Cash-for-gold warning

GRESHAM, Ore. -- The advertisements on television say, “Send in your unwanted gold jewelry and you could strike it rich.” Not so, according to a Gresham woman who said sending in her gold for cash nearly left her broke.

Gold jewelry can be worth a lot of money, especially at today’s gold prices of more than $1,000/ounce.

After seeing one of those flashy TV ads, Colleen McMannis dug through her jewelry and sorted out the gold. “It was kind of fun thinking maybe I had a couple hundred dollars worth,” she recalled. "The advertisements, they show little bits of gold in your hand and say, ‘this could pay your car payment’ and ‘this could pay your mortgage payment.’”

McMannis’s son, Warren Wittig, helped his mom by sending an e-mail to the company, Cash for Gold. Days later, they got several envelopes to put jewelry in but the name of the company had changed to Cash Your Gold Now, a California company.

"It was more of a surprise, kind of like, send it away to see how much are you going to get in the mail, like you see on the commercials. You open letters up and wow, O.K.,” said Wittig.

But their excitement turned to anger once they got their payout check. "I received a check from them for $9.90 and was shocked, said Wittig. “Then I got angry. I couldn't believe it was $9, I mean any scrap of gold is worth $9 ."

So McMannis immediately sent the check from Cash Your Gold Now back to the company the same day she received it. Then, after nearly a week went by, she called the company and after a long wait on hold, an employee told her they received her check but that her request for her jewelry was still being processed.

That concerned her because in the company’s terms and conditions it stated, “If we do not receive the check back from you within eight (8) days of the date on the check we mailed to you, your material will be processed in our refinery. This time limitation cannot be waived for any reason.”

“I thought getting the check back to them within the eight days from when they signed it was nearly impossible,” said McMannis.” It took more than five days from the date they signed it to get it to me and when they told me it took five days for the check to get from Gresham to California I thought, I’ll never get my gold back.”

So McMannis’s son filed a formal complaint with the Better Business Bureau.

KGW Newschannel 8 checked Cash Your Gold Now’s record and found the Better Business Bureau gave it the worst rating, an F.

Wiggins wasn’t sure if the complaint was what did it, but he said the company eventually did send his mom’s jewelry back.

“That’s when I took it to a local jeweler to see what it was worth,” said Wiggins.

Wiggins brought his mom’s gold jewelry to perhaps Portland’s oldest jeweler, La Rog’s Jewelry. “We’ve been in business for more than 100 years and when gold prices get high, we too will pay cash for gold,” said La Rog owner Dave Rogoway. But that’s where the similarities stopped.

Rogoway said he’s heard so many stories like McMannis’ where mail-in businesses that pay cash for gold pay really low prices.

Worst of all, he said there were no regulations, other than each states’ effort to check weight scales, that mail-in cash for gold companies have to follow.

“For consumers I think it's probably the biggest rip off going on right now,” said Rogoway.

La Rog’s Jewelry tested and weighed McMannis’s gold jewelry and only accepted a few pieces of the pile she got returned from Cash Your Gold Now. But they still offered her more, a lot more. “La Rogs is wonderful,” said McMannis. “They paid my son $181 for only a fraction of the gold that Cash Your Gold Now paid us $9.90 for.”

No one at Cash Your Gold Now returned KGW’s calls for comment. The BBB had 37 complaints over the past 36 months on the California company located in Claremont.

McMannis admitted she felt stupid for sending her gold jewelry to a company she knew nothing about.

Now, she said her advice to anyone thinking about sending in their gold was to “take your jewelry to a trusted local company first and get a free estimate. That way you’ll know what it’s worth before you ship it off to someone you don’t even know.”