Sorry to disillusion you, but Cash4Gold, the company that targets poor, desperate late-night TV watchers with endorsements by equally cash-strapped celebrities, is a scam! Okay, maybe you already knew that. But unless you're one of the poor chumps who dialed their 1-800 number, you don't know how they fleece customers—4 Cash!—or what the state plans to do about it.
The company's advertisements—which feature washed-up rapper MC Hammer—lure in customers with handfuls of money, but in reality pay only 11 to 29 percent of an item's market value, compared with pawn shops that pay 35 to 70 percent. One victim, church organist Frank Poindexter, received 15 cents for jewelry that had been appraised at $200. "I looked at the check and thought it was a mistake," Poindexter (heh) told the NY Post. "When I called them, they actually accused me of scamming them." After customers send in their jewelry for appraisal, Cash4Gold gives them only twelve days to get their goods back if they feel they've been low-balled. Sometimes when they protest they're told the jewelry has already been thrown in the furnace, reported Consumers Union. Yesterday Rep. Anthony Weiner called for a new federal law requiring mail-in gold buyers to give sellers more time to refuse their offers. "They are playing people in tough times," said the Democrat from Brooklyn, in his latest jab at a cheating institution.
But at least Cash4Gold is doing its part to fundraise for Haiti! According to its blog, celebrity visitors to a company expo were invited to "play a coin toss game in which 'golden' coins were thrown into a smoking crucible representing the furnaces in which Cash4Gold melts the broken or unwanted items it receives in the mail each day. Every coin that made it into the cauldron equated to more money raised for the Red Cross to support relief for Haiti." It's good to know all that stolen money is going to a worthy cause.
