The Australian Communications and Media Authority is warning Canberrans not to open an email from electricity company Simply Energy, after residents were targeted with fraudulent bills on Wednesday evening.
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The $288.53 bill purports to be from the South Australian electricity retailer and calls on recipients to download an attachment.
Unlike many email hoaxes, the bill does not include obvious spelling and grammatical errors and appears to be from a legitimate email address.
ACMA has received more than 100 reports in 24 hours about fake bills.
Multiple ActewAGL customers have contacted Fairfax Media concerned about the scam.
"I rang ActewAGL and they said a number of people in Canberra started receiving these," one recipient, Darryl Johnson said.
"Then I rang the ACT Office of Fair Trading and they said they were aware of it and I said you need to let people know otherwise they might go ahead and pay it."
Phil Button was suspicious of the email as he'd only paid his gas bill four days earlier.
He actually rang the number on the email and found a legitimate and exasperated customer service representative on the end.
"If someone responded to this they could get into a bit of a mess," he said.
ActewAGL's general manager of retail Ayesha Razzaq said no customer data had been compromised.
Simply Energy CEO Carly Wishart recommends people delete the email without opening any attachments or clicking on any links in the email.
"We are investigating this issue and will provide further updates," she said in a statement.
