Since this is an embarrassing public service announcement about falling prey to something akin to a scam, I'd like to frontload it with a few established facts.
First: I am the designated skeptic in our house, the one most likely to not answer the door if a stranger comes knocking.
Second, I take disproportionate pride in passing all the phishing-test emails the IT department sends out at work.
Third, about 10 days before this incident took place, I aced an online quiz titled "Could You Be the Victim of a Scam?" I like to think I have a Grade A bullshit detector bestowed via the miracle of genetics and 25 years as a journalist.
But now I don't know.
It's late afternoon on a workday and the dog starts barking her frantic someone's-at-the-door bark. I look out the window to see a young woman wearing a reflective vest — like something a utility worker would wear — so I decide I'd better see what's up. I step onto the porch, where she holds up a letter from Dominion, our natural gas supplier, and says she's being sent to follow up with folks who didn't answer the letter. There's a vague sense of emergency in her voice, and it's true that I ignore almost every piece of mail from Dominion because I pay my bill online. So instead of telling her to take a hike, I listen more.
Right here I'm going to say that it's about 5 in the afternoon, when I am at neither my sharpest nor most caffeinated.
At any rate, It takes a few minutes for me to realize she is not actually FROM Dominion, but from another company that supplies natural gas via Dominion gas lines. But I actually did have to say, "Oh, so you're not from Dominion, then?" before she admitted that she was not.
Instead, she spins a tale about how Dominion could raise my natural gas rates up to $12 per cubic whatever, and asks me if I know what I'm paying now, and of course I don't, so I agree to look up my bill online to see that I'm currently paying about $4. Her sell is that if I sign with her company (what was the name again?) I could lock in a guarantee of $6 per cubic whatever for a year.
It wasn't as if my skeptical self sauntered back into the house to do some day drinking. No, she was saying, "Hmm. Six dollars is more than four. Does that make any sense to you, Karen?"
But I was vaguely aware of news stories predicting spikes in natural gas prices due to Russia's ongoing rape of Ukraine as well as climate change weather events that have made this summer, we'd have to agree, a season of Biblical cataclysmic heat, fires and floods that suggests we actually have crossed the Rubicon and now the scientists are just too kind to mention it anymore.
But I digress. What was happening on the porch with Reflective Vest Lady is that I was feeling a little guilty for never having checked into alternate natural gas suppliers, so I kept listening. Also — and this is important — now that I had answered the door, I didn't want to be the person who wouldn't listen. Plus, she was sort of charming.
Inside, of course, my skeptic was whispering, "You should not be engaging with this person; it's not too late to send her on her way," but my journalist part was responding with, "And I will, if I detect that this is a scam. And I will know if it's a scam, because I pass all those phishing tests at work."
By the way, it isn't precisely a scam. I ask enough questions to satisfy myself that this is a real company that delivers an actual product, although skeptical Karen isn't sure about agreeing to something that costs more than I am currently paying. Still: Ukraine. Floods. Fires. Price hikes.
Long story short, I agree to switch.
This entails giving a stranger my Dominion account number — a fact which gives me a five-alarm shame attack to admit, but I did it. Why WOULDN'T I have to do that, after all? I was authorizing this company (what was its name again?) to tell Dominion I am switching my natural gas provider.
Along the way, Reflective Vest Lady makes conversation. Did I have any tattoos? She and her mom were going to go together to get tattoos. What kind of dog is Daisy?
When the time draws near to sign the contract, there is one more step, which involves a third party verification company calling me on my cell phone to answer some brief questions. Reflective Vest hits some keys on her iPad, triggering a call to my cell phone, where the representative explains that her job is to determine whether I know what I am getting myself into (ha!) and that she will be asking me a series of questions which I am to answer very straightforwardly yes or no.
Her first question is whether I can confirm that the salesperson has left my property. But of course she is still sitting on our glider on the front porch. So, stumped, I hold my phone against my chest and tell Reflective Vest what I am being asked, and she whispers, "That's OK, just say yes."
I get back on the phone, and the verifier lady is saying, "Who were you talking to? It sounds like the salesperson is still there. Can you confirm that they have left your property?"
So I hang up on the verifier. "Look," I tell RV, "she was asking whether you are still here. I assume that's because she wanted to be sure you were gone as I answered the survey."
RV starts explaining why the company asks that and why it shouldn't matter, but the more she talks, the more the explanation sounds like it was written by Trump at 3 in the morning.
"I don't care," I tell her. "I'm not going to lie for this."
Don't I sound like a smart, reasonable person here?
Now, I see this little flash of anger in RV's eyes, almost as if she has forgotten the nice mother-daughter tattoo outing in her near future. And she says, with a frisson of passive aggression, "Fine. I'll leave, and I can have them call you back again."
That seems reasonable. So I answer a few more of RV's questions reiterating the terms of the contract and agreeing to switch providers. Then she triggers the verification process again and leaves my porch, and I go inside and answer the verifier's questions, including the ones that acknowledge that I can cancel the contract at no charge within 30 days, and after that I would be charged $150 to cancel. And that if I wanted to cancel, I had to call my local utility company (Dominion) to inform them.
Done deal.
Then I get off the phone and check my email where, as I had been promised, I find a communication with the contract attached. And of course the company's name (what was it again?) is on the letterhead, so I do the smart thing and look them up on the Better Business Bureau site.
And there I find a litany of complaints so egregious that my laptop practically bursts into flames.
In the words of Bugs Bunny, what a maroon.
To add insult to injury, at that very moment our neighborhood's Facebook page is lit up with warning posts about this shady-seeming young woman who is going door-to-door in a reflective vest.
I immediately call Dominion, where a representative answers the phone with "How can I help you?"
I tell her, "Well, I, um ... think I was scammed and I feel like a jerk."
"Uh-huh. People going door-to-door?" she asks.
Then she very kindly describes the basics of the interaction I'd just had, tells me it's not my fault, and makes a point that these companies especially prey on places where older people and people who are not that tech-savvy tend to live. I tell her I didn't consider myself to be in either category, but that doesn't stop her from repeating that little detail again later in the otherwise pleasant 10-minute conversation where we iron things out.
Bottom line: The Dominion lady put a note in my account file indicating that we do not want to change natural gas providers. She also tells me to call the company and cancel the contract, and to be prepared to be harsh, since these companies often get nasty when folks try to cancel. She gives me the number for the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, and suggests I tell the company that I am willing to call and report them to PUCO if they give me any grief.
"And I'm sorry to tell you this," she adds, "but since these people now have your information, sometimes what they do is wait a bit, then resubmit it to us as if you have authorized the switch. They won't tell you they've done it. So you really need to call us back about once a week for several months until they get tired and move onto someone else."
SEVERAL MONTHS.
The next day, I called the company and canceled. It all seemed to go very smoothly and easily, which of course made me super-suspicious, because after all I had seen the BBB complaints about how much they lie. And now I have a reminder on my calendar to call Dominion every Thursday to confirm that they are still my natural gas supplier.
As Wordle says when you bat a six, "Phew."
I spent about a day feeling extremely ashamed of myself, wondering how a woman can turn into the I've-Fallen-And-I-Can't-Get-Up person in the span of an hour.
But the Dominion rep had said one thing that I think is worth noting.
These people are very good at what they do.
For every person they sign to a new contract, the salesfolk earn $100. My guess is that they knock on a lot of doors before they hit that $100, and also that they have been trained in techniques that exploit any little cracks in the foundation.
In my case, those vulnerabilities were low late-day power reserves, guilt about not having previously investigated alternative gas suppliers, my belief that I was too smart to be had, and then of course the problem of looking at someone on my porch and telling them to leave. I was raised to be a nice girl, and no amount of journalism training ever washes that scourge away completely.
So I offer this embarrassment of a story because scammers — and real companies that use scammer sales techniques — really grind my gears and I want to interrupt their mojo.
Over the last few years, scammers have gone after two of my smartest friends. One scammer succeeded and the other was a near miss. I was hoping my friends might share their stories widely, but I understand why they didn't. In a closed-group online community I'm part of, a friend admitted that she had been scammed and that it deeply devastated her sense of herself. The part of me that spent a day self-flagellating with colorful, Karen-directed profanity gets that completely.
The day after all this happened, I hopped on Amazon to order a "no soliciting" sign for our front door. I remembered seeing these things once when I canvassed for a school levy. I figured the person behind the door was about 102 and had some quaint beliefs that a sign like that might really keep unwanted visitors away.
I know it won't. But I put the sign up anyway -- for me. Now, whenever I open my front door, there it is, a shiny reminder to myself that the weasels are out there. They will call on the phone. They will knock on the door. They will be charming. Some will be convincing.
My job is to remember not to invite them in for tea.