As Elwood once said to Jake – “You can’t lie to a nun.”  The energy salesman in this article better hope that the none of the nuns in questions are anything like Sister Mary Stigmata.

A group of Chicago-area nuns claims that an unregulated natural gas utility, since charged with fraud by the Illinois attorney general, pressured them into signing an exploitative contract.The Sisters of the Living Word are among hundreds of customers who allege that salesmen for U.S. Energy Savings Corp. misled them about cutting their gas bills. The nuns agreed to five-year contracts that locked in rates almost 50 percent higher than those currently offered by regulated utilities.

When the treasurer for the Roman Catholic order attempted to cancel contracts for gas for two apartments with U.S. Energy Savings, the Toronto-based company tried to charge an additional $1,180 penalty.

“Our mission is jeopardized by this needless expense,” the order’s treasurer, Michael Gibbs, wrote in a letter to the Citizens Utility Board, which negotiated with U.S. Energy Savings to revoke the penalty.

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