A 91 year old property owner was warned by an official looking document mailed from the California State Capital, Sacramento, that his personally owned apartment properties required a fictitious business name filing and that it was about to expire. He was preparing to send the $100 fee required when he to mentioned to his son-in-law that the city in which his property was situated was getting around increasing his property taxes by requiring a fictitious filing fee!
I have managed his properties for the past 10 years and was unaware of any filing that had ever been made on his properties and questioned the validity of such a request in that his properties were titled in his name personally, not under the DBA that they were using.
When I carefully examined the form letter from "Fictitious Business Name Renewal Center", at the very bottom, in the smallest print on the page, hidden in a paragraph telling him to complete the form "now" and giving him a two week deadline to send in the money, wording as follows:
"This Service has not been approved or endorsed by any government agency, and this offer is not being made by an agency of the government. The fee for this service is not required to be paid by or to any government agency. This is not a bill. This is a solicitation."
I followed up by checking on usacomplaints.com to find other potential victims being solicited and found we were not alone.
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