April, the beginning of the fiscal year, is when many people move to new homes when they start a new job or a school program. It is also when consumer centers nationwide see a rise in complaints over a variety of dubious new electricity and gas contracts ¡ª enabled by the liberalization of the utilities markets a decade ago.
Between April 2025 and February, the National Consumer Affairs Center received a total of 3,648 complaints over electricity contracts and 418 on gas contracts. This remains within the same range as the number of cases that have been reported in the past several years ¡ª 3,695 electricity contract issues and 437 with gas in the same time frame last year.
When the retail market for electricity was liberalized in April 2016, residents were able to pick and choose from the menu of services that they wished to have included in their electricity plan, instead of paying a fixed amount that had been pre-established by the local authorities in the area they live in.
Similar liberalization of the gas market followed in April 2017. While this allowed consumers to diversify and customize their utility plans depending on their lifestyle, it has made room for inappropriate business practices.
Some utilities, for instance, tout that the utility costs will be cheaper under their plan without accounting for a variable fuel adjustment charge. In other cases, utilities fail to sufficiently explain the downside of a certain plan in their ads, leading to consumer confusion.
In one case, a man in his 20s reported last July that he signed an electricity contract with a vendor who told him that the entire apartment complex he lives in was changing electricity plans. When he contacted the apartment management company, however, he was told that they were unaware of any plans of changes in the electricity contracts.
Other cases include instances of being solicited to sign other contracts that are unrelated to gas or electricity, such as electricity vendors selling subscriptions to water servers door-to-door.
The consumer affairs center as well as the economy ministry recommend that consumers be extra careful when signing up for new contracts, urging them to check the vendors who are offering the utility plans and the components of service menus that are added in the plan. When switching plans, it¡¯s important to compare the breakdown of costs between the current plan and the price simulation, it said.
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