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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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 This information came from:
Iowa Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division
Lottery Scams Plus Counterfeit Checks: You're the Loser!
Checks are in the mail -- thousands of them. Iowans are being showered with unexpected cashier's checks or money orders that come with a notice that the recipients have won a foreign lottery. It says all they must do to receive the huge lottery prize is deposit the cashier's check and wire off several thousand dollars for "taxes and fees."
Don't do it! It's a scam to get Iowans to wire money off to con-artists. The counterfeit checks soon bounce, the banks come back for their money, and consumers lose thousands of dollars apiece. The wired money can't be retrieved, and the international crooks can't be caught. It's a costly scheme -- Iowans must be smart and avoid it.
Here's a very typical example: An Iowan receives a letter announcing she has won $100,000 in a Canadian lottery. ("Your name was selected in a random drawing," it might explain.) A cashier's check is enclosed for $2900. The Iowan simply must deposit the check at her bank, and then wire the $2900 to the office in Canada "for taxes, fees, and insurance." When payment is received, the Iowan will get the $100,000 prize
-- they say. In reality, all the victim gets is a mess when the cashier's check or money order bounces.
This is a very nasty scam threatening thousands of Iowans. It plays on people's dreams of getting a huge prize, and their longstanding trust in cashier's checks - especially if the bank accepts the check and provides the funds, at first. The counterfeit checks or money orders are "dead-on," superb forgeries. We've seen lottery scams and counterfeit check scams for years -- but now the combination of the two is very nasty indeed.
Beware of a scam if you see any of these warning signs:
* A "notice" that you have "won a lottery" - by mail, e-mail or telephone.
* A cashier's check or U.S. Postal money order.
* A request that you wire all or some of the money to someone.
*Solicitations from abroad, such as Canada, Nigeria, London, Amsterdam, etc.
Posted: 10/23/2006
Phone Scam call received by Beneficiary in New Hampton, Iowa
We received the following information regarding a phone scam in Iowa. It is worth passing along to everyone to say that even though this had been happening in the past, it is still happening. Luckily this person realized her mistake of giving out her bank account number in time to avoid further problems. This information was received from an Area Agency on Aging in Iowa who gave the beneficiary the Operation Restore Trust of Iowa's 800-423-2449 help line.
“Beneficiary received a call two weeks ago saying they were selling a drug card that she had to have called Farmavay. They asked her for her bank number and she gave it to them. A couple of days later, she became suspicious and talked to her senior center and bank about it. The senior center told her to call Operation Restore Trust of Iowa. The bank changed her bank account number. The company later tried to get money from her account, but the number had been changed and they didn't get any. A man called her again this morning (8/7/06) to get her new account number and she hung up on him. He called her back and scolded her for hanging up on him. She hung up on him again.”
Posted: 08/10/2006
New Scam called “Vishing”
See the website: http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3619086
AND read the following information
Uses VoIP Telephony to Entrap Victims
Dubbed "vishing," the fraud sees randomly dialed users phoned by an automated system to be told that their credit card has been used illegally.
The ploy then requires their victims to dial a fake 800 number, which accesses a system requesting they confirm their account details and credit card number.
Armed with this information, criminals then empty the victim's account by buying products and services on the card.
A clutch of phone-based scams have suddenly come to light in the past month, but this one is one of the most advanced for the way it uses the features allowed by VoIP to disarm the suspicions of contacted subjects.
According to experts, the call return number is spoofed to appear as a regional telephone number of the financial institution the criminals are pretending to represent, a feint that is much easier to pull off on VoIP than it would be on a conventional PSTN. The real VoIP number could be anywhere in the world.
Because the scam is carried out offline, it represents a form of social engineering that no computer security system can stop.
Once a credit card customer has fallen for the story-and it is quite possible that average account holders will be less suspicious of phone contact than they would be of the same message received via e-mail-they are heading for an empty account.
"Like most other social engineering exploits, vishing relies upon the hacking of a common procedure that fits within the victim's comfort zone," said Secure Computing's Paul Henry.
As a matter of course, customers should be highly suspicious of any phone or e-mail contact that does not use their first and surnames, and should never dial a call-return number or reply to an e-mail regarding any financial matter.
Posted: 07/27/2006
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