Illegal buying of prepaid electricity tokens from illegal or ghost vendors will come to an end on November 24, Eskom has warned that the tokens will not be loaded in the new pre-coded meters.
The power utility has urged its customers to complete the manual Do It Yourself (DIY) recoding process and be able to purchase or load their top-up prepaid electricity tokens after the cut down date.
“If a meter is pre-coded and the customer buys illegal prepaid tokens from illegal or ghost vendors, they will not be able to recode or load the illegal top-up prepaid electricity tokens,” Eskom said.
November 24 is the cut-off date for meters to be recoded to continue to accept pre-paid tokens.
This was revealed in a statement on Tuesday where Eskom announced that it has pre-coded 6.6 million out of its 6.9 million pre-payment meters to ensure that customers continue to purchase electricity beyond the deadline.
Pre-coding is an internal procedure where Eskom prepares the meters for the issuance of recoding tokens.
Eskom mentioned that pre-coding of the meters will not impact the usage of old credit tokens until the DIY process is completed but said it was crucial as old credit tokens will not function after the meter is recoded by a customer through the DIY process.
In the statement, Eskom’s Group Executive for Distribution Monde Bala said that they have changed their approach to deliver the goal of making it as easy as possible for customers using pre-paid meters to do even after the deadline.
“We decided to refocus our resources to pre-code the meters via our central systems, in addition to still promoting the DIY approach, where we had been encouraging customers to recode their meters now.
“Thanks to pre-coding, customers can now effortlessly continue to purchase electricity from authorised vendors with ease after November 24, 2024, safe and confident in the knowledge that their pre-payment meters are either recoded to accept purchased tokens or pre-coded for recoding and can accept tokens purchased through all our official channels,” Bala said.
Eskom further urged customers to input all previously purchased credit tokens from authorised vendors into their meter before entering their new meter recoding tokens.
kamogelo.moichela@iol.co.za
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