Caroline Fowler, Deputy District Attorney in the Environmental and Consumer Law Division
Our speaker for January 25, 2024, was Caroline Fowler, Sonoma County Deputy District Attorney in the Environmental and Consumer Law Division. Prior to joining the DA’s office, Caroline was the City Attorney for Santa Rosa for 8 years. She was an attorney in private practice in Los Angeles and Sonoma Counties before becoming Santa Rosa’s City Attorney.
The Environmental and Consumer Law Division (ECLD) prosecutes defendants engaged in unfair, deceptive, and fraudulent business practices. Businesses who violate the unfair competition laws unfairly penalize businesses who do follow the law; hence the term “unfair competition.” The division has obtained criminal convictions, civil judgments, and injunctions against companies who violated the laws and regulations designed to safeguard Californians from unfair business practices. Many of the cases Caroline works on are against large corporations who intentionally or inadvertently violate regulations. For example, she is now working on cases involving retailers whose scanners were charging more than the advertised prices. She mentioned a case involving Target, which got creative with a scanning issue. Target built a “geofence” around its store and when a consumer within the geofence checked their Target app for a price the price for that item would sometimes magically increase!
She also mentioned a variety of other consumer scams handled by the Division, including movie passes that have unadvertised limitations, landlords illegally taking advantage of tenants after fires (such as the 2017 Tubbs Fire), unlicensed contractors, and an Overstock scam in which Overstock advertised prices that were totally invented! The Overstock case resulted in a 6 million dollar verdict. Caroline also talked about jury duty scams (you get a call from someone telling you that you failed to show up for jury duty and unless you pay up right away with some untraceable payment method the police will be over right away to arrest you!) Hint – government agencies never ask you to pay over the phone, or use Apple Pay, bitcoin or gift cards for payment! The Division is also now working on wage theft cases based on laws making certain wage theft cases punishable as felonies. These cases can include the failure to pay minimum wage, overtime, allowing breaks, and not paying independent contractors as employees.
Caroline also had information about current scams targeting consumers. She publishes a consumer alert, which can be found on the DA’s website. She mentioned some of the latest scams, including false notifications that your streaming service has expired, lots of Amazon scams about fake unauthorized charges and asking you to click on an attachment (never click on an attachment unless it is from someone you know!). A couple of additional ideas from Caroline: open up the full address of an email sender before you respond to any email (this can reveal that a “company” email is actually from an individual), bad spelling usually means the email is a scam, UPS/Fed Ex is not delivering a package so don’t respond to them; and your grandchildren are probably not being held hostage in a foreign country (instead of responding to such ‘kidnapping’ scams, agree on a password that can be used to verify such stories). Again, sign up for consumer alerts from the DA’s website to stay in the know about the most current scams being reported.
Thank you so much, Caroline, for the enlightening presentation. Keep up the good work in the DA’s office!
Click HERE to see a limited-time recording of Caroline's presentation.
