By Craig Marx, Editor

A member of our Antigo Times staff received a call on our business line on Friday morning from a company claiming to be Xcel Energy. The man on the line claimed that we needed to call their billing department immediately in order to provide credit card information for our bill lest our power would be disconnected in 45 minutes from that time.

Our office uses Wisconsin Public Service for our power provider.

The “company” left a phone number for their billing department at 1-888-617-7222 (ext. 101). After calling the number just to check it out, the production quality of the answering service alone was rather poor. After entering the billing extension, a man answered the call the first time while on a second try it went to voicemail, a service that is not used traditionally by billing services that want to keep their customers on the phone.

The actual billing/payment method phone number from the Xcel Energy website is 1-888-747-1523. Xcel also had a separate page describing potential scams and how to deter them, located at this link:

https://www.xcelenergy.com/billing_and_payment/customer_data_&_privacy/avoiding_scams

We wanted to let the public know that this occurred. If this happens to you, please do not follow up with this billing claims department, especially if you realize you do not even use their service.