How do I know if a bill is legit? (internet, gas, …)

12 comments

1. Who pays a bill of an unknown service?

2. It wouldn’t be under your name???

3. It’s not exactly easy to get a barcode for a legitimate business, how would a scammer somehow get accepted into the system

4. Don’t pay for anything you’re unsure of. If you don’t know what a bill is for, call the company involved and find out. If it’s from the city hall, go there and ask someone what it is.

   I recommend setting up automatic billing from your bank account anyway – it makes things a lot easier in general.

5. Maybe don’t pay some random BS that you didn’t check? The whole point of a mailbox is to be accessible, so people can send you stuff. What kind of question is that?

6. That is a common strategy of “insurance” companies: they mass mail letters that look like monthly bills, but are in fact sign-up sheets. If you get anything related to insurance, double check that it is insurance you actually have before doing anything with those letters. Its probably not as much of an issue for people who are fully literate and not suffering from dimensia, but I feel like its a targeted scam: someone’s grandma or a recent immigrant with no support network is going to be signed up for seven or eight private health insurance policies.

   I have also caught neighbors’ bills in my mailbox; luckily I was able to read just well enough to recognize they weren’t in my name, but the address was so similar it would be easy to overlook. I can’t be sure if this was just a mistake by a postal worker, although that is most likely, or an attempt by my neighbor to take advantage of my aparent lack of literacy. There would have been several years I lived in Japan where I would not have been able to discern it unless I checked the address on every bill, which was quite a lot of pieces of paper to check.

7. You could switch to autopayments, if you want to avoid the need to have a bill put into your mailbox at all.

8. Do you not know what company you do business with?

9. Thank you everyone for answering. The problem I see was that anyone can possibly forge a common monthly bill and trick you into paying it. Now I understand that’s a problem only to some extent since payment barcode isn’t that easy to get, and also paying by credit cards or direct bank transfer would solve this issue. 😀

10. Legit bill has your name, account number , bar code and address. And comes at almost exactly the same day every month. Very hard to forge this. Not worth it for scammers. They have to create bank account and go through hoops for like few man? Then the scheme discovered and bank shut. Better beg on the street.

11. I think the account number would be relatively hard to guess. You also might consider signing up for online access to your utilities. Then you can cross-reference what’s on their website with what’s in your mailbox.

12. That would require tricking you into making a bank transfer or handing cash in person. Are you smart enough to avoid that?

    If not, what’s your address? You owe me for three internets and two electricities.