I received this very official-looking document in the mail today. And I’m used to getting official-looking mailers that purport to be sweepstakes prizes, fake checks, and so on, but it took me ten hard seconds of looking at this thing to determine it’s a total scam — and a particularly evil one. (Click on the image to see the whole thing, with my personal information blocked out.)

See this page and this news story, which comments on the scam. They’re talking about the exact same letter I received.

I called the San Francisco Assessor’s office, and they said anyone can request a reassessment for free. There’s no need to use this “service.”

Update: A Fresno TV station did a story tonight on the deceptive letters.

San Francisco commercial property owners are seeking lower assesment valuations, with the 10 biggest claiming a total drop in value of $1.2 billion, which means Gavin and the Supes potentially losing another $13.2 million in annual dough to play with. The New Jersey based investment group that owns Crocker Galleria downtown say that their marquee retail property alone has lost $242 million in value.

DataQuick has recently reported that …

“In the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area, the median home price fell 11.6 percent to $548,000 compared to a year earlier and 17.6 percent from the region’s peak median price of $665,000 last summer…as sales (volume) has dropped 36.7 percent last month from February 2007.”

These figures and stats can be reinforced as I observed that the normally thin classified pages of the suburban Concord Transcript newspaper last Thursday alone contained literally 5 1/2 jam packed pages of tiny typefaced foreclosure trustee sale notices…and even auctions in Gawd Forbid! the newest “shoreline” developments of San Francisco.