SACO — Sen. Linda Valentino, D-Saco, has sponsored a bill intended to curb deceptive business practices in Maine.

Currently the bill, which was referred to the Insurance and Financial Services Committee and received a public hearing in Augusta Tuesday, reads as a means of prohibiting companies from mailing unsolicited loan offers to people in the form of checks that, when cashed, constitute the acceptance of a loan.

“Deceptive practices like these should be prohibited, plain and simple,” Valentino was quoted saying in a recent Senate Democratic Office press release. “These companies prey on elderly folks or those who might be down on hard times, living paycheck to paycheck, causing them to get locked into a never-ending cycle of debt.”

In a telephone call Tuesday, Valentino said she was inspired to push for legislation on the matter after her business started receiving what appeared to be checks for nearly $60,000 in the mail.

“I had been receiving several of them in the mail,” she said. “I had copies of the checks that I brought to the committee, and the committee was quite surprised by the authenticity of the checks, by how real they looked. … They all agreed that they were very realistic-looking and there was the potential for deceptive practices.”

William Lund, the superintendent of the state’s Bureau of Consumer Credit Protection, clarified Tuesday that the checks Valentino showed the committee were not in fact the so-called “live” checks, or loan checks, that her bills aims to eliminate. Instead, they were simply fake checks, he said, which couldn’t be cashed, as they didn’t contain a bank name or routing number.

But Lund admitted they were still “disconcertingly” realistic-looking, and he’s working with Valentino to tweak her bill so that it might stop companies from mailing people fake checks as well as live ones.

As far as why a company would send someone a fake check, Lund said anyone’s guess is as good as his, but he suspects it’s “merely an effort to get the recipient to call the company about business loans.” Fake checks are most often sent to businesses, as opposed to individuals, he said, as there are fewer regulations concerning businesses’ rights when it comes to loans.

Lund said he thinks it may be easier to tackle the issue of fake checks versus live ones, as people can currently opt out of receiving the latter. Furthermore, he said, other states have run into legal limitations in trying to regulate live checks, especially when they are mailed from federal banks.

Because the fake checks looked so real, Lund said he and Valentino will be in talks with the Attorney General’s Office to see if mailing them might constitute an illegal business practice.

“It would’ve taken a somewhat sophisticated recipient to understand that the checks were fake,” he said. “There’s a line somewhere between clever marketing and deception.”

He said that without any disclaimers printed on the checks, he and the senator will try to find out whether “having something this confusing … constitutes deceptive trade practice.”

— Staff Writer Angelo J. Verzoni can be contacted at 282-1535, ext. 329 or averzoni@journaltribune.com.