Album seller settles case
Marketing of family books to change
Rachel Brand, Rocky Mountain News
Friday, February 10, 2006
An Arapahoe County company accused of deceptively promoting genealogy albums will pay a $30,000 fine, cover $25,000 in legal fees and revamp how it markets its Family Yearbooks.
Maxwell MacMaster and his Parker-based company MorphCorp. advertised the $45 "family history" books as unique to an individual's surname. The company promised its yearbooks would summarize 2,000 years of a particular family's history.
But the tomes were not published annually and contained no pictures of the buyer's family members.
"The 'Family Yearbook' was nothing more than a photocopy of the same material deceptively sold to thousands of consumers," Attorney General John Suthers, who negotiated the settlement, said in a statement.
Jeffery Scism, a San Bernardino, Calif., genealogist who has tracked MacMaster for years, said the fine is puny when compared with the hundreds of thousands of dollars he believes -MorphCorp raked in.
"The only fairest solution would be to seize the business, liquidate the assets and put them in a holding company," said Scism, who lists the company on his "Genealogy Hall of Shame" Web site, blacksheep.rootsweb.com.
Nobody answered the phone Thursday at MorphCorp, 1181 S. Parker Road, and a message left with the company's outside counsel, Burton Wherry of Denver's Wherry & Carlstead LLC, was not returned.
Here's how the books worked: If you were a customer named John Smith, MacMaster would send you a letter identifying himself as your distant relative. He would promise to sell you a yearbook authored by someone in the Smith clan and containing jokes and recipes from the Smith family.
"Essentially what they'd do is stick a few telephone listings in there and names changed from the Census Bureau," Scism said.
MacMaster is now barred from pretending to be related to potential customers and advertising that a "contributing family member" wrote the text.
In addition, MorphCorp. must provide refunds to those who request them. If the company refuses, customers may complain to the Colorado consumer line, 1-800-222-4444.
brandr@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5269
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