Residents of Western Australia shared the text online to warn each other of the text message from electricity supplier Western Power – even though it was legitimate.
A link to details of the supposed outage, an obvious grammatical error, and the company’s name being shortened to ‘WesternPwr’ all seemed like dead giveaways.
The message tells the receiver ‘We’re sorry about the unplanned power outage in the (sic) your area.
‘The cause is currently under investigation and the estimated restoration time is currently 11am,’ it says, while being careful not to say what day at 11am.
The receiver, who probably has noticed that their electricity is not actually gone, will no doubt be confused.
If, however, they haven’t been put off by the poor use of English and the fact that their power isn’t off, they might be tempted by the next line.
It reads ‘Get the latest updates and restoration times on the Western Power website.’
Western Power’s website, gives examples of what genuine communications from it about power outages look like.
The company also notes that customers can choose whether they want to receive planned outage notifications via email, SMS or mail.
Western Power’s default method is email, followed by SMS, and finally mail.
Residents of Western Australia shared the text online to warn each other of the scam pretending to be electricity supplier Western Power
However, Western Power confirmed the message was in fact legitimate and the link led to its outage updates page, so its concerned customers had nothing to worry about.
‘This text doesn’t appear to be scam, the link goes direct to the Western Power outages map (we regularly send text messages to customers impacted by unplanned outages),’ it said.
‘It’s just in a compressed URL format rather than a direct link as there are character limits to SMS messages.’
Authorities urged people to be wary of text message scams after victims reported losing $2.6 million in the first seven months of this year.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission deputy chair Delia Rickard said it was important to independently verify suspicious messages.
‘We are warning Australians to be very wary of messages from unknown numbers,’ she said.
‘Scammers will stop at nothing to get your personal details or money.’