Georgia Power (Southern Company) is currently and has been for some time replacing their older meters (and most of the newer ones) with "SMART METERS" , saves having to have the meter reader get out of the truck to read the meter , just pull up close and point the reader device at the meter.
And in some areas it's all done by RF.

 

Yep. We 'spect that's happenin' all over the place, purty soon.
Oh..wait...you aren't from Georgia. (I was looking at your icon.)

Who's yere? (if you know that much about Indiana history)

and welcome to allaboutcircuits.

 

Could it be that your "smart meter" was a "pre-Paid meter"? If you pre pay, and load the power budget into the meter with a "smart box" then you had a meter that was synchronized to the smart box. This meter can be turned off remotely, but must be reprogrammed to change service.
...
dataman19

 

Since this is for a project,
You will need two similar devices that generates one pulse per kw or watt*time.
Wire these signal to a digital counter, one to increment and another to decrement the count. The counter has to produce an alarm when the output is more than say 3 and after a delay of say 1 minute.
Attach the pulse generator, one at the source (sending end) and other at the load (receiving end). So long as you keep the loads constant, the alarm will not be triggered. (provide automatic reset on powerup)
If the load is stolen in the middle or anywhere, the source will feed more and the count will keep going negative. Depending on the count value, you can state how much power was lost, or energy if you multiply by time.
In reallity this can be done based on hourly or daily basis, multiple counters for cumilative loss etc.

regards,
Maanga.