ON Saturday morning, 26 January, I received a phone call on our landline from a man who said he was calling as an employee of eThekwini Municipality.
He said he can see we applied for a rate rebate in March 2018 upon which he asked whether we have applied for a rebate in 2019.
He even quoted the amounts of our electricity bill for the past three months.
He then said someone from eThekwini would come to our home. He gave a reference number and said unless the employee quotes the reference, not to allow him on our premises.
Not long after we received the phone call from a young, well-dressed, man in his early 20s who said he was at the gate.
He quoted the reference number and my husband allowed him in. He introduced himself as Kale employed by eThekwini Municipality, however, we noticed that he had no eThekwini identification.
He mentioned that a girl by the name of Anastasia had been to our home on three different occasions finding nobody home.
He asked to talk to us about how we can save up to R1 200 per month on the electricity bill, as my husband is a pensioner, by installing this new meter.
Because one is wary of any such persons – my husband asked our son to sit in on the conversation.
The man was so caring and concerned about pensioners and their money. He explained to us the benefits of having the new meter installed – which would only cost us R3 000.
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The option was to pay cash or give credit card details. He was quite pushy to pay today and the meter would be ordered today and installed the following working day.
We opted to do EFT. He was not at all impressed – as the money would only reflect after seven days.
My question to him was, “do we use the same account details as when payment is made to eThekwini?”
His answer was, no, it needed to go to a different account. He then said he really needed to rush off to the next client. We asked for banking details and needless to say, have not received any to date. We immediately smelt a rat.
My concern is that it seems that people are pretending to be concerned about the poor pensioners – but they really stealing pensioners’ money.
Please warn the pensioners.
Sterna Olivier
Malvern
