It’s well known that fraudsters are nothing if not creative and cunning as they continually seek to prey on the most basic human traits of altruism and sympathy.
There are few things more despicable than those who scam the most vulnerable among us or use their stories of hardship and pain to perpetuate schemes to defraud other caring people to help them out.
Picture a GoFundMe page that seeks donations for someone afflicted with a rare or life-threatening medical situation — with a real person featured, with real-life details as to where they live, treatments undergone, the money needed for those treatments and hospitals visited. The donations come pouring in, from friends and family members, strangers too — only to be siphoned away by bad actors, successful in exploiting the impulse to help first, ask questions later.
To that end, Featurespace Founder Dave Excell told Karen Webster that our most sensitive data — well beyond the confines of bank accounts and credit card numbers — are being ferreted out by fraudsters in nefarious ways. At a high level, he said, “there’s all sorts of personal information that can be used not just against the individual — but also their families.”
That means fraud management (on the part of financial institutions and healthcare firms) itself is ripe for a retooling, he told Webster, toward a policy where the individuals/patients themselves take ownership of their healthcare information and their online identities…
