Everyone’s talking about climate change. One way to help tackle the issue is to make some energy efficient home improvements to our homes, which can help to reduce bills too.

But it’s important to note that as more and more renewable energy products crop up, we’re also seeing a steep rise in fraudulent activity in this area. Criminals are increasingly preying on unsuspecting homeowners, often scamming them into fake deals on sustainable home improvements, such as heat pumps, solar panels, and other renewable energy technologies. 

It’s been reported that the threat of green scams continues to rise, so here’s what you need to know to help you identify when something doesn’t seem quite right.

Criminals will often contact their targets via phone, text, or email, with some pretending to be from price comparison websites offering ‘special deals and discounts’. In a different scam, criminals invited people to apply for the government’s £400 energy grant¹, in order to steal their financial information.

If something like this happens to you, stop and think before responding, especially if they’re asking you for any personal details. Genuine providers will never request this information over text or email, as they’d need to go through the usual identity verification checks first. So if in doubt, it’s always worth checking the credentials of the company.

They may also try to entice you through other methods, such as: 

• offering free health checks for solar panels
• selling voltage optimisers or falsely claiming that your inverters need changing
• claiming that your solar panels are a potential fire risk or that a fire switch replacement is needed because the law has changed (neither of which is true).