They call it electricity bill scams, and the Otea association had warned its members that they might try to scam them. This Tuesday, a hotelier from Ribera de Arriba received a very strange call from the name of Alejandro, who claimed to be working for a Total Energy marketer. “A colleague told me they’re going to shut you down in three hours,” he began to explain, “with great familiarity.” This Alejandro had all the details of the establishment: phone number, name, location, CUPS counter code. But the hotelier with many years of experience noticed that something strange had happened and began to ask the reasons for the outage. The person reassured him that it had “not submitted an energy efficiency certificate in the last three months”. This detail was of no interest to the hotelier, who continued to ask for more information from his addressee before. “They don’t seem like proper protocols to me to convey something like this,” he told Alejandro. When she asked for more details, such as a last name, the scammer felt cornered and broke all fiction, starting to humiliate her and lie to her mother. The problem is, the scammer didn’t even bother to override your phone and keep it active. As you can see, the scam was never completed. The next step would be for the scammer to offer to rectify the situation and demand a payment ranging from 900 to 1,500 euros to fix it. The hotel operator will condemn the events at the Ribera de Arriba barracks this Thursday.
This hotelier’s energy consultant assures him that this is not the first case he knows of, and that his other clients experienced the same attempt a few weeks ago. “In this case they identified themselves as marketer Iberdrola. The result was the same. My client phoned me and I agreed with the distributor to find out that it was a lie and a scam. He didn’t. Or pay, that shows the same energy consultant.
“If documents are missing, the distributor will send a notice with a monthly margin to fix the problem,” explains the consultant, who advises people who receive a similar call not to get trapped.
This Alejandro’s procedure is the same as that of a well-known swindler from Gijón, he has been arrested multiple times but commits a crime again without ever appearing in the ongoing trials.