We often get questions from consumers who are asking about the legitimacy of a certain business. There can be a wide variety of choices in any sector and sometimes it can be hard to know which business to frequent.  We know that here are many legitimate businesses out there who are commited to raising the bar in their industry and we want to help you make an informed purchasing decision.

Fraud Prevention Month, a month-long national initiative that helps Canadians recognize, prevent and report fraudulent activities, kicked off today. As in previous years, we’re going to mark this important event by sharing information with you throughout the month that’ll help reduce your odds of being targeted by fraudsters. First up: smartphones and the importance of protecting your data.

This week we received the following question on our blog from a consumer.  Check out our video below for the answer!

Jeremy asks:

"Do the {BC gift card} laws only apply to the kind of gift card that is plastic with the magnetic strip?

My manager got me a gift card to a local restaurant (a general card for food and/or drinks), which is just a folded paper card listing the amount of the gift, who authorized it, etc. I recently found that it had fallen in-behind my bookshelf, but it is now 2 years past the expiry they wrote on it. They refuse to honour it. Do the laws still apply to local business gift cards? Or do they only apply to the plastic ones with magnetic strips? Thanks!"

What do you do if you believe you have received a parking ticket in error? Maybe the ticket is issued for a parking violation in a city that you’ve never visited, or maybe you got a ticket in a spot where you felt you were legally parked. 

In November 2001, thousands of Canadian travellers were left in the lurch after Canada 3000 Holidays (C3 Holidays) filed for bankruptcy. Following the business failure, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) was authorized as the trustee to provide refunds to eligible clients from consumer funds held in a trust account. In 2010, the Supreme Court of British Columbia approved Consumer Protection BC as the administrator of the C3 Holidays trust account for BC and Western Canada.

As you know, our original Consumer Protection BC blogger, Michelle, left our organization in May. We are happy to introduce you to our new blogger, Melaina!

When you have a question or complaint you want addressed, sometimes it is challenging to figure out which organization can assist you. Our Inquiry team often receives inquiries about concerns that do not fall within the laws that we oversee. For this reason, we have created an online directory of organizations which you may find very useful.

2011 was another exciting year for Consumer Protection BC.   Did you know that we answer our calls live? Debt collection, retail and travel questions continued to be the top 3 topics of consumer questions to Consumer Protection BC’s call centre in 2011.

We have all had that knock at the door. You are usually just sitting down to dinner or are up to your elbows in dish water.   You answer the door to find someone “just happens to be in the area” and has extra material for paving your driveway, has a ladder handy to wash your windows, or has a vacuum that you just have to hear about. We often feel hesitation around starting a conversation with a door to door sales person but we do it anyway because we want to be polite. And then we don’t know how to end the conversation.