Scammers Threaten To Cut Off Electricity Over Past-Due Bills

HERNDON, VA — Dominion Energy is warning its customers to be wary of anyone calling about a past-due power bill and threatening to shut off the customer's electricity. These phone scammers typically direct the customer to call a 1-800-number, where they'll be instructed to obtain a gift card and where to can send it to avoid having their electricity shut off.

"This is a typical scam where they'll be like, 'You have to pay now or we're going to cut your power off," said Peggy Fox, Dominion's media and community relations manager. "We never pressure people like that. We never asked for personal information."

Exacerbating the problem is the scammers use a recording of actual Dominion audio directing customers to hit a number to pay the bill, making the call seem more legitimate.

"People fall for that," said Roxanne Dotterer, the shift manager at Dominion's Northern Regional Center. "It's going to be a certain percentage of people that somebody has moved on or they were in a roommate situation and they thought it was taken care of. There's people, my mom, if she were still around, might've fallen for it. It was that good."

Dominion has set up a website to help customers determine whether a call they received is legitimate. If they feel like a call is a scam, customers should hang-up and call Dominion at 1-866-366-4357 for help.

Rob McIntyre is the operations manager for Dominion's Northern Regional Center, which is located off of Centreville Road in the Herndon part of Fairfax County. If your power goes out and you live anywhere from Northern Virginia on down to Charlottesville and anywhere on the Interstate 81 corridor to Roanoke, this is the center that handles your calls and dispatches service personnel to your neighborhood.

Forty-two employees work 24-7 in shifts to man the center, which serves 991,000 accounts. McIntyre draws a distinction between accounts and customers because many customers could be on a single account, such as a hospital, school or apartment building. Center employees monitor power outages, take calls from customers, and keep an eye on developing weather patterns in nearby states that could cause power outages.

"We have three of these operation centers and they're all separate, but we can operate one from another one," McIntyre said. "If everyone is down for whatever reason, we could easily operate any of the of three from here."

He urged customers to report an outage — no matter how small — as soon as possible rather than wait for a neighbor to do so.

"Large outages with a lot of load loss, where they have a lot of people involved, we'll see that," McIntyre said. "We'll get an alarm in here. We'll know about the bigger ones, but if a squirrel gets on a pole and knocks out a fuse or maybe one tree comes down or something knocks out a small area, we may not know."

Once a call comes in, Dominion creates a project and then waits 8 minutes before doing anything. This allows them time to collect data and assess what it is they're dealing with.

"We have an algorithm that says, 'All right, you got three outages on this line. The fuse must be out,'" McIntyre said. "So, a job will be made up on the fuse and then we'll dispatch from here to our local offices."

Dominion then calls the customer to tell them what's going on and give them instructions if necessary, such as they should try resetting their breakers. "We have a whole script we go through to try and identify what the problem is," he said. "Is it our problem? A lot of times, there are other electrical problems that happen that aren't unique to the customer."

Dominion also reminds people to stay clear of downed power lines. Even if it's not throwing sparks, it still could be a live wire.

"One of our big messages is stay 30 feet away from any lines and always assume they're energized," Dotterer said. "I've been amazed to learn that some people don't get that."