Scammers are ‘aggressively’ targeting Peco customers. Here’s what you need to know.

Cheryl Hassler answered the call from an unknown number with a Philadelphia area code, concerned something may have happened to her elderly mother-in-law.

The caller, who said he was from Peco, gave her another kind of bad news.

“He said there was someone coming to shut my electricity off,” said Hassler, 50, of Coatesville. “I was like, ‘What? For what reason?’ They stated my last payment to them did not go through,” due to some issue with the new account numbers Peco customers recently received.

Hassler asked to speak to the caller’s supervisor. Another person got on the line, and confirmed what the first man had told her. She quickly changed her plans for the afternoon, and rushed to make a payment, not realizing that the call wasn’t from Peco at all.

Peco officials this week warned that scammers have been “aggressively” targeting the company’s 2.2 million residential and business customers since the utility upgraded its billing system in February.

“Scammers have been taking advantage of Peco’s recent system upgrades to manipulate and confuse customers into making immediate payments,” the company said in an email to customers. “These scammers are contacting Peco customers and falsely claiming their electric or natural gas service will be disconnected unless payment is made immediately.”

That’s exactly what a caller told Jack Bosley, 63, of Exton, in February, and what someone told Hassler last month.

Hassler raced to the nearest Allpoint ATM, a fee-free interbank machine that the caller instructed she had to use make a payment of nearly $400, the approximate total of her past three months of electric bills.

The caller stayed on the line for 15 minutes while she and her husband drove to a local CVS. When the caller directed Hassler to type in an order number at an ATM inside the store, a screen appeared prompting her to pay in bitcoin.

Alarm bells starting going off in her head.

“The guy was very adamant, saying that they had changed account numbers, that it messed with their banking system,” Hassler said. As she started to push back, he became agitated, assuring her it wasn’t a scam and saying she just needed to insert her debit card.

She shoved the card back in her wallet, hit cancel on the screen, and hung up the phone. She called Peco, then the local police department to report the incident, which was especially jarring to Hassler as a past victim of identity theft.

“My fear is I have an 89-year-old mother-in-law. What if they call someone like that who doesn’t know anything about bitcoin or anything else at the ATM?” she said.

Peco will never ask customers to make payments over the phone, officials said in the email to customers. If service were going to be shut off, there would be a regulated disconnection process, which involves advance notice.

Customers who receive a call, text, email, or a visit from someone that seems suspicious should call Peco directly at 1-800-494-4000, the company urges. About 900 customers have reported scams to Peco in the first four months of the year, spokesperson Tom Brubaker said.

This comes amid an overall rise in unwanted calls. Each month, U.S. consumers receive about four billion robocalls, according to the Federal Communications Commission. These include more banal notifications and payment reminders, as well as telemarketing and scam calls.

Several times a day, Alisa Garnek’s cell phone rings from numbers she doesn’t recognize. It feels to her like the calls have increased recently.

“It is shocking how many spam calls come through now,” said the 45-year-old King of Prussia financial planner. She also received a call two weeks ago from someone threatening to cut off her Peco service due to an unpaid bill (which that morning had been debited from her account via autopay). “It makes you not want to answer any calls.”