Well, the time has come again. I received a phone call today from a company called Energy Savings Manitoba, whom offered for me to come down tomorrow at 11:15am to their scurfield location for a job interview. Saying that they looked at my resume and that they had a position to offer me and that I would receive training for this position.

I received a second phone call to re-affirm this a few hours later.  That simply re-affirmed this bad feeling I had from the initial phone call.  The last time I had recieved a phone call like this was AIG insurance and before that with another insurance agency.  In the case of AIG, they required you to spend $1000 from your own pocket to receive the training for their ‘job’ and they would ‘provide leads’ on potential customers.  Long story short, all of these companies have questionable reputations to begin with.  On top of that when you do research into how their ‘representatives’ work, you find out quickly that they are con-artists. 

In the case of my latest job offer, like the others, harvest resumes off Monster.ca or Workopolis, ignore the content and simply contact people en masse.  Then they pull you in for a ‘job interview’ which is more of a recruiting session to sucker people into the profitable field of energy brokerage.  Their tactics, according to a number of sources available online, include flat-out lying to their victims about what they’re signing, signing home owners up for ‘savings plans’ that are supposedly designed to equalize the cost of energy over a 5 year period.  In actuality, they charge around double for the service that they’re brokering.  That’s not the kicker though, they will claim that anyone who answers the door can sign for the home-owner, which in reality they have no right, but they do it anyways.  They will lie to a person claiming to be a represenative from the current energy/gas provider and to inform them of changes in their billing fees, etc. and will ask the home-owner to sign a document saying that the person who told them was actually there.  This is part of the scam, they will cover the page with fliers, documents, whatever and fold it so that they can quickly sucker you in and get out. They have lots of legitimate looking graphs and support information, but beware! It’s accuracy is questionable at best. One tale even involved a representative going onto a Canadian Forces base (soliciting on a base is illegal) and pushing and forcing the issue until the person signed.

I’m not going to bother going for the interview now, since I doubt I’d even get a real job interview experience from the bunch.  So a word of advice to everyone out there, do not sign anything that someone brings to your door that looks like a contract or is folded. Be especially careful if:

• They’re claiming a change of price in energy costs and that they’re coming from the local energy company
• They will save you money on your energy bills by signing you up for a 5 year contract

Simply put, be very careful with these predatory brokers abounding. I’m not aware if this extends to phone call soliciting either, but if you have any loved ones that could fall prey to such a crime as this, please educate them and inform them of the dangers involved.

And they said de-regulation was a good thing. Yet another example of where capitalism can be intentionally harmful to and government regulation is ‘A Good Thing’.