HECO Customers Prove Too Smart for Bitcoin Cryptocurrency Scammers

People in Hawaii have been bombarded with automated threating to terminate their power. Scam robots have been making calls to customers to extort money, luckily, they’ve proved to be ineffective.

The lack of accomplishment by the robots, shows that people wising up to scammers, instead they are simply hanging up on the robocalls. HECO reported that out of some seventy robot scam calls, zero were effective in getting payments from the customers.

The onslaught of robo-calls occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week. They continued happening through the weekend at more than ten a day. Home, business owners and commercial employees all reported receiving calls. Businesses of every sort and type were the attempted victims of would-be scammers, who achieved a zero-success rate. A robocall was even reportedly made to a church, proving the true nature of the responsible party.

It’s likely that people refused the calls due to an anti-scam campaign ran by local authorities in 2018. Individuals were taught how to spot fraudulent activity, including phone calls.

The campaign helped them become more self-aware to the attempts of scammers. Robot calls were made against the customers livelihood by way of threat, stating their power would be terminated if they didn’t make payments in 30 mins. Customers were then prompted to pay over the phone through an automated system. One of the phone calls reportedly attempted to extract $700 cash from a customer by way of cryptocurrency.

They asked the individual to send the currency to an anonymous BTC account, he did not comply.

In 2018, more than two-hundred like robocalls were reported to authorities in Hawaii. The calls resulted in thousands of dollars in fraudulent payments from unaware customers, who thought they were sending money to Hawaiian Electric. Thankfully this year, training from the company helped stop theft from happening to some 70 customers.