Have I got a website for you

When my buddy Joe entered the bar, he looked very excited. “I have a story I know you’ll love, Mister Financial Editor,” he said. I knew this was a mixed blessing because if his story was really good, I would be buying the beers all night.

Joe told me about his friends, a married couple who live in Connecticut with their two teenagers. They have a nice house and two cars — and the husband has been out of work for more than a year.

Things are tight and getting tighter, and they’re having trouble paying their bills. They are being dunned by creditors and their credit card accounts are on the verge of being turned over to debt collectors.

They are terrified about losing their home and cars.

Realizing they are behind the eight ball, they started searching the Internet for debt relief options and found a website for a firm called Esteemed Lending Services, which “guarantees a loan to fit every situation.”

The good folks at Esteemed Lending promise that anyone can become a customer, “even if you’ve been turned down by other lenders because of a less-than-perfect credit history.”

Esteemed says it can consolidate high-interest debt, lower monthly payments, get money to borrowers fast and provide one-on-one service with a custom loan specialist, along with preliminary loan approval in 24 hours.

My first question to Joe was: “Exactly how dumb are your friends?”

Still, it all sounded so fantastic that the couple, at their wits’ end, clicked “Next.”

But instead of forms or further instructions popping up, the next page — all in red letters — screamed:

“If you responded to an offer like this one, you could have been SCAMMED.”

The site, it turns out, is not the miracle lender it purports to be. It’s actually the creation of the Federal Trade Commission and is intended to alert consumers to scam artists preying on desperate borrowers.

“We designed the site with key words in hopes that people will find it and realize there are a lot of scammers out there,” Amy Hebert, a consumer education specialist in the FTC’s division of consumer and business education, said in a published report. “This one isn’t a scam, but it could have been.”

The fact that this site has received thousands of hits indicates that the mortgage meltdown and recession have driven people to search for a magic solution.

We all know that there are no simple ways out, especially when borrowers have dug themselves into a deep hole and another misfortune strikes, such as losing a job.

By virtue of their relationship with you, most of your clients — thankfully — are unlikely to have gotten themselves into a financial mess in the first place, let alone think the place to look for magical solutions is online. But financial advisers can increase their credibility with clients and others by passing along the URL of the Esteemed Lending site (wemarket4u.net/esteemed) anyway.

Your client may have a family member, friend or work colleague who is desperate and may be tempted to do something stupid — like fall prey to a financial scam. (Nigerian loans, anyone?)

Just think how great you would look in a client’s eyes if your advice saved someone they knew from further financial hardship and humiliation.

On the consumer financial education front, it seems, the battle is never won. The FTC is to be commended for its use of a mock website to grab the public’s attention, but I doubt that even the most creative educational effort will put a dent in the millions lost through scams and financial fraud.

How many articles have to be written before consumers understand that no financial genie is going to come along and make mountainous mortgages, staggering credit card debt and consumer loans disappear.

Apparently too few people have learned the financial lesson that everyone should know: When things seem too good to be true, they are.

Related Topics: Just Thinking