ECG cautions customers against fraudsters, using unapproved MoMo numbers

Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has warned the public against fraudsters, who operate in the name of the company, request­ing customers to make payments through illegal mobile money transfer (MoMo) numbers.

“No ECG payment is done to a specific number. If someone calls and asks you to pay to a phone number, that person is a fraudster, don’t pay to a name or num­ber,” the Western Regional ECG General Manager, Mr Emmanuel Ofori, has alerted.

He was addressing a news conference in Takoradi yesterday, to officially launch “No Free Con­sumption” exercise, in the Western Region.

As part of the exercise, the ECG teams would go to the field to update customers on import­ant practices, including import­ant ECG phone numbers, GPS addresses and collection of any arrears, Mr Ofori said.

He said the team would also educate the public on issues con­cerning the disconnection of custom­ers for non-payment of arrears and pick pictorial readings of all postpaid meters with a new meter reading electronic device (Zeus mobile device).

The team, Mr Ofori explained, would also capture, regularise all Self- Help Electrification Pro­gramme (SHEP) and non-ECG meters on the Zeus mobile device for customers to pay regularisation fee.

He said “you will only be asked to pay when weprompt you through text messages. This comes after you have gone through the process. May be you have done the registration, they’ve come to inspect your premises for the new services, then you will receive this message indicating that they have carried out the exercise.”

Mr Ofori indicated “now, you can go ahead and do the payment whereby an invoice will be generated for you. It is that invoice that you can use to do the payment. You don’t do a payment without an invoice. So when somebody call you that do a pay­ment to a specific number, please, let us know before you do that payment because people are taking advantage of our digitalisation to defraud customers.”

Mr Ofori said that the oper­ation was to help ECG improve upon its services, and also retrieve debts, stressing “our main objec­tive is to ensure that customers who have been consuming power free are identified and then billed.”

He said ECG would also promote the use of its mobile app, as it goes cashless, especially with customers requesting new services