Between email, calls, texts, and now an unending torrent of AI slop, I feel like I’ve been fighting off scammers every single day for basically my entire adult life. And now that my creaky adult body is starting to succumb to the inexorable forces of entropy, the scammers are coming for my health insurance. I suppose that only makes sense. Existence is suffering–existence on the internet, more so.
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation says that there’s been a huge uptick in scammers pretending to be health insurance representatives. Based on the short news bulletin (spotted by PCMag), it’s a familiar setup. In the same way that scammers pretend to be communicating from a bank or a government official, they’ll pretend to be a healthcare or insurance representative, hoping to put people off their guard.
Once the initial panic sets in, they’ll be more likely to share “protected health information, medical records, personal financial details, or providing reimbursements for alleged service overpayments or non-covered services.” From there, a scammer can start in on the usual identity theft two-step, either trying to break into your personal accounts with said info or simply trying to register for new bank accounts, credit cards, et cetera as you.
Since this is the FBI we’re talking about, presumably the scammers are targeting Americans, who are already on edge for the most expensive medical care in the world thanks to our health insurance system. Ongoing attempts to cut Medicare and Medicaid programs have elevated concerns for millions. Of course, there’s nothing stopping the same scammers from targeting people in other countries with a little tweaking. Generative AI systems have made these scam packages easy to create and deploy to victims en masse.
As usual, the advice is simple, if not exactly easy to follow in the heat of the moment. Don’t follow links from email addresses or texts from phone numbers you don’t know. Verify information in another tab, or even another device, instead. Don’t share any personal information, especially logins or passwords, with anyone you can’t independently verify. Oh, and maybe pass this info along to anyone in your family who’s a little less technical.