Scammers Target Seniors
Posted on: Sunday, 30 October 2005, 15:00 CST
By Portsia Smith, The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va.
Oct. 29--Iris Deale wants the area's elderly to beware of the latest telephone scam.
Two weeks ago, the Spotsylvania County senior citizen received a phone call from a man wanting to verify her application for the new Medicare prescription drug program.
He asked for her social security number and other personal information.
"I told him I hadn't applied for Medicare and that I didn't intend to," she said. "And then he hung up." That's when Deale realized she was a target for a new scam affecting senior citizens.
Scam artists are using the new drug program as a prescription for cheating older Americans out of their money and identities, area agency officials say.
The national program allows private companies to offer various plans to Medicare recipients for their prescription drug coverage.
Enrollment for the program starts Nov. 15, but the program itself goes into effect on Jan. 1.
Deale said if she happened to be on Medicare, she may have fallen for the scam and didn't want that to happen to others.
"I think people need to know what's going on because if I had given my social security number to them I don't know what could've happened." Tom Gallagher, president of the Better Business Bureau of Central Virginia, said he has received numerous calls about prescription drug scams. But his office isn't the appropriate place to report to, he said.
"We advise them to talk to their local Area Agency on Aging to get some better advice," he said.
Valerie Hopson-Bell is the senior fraud patrol coordinator and coordinator of the Virginia Insurance Counseling and Assistance programs at the Rappahannock Area Agency on Aging in Stafford County.
She said her office hasn't received any reports of scams from local seniors.
But she did say The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services advised them to warn people.
"We let them know that no one should call them or come to their door asking for personal information [about Medicare]," she said.
This news came too late for Chatham resident Winny Parrish.
Parrish, 83, received two calls from people claiming to be from a company called Medication For Life. They were offering discounts on prescription medication.
"They wanted all this information and then gave me a registration number," she said in July, a few weeks after she got the call and suspected the callers were phoney. "They said they would give me a $500 medication discount for signing up. I guess you feel desperate when someone says something like that." Now, three months later, Parrish didn't get the discount. But someone stripped her bank account, she said.
She says she lost at least $1,000 and has been working with her bank to try to get at least $399 of it back.
"I never saw such a mess in my life," Parrish said this week. "I'm so disgusted and frustrated with it all.
"There's rarely a week that goes by that I don't get a call from those people. I finally got wise to what was happening." Fortunately for Parrish, her son is taking care of her expenses.
THE CENTER FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES OFFERS THE FOLLOWING ADVICE FOR MEDICARE BENEFICIARIES TO AVOID SUCH SCAMS:
--No one can come to your door uninvited.
--No one can ask you to enroll before Nov. 15.
--No one can ask you for personal information during their marketing activities.
--Always keep all personal information, such as your Medicare number, safe just as you would a credit card or a bank account number.
--Never give out personal information until you are certain that the person or product is approved by Medicare.
--Whenever you have a question or concern, call 800/MEDICARE.
--If you suspect fraud, you can also call your local law enforcement agency or the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General at 800/HHS-TIPS.
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Copyright (c) 2005, The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va.
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Source: The Free Lance-Star
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