(Des Moines) — Iowa’s largest utility is warning its customers to be wary if they’re using a search engine to find the company’s 800-number for customer service.
MidAmerican Energy spokesman Dan Winters says scammers are using paid search engine ads to manipulate search results and steer people to fake phone numbers — with crooks waiting to take your call.
“These criminals have figured out that if you put a fraudulent number in enough places on the internet and you connect that phone number to a real company like MidAmerican,” Winters says, “then it tricks internet search results into assuming those two are connected when in fact they are not.”…