It was a sultry summer evening in south Minneapolis. I was helping my son and his friend from across the street look for bugs underneath rocks in my front yard. A young man with a stubbly beard walked up my steps and crossed my lawn.

“Is this your home?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered, antennae twitching. I noticed his gray tennis shirt had a corporate logo on it, and that he held a binder in his hands.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Who are you?” I said. I’m sure he could almost taste the hostility in the air, but he kept smiling. He said he was selling alarm systems for Pinnacle Security and that in this neighborhood –

I cut him off. “Do you have a city solicitor license?”

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Katie Trottier of Minneapolis turned to Whistleblower when she couldn’t persuade U.S. Bank to forgive overdraft fees charged to her after a thief drained her checking account. Whistleblower reporter Lora Pabst described the bank’s change of heart when confronted with the facts. In the Sunday Whistleblower column, I described how Vivian Mason, a Minneapolis park commissioner from 1997 until 2005, was taken aback when she learned that memorials aren’t forever in the City of Lakes parklands. Her endowment of a bench in memory of her late husband Jack came with a time limit, and the cost of renewal was rising 150 percent, as part of a new plan to use the tributes to cover the park board’s maintenance costs and to raise money for the park system’s foundation. Whistleblower will check back in with Mason to see if the bench by Cedar Lake gets a new benefactor.

My Sunday column told the tale of Pamela Hanson,a retired teacher in Arden Hills who ordered some fleece sheets from BrylaneHome.com and ended up feeling fleeced. Now some have commented that it was all her fault. Indeed, Hanson would be the first to say she should have paid closer attention. But obviously the company felt it was easier to refund the money than defend its practices in the face of an unhappy customer who went public with her story.

My colleague and fellow reporter Tim Harlow offers this tale of a cell phone debt collection scam, in which she unwittingly handed over her credit card number to an impostor:

Deb Smith of Bloomington isn’t the kind of person to give away her credit card number to strange callers. But early Sunday morning before she’d even downed her coffee, the caller sounded so legitimate that she did, only to learn just hours later that she fallen prey to a scam.

It started when a man purportedly acting as a representative of T-Mobile called her college-age son Nick’s cell phone around 7:45 a.m. and threatened to cut off service if he didn’t pay his bill of $128.05 immediately. He handed the phone to his mother, who gave the man her credit card information.

“Life’s been crazy recently and I thought perhaps I forgot or didn’t pay the full amount the previous month,” Smith said. “I thought, let’s get this taken care of.”

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