Here’s a statistic that alarms Watchdog Nation more than any other: According to a new survey, 1 out of 5 Americans age 65 or older have “been taken advantage of financially in terms of an inappropriate investment, unreasonably high fees for financial services or outright fraud.” Read the survey here.

Advisers are about to be reigned in somewhat with the new consumer financial protection bill weaving through Congress. One provision requires full disclosure of broker fees, commissions and other charges levied on investors. In the past, some folks thought if they invested $50,000 they actually invested $50,000. Read about one such case here.

Here’s another example of duplicity that ensnared investors: A Concord, New Hampshire company, Lincoln Financial Securities Corp., sold the contents of an investment book written by another company’s chief executive officer. According to the Texas State Securities Board, six different agents of Lincoln, all based in Texas, put their names on the cover as co-authors with Mark Matson, the actual author. They used the book to attract clients and establish their own credibility.

However, the six agents didn’t write the book. They just wrote a preface to it.

Title of the book?

The Dirty, Filthy Lies My Broker Taught Me and 101 Truths About Money & Investing.

Ironic, eh?

After the Texas securities board inquired, David Booth, president of Lincoln Financial, told the Texas agents to stop using the book.

On June 15, 2010, Texas regulators entered a disciplinary order that fined Lincoln Financial $40,000 and reprimanded the firm. Read the order here.

What will they think of next?

If you hear of investment folks using deceptive practices to entice clients, write to Dave Lieber, founder of Watchdog Nation, at watchdog@star-telegram.com.

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

Americans are confused and worried about the installation of smart electric meters. Some believe the meters result in higher bills. In North Texas, where Watchdog Nation founder Dave Lieber lives, Oncor Electric Delivery denies that.

The Watchdog is on the case. Here’s the latest.

Remember that Oncor maintains the power lines and installs the new meters. Your electricity provider handles your billing.

Installation update

Almost 1 million new meters have been installed in Oncor’s service area. That’s about one-third of the more than 3 million residences and businesses that will receive them by 2013, the Public Utility Commission of Texas says.

The PUC hired a company to test the meters, and that continues. So far, 1,400 meters have been tested “and all were found to be accurate,” according to the PUC.

Oncor has acknowledged that 1,800 customers’ meter readings were in error, but the company blames human error during conversion to the new meters. It says the meters themselves are fine.

Meanwhile, in California, Pacific Gas and Electric has admitted that there were 43,000 cases in which smart meters had problems, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

“The utility found 23,000 meters that were installed improperly, 11,376 that failed to retain consumer usage information and 9,000 that had trouble connecting with the wireless network,” the paper reported. The utility said that only “a few” customers received inaccurate bills.

Turns out that the meters that were installed incorrectly were gas meters and that the “vast majority” of those customers got inaccurate bills, the paper reported.

California state officials, like those in Texas, continue investigating.

Installation difficulties

Thanks to Melodi and George Faris of Fort Worth for teaching me two important facts about smart-meter installations.

First, Oncor can enter your back yard to install the meters without your permission.

Second, during the installation, the power to your home will go off for several minutes.

Melodi Faris told me how she watched an Oncor installer climb over their wrought iron gate, then push a button that opened the gate to her driveway. When Melodi Faris confronted the installer, he denied climbing the fence. He said he reached through the gate and pushed the button. She measured the distance and told me that’s not possible.

After the power went off, the family’s phones went dead. Permanently.

They filed a claim with Oncor for the replacement cost, but it was denied. Oncor stated in a letter that it is not responsible for “voltage fluctuations or electrical interruptions.”

An Oncor spokeswoman told me that proper installation procedures were followed. Oncor left a notice on the front door that it would be doing work, and the installer knocked before entering the property. No one answered.

As for jumping the fence, she said, “In normal circumstances, he would use a ladder.”

Power goes off “no more than a minute or two,” she said.

“Every person should have protection for their appliances,” she added. “Surge protectors. That’s what we recommend.”

Website problems

A new website — www.SmartMeterTexas.com — is supposed to let customers with smart meters manage electric usage.

Greg McKinney of Arlington, who works on websites for a bank, says he cannot get the site to work for the new smart meter at his home.

“It’s as though they didn’t test the test before rolling it out,” he says.

He wrote to me: “Dave, I don’t know what you can do here, but it’s frustrating that with electricity deregulation, I’m supposed to educate myself about electricity usage. And the very tools that the PUC puts out there” don’t work.

The PUC tells me the site is operated by Oncor and other transmission and distribution utilities. Users must have smart meters for about a month or two before the site will work.

So far, 2,000 electric customers have enrolled, the PUC reports.

Doing the right thing

Donald Martin of Fort Worth is trying to do the right thing. He says he tallies his kilowatt-hour usage by looking at his smart meter every day.

“When I received my last bill, I compared their current meter reading to my recorded reading,” he wrote. “Their reading was 37 kWh more than my observation.”

He called TXU Energy, his retail provider, but says he couldn’t communicate with the rep and got frustrated.

The Watchdog contacted TXU. A spokeswoman listened to the tapes of his calls.

“He was really upset ….,” she told me. “He did not let us help him.”

Meanwhile, an Oncor spokeswoman told me that Martin’s problem was that his bill stated his meter was read on May 12, but the actual reading occurred on May 13, hence the difference in usage.

“We have two business days to get in there around that time to actually read the meter,” she said. “We read it the next day. Sometimes that happens. We try to stick to the schedule. We read so many meters in a day that this might happen.”

She also taught me — and you — a new trick to get better service from Oncor. Each city has an Oncor community manager. The managers’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses are listed on Oncor’s website.

Here’s how to find it: Go to oncor.com and look for the Community tab on the upper-right corner. On the drop-down menu click on Community and Customer Relations. On the left side, click on Local Contacts, then find your city and the local area manager.

“That’s something you can do if you don’t feel satisfied,” the Oncor spokeswoman says.

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Read Dave Lieber’s previous post about how Smart meters are becoming urban legends.

Read an earlier Dave Lieber post about how Oncor doesn’t have a sufficient emergency alert system for its customers.

Read the Dave Lieber post about how to fight your electric company.

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Read Texas PUC Chairman Barry Smitherman’s presentation to a Texas legislative committee in May 2010 here.

The latest PUC news release about independent smart meter testing is here.

Here is the complete rule for Texans about smart meters from the PUC.

This is the smart meter website that the state offers Texans to measure their usage. This is the PUC announcement about the site.

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

Do you know what “whole house surge protectors” are?

H.D. Biddle was jolted with the knowledge that he could have spent $200 and prevented the loss of thousands of dollars.

Now he knows about them.

One night in late November, Biddle remembers, the lights in his home flickered and the television set turned off. The power went off and came back on.

The next morning, the toaster didn’t work. The family found that the dishwasher and garbage disposal stopped working, too. The digital video recorder for the TV failed. The furnace was quiet.

He realized that his house might have been hit with a power surge, a voltage spike that can be caused by a number of factors.

Most common causes: downed power lines, a lightning strike, household appliances cycling on and off, or a sudden change in electricity usage at a nearby factory.

Biddle hired an electrician who couldn’t find any wiring problems in the house. The electrician wrote that the problems were caused by “a power company line surge on one phase, thereby causing the failure of said electrical appliances and heat units.”

He contacted Oncor, which owns and services the power lines in parts of North Texas, where Biddle lives, and asked it to help pay for the loss. Oncor sent a service rep to look things over. The rep said he found nothing wrong.

Then in December, a letter from Oncor informed Biddle that the company had denied his claim. Oncor told him that it had no responsibility for electricity spikes and that it was up to the homeowner to protect his or her home.

Biddle had lost about $7,000 in electrical appliances and expenses from the mishap. His family went without heat until the furnace was repaired. Everything else had to be replaced.

Biddle wrote to Watchdog Dave Lieber at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for help. And after that, Oncor offered to send another service rep over to install a recording voltmeter on the lines to the house to see what the levels were. But Biddle declined, saying the surge was a one-time deal and wouldn’t show up on a test.

“The customer is responsible for installing grounding and other protective devices to protect their equipment,” Oncor spokesman Carol Peters says. “Unless Oncor has some prior knowledge of a problem and unless we did something wrong causing the problem, we do not pay on these kinds of damages,” she adds. “The cause is unknown and undetermined.”

Biddle’s insurance company covered about 30 percent of his loss. The family’s out-of-pocket costs came to more than $4,000. Frustrated, Biddle says, “Oncor dismissed the matter and attempted to ignore us altogether.”

So what’s the solution?

Everyone knows about small surge protectors that became popular when personal computers and printers entered homes in the 1980s. You attach them to your electronics, and when a spike occurs, the surge protector gives its life to save the appliance.

In Biddle’s house, his music system was protected by a small surge protector and survived the ordeal just fine.

But in the last several years a new product has entered the residential market called a whole-house surge protector.

Installed on the main line leading into the house, it is designed to protect appliances as well as phone and cable lines from voltage spikes.

A few years ago, these cost about $350 and had to be installed by a qualified electrician. Recently, some area electricians are offering the product and installation for about half of that. So shop around.

I had one installed last year and still use the smaller protectors on computer equipment for backup.

Biddle has a new whole-house surge protector, too.

Some U.S. power companies offer whole-house surge protection to their customers. Oncor does not.

“I’m not familiar with a whole-house surge protector, and we wouldn’t endorse a particular product,” said Peters, the Oncor spokeswoman. “From our side, we’re doing what we’re supposed to do. Deliver electrical service on a reliable basis.”

Biddle wishes that Oncor informed customers more clearly before a surge, rather than after, that surge protection is their responsibility. As Oncor wrote to Biddle, “If protection on customers’ equipment is desired, the customer must select, install and maintain the protective equipment.”

Now you know.

And thanks to Ralph Weibaum who provided me with this very informative website on surges.

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

Smart meters are coming to your house. Eventually. But as the first wave of North Texans gets those digital meters, they are becoming the stuff of urban legend.

Look at what has happened to Oncor Electric Delivery.

The region’s major power supplier was energized about the rollout of the 3.4 million new digital meters. Oncor promised more control over your electric usage with real-time information about your spending.

What happened instead is a public relations disaster. Oncor’s smart meters, which debuted last month in parts of Fort Worth and Arlington, are turning into an urban legend: a story everyone hears but can’t tell whether it’s true.

In this urban legend, once a smart meter is installed, customers see a sharp spike in their next monthly electric bill.

That belief is at the heart of a lawsuit filed on behalf of Oncor customers that cites “a dramatic and unreasonable rise” in electric bills after smart-meter installations. And a residents group, SmartURCitizens.com, is protesting and raising lots of questions about the meters. Group members even picketed the shining star of Oncor’s meter rollout, its traveling smart-meter exhibit trailer.

In its first five weeks, SmartURCitizens.com picked up 500 members.

Co-founder Ree Wattner testified before the Public Utility Commission on April 1. She asked for a three-month break in smart-meter installations. That request was denied. (To watch the broadcast, go to this site and search for the April 1, 2010 meeting to PUCT Open Meeting that shows only two parts. Click on “View part 2 of conference” and scroll to 45:30 in the timeline.)

There was a good piece of news, though, which could lead to a credible resolution.

The PUC hired Navigant Consulting to conduct a three-month investigation of smart meters in Texas. And when it comes to investigating power companies here, Navigant has a strong track record.

The company completed a nearly 400-page report in 2008 on questionable practices at the Pedernales Electric Cooperative in Central Texas. (You can read that report, which to Watchdog Nation is a textbook study of 21st century bad behavior in the pubic arena — or worse — here.) Former leaders of the cooperative face felony charges.

Navigant investigator Todd Lester, who ran that PEC inquiry, is handling the smart-meter examination. He promises detailed testing of 5,000 new digital meters in labs and in the field and side by side with old-style mechanical meters. He says he will follow the data from the meter all the way through billing, looking for flaws. Results are due in three months.

Oncor spokesman Chris Schein tells me: “So far there has not been any evidence to show there are widespread problems with either the meter accuracy or the software that would warrant us stopping the installation. If we found anything that would indicate that, we would be the first to stand up and say, ‘No more.’”

Oncor acknowledges 1,800 errors out of 800,000 meter installations. Those were human errors, not meter errors, it says.

Dallas lawyer Jason Berent, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of a Heath couple who believe they were overcharged, calls the smart-meter problem “the biggest controversy sitting just below the surface.”

His clients’ bill jumped to about $1,900 a month several months after a new meter was installed. For three months, the bill faced by Robert and Jennifer Cordts was almost $5,000, the lawsuit says.

Oncor has attributed the higher bills to the cold winter.

Tricia Lambert, the other founder of SmartURCitizens, tells me that Oncor’s strategy “is to discredit us as hystericals.”

She says calls are coming from people who are getting their electricity cut off because they can’t pay big winter bills, and she doesn’t believe that cold weather is the reason the bills shot up.

“These are hardworking Texans,” she says. “They are not ne’er-do-wells that don’t want to pay their bills. That’s who we’re fighting for.”

Schein says Oncor wants to help, not fight back. He says Oncor is doing everything it can to help customers understand their situations by “answering thousands of calls.”

One customer even sought his help on Facebook, and Schein said he happily obliged.

Tip: Become friends with Chris Schein on Facebook. After your smart meter is installed, if the next bill is high, you can either send a message or “poke” him.

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Want more? Read this latest Dave Lieber blog post about a Grapevine man who has a theory about why people believe smart meters are charging them more.

Dave Lieber writes the Dave Lieber Watchdog column at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where this report originally appeared.

After he saw my report on Oncor Electric Delivery’s poor outage information system a week ago, reader Doug Edwards of Dallas summarized my findings better in 18 words than I did in a thousand.

“It looks like you got the brush off from Oncor everybody else is. They always say `Tomorrow, Tomorrow …’ ” was the message he sent via my Twitter feed.

He’s right.

I had asked Oncor why the company couldn’t do better at providing power outage information to the public, especially during a major storm.

But what happened? I got steered into an explanation about how everything will be better in two or three years because we’ll have smart meters.

So last week, I tried again. I pressed Oncor harder when I previewed its new smart meter exhibit, soon to be visiting a county fair near you.

Because North Texas gets its share of severe weather, it’s hard to understand why Oncor won’t do a better job of informing the public when neighborhoods are dark, when crews are working to restore power and when it’s finally restored.

Oncor doesn’t offer that service. That also means that the news media can’t report the latest information to a wider public.

Yet last week I found two electricity transmission companies similar to Oncor that do tell their customers what is happening during bad weather in modern, quick and efficient ways.

AEP Texas, which serves a giant swath of West Texas, presents on its Web site a real-time listing and accompanying color map — broken down by ZIP code — that shows how many customers have lost power.

The information comes from telephone complaints by customers, which are then transferred to the Web site, spokesman Larry Jones said. The site is updated every few minutes. Parent company American Electric Power offers real-time outage alerts in the 11 states it serves.

In Florida, Kissimmee Utility Authority created an outage alert system five years ago that sends text alerts or e-mails to anyone who signs up, giving the number of affected customers by ZIP code. Updates give customers an idea of how quickly the problem is being fixed.

Spokesman Chris Gent says the authority’s system preceded Twitter, which was developed a year later. Now the authority offers both a Twitter feed and its original system to customers.

The service is inexpensive, he said, because it was designed in-house and is run by staff.

The authority is experimenting with GPS devices on work trucks so that information can eventually be used, too.

Several readers called and questioned my plea for a strong Internet alert system for Oncor customers. They said they wouldn’t have electricity to access a Web site.

Remember that hand-held phones and laptops are often battery-powered. Friends and relatives can relay information to you from elsewhere. The news media uses the information. And all of this is important for families that have evacuated and want to learn when they can return.

Does Oncor have any plans to offer an outage alert system?

At the smart-meter exhibit in Lancaster, spokeswoman Jeamy Molina answered, “We’re just not at a place where that can be done right now. It goes back to the grid with the whole outage system. We know when there are widespread outages. We know where that is. It goes back to our restoration process and how it works.

“We understand that there are places that Oncor can improve on its customer service and dealing with these kinds of things. And of course, these will be things that we’ll take into account when we start seeing what we could have done better before the next storm. So that will be something that will come up. But right now, Oncor is not at that place.”

What about the near future?

“It’s stuff that will be talked about, of course,” she continued. “We’ll take this back to our team. We have to review steps about what could be done.”

As my Twitter pal sang in his tweet: “Tomorrow, Tomorrow …”

No system’s perfect

OK, I have a smart-meter story for you. Those are the 21st-century meters that connect directly to the electric company. You can monitor your power usage and set your smart appliances to run at off-peak times. Most Texas electric customers will have one in a few years.

Oncor took a lot of, uh, heat from customers in recent weeks in Killeen and Temple. Soon after their smart meters were installed, their bills jumped. But Oncor says that the increase was due to the cold weather and that it tested about 500 meters and all were accurate.

Even though smart meters are designed to eliminate humans and our errors, there is still that possibility. When an old meter is removed, the final reading is recorded by — gasp — a human.

And wouldn’t you know it? Sometimes people make mistakes. About a dozen so far when it comes to smart-meter conversions, Oncor says.

There’s this one fellow who had a smart meter installed nine months ago at his home in the Austin area (not served by Oncor).

When he received the first bill afterward, he recalls, “It looked like they overcharged me 1,000 kilowatts.”

He called Austin Energy to complain. “The meter reader, in closing out, put the decimal point in the wrong place,” he says. “I was charged an extra 1,000 kwh. So there’s that potential element for human error.”

And who is this fellow who was done wrong?

His name is Terry Hadley.

His job?

He’s the spokesman for the Public Utility Commission of Texas.

If it can happen to him …

Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber