paperwork – including gift receipts.

Payment protections: Collect customer service information, save receipts, and pay by credit card when possible.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

Recall of the Week: Christmas Tree Shops’ Farm Glass & Metal Spiral Tea Light Holders due to fire hazard

By Rita R. Robison

Christmas Tree Shops is recalling about 6,200 Farm Glass & Metal Spiral Tea Light Holders.

Due to the design of the product, the tea lights can burn with a high flame, posing a fire hazard to consumers, the company and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a statement.

Christmas Tree Shops has received one report of a tea light burning with a high flame that resulted in a burn to a consumer's hand.

The recall involves a decorative spiral tea light holder made from a painted glass with a red, orange, and green floral design. The glass has a metal insert for holding tea lights. The metal insert is spiral shaped with places for three tea lights. The metal insert is placed within the glass container. SKU/UPC number 000015931955 is found on a label on the bottom of the glass.

Manufactured in China, the tea light holders were sold at Christmas Tree Shops in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest from July 2011 through March 2012. The cost was about $5.

Consumers should stop using the recalled spiral tea light holder and return it to any Christmas Tree Shops store to receive a full refund, the company and commission advise.

For additional information, contact Christmas Tree Shops at 888-287-3232 any time, or visit the firm's website www.christmastreeshops.com.

For details on other recalls, see www.recalls.gov.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

Nine ways to stay protected on Facebook

Face book offers many privacy controls that may not be easy for consumers to understand.

Below are nine tips from Consumer Reports that will help users use privacy tools:

• Think before typing. Even if a user deletes his or her account, which takes Face book about a month, some information can remain in Facebook’s computers for up to 90 days.
• Regularly check Face book exposure. Each month, users should check how their page looks to others. Review individual privacy settings if necessary.
• Protect basic information. Set the audience for profile items, such as town or employer. And users should remember: Sharing info with “friends of friends” could expose them to tens of thousands of strangers.
• Know what can’t be protected. Each user’s name and profile picture are public. To protect one’s identity, consumers shouldn’t use a photo or use one that doesn’t show their face.
• “UnPublic” the wall. Set the audience for all previous wall posts to just friends.
• Turn off Tag Suggest. If users would rather not have Face book automatically recognize their face in photos, they could disable that feature in their privacy settings. The information will be deleted.
• Block apps and sites that snoop. Unless users intercede, friends can share personal information about them with apps. To block that, they should use controls to limit the information apps can see.
• Keep wall posts from friends. Users don’t have to share every wall post with every friend. They can also keep certain people from viewing specific items in their profile.
• When all else fails, deactivate. When a user deactivates his or her account, Face book retains the profile data but the account is made temporarily inaccessible. Deleting an account makes it inaccessible forever.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

Million of Facebook users risk sharing updates beyond their ‘friends’ because they don’t use privacy controls

Nearly 13 million U.S. Facebook users don’t use or aren’t aware of the site’s privacy controls, potentially exposing personal information widely beyond their network of Face book “friends,” according to Consumer Reports.

Its report on Facebook and privacy also shows that more than 4.8 million people have posted about where they planned to go on a certain day, a potential tip-off to burglars, while 4.7 million have “liked” a Facebook page about health conditions or treatments, details that insurers might use against them.

Facebook is the largest social network with more than 900 million users worldwide and 150 million users in the United States.

Facebook makes it easy for people to keep up with friends, family, and colleagues, discover great content, and connect to causes. To deliver this service, Facebook and other social networks collect enormous amounts of often highly sensitive information and distribute it widely and quickly.

This data collection has risks. About seven million households using Facebook said they had trouble last year, ranging from someone using their log-in without permission to being harassed or threatened – up 30 percent from the previous year, according to the Consumer Reports Annual State of the Net survey.

Unless an individual chooses his or her privacy settings carefully, a friend who runs an app could grant it access to the person’s information without his or her knowledge, including information that was set to “friends” only view. Only 37 percent of users say they’ve used the site’s privacy tools to customize how much information apps are allowed to see, according to the Consumer Reports survey.

What does Facebook know? Americans feed all kinds of personal details into Facebook’s vast database by posting status updates on their “wall,” updating their profile, “liking a page,” or using other Face book features. The numbers below show how many people engaged in each activity during the past 12 months, based on projections from the Consumer Reports State of the Net survey:

• 39.3 million identified a family member in a profile.
• 20.4 million included their birth date and year in their profile.
• 7.7 million “liked” a Face book page pertaining to a religious affiliation.
• 4.6 million discussed their love life on their wall.
• 2.6 million discussed their recreational use of alcohol on their wall.
• 2.3 million “liked” a page regarding sexual orientation.

While some privacy or security issues arise from poor choices Facebook users themselves make, other problems can stem from the ways the company collects data, how it manages and packages its privacy controls, and the fact that users’ data can wind up with people or companies with whom they didn’t intend to share.

Some users might be surprised to know that Facebook gets a report every time they visit a site with a “Like” button, regardless of whether or not they click on that button, have a Facebook account, or are even logged in.

Better protections. Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports, wants:

• A national privacy law that holds all companies to the same privacy standards and lets consumers tell companies not to track them online.
• Industry and privacy groups to meet to set clear rules for how personal data is collected and used, an Obama administration initiative.
• Consumers to sign a petition urging Facebook to improve privacy controls and address concerns about sharing practices.
• Facebook to fix a security lapse that permits users to set up weak passwords including some six-letter dictionary words and help users avoid inadvertently sharing status updates with the public, either by alerting them more prominently when they are about to do so or by changing the default audience for posts to the user’s preferred audience.

The report can be found in the June 2012 issue of Consumer Reports, available on newsstands on May 8, and online at www.ConsumerReports.org. The issue also features a report on online security and what consumers can do to protect themselves.

My next post will offer information on Consumer Report’s recommendations on “Nine Ways to Stay Protected” when you use Facebook.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist

Consumer group says U.S. needs better system to track animals to prevent ‘mad cow disease’

By Rita R. Robison

Two consumers that I know don’t eat meat or poultry anymore due to outbreaks of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or “mad cow disease” in the 1990s.

With a case reported last week in a California dairy cow, I wondered if their plan of action is something I need to consider.

The cow was never presented for slaughter for human consumption and at no time presented a risk to the food supply or human health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a statement. In addition, the agency said milk doesn’t transmit BSE.

"The United States has had longstanding interlocking safeguards to protect human and animal health against BSE,” USDA Chief Veterinary Officer John Clifford said.

These include the USDA ban on specified risk materials, or SRMs, from the food supply. SRMs are parts of the animal that are most likely to contain the BSE agent if it’s present in an animal. The USDA also bans all nonambulatory or "downer" cattle from entering the human food chain.

For animal health, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban on ruminant material in cattle feed prevents the spread of the disease in cattle herds.

"Evidence shows that our systems and safeguards to prevent BSE are working, as are similar actions taken by countries around the world,” Clifford said. “In 2011, there were only 29 worldwide cases of BSE, a dramatic decline and 99 percent reduction since the peak in 1992 of 37,311 cases.”

USDA remains confident in the health of the national herd and the safety of beef and dairy products, he added.

However, the Center for Science in the Public Interest doesn’t agree.

The U. S. has first-world resources and technology but a third-world animal identification system, Sarah Klein, food safety attorney for the center, said in a statement.

“In fact, some third-world countries do a better job of tracking livestock than America does,” Klein said. “Botswana, for one, uses RFID microchips to track its animals up and down the supply chain.”

She said if American cattlemen suffer economic losses at the news of discovery of BSE in the California dairy cow because some consumers reduce their meat consumption, they should blame only themselves and other opponents of a mandatory animal identification system.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist