For residents around Ottawa Street, there are people going door to door claiming to be from the province, and ask for access to your backyard or home to finish a "safety check" These people are scam artists. The company they said they represented was "Ontario Energy Group" or OEG with lots of branding on clothes and hats. EOG has nothing to do with the Ontario government.
All in the course of a single pitch, that his company was working with home-owners in the area. Then they were doing inspections on behalf of the province. Then finally he said that energy efficiency standards had changed and based on the exterior pipes he could see protruding from the side of our house, he could tell we did not have energy-efficient equipment heating our home. When we told him he was representing a scam, he protested and claimed his business was accredited by the Better Business Bureau. I looked his company up on the BBB site not only were they not accredited, they have been in existence for less than a year. The BBB listed the name of the CEO and indicated the company had only that single employee which is how the listing remains the last time I checked it. By the way, an earlier version of this blog post provided a hyperlink to the Linkedin profile of the BBB-listed CEO showing that he d gone from new university grad to Sales Executive to Director of Marketing to CEO of his own (scam) company in less than four years. Now that s entrepreneurial! The CEO has since removed that level of detail from his public profile. Hmm, wonder why?
The Ontario Ministry of Consumer Services maintains a Beware List of shady businesses that have been reported to them. They have a list of over twenty names doing business in the water heater industry that are scams. Several of them have the same name located at different addresses. The same sort of result appears when you search for furnace scams. That s great info when you re looking up companies online that you may want to do business with be sure to check them out first. But even if the company does not appear on the Beware List, don t let them in your door or share any info with them. Note also that the Competition Bureau of Canada has gone after several door-to-door water heater sales companies for their anti-competitive policies and practices. Reliance and Enercare (formerly Direct Energy) have agreed to settle out of court for millions of dollars. Don t worry, I m sure they consider that the price of doing business.