EDMONTON – For the fourth year in a row, Global Edmonton’s Trouble Shooter, Julie Matthews, has received a Consumer Champion award from Service Alberta.
It’s the seventh time she has been given the honour. This year’s win is for a series on Amour Décor, a Stony Plain wedding decorating company whose former owner left dozens of brides stranded.
“Through our investigations we were actually able to put these brides in connection with each other, collect all that documentation, help them go to RCMP and Service Alberta,” Matthews explains. “RCMP did end up opening a fraud investigation, which can be quite rare in cases like this.”
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While the 73 charges of fraud were eventually stayed, the former owner of the company pleaded guilty to four counts under the Fair Trading Act. She was also ordered to pay back $22,000 to her customers.
And because of the investigation, the brides were able to find out about the closure and have time to hire another company.
As the Trouble Shooter, Matthews receives an overwhelming amount of requests for help from consumers.
“We’d like to help everyone but we just can’t,” she says. “So basically, we try to choose it based on variety of stories. I really like education. I believe we can take one person’s problem and look at it from the point of view of all of our viewers. What can we all learn from that? How can we all protect ourself? And then I think it goes beyond one person’s problem and hopefully it can help everyone.”
If you have something you’d like our Julie Matthews to investigate, you can email her at troubleshooter@globalnews.ca, call 780-433-3232 or tweet her @GlobalTShooter.
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