Are M Group Energy a legitimate company?

Hi ​@Lorena Milla ,

Actually, M Group does work for OVO! They’re a known contractor so you may have accidentally blocked something legitimate. Let me see if ​@Abby_OVO is around though, just to be safe.

Bear with us!

I'm happy to also share screenshots of the email and text I received. As I mentioned I did contact support to check if they could corroborate this (I never had an email or anything from Ovo about them sending someone to my home), and they checked my account but said they didn't have a visit to my home in their records, which is why I reported this.

If there is confirmation this firm is not above board you can contact the Information Commissioner as this is a data breach.  Perhaps it is one department at OVO not talking to another?  A working from home communication concern.

Are you sorted now ​@Lorena Milla 

Hi ​@Ben_OVO , apologies, I missed your reply. That's good to know! Thank you for investigating. Do you know if there is someone in the OVO team I could speak to, to confirm the work that needs to be done? I haven't got an email or anything from the OVO side confirming this, so I'd appreciate being able to check before I get in touch with MDS, just for peace of mind.

Thank you!

Hi ​@Lorena Milla 

With the prevalence of phishing attacks it's not unreasonable to suspect emails from unknown addresses. I'm one of the forum volunteers along with ​@Blastoise186 and others and sometimes look into the background of how these things happen and how we can help customers in a more generic sense so that they can help themselves in the first case. To that end I have found that there is a site that examines the authenticity of email addresses and it is here.

https://email-checker.net/

Have a read at what it does and have a go at putting the address into it and see what happens. If it comes back as not suspect that should give you the confidence to at least start a dialogue with the company to see what they actually want. Most of what happens in the background of energy supply companies is complex to say the least so it is not surprising that that customers are confused and possibly alarmed when an unknown company contacts them without warning. To be honest better communication from OVO to the customer is also to be expected in the first place.

As volunteers we have regular meetings with OVO staff to discuss specific snd general topics and I'm going to raise this and take the issue forward with perhaps better guidance for customer account staff and making customers aware of tools they can use to help themselves with suitable guidance.

We do all strive to do better but the scammers etc who would take advantage our customers are always one step ahead and we have to adapt and evolve to keep up.

Peter

Indeed, as the cybersecurity pro of the group it’s often part of what I do here to keep an eye out for this stuff.

I am tempted to write a forum guide myself to help with explaining exactly who OVO uses, how they reach out and for what purposes, but I don’t have enough access to internal resources to be definitive. I’ll definitely consider suggesting this for future forum content though.

Thanks for bringing this up!