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this is pretty much what I expected
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when we're checking people normally
don't come out and the reason is if they
are stealing power they do not want us
to see their face you're gonna have 240
voltage coming into that meter they
could be burned they could be killed my
name is Curtis Milton I'm the senior
manager of Revenue Security
so I'm overall the Delta of electricity
here at encore in the state of Texas
well there's many ways that we find
tampering throughout our system one
being customers notifying us that either
a neighbor or they see something that
looks funny to them we work closely with
all levels of law enforcement we also
have ways that we find it through data
analytics whenever we find tampering
that an account regardless of what type
of tampering it is we've removed the
meters now that we have advanced meters
they store data and we use the data from
these meters as part of the evidence
we're here at the revenue Security
warehouse and for Texas we store all of
our tampering evidence and we find as we
visit locations in the field you know we
currently are sitting on a little over
30,000 pieces of evidence that we've
collected over the last 24 months
don't use basically anything that will
conduct electricity a lot of what we
found is no clothes hangers pieces of
copper wire knives don't even use a beer
can just a couple of weeks ago I found
that the blade to a steak knife just the
blade not the handle part or anything so
there was really no safe part of it to
grab it's very dangerous because while
you're sticking it in there its
energized I wear gloves that are rated
for up to 600 volts and I would be
scared to touch these things barehanded
for a lot of people it's a way of life
they try to get away with it as long as
they can until we catch them
we have analysts that analyze all the
data coming from the meters and we've
got some data that is potential for that
that's what we're hoping to find here
what I normally like to do is try and I
could get my fingers behind the meter
and you can actually feel if there's a
jumper behind the meter and yeah there's
something behind this meter
yep this is pretty much what I expected
what we found here some jumpers that are
attached to the backside of meter so
it's basically diverting electricity
it's going through these copper jumpers
instead of through the me with the the
day down downloading from this meter I
hope to find out when these jumpers were
installed typically we don't prosecute
at a residential location but we do what
we call back bill we figure out what you
possibly could have taken in that time
period based on what you've used with
your past history there is a tampering
fee and that tampering of fee includes
you know our site visit if it is more
complicated that we've got to call in
additional employees then there is a fee
that that we add to that customer for
that again the big deal is is about the
safety it's really not about the money
it's not about revenue of course that is
important but the ultimate in gold is is
that we keep everybody safe
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