Pay your bills, not impersonators
If you’re paying a County vehicle registration, County property tax or County water bill online you probably expect to wind up on the County’s website at Shelbyal.com. However many impersonators websites exist that may try to trick you into paying with them instead. That is exactly what the FTC says a company called Doxo is doing now. “Doxo intercepted consumers trying to reach their billers and tricked them into paying millions of dollars in junk fees,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
According to the FTC, Doxo pretended to be an official payment site for big-name companies like AT&T, Spectrum, and Labcorp and many County and City governments. The FTC says Doxo used online ads that looked like they were from these entities and even used company names and phone numbers as keywords so Doxo’s ads would show up in search results.
If the bills got paid, what’s the problem? There’s lots of them, says the FTC. People who paid their bills through Doxo often paid fees to Doxo on top of what they owed on the bill they were trying to pay. And, in some cases, the payment never got to the company that issued the bill. People only found out when they got a warning letter from a bill collector or had their utility service shut off. Some people wound up paying late fees to the actual company that billed them — or paid their bill a second time, just to avoid other problems.
If you’re looking to pay your bill online, know that search results might not get you to the right place. Instead, check your bill to find the online payment site or start at Shelbyal.com.
Learn more about impersonator scams at ftc.gov/impersonators. If you spot an impersonator scam, tell the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.