Nunavut power minister: I too have been scammed

If you live in Nunavut, between now and Nov. 5 you may get a phone call from a telephone surveyor working on behalf of the Qulliq Energy Corp. But if you get a call from someone threatening to cut your power off if you don’t pay your QEC bill immediately, hang up, because it’s a con artist trying to rip you off. (FILE PHOTO)

Beware of callers who claim they’re phoning you on behalf of the Qulliq Energy Corp.—if they can’t offer service in Inuktitut, they may be trying to rip you off.

Pangnirtung MLA Johnny Mike, the minister responsible for the QEC, ought to know.

“This may be humorous or unbelievable what I am about to tell to you, as I have personally been scammed,” Mike said Oct. 28 in the legislative assembly.

Mike had been responding to questions from Iqaluit-Sinaa MLA Paul Okalik about the languages used by a company called Forum Research, which the QEC has hired to do a $40,000 telephone survey in Nunavut.

Forum Research is doing the survey between Oct. 17 and Nov. 5, in Inuktitut, French or English, Mike said.

But it appears as if the survey firm’s legitimate QEC phone calls are getting confused with a wave of scam calls that have plagued Nunavut residents since at least March 2015.

The rip-off works like this. A person rings you up, claiming to represent the QEC and then tells you they’ll cut off your power unless you make an immediate payment with a credit card, the QEC said this past December in a PSA.

The QEC, however, does not use phone calls to contact customers whose bills are overdue.

But the con artists who work this type of fraud appear to be so convincing, they even managed briefly to fool the Nunavut QEC minister.

That’s because when he received his scam phone call, Mike assumed it was a Forum Research surveyor who had called him.

“Apparently, a scammer called me, but I thought it was the survey group that was calling me. I found out it was a scam as I wasn’t expecting a call other than from the group, and due to that personal experience, I have tasked the QEC administrators to keep that in mind,” Mike said.

To provide assurance to those who receive legitimate QEC survey calls, Mike said he has asked QEC officials to make sure that survey calls start off in Inuktitut.

“I tasked the senior managers in QEC to resolve this issue and to ensure Inuktitut is the first language used when calling Nunavummiut as most of their clients are Inuit who speak in Inuktitut,” Mike said.

In his series of questions, Okalik said “a southern-based company, using only English interviewers” had won the contract to do the telephone survey.

But Mike said the survey is to be done in Inuktitut, French or English and that the contractor has hired an Inuk in Ottawa to help with the survey.