Sounds kind of speculative to me. A static magnetic field, like that created by a magnet isn't going to interfere with an RF transmitter.
At least one manufacturer of gas meter transmitters indicates that their product will detect magnetic tampering. Perhaps they use some kind of motion detection scheme based on magnetic coupling, since the fundamental metering strategy is to measure the motion of a bellows as gas flows through it, and that sensor can be confused by a strong magnetic field.
In my experience employees at gas utilities sometimes seem to have a narrow way of thinking. In the days of manual reading I once got a gas bill with an impossible amount of gas consumption, where one of the higher digits in the "reading" had changed, when lower digits hadn't. It appeared to me to be an obvious typo or reading error, so I called the gas company.
The guy they sent out read the meter and promptly announced that I must have set it back - since now the same digit was what it always had been in prior months. No amount of explaining how the math worked, or how the corrected reading made sense compared to our normal usage would change his opinion. It took a half a dozen phone calls and another visit by a gas company guy before they finally agreed with what was obvious in the first place.
Some of their arguments were laughable. When I tried to explain that it didn't make sense for our gas usage to have increased by a factor of 100 over one month they suggested we may have been taking longer showers.
PGW's explanation might come from the same set of talking points.
As someone who worked for 30 years for a gas company, and who saw and heard customers pull off one outrage after another, all I can say is that most customers are as honest as they can get away with. That breeds contempt by many employees. You have no idea the scams customers pull. It tends to make most employees rather jaded.
They installed those smart gas meters, here in Orange County, CA, a few months ago. My next bill was twice as much, as my all time highest bill (in a 15 year period).Before I got around to asking about it, the media was flooded with outraged stories, from similar situations.
At first, The Gas Company blamed it on an the cold winter month(it was not abnormally cold). They also had to deal with a huge black eye, caused by a massive gas leak about 90 miles north, of here; speculation had it that we were paying for the lost gas. After about six weeks, and a ton of news reports, they fessed up, and admitted that the fancy new meters were to blame.
Still waiting to see how, or if, they make this right.