Energy UK, the company which oversees the UK’s six largest energy providers, has voiced copyright infringement concerns over ‘novelty bills’ – fraudulent documents sold online by supposed ‘joke’ websites.
Such websites reportedly offer false reproductions of bills purporting to be from the likes of Scottish Power or Scottish Hydro – and also sell personalised documents with bogus bank branding from Nationwide, Halifax and Santander.
False documents are sold to consumers at a cost of around £25 per page and concerns have been raised that such documents could effectively help buyers to create a ‘fraud toolkit’ in the form of a false name and address backed up by false bank and utility statements.
But Energy UK has raised other concerns – on grounds of copyright infringement.
An Energy UK spokesperson has said: “We are aware that so-called novelty bills are available from certain websites and that they represent a risk, however small, of copyright infringement and fraudulent behaviour.
They added: “We will track incidents across the industry to see how big the problem is and the best course of action to deal with it.”
Energy UK owns the UK’s six largest energy suppliers, including British Gas, EON and Scottish Power – the latter of which is well known to have been targeted by such ‘novelty bill’ websites, according to reports in Herald Scotland.