Business Blog
Wondering what you can do to help protect consumers in your area? The FTC just launched an initiative aimed at partnering with legal aid organizations to expand outreach to lower-income members of the community. The goal: to connect people who have experienced fraud and other consumer problems with an easy way to report it and with advice to help them recover.
The Community Advocate Center initiative provides a new way for groups that provide free or low-cost legal services to report fraud and other questionable practices their clients have experienced directly to the FTC on behalf of their clients. The Legal Services Corporation, Inc., the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, the National Consumer Law Center, and the National Association of Consumer Advocates support this initiative. By participating, organizations can connect community members to specific advice to help them try to get their money back.
What can you do to help? If you’re active in the legal services community, encourage local organizations to participate. Groups that provide access to legal services often serve the people the FTC wants to hear more from, including communities of color, speakers of other languages, and lower-income consumers. We need to hear their stories to get an accurate picture of the kinds of consumer issues they face. For more information about the Community Advocate Center, visit ReportFraud.ftc.gov/community.
But even without an official initiative, if you’re active in community groups in your area, encourage people to speak up about questionable practices by contacting us at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Here’s a video explaining why consumers should report fraud and how the FTC and law enforcement partners use those reports.
0 Comments
It is your choice whether to submit a comment. If you do, you must create a user name, or we will not post your comment. The Federal Trade Commission Act authorizes this information collection for purposes of managing online comments. Comments and user names are part of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) public records system, and user names also are part of the FTC’s computer user records system. We may routinely use these records as described in the FTC’s Privacy Act system notices. For more information on how the FTC handles information that we collect, please read our privacy policy.
The purpose of this blog and its comments section is to inform readers about Federal Trade Commission activity, and share information to help them avoid, report, and recover from fraud, scams, and bad business practices. Your thoughts, ideas, and concerns are welcome, and we encourage comments. But keep in mind, this is a moderated blog. We review all comments before they are posted, and we won’t post comments that don’t comply with our commenting policy. We expect commenters to treat each other and the blog writers with respect.
We don't edit comments to remove objectionable content, so please ensure that your comment contains none of the above. The comments posted on this blog become part of the public domain. To protect your privacy and the privacy of other people, please do not include personal information. Opinions in comments that appear in this blog belong to the individuals who expressed them. They do not belong to or represent views of the Federal Trade Commission.