ESB Impersonation Scam – Fake Rebate Calls and Clone Login Pages

A call or message using the name "ESB" trades on a confusion the Irish electricity market creates. ESB Networks runs the wires and the meters — it describes itself on its own site as "the Irish electricity distribution system operator (DSO), distribution asset owner (DAO), and onshore transmission asset owner (TAO)" — and it does not send your bill. Its own site says its work is funded by "use of system" charges that are "billed to every customer by their electricity suppliers". Electric Ireland and Bord Gáis Energy are suppliers, and one of them, or another supplier, is who actually bills you. ESB Networks describes two separate approaches on two separate channels, and this page keeps them apart because the advice for each differs. On the phone: "A phone caller may try to trick a customer into giving their bank details in return for a special offer or rebate." By text or email: a link that leads, in ESB Networks' words, to "a fake page which will try to deceive them into entering personal information such as a username, password, credit card or bank account information". One line settles either version, and it is ESB Networks' own — it "will never send you text messages, calls or emails with a link to a log in page to a website which asks you to share personal details such as bank details, one-time passcodes or personal information". This is the same shape as the Vodafone Loyalty Discount Scam and the Eir Scam Calls page under this same heading: a utility or telco offering you money or a better deal, ending on a clone page or with your details read down the phone. What is particular here is that neither of those pages has to explain who bills you.

• •Anyone unsure whether ESB Networks, Electric Ireland or another supplier is the company that bills them
• •Households waiting for power to come back after a storm, when contact about the network is expected
• •People who have just switched supplier or moved home and are expecting account paperwork
• •Anyone watching the cost of electricity, for whom a rebate or discount is worth a moment's attention
• •Older adults used to the single name ESB, from before the network and supply sides were separate companies

• •"ESB" is the name most people in Ireland still use for electricity, so it carries trust that no one company today owns
• •Few customers could say which company reads the meter and which one sends the bill, so a message from either sounds plausible
• •A rebate or refund arrives as good news, and good news gets less scrutiny than a demand does
• •Suppliers genuinely do send texts, so the arrival of a text proves nothing either way
• •The landing pages are built to be convincing — ESB Networks warns the link leads to "a fake page" designed to deceive
• •After a storm, a household waiting for restoration is already expecting to be contacted about the network
• •An Garda Síochána describes this exact pattern, quoted by RTÉ: criminals contacting you "by phone (vishing) or by text (smishing) pretending to be your bank, credit card issuer, utility company or a computer company"