We’ve covered the dangers and necessary defenses against various scams, including romance scams, supply chain scams, financial scams, lottery scams, and vishing scams, but now we turn our attention to what could be the most personal and invasive of scams – the medical scam.
But wait, you might think, wouldn’t ROMANCE scams be the most personal and invasive? To that, we would beg to differ. While romance scams do prey on matters of the heart, medical scams prey on matters of life or death. Your health care, your prescriptions, your treatments, even your diagnoses, are at risk. These scams are particularly unethical in that they take advantage of people dependent on medical help and support. There are two main scams in this category – the medical equipment scam and the medical identity theft scam.
Medical equipment scams
There is big business in durable medical equipment (DME) fraud. DME encompasses wheelchairs, walkers, braces, and other devices prescribed by doctors to help patients deal with injury or illness at home.
Fraudsters take advantage of this industry by leveraging the personal information of unsuspecting patients to steal from Medicare. The way they do this is by contacting patients and tricking them into ordering DME by, for instance, telling them they’re eligible for a free device. The scammers then get the users’ health care information and proceed to use it to file false claims, sticking Medicare with the bill for costly devices that,…
