Reuters Money
The Viking refrigerator saga: When high-end went awry
Under federal law, companies are required to self-report to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission any product defect that could cause serious harm. Most seem to.
Every now and then, a company that doesn’t do this gets punished by the agency. It’s usually termed an “agreement,” in which the company disputes the allegations and then agrees to pay a penalty anyway.
These situations aren’t common, and it is rarer still when the company involved caters to upscale consumers.
Enter Viking Range Corp., which recently agreed to pay $450,000 after being accused of not telling the government that the doors of several models of its refrigerators were literally falling off their hinges in dozens of homes across America.
When you spend $5,000 to $6,000 for a refrigerator, the last thing you’d expect is to have one of those weighty doors snap loose.
“It swung open and the hinge on the top broke and literally the whole door fell off,” says Gary Budnick of Basking Ridge, N.J. “Fortunately it was me that opened it. When it fell off I was able to catch it. I was shocked.”
The 36-inch-wide door of the bottom-freezer model was extremely heavy, he said, and still filled with condiments. “This thing can crush a kid,” says Budnick, who has three small children at home.
Child identity theft: Why you should worry
Michelle Dennedy’s daughter Reilly is nine and already has had her identity stolen twice. Earlier this year Dennedy, who lives in California, learned that the most recent use of Reilly’s identity was to get utilities set up in Arizona.
She is part of a growing trend — stealing the identities of children. On July 12, the Federal Trade Commission is hosting a forum on child identity theft, pulling together a broad group of parents, lawyers, advocates and experts to discuss how to handle this disturbing crime.
“The criminals are focused on where is the softest the target and we’re handing them our kids,” said Dennedy, who was the chief privacy officer for Sun Microsystems and vice president for privacy at Oracle Corp. and started a website on the issue. “We have a whole generation of kids being compromised.”
Children are, indeed, an easy target. They become victims without even knowing it.
“Child ID theft is a particularly troubling crime because it is often undetected for years,” said David Vladeck, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
A child could become victimized at birth and not even learn of the situation until they apply for a student loan or have a background check done for an internship when they’re a teenager. A recent study found children’s identities are stolen at more than 50 times the rate of adults. There are several reasons why.
Until now, there was really no reason to check on your child’s credit report. After all, children don’t have credit histories. Social Security numbers have been issued in a somewhat predictable sequence, so identity thieves have taken to plucking newly minted numbers or those that would have been given out a couple of years ago and started using them to help people to acquire an identity with a clean slate — one not tainted by prior financial woes and one that could be used to gain employment in a country they did not legally enter.
Any Social Security Number MUST INCLUDE the DATE OF BIRTH.
In a fact ALL national numbers in Scandinavia includes the year & date of birth plus some special ‘control’ digits from 1947, so NO ONE can steal child’s ID or invent itself.
I didn’t know that numbers in USA was so funny undigested, that very stupid, really.
A ‘new idea’ about foto in the comments was very funny too (just think about how to use the ID number ‘with foto’ in the Internet – via webcam?), thanks for a good time, lol ))
Consumer product database in jeopardy
You may think the government’s wheels always grind slowly, but they can spin fast when a government action runs afoul of business.
After years and years of providing but an iceberg’s tip of the information possessed by the agency, the tiny U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in March opened the door to a new world for its constituents: American consumers. The agency launched a publicly searchable database that catalogs product incidents experienced in homes across the nation.
But now the database that gives the public access to safety incidents on everything from microwaves to baby monitors is on the verge of being defunded, potentially dealing a blow to consumer safety.
The purpose for the database was to add an unprecedented level of transparency to a process cloaked in secrecy. We still don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes as the government and business haggle over the terms of the recalls you eventually hear about. But you can — in almost real-time — see what folks are saying are product dangers.
Here’s an excerpt from a recent incident documented by a consumer about a microwave that seems to have gone a bit haywire: “Unit turned itself on when we were out of the home. When we got home we heard a fast beeping and the keyboard was locked, the microwave was hot to the touch and the only way to shut it off was to unplug it … ”
It’s not unlike reading the comments on Internet complaint boards, except the government is required to give every company named in an entry 10 days to issue a response before the incident is made public. In the case of the microwave, the company chose not to comment. Some companies do respond, often explaining that the described episode was a fluke or user error. Then it’s up to the consumer to decide how to process that information.
The value is that consumers can see if others have had they same problems they are experiencing. The database can be used for research when making a purchase for anything from a high chair to a dehumidifier.
Re: Abkisa: People shouldn’t have to pay for vital life-and-death safety information.
Even “healthy” food can make you sick
Even those who zealously eat healthy food or are partial to the finer things aren’t immune from the dangers of food poisoning.
The situation in Germany, where nearly two dozen have died and 2,000 more have been sickened from E.coli contamination, is just the latest example of the potential perils in the food chain. The deadly infection has been linked to bean sprouts. Suspicion also has focused on other salad standbys: lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes.
Just over a month ago, U.S. consumers had to be leery of grape tomatoes after a series of recalls connected to suspected Salmonella. Salad items often are problematic because of their growing conditions and the speed at which they’re brought to market — leaving little time for warning, even if the problem is discovered quickly.
Quite often, though, the problems aren’t noticed until after people have started getting sick.
“The on-going devastation in Europe … serves as a strong reminder to those of us in the United States that we are always one step away from a major food safety crisis,” former U.S. Food and Drug Administration Assistant Commissioner David Acheson said recently. He is now managing director of food safety practices at Leavitt Partners.
How big a problem is this? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in six Americans will get sick from food every year — about 48 million consumers. Of those, 3,000 will die and about 128,000 will be hospitalized.
While deadly outbreaks of food poisoning tend to get widespread notice, far more instances go under the radar. The dangers to consumers can range from E.coli and Salmonella to foreign objects in the food.
China making improvements with product safety, CPSC chief says
After a staggering run of lead-related toy recalls a few years ago, mostly imported from China, Congress made meaningful advances in consumer product safety laws for the first time in decades. It was also a painful blow the “Made in China” branding experience — perpetuating the notion that it was synonymous with cheaply made, lower-quality products.
While it hardly made a blip on the Chinese export machine, the passage of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act in 2008 has made an impact on Chinese manufacturing and, indeed, the government itself. Inez Tenenbaum, chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, recognized that in order to make some significant improvement in the track record of Chinese imports, the Chinese would need to be involved.
So early in her tenure as America’s chief product safety official, she went to China to build relationships and send a message that the rules of the game were changing. And over the past two years, Tenenbaum said it appears the Chinese are playing.
“We put out a warning on cadmium, the AQSIQ (China’s Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine) took our warning and put out the same warning,” she said in an interview. “The Chinese government closed down toy factories not complying with lead limits. They went in and they just closed down these toy manufacturing companies.”
While the sheer enormity of China has inhibited uniformity of enforcement, Tenenbaum said, overall the sense that the Chinese realize what’s at stake is palpable: “We believe there is a some fear.”
One of the biggest changes was the recent requirement that an independent lab test certain products, such as children’s products (something that has made business bristle).
“It’s not new that companies who manufacture in China had requirements they had to meet. The CPSIA in 2008 was not a new requirement. What was a new requirement was third-party testing.”
China imports in the grocery store: A cause for concern
With Chinese products dominating more than just the shelves of dollar stores, it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise — if you’re surprised at all — that imports from the largest nation in the world are increasingly finding their way into American grocery stores.
But the Chinese imports are starting to crop up in parts of the store that were more typically dominated by U.S. grown products or those from Central America. One such place is the freezer case, where imports are up 20 percent over the past decade and it is no longer unusual to find frozen vegetables that originated in China.
Even so, China still accounts for only seven percent of the overall market of frozen fruits and vegetable — up from two percent in 1999, notes Corey Henry, vice president of the American Frozen Food Institute,
“So, yes, imports from China have grown quite a bit, but still represent a small segment of the overall fruit and vegetable market,” Henry says. “China is the fourth largest foreign supplier of fruit and vegetables with Mexico, Canada and Chile the top three.”
But, if you shift away from frozen and fresh fruits and vegetables, where influence is growing but not yet commanding, you need not stray too far to see domination.
As American as apples are (apple pie and all), Chinese apples dominate the apple juice market in the U.S. — the mainstay of brands including Motts, Tree Top and Apple & Eve. Chinese apple juice concentrate, a crystallized concoction reconstituted in the states, accounts for about 60 percent of the U.S. apple juice supply.
To get an idea of the stakes of this battle in the war of public perception of food from China, look no further than two niche grocery chains that are associated with the higher end of the marketplace.
Although this is dated May 11, 2011, it still applies… I don’t shop Whole Foods for another reason (it’s support of “anti-choice” organizations) but this just gives me more reason…
How safe is your mobile wallet?
When you whip out your smartphone to transfer money, deposit a check, or “tap” it on an electric reader to buy milk at your local 7-Eleven, do you ever wonder how secure it is?
The good news is, using your phone as a “mobile wallet” is largely considered safe. In fact, some experts argue the security of mobile payments is on par with online banking, with the added layer of password protection.
“Overall, consumers shouldn’t be any more nervous than they would be using their computers for banking,” says Avivah Litan, an analyst at IT research firm Gartner.
But that isn’t a license to throw caution to the wind. A February report by McAfee (which sells anti-virus software) found a whopping 20 million new pieces of “malware” — aka: malicious software — in 2010, a trend expected to surge in 2011 as cyber criminals catch up with the latest mobile technologies.
And with the value of mobile transactions expected to grow to $245 billion globally by 2014, according to Gartner estimates, plenty of money is at stake. Here are five security tips to consider:
Know what you’re doing: First of all, mobile banking and mobile payments aren’t the same thing. Mobile banking refers to checking account balances and transferring funds much like you would online. With mobile payment, however, you’re using a phone with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, a chip that that allows you to swipe your phone at the point of sale (ie: McDonald’s or 7-Eleven) to deduct the money out of your bank account or charge your credit card.
A common misconception is that NFC sends all your personal information over the wireless network. Not so, says Forrester analyst Emmett Higdon. “It’s simply an exchange of credentials confirming that you are who you say you are and have the authority to make the transaction,” he explains. “It’s not like your payment details are going over Verizon’s network.”
The Hard Facts:
• NFC payment, here is a lack of platform standards and global standard.
• Mobiles have only recently started to see exploitation by hackers, but the advent of NFC payments and the use of mobiles as credit or debit cards is likely to excite the attention of hackers to a much greater degree.
• Hackers have invented ways to detect the majority of the defects in code that could render an NFC vulnerable to security issues, which in turn could lead to software failures or leave it exposed to malware attacks. They track data and financial transactions. Also the NFC technology introduced in the device may be vulnerable for eavesdropping, data modification and relay attack.
• NFC technology and system 14 very huge security gap= 10 places software, 4 places hardware, fraud point VERY BLEED!
• It will eventually cause a high profile incident that will cause a lot of people to be worried. Will then have to regain NFC customer trust, long, long time…
• It’s a calculated gamble about whether to be first to market, where you may gain traction and credit, or be cautious and get it right, but be behind the curve (Non Calculated User’s and Hackers).
• My thinks it is likely we will start to see two camps emerging: those that build the wall higher, so the hackers can’t get in (wisely); or those that build the product, as of keeping.
• NFC mobile payment, unresolved issues for includes licensing, security, and how the big players will act to protect their income.
NFC balloon, inflate and burst in the end, phew! Many NFC investors, banks, mobile network operators, small and big merchants and customers CRY, when it disappears in the transactions and money…
Regards, Dee777
Paperless tickets: Is Ticketmaster hurting consumers?
If you buy tickets to events, there’s an awfully good chance you get them from Live Nation’s Ticketmaster, the dominant player in the industry. And if you get paperless tickets, you had better read the fine print before you buy them or you could be in for a shock.
Ticketmaster, some artists and venues are changing the terms of tickets — moving to a paperless ticket (known to some as a restricted ticket). The restriction on these tickets is that they are linked to the buyer, who must show the credit card used to purchase them and possibly some other identification in order to gain entry to a venue.
Ticketmaster says the restrictions prevent scalping. But a new group formed to fight this tactic says the practice is aimed at the company gaining greater control of the secondary ticket market (they would be the conduit for resales or transfers) and would badly hurt consumers by taking away the actual ownership of the seats for a given event.
Brad O’Keefe, a banker in Minnesota who owns season tickets for several teams, is livid about the notion that he may no longer be able to easily give his seats to customers, friends or family. And, he said, even donating seats to be auctioned for a charity would become too cumbersome to even bother.
“With that restrictive ticket that I have no control of the ticket,” O’Keefe said. “That’s where I have a problem as a fan and as a ticket holder.”
Jon Potter, the former head of the Digital Media Association who runs the fledgling Fan Freedom Project, said too much is being taken away from consumers in this new maneuver by those who control the tickets.
If you’re not named as an attending person at the time the tickets are purchased you’re not getting in.
The problem with applying property law directly is that you aren’t really buying any property. The ticket is probably better viewed as a rental agreement for the seat which comes with restrictions even in it’s current form. I think it makes sense to consider it more like an apartment rental… you aren’t always allowed to do as you please with it.. (remodel, sublet, pets, etc..)
I absolutely hate TicketMaster/LiveNation/Stubhub, etc… and would love more competition and a better way to get tickets to the actual fans at face value. I like the idea of paperless tickets, but it certainly has flaws that need to be worked out first. Unfortunately I don’t trust that anyone in the ticket business or government will find a way that is fair and isn’t influenced by greed.
Google work-from-home scammers to pay $1.6 million settlement
Being the giant brand that Google is and given that people are always hoping to find a way to make money quickly, mixing the two makes for a great scam. And such has been the bait for many thousands of people who have gotten hooked on the idea they could participate in a program that would bring in big bucks selling Google ads.
A couple of years ago Google decided it was time to protect its brand and sued a collection of the outfits selling get-rich-quick schemes in the company’s name. Google’s attack against those companies — not really on behalf of consumers but on behalf of its brand — won the company a $1.6 million settlement last week.
While Google wasn’t looking out for the little guy, the case still should end up serving as both a warning to others looking to set up similar scams and to those who fall for these sorts of things. Companies named in the case include: Pacific WebWorks, Bloosky Interactive, Just Think Media, Online Cash Success Kit, Quick Profit Kit, Hyper Interactive and Search 4 Profit.
They used Google’s name and logo with the come-on that participants could make hundreds of dollars a day by following their plan, which was sometimes advertised as being free or only costing shipping and handling. Instead, though, those who bit ended up watched their “low shipping and handling fee” or “instant access fee” for those who joined for “free” leave them on the hook for recurring charges that could run from $50-$80 a month.
To compound the situation, consumers who bought into these schemes found it very difficult to get the charges to stop.
The sales pitch appeared to be endorsed by or actually involving Google, including showing checks purported to be written to participants from Google’s accounts and using phony news stories.
These were hardly the only outfits to try to prey on down on their luck consumers using Google’s name.
Electronic fans yanked from market after causing fires
Nearly 5 million inexpensive electric fans are being recalled after they were blamed as the cause of at least seven fires, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said.
The box style Lasko and Galaxy brand fans were sold at major retailers nationwide between 2002 and 2005 for $12 to $25. They were manufactured in the U.S. by Lasko Products Inc. of West Chester, Pennsylvania.
CPSC officials said electrical failure in the motor is the source of the problems with the fans. Consumers who have the fans are urged to unplug them until they receive a free plug safety adapter with a fuse that must be requested from the manufacturer.
The following models are subject to the recall: Lasko box fans models 3720, 3723, and 3733 and Galaxy box fans that have the model number 4733 and “2002-03” or “2003-04” stamped on the bottom of the metal frame.
Five years ago, Lasko recalled 5.6 million fans after the company received reports of more than 40 fires that were also associated with motor failure. One homeowner whose house was destroyed said the fan that started the fire was turned off at the time.
Safety advocates have assailed box fans as being unsafe since that recall. While the brand wasn’t immediately known, a box fan was blamed for a fire in Colorado this week that displaced more than two dozen people.
To get more information or order the adapter that is intended to make the fans safe, call Lasko at (877) 445-1314 or go to the company website: www.laskoproducts.com.
We had a Viking 48 inch side by side – 8 years old.
Since last Oct. 2010, when the frig and freezer started to defrost and alarms would go off, we have had 9 service calls – costing a total of $2285.96. (the hinges were two of the calls) but we never received a recall. And the other problems were never fixed. Finally on Dec. 12, 2011 they delivered a new frig for half price which was how they were handling the hinge problem. Are we the only ones who had all these problems with Viking? I have written to the President, Vice President-Business Development, Karen McKay, Customer Assurance Department itemizing every service call and cost. Have not heard back. Need to know if anyone else has had these dealings with Viking and what they did about it. We are
about to get an attorney involved.