Car Insurance

For the second year in a row, unauthorized charges to phone bills and switching long-distance providers without the consumer’s consent topped the list of consumer complaints in Missouri, Attorney General Jay Nixon announced Thursday.

Nixon’s office received an estimated 88,000 consumer complaint calls, letters and e-mails in 2004. The final numbers, including consumer mediation dollars, will be available after the first of the year.

The most frequent complaints coming into Nixon’s office involved telephone services, specifically the practices known as cramming - adding services to customers’ bills without their consent - and slamming, in which customers’ long-distance providers are switched without permission. Slamming and cramming complaints accounted for 1,898 of the total.

Home repair fraud, with 1,595 complaints, and travel scams, at 1,355, also continued to be major areas of concern for consumers.

Aggressive enforcement of the no-call law has resulted in a precipitous decline in telemarketing fraud, yet there are still those who will always try to find a way to make a dishonest buck, Nixon said in a statement. Missourians should feel empowered to contact my office any time they feel like someone is trying to pull one of these scams.