DEARBORN — The owner of Fuego Mexican Grill on Schaefer Road lost $1,000 to a swindler, who posed as a DTE Energy representative over the telephone on Thursday, June 27.

The scammer called the restaurant in the middle of the establishment’s dinner rush, claiming that he works at DTE Energy. He told the owner, Sam Alvarado, that a work crew was coming to shut off the business’s electricity in an hour and the only way to avoid the shut-off would be to pay $1,000 that was owed by the restaurant to the energy company. 

The restaurant is signed up for automatic monthly online payments. However, the caller had said that the online payment system had not been working for months.

“We were busy, so we were like what do we do?” said Alvarado.

Alvarado added that he was skeptical, because the caller spoke in Spanish, and DTE Energy does not have language options. However, the scammer knew private information about the business’s payment history, which made him more believable.

Eventually, Alvarado’s wife, who handles bills and payments for the business, purchased two PayPal MoneyPaks from the Walgreens across the street, each for $500, and gave their numbers to the caller, transferring the money over to him. 

MonyPaks are prepaid cards, which could be purchased at convenience stores and instantly added to a PayPal account by simply applying the number of the card to the online bank account. They can hold up to a maximum of $500.

Transactions under $500 are untraceable online, via PayPal.

The owner realized that the call was a scam when the caller could not provide the restaurant’s DTE Energy account number. Unfortunately, by then it was too late– the money had already been transferred.

After calling DTE Energy and having them confirm that they were the victim of a scam, Alvarado and his wife filed a police report.

The next day, the couple called the swindler, whose number has a Virginia area code, but he was adamant in insisting that the money did, in fact, go to DTE Energy and stuck to his story, 

“It’s horrible to do this to people, especially a small business. We work really hard,” said Alvarado. “We were keeping this money to pay our sales tax. Now we are short on our taxes.”

He added that the caller, who sounded like a native Spanish speaker, specifically targeted Fuego Mexican Grill as a Latino business. 

He was told by the police that he could get his money back if they get to the scammer, but it would be a long process.

Fuego Mexican Grill, which has ironically been featured on the DTE Energy magazine for its energy conservation, opened in 2010 and is located at 7040 Schaefer Rd. It serves authentic Mexican food and uses halal meat to cater to the area’s large Muslim community.