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Most
health care providers are honest and are providing the best care
they can, but the small number who aren't find ways to steal billions
of dollars from the health care system each year. Even more is lost
to errors in billing that are never found. Below you will find current
scams that are happening right here in Iowa.
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 LATE BREAKING SCAM ALERTS!
Every time you receive your bank statement, look it over carefully for any debits you didn’t authorize. A company calling itself “Life-T” is using stolen bank account information to make debits of $49.99 from victims’ accounts. When you call their phone number, they tell you that you enrolled in a drug insurance plan over the Internet. If you find items on your statement that aren’t yours, contact your bank immediately.
The FBI has issued a warning of another scam involving phone calls made about jury duty. The callers are very intimidating, telling you that you failed to report for jury duty and a warrant has been issued for your arrest. If you receive such a call, you feel anxious to resolve it, so the caller asks to verify your identity – your Social Security number, birth date and so forth. Then you are told you can get out of trouble by paying the fine on your credit card. If you then give them your card number, they have everything they need to steal your identity, charging perhaps thousands of dollars on your credit card before you know it.
Posted: 12/13/2007
CA lady from Lake Charles, LA left a message to inquire about where she needed to send her bank statement and insurance policy #’s after receiving a call from someone who stated they were from the Medicare office. She was planning to send this information and by chance she called the concerns fraud line and talked with a person who informed her that this was likely a scam and not to send anything - Medicare will not ask for this information. The scammers are active. Be sure to protect yourself!
Posted: 04/23/2007
JURY DUTY SCAM:
This has been verified by the FBI (Their link is also included below).
Most of us take those summons for jury duty seriously, but enough people skip out on their civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of scam has surfaced.
The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you never received a summons for jury duty,
the scammer asks you for your Social Security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the information
and cancel the arrest warrant.
Give out any of this information and bingo, your identity just got stolen.
The scam has been reported so far in 11 states, including Oklahoma, Illinois and Colorado.
This (scam) is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into giving information by
pretending they're with the court system.
The FBI and the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites, warning consumers about the fraud.
Check it out here:
http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/juryduty.asp
http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel 05/092805.htm
Posted: 04/19/2007
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