Consumers may be losing millions of dollars due to fraudulent practices by prepaid phone card providers, according to the executive chairman of the National Latino Officers Association, Anthony Miranda, and the organization’s lawyer, famed civil rights activist Norman Seigel.

Messrs. Miranda and Seigel, along with the heads of several community and trade groups, called on state and federal authorities to investigate the card providers and urged anyone who felt victimized to come forward.

Earlier, the Bodega Association of the United States made allegations of fraud against the distributors of Grandes Ligas (Major League) phone cards, which bear the likenesses of baseball stars such as Pedro Martinez, Miguel Tejada, and Vladimir Guerrero. The bodega association and the Neighborhood Retail Alliance, a small business advocacy group, contend that the buyers of the cards, primarily low-income Hispanics, received cards with substantially less talk time than advertised; paid for cards they never received or were never activated; did not receive toll free access numbers or were given numbers that were constantly busy; were sent cards that deducted minutes even for unconnected calls, and were not given refunds or replacement cards after complaining to various customer service representatives.

The owner of American Worldwide Travel, the Washington Heights-based firm that distributes the Grandes Ligas cards, Juan Nunez, told the New York Post, “It’s not true. There’s nothing wrong with these phone cards.”

Because the bodegas were selling the cards, which they did not know to be fraudulent, “they were put into a position of being unwitting accomplices to a potential widespread fraud and took action to protect their good name and protect the monetary rights of their customers who are being ripped off,” a spokesman for the retail alliance, Richard Lipsky, said.

Spokesmen for Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association said their organizations had not licensed the images on the cards and are investigating the matter. Some of the players have denied that they were paid for appearing on the cards, according to Mr. Siegel. If that’s true, they were taken advantage of themselves, and they should join us,” Mr. Seigel said of the statements by MLB and the players.

Mr. Seigel suggested the possibility of a class action lawsuit against phone card distributors on a statewide or national scale.