ST. TAMMANY - More and more calls to the Town of Madisonville have been ending with a clerk advising callers to contact their banks to stop payment.
Over the past two months, those calls have been coming from customers asking why town records don't show their utility bills paid when they know they paid them online.
"We started looking into what they were looking at and realized there was a third-party that had a collection that appeared to be a Madisonville site," said Mayor Jean Pelloat.
That third-party website is Doxo.com. It's a legitimate online bill-pay service that comes up in search engine results, often right next to the real agency or company website. But when clicked, a logo from the real site is displayed, along with a disclaimer of non-affiliation. It's leaving customers confused, and sometimes, with late fees because their payments don't arrive on time.
"People should know and recognize that it's not the town's website," said Pelloat.
So Madisonville alerted Abita Springs, after finding their town name and logo in a search. Abita leaders then alerted their residents and got the St. Tammany Sheriff's Office involved.
"What's wrong with it is it's not authorized and it's not endorsed, so when you're putting your bank account information into here, we have no idea where it's going," said Sgt. Stefan Montgomery with the Financial Crimes Unit.
When detectives started looking deeper, they found it's not just happening in Madisonville and it's not just happening in Abita Springs. It's happening all over St. Tammany Parish, the state and the country.
Doxo.com Co-Founder Roger Parks says that's because his service caters to more than two million users who pay tens of thousands of billers through his website, which has been operating since 2011. He says Doxo is more like a directory of businesses, similar to Yelp, where users recommend the listings and his company adds the contact information and logos, with and without an official partnership, to help clarify to users what business they're clicking on to pay. Parks says customers can use his site as a one-stop-shop to pay multiple bill to those listed businesses for a fee. He says while his service is not unique, it is geared toward filling a gap for the growing amount of mobile users, who may find themselves unable to easily pay a town or company with an antiquated online system.
"I'm providing a benefit to their customers. I am providing a mobile-friendly place for them to pay and I'm guessing many of them, most of them, do not have that on their own," said Parks.
Parks does acknowledge the potential confusion, despite what he says is a clear disclaimer, and offers any government or company listed on Doxo to reach out to have their logo or listing removed if they so choose. But he hopes, instead, that those businesses will want to create official partnerships after learning more about Doxo.
"I get it, there's an education gap," said Parks, "It's incumbent upon us to try and close that. We care about that a lot."
Local leaders and law enforcement just want this situation to teach the public to always be aware of what they're clicking on.
Authorities say the best way to protect yourself is to pay attention to the website URL, take notice of any fees you're not used to paying and see if the website allows you to review your bill before payment.