AG Reaches Settlement That Could Provide $2.6 Million For Companies

Sacramento, CA — California´s attorney general says U-S Bancorp has agreed to forgive up to $2.6 million in payments from nearly a thousand companies that rented a service that falsely promised them savings of up to 30 percent on telephone and Internet bills.

State Attorney General Bill Lockyer says U-S-B was one of the finance companies that brought rental contacts from a now bankrupted New Jersey company that promised customers big savings if they installed a Matrix black box that would allow them to integrate their telecommunications systems.

About 11,000 companies agreed to pay between $500 to $2,000 a month to rent the boxes under contracts that typically lasted five years, but Lockyer says the New Jersey company, NorVergence, couldn´t guarantee the savings because it didn´t have long-term contacts with telephone networks.Nearly a thousand of those companies are based in California.