Phone scammers in Alabama have gone multi-lingual, according to the state’s major power utility.
Alabama Power, serving 1.4 million customers in the southern two-thirds of the state, recently reported a new take on a years-old scam. In it, callers warn utility customers that a quick payment is needed to keep the lights on and urge them to pay with prepaid money cards. The scammers’ tactics remain essentially the same, but now they are branching out with Spanish-speaking callers targeting Hispanic businesses and restaurants, according to a warning issued by the Alabama Attorney General.
The warning is a reminder that phone scams are not limited to English-speaking callers and consumers.
Recognizing this, the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau has long provided Spanish translations of its many consumer guides, including a growing number of ones focusing on frauds, scams and alerts.
More recently, we have expanded our consumer education efforts to include translations into Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Korean – the most common Asian American Pacific Islander languages spoken in Asian American households, according to the US Census Bureau.
You can find them all here:
- Guías en Español (Spanish)
- 消費者指南 (Chinese)
- Consumer Mga Gabay (Tagalog)
- Người tiêu dùng Hướng dẫn (Vietnamese)
- 소비자 안내서 (Korean)
For more information, visit our Consumer Guide library, including a regularly updated list of the guides most viewed by our visitors.