The TV commercials promise quick money for your unwanted jewelry—a tempting offer, what with the rising price of gold in recent years. But mounting allegations of pitiful payments, ignored return guarantees and other deceptive and unfair practices mean that your attempts to sell those old necklaces and rings could subject you to a golden fleece. Many mail-in gold companies are legitimate, with some earning “A” ratings from the Better Business Bureau. However, officials charge that it’s not always the case with industry leader Cash4Gold, which has generated more than 300 complaints to the BBB in the past three years and has resolved most of them. Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum recently launched an investigation into Cash4Gold after receiving at least 72 complaints from customers about the Pompano Beach-based company. A few weeks earlier, Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., called for the Federal Trade Commission to look into practices by Cash4Gold and other companies, and said he intended to introduce legislation to regulate mail-in gold buyers that use the U.S. mail. And in October 2009, a class action lawsuit was filed against Cash4Gold and its parent company, Green Bullion Financial Services. McCollum, Weiner and past customers level two main allegations against Cash4Gold: (1) They say the company pays only a fraction of the true value of customers’ gold, issuing checks as low as seven cents for individual items. An investigation by Consumer Reports found that Cash4Gold and similar companies paid only 11 to 29 percent of the day’s market value for jewelry it submitted. By comparison, pawnshops and other venues paid up to 70 percent of value for the same merchandise. (2) Some customers say that when they are dissatisfied with Cash4Gold’s payment and try to get their merchandise returned, they are told it already had been melted down—even when they have contacted the company within its 12-day window for returns. Others allege that when they send back the check for their gold’s return, they receive nothing in return—or sometimes, an empty envelope. In the past two years, the U.S. Postal Service has received numerous complaints about items lost in the mail going to or from Cash4Gold. A spokesman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service tells Scam Alert that his agency has found that in the overwhelming majority of those cases, incoming mail with jewelry was properly delivered to Cash4Gold, but raises the possibility of “delay tactics on the company’s part” in replying. Richard Santamaria of the Office of the Inspector General for the USPS in Miami, who has also investigated these cases, says the missing mail represents less than 1 percent of Cash4Gold’s total mail volume. Cash4Gold CEO Jeff Aronson insists that his company is not a “scam business” and that dissatisfied customers often “have unrealistic expectations of what that material is really worth.”