“This guy had bought a new pontoon boat and was upset that the dealer wouldn’t take it back. The reason he wanted to return it is it wouldn’t fit under the bridge,” said Bruce Barrett, who has been helping answer the hotline for two years.

Talk about buyer beware. There was nothing they could do for him.
Barrett was one of four hotline volunteers at a recent gathering to honor a program that has been run by the Department of Justice’s Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau since 1992. It helps the public when they have issues with a purchase or a business or if they’ve been ripped off somehow and does it in a very New Hampshire manner: with unpaid volunteers instead of staff.

“I think it’s great that this office has this program,” said Lisa Porter, a former prosecutor and criminal judge in Florida who has been answering the phones for seven months since moving to New Hampshire. “In Florida, I can’t imagine a similar office saying: ‘Oh we’re going to have volunteers come in and help us do this!’

“We get a lot of calls from people out of state, Massachusetts or Maine; they come into New Hampshire and buy a car and they’ll have a problem, so they call us,” Porter said. “I’ve had people call from other states, with no nexus to New Hampshire, just looking for advice. … I ask why they called New Hampshire (and they say), ‘You’re the only one that answers!’ ”

The Justice Department says 94 people have volunteered in the program over the years, some for as long as 22 years. The program receives no direct funding, although the state does provide an office in the new Justice Department setting in the former Lincoln Financial building, which the volunteers said is much nicer than the old Justice building behind the State House. The state also gives indirect support, including two weeks of training for new recruits.

The hotline (603-271-3641 ) is open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., five days a week. Volunteers answer phones for the entire shift one day a week. They can’t give legal advice but can provide guidance on what possible action people can take, which often means transferring them to the appropriate division of the Justice Department.

Karen Gilmore-McCabe has been volunteering in the program for 15 years. She says two issues come up far more often than any other: Problems with used cars – signing a contract that says the vehicle is sold “as is” leaves few options, she noted – and people who have been scammed out of money.

She said scams have grown in number, size and complexity over the years partly because technology makes it easier to impersonate people on the phone and partly because bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies makes it easier to steal money quickly.

“The big hot item right now is crypto scam, this new thing that cannot be traced. People are leaving their homes with alleged Microsoft or Paypal scammers on the phone, staying on the phone the whole time while going to CVS, going to a (bitcoin) kiosk and feeding in tens of thousands of dollars, either dollars or a debit card,” Gilmore-McCabe said.

That sounds crazy but all four volunteers have heard similar stories of people giving away thousands or tens of thousands of dollars via crypto because they were fooled into thinking the IRS was after them, or their grandchild needed to be bailed out of jail, or a soldier needed money to fly home after being discharged, or a potential lover was in trouble.

“One of my very first calls, the gentleman who called in had fallen victim to a romance scam. He lost over $30,000, befriended a woman, I forget what country she was in. I was just floored by that,” said Marianne Anastasia, a volunteer for 14 months. “Another call, his words were, ‘I’m going to lose my house,’ and that one shook me.”

A recent very big win for the team reflects how cryptocurrency has complicated things. Gilmore-McCabe was able to recoup $500,000 that had been lost in a scam. “They had wired the money, so the banks were able to reverse it,” she said. If bitcoin had been involved, the money would be gone.

One lesson that all say they have learned: Many scam victims have nobody in their life to help them. “Some people are so incredibly lonely. They want to believe it, that’s what makes it so sad,” said Anastasia.

That’s part of the reason victims are often elderly people who have lost friends and family over the years, although people of any age or background can be fooled.

The question arises: If this work can be so sad, why are they volunteering to do it? Aside from Porter, the former judge, none of the four has any past connection to law enforcement or consumer protection, and most of them have to commute pretty far to Concord. They all joined up after seeing an ad seeking people to help the program or encountering it on the Volunteer N.H. website at volunteernh.org.

The reason they do it, they say, is the satisfaction of helping people in need.

“It’s definitely rewarding, educational, humbling, eye-opening, all of those things,” said Anastasia.

“You think you would be depressed but you’re not – you’re not depressed,” said Gilmore-McCabe. “It’s an honor to do this, to be here.”

Which is not to say that the volunteers don’t have some small regrets.

“I do find myself thinking, ‘I wonder whatever happened to that guy?’ ” said Anastasia. “I wish I could call them again and say, ‘How did that work out for you?’ But that’s not going to happen!”