Today is Friday, July 10th, 2026, and for the past ten weeks I’ve been working as an intern in the Consumer Frauds department of the Attorney General’s (AG) office in New York City. It is my last in-office workday and I will be returning to Ithaca in a week. A major part of my work at AG’s office was mediating between consumers and business entities: I receive complaints from disgruntled consumers who felt harmed by a business or corporation, I then reach out to the entity to request information about the situation. Entities range from local mom-and-pop shops to conglomerates like Meta or Amazon — no one is outside the AG’s periphery. After gathering information, I read the complaint and decide, based on a (confidential) rubric, whether the case can be mediated by our office. Depending on severity and the resources available, certain cases can be promoted to litigation status, where the AG’s office takes on the role of legal counsel, provides attorneys and begins formal action against a corporation.
At this internship, I have had two most valuable experiences. On one hand, is the opportunity to continue my education on the United States’ legal system: learning relevant elements of the litigation process, how a trial case begins in court, the mechanics of serving papers, legal research, relevant case law, and more. On the other hand, I learned the value of a functioning public service sector. Thousands of New York consumers file complaints with the AG’s office every day. Sifting through them can be daunting ( physically and emotionally) : cases dealing with landlord harassment and abuse, deceptive corporate tactics, immigrants deceived and exploited by “immigration attorneys,” and, occasionally, cases where it is the consumer who is at fault, or who is trying to use our office as a way to dodge payment for services rendered. Still, the real value of working in the AG’s office is witnessing the safety it provides to both sides. Consumers and businesses don’t start from an equal footing when disputes arise, and having a neutral arbiter who can legally compel both sides changes that. It creates an environment where business can be conducted without fear because consumers and service providers alike know that avenues exist for addressing fraud and corruption. While this does not eliminate fraudulence in business, it goes a long way of deterring such practice.
There’s no single “type” of fraud case at the Attorney General’s office. Over the summer, I helped mediate hundreds of cases spanning every sector you might imagine— entertainment, tax, technology, finance, and more. Sometimes a case would be transferred to a different agency based on its specificity or due to jurisdictional procedures. Regardless, I was exposed to so many patterns of fraudulent business practice that I began to instinctively identify specific types of fraud just by reading the first few lines of a complaint in certain fields ( automobile industry 😑). [Unfortunately, because of the confidentiality and nature of the cases we handle, some of which are still active in court, I am not permitted to dive into distinct cases].
Working in the public sector stretched me in ways I didn’t expect. Because the service is free, I heard and read complaints from all kinds of people. I met people for whom the AG’s office was their last hope of potential relief; I also met others who felt entitled to my work, people who would demand my constant attention to their case, and who were verbally abusive. Learning to detach from such situations was crucial. It kept me sane. You only get to meet people where they are that day, and it’s easy to forget how hard it is to survive in this world where most consumers are simply trying to get by. This internship kept reminding me of that. It also left me wistful for a public service infrastructure that simply doesn’t exist in my own country, Nigeria. It’s not hard to draw a straight line between Nigeria’s lack of a functioning public sector and the persistent suffering of its consumers. This will be the subject of my next essay. Today, I log off my AG laptop for the final time (though who knows, I might be back). For now, I am sending my last emails: responses to consumers with active cases, final requests to businesses that have ignored me for weeks, closures for cases that are no longer getting responses from either party. I am wiping down my desk and taking my notes, with my jottings of the various cases I worked on, to the shredder for disposal (because it’s confidential and I cannot keep it), then I will hand my badge to my supervisor. And that will be the end.