Something fishy going on

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2018 (2654 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When one of Gimli Fish Market’s three Winnipeg stores got a call saying Manitoba Hydro employees were on the way to disconnect its power, general manager Wendy Vigfusson was alarmed, and a little suspicious.

The store has always paid its bill on time but, if there was a glitch at the bank or with the public utility’s record-keeping and the electricity was shut off, the fish seller’s financial losses could be huge. “We were all pretty much in a panic,” Vigfusson said, recalling the Oct. 10 incident. “We have freezers and equipment and can’t afford not to have electricity.”

She phoned the number that had shown up on call display as “Manitoba Hydro” and spoke to a professional-sounding customer service representative about the alleged unpaid bill. He quoted an amount owing that was very close to the amount Gimli Fish Market was normally billed.

Vigfusson said she had a credit card ready, rationalizing Hydro would soon discover it made a mistake and reimburse Gimli Fish Market for the overpayment. However, she went with her gut — which was telling her something was “a little bit off.”

While talking to the so-called Hydro representative, she checked Manitoba Hydro’s Twitter feed and discovered warnings about such scams, and realized she had a crook on the line.

“I said, ‘This is a scam, isn’t it?’” said Vigfusson, who peppered the scammer with questions before he hung up.

Manitoba Hydro said Friday it has recorded a near-300 per cent jump in the number of fraud-related complaints this year — 862 phone, text and e-mail scams as of Oct. 31, compared with 221 during the same period in 2017.

The jump is due to an increased number of scammers who threatened to disconnect service to small business owners, said Hydro spokesman Bruce Owen.

“What we’re finding here now are small business owners — people who deal directly with the public in restaurants and food stores — they’re the ones being targeted” all over Canada and the U.S., he said. “They’re getting a phone call during the middle of the day, at the height of business, that a truck is on its way and it’s coming to disconnect the power because you haven’t paid.”

Manitoba Hydro doesn’t do that, Owen said. Most businesses know that “but, in the back of their minds, they’re thinking, ‘I’ve got thousands of dollars of food in freezers and I can’t afford to have the power go out.’”

Owen figures 10 per cent of the customers who’ve complained to Hydro realized too late it was a scam, and many others never complain to Hydro even after they’d been duped.

The sophistication of the scammers is alarming, said Vigfusson — from estimating what the market’s hydro bill usually is to the legitimate-looking call display and the professional-sounding customer service rep.

“I feel they put some thought into it,” she said. “They wanted it to sound as authentic as possible.”

Manitoba Hydro said it has received many other fraud-related complaints this year, including unsolicited text messages to customers saying they were overbilled and eligible for a refund — a scam that aims to get a customer’s personal banking information.

It advises customers to never give out personal account information, such as debit or credit card numbers, over the phone or in a text or email.

Seniors living alone continue to be targeted by aggressive door-to-door sales, Hydro said in a news release. Its employees always display Manitoba Hydro photo ID and will never demand to enter a home, it said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca