People approaching Medicare eligibility are one of the most heavily targeted groups for fraud in the country. The calls are constant during enrollment season, and they are convincing because they are professionally scripted.
The good news is that the tells are consistent.
What no legitimate caller will ever ask for
- Your Medicare number, unprompted. A genuine agency asks for it only at the point of completing an enrollment you asked for, on a call you initiated or scheduled.
- Your Social Security number to “verify” or “look up” anything.
- Bank details or a card number over the phone for a Medicare product.
- Payment for a new Medicare card. There is no such thing. Cards are free and are never sold.
If a caller asks for any of those, the call is not what it says it is. Hang up. You do not owe them the end of the conversation.
The four pressure patterns
Urgency. “Your coverage lapses today.” “This offer ends at midnight.” Real enrollment windows last weeks or months, and no legitimate agent needs a decision in the next ten minutes.
Authority. Claiming to be from Medicare, from “the Medicare office”, or from a government department. Medicare does not cold-call people to sell plans.
Free things. Braces, test kits, genetic screening, medical equipment offered unsolicited by phone. This is one of the most common fraud patterns and it usually exists to obtain your Medicare number for billing.
Confirmation. “We just need to confirm your details.” A call that opens by asking you to confirm information they should already have is fishing for information they do not have.
The rule that makes it simple
Hang up and call back on a number you found yourself.
Not the number they gave you. Not the number on the caller ID, which is trivially faked. A number from a statement, a card, an official website, or a directory.
Any legitimate organization will be entirely comfortable with this. A fraudulent one will try to talk you out of it, which is itself the answer.
What we do and do not do
We do not cold-call. If you have not asked us to contact you, and you have not consented to be contacted, a call claiming to be from us is not from us.
If you get one, hang up and telephone the number published on this website. We would rather field ten calls checking than have one person lose money.
If you think you have been targeted
Report it. Medicare fraud is investigated, and reporting genuinely helps — these campaigns work through whole neighbourhoods, so one report often protects several people.
- 1-800-MEDICARE — report suspected fraud, 24 hours a day. TTY 1-877-486-2048.
- Your SHIP counselor — free, independent, sells nothing, and will look at a suspicious letter or call with you.
- Your state insurance department — for anything involving a licensed agent’s conduct.
You do not need our permission and you do not need to tell us first.
If you already gave something away
Act quickly rather than waiting to be sure.
If it was your Medicare number, report it to 1-800-MEDICARE and watch your Medicare statements for services you did not receive. If it was bank or card details, telephone your bank now. If it was your Social Security number, the Federal Trade Commission publishes a recovery process.
The tells, in order of reliability
Scripts change; structure does not. These hold up across almost every version we hear about.
Pressure on time. A real enrollment deadline is a date you can look up. An invented one is always today, or this call, or before the line drops. Nothing legitimate in this industry expires while you are on the telephone.
They already have some of your details. Knowing your name, address, or even the last digits of a number proves nothing — a great deal of that is publicly available or previously breached. Callers lead with it precisely because it feels like proof.
A new card is coming. There is no periodic reissue of Medicare cards requiring you to confirm your number. This has been a staple for years.
Something free, conditional on your number. Braces, testing kits, genetic screening, a back brace. The item is the hook; the number is the product.
They discourage you from hanging up and calling back. This is the most reliable tell of all, because it is the one thing a genuine caller will never mind.
What real callers do and do not do
Medicare does not cold-call you to sell you a plan. Nor does the Social Security Administration ring to demand payment or to threaten your benefits.
Agents operate under marketing rules that are stricter than most people assume. An agent generally may not call you without permission you have given, may not turn up at your door uninvited, and may not offer you anything of more than nominal value to induce enrollment. Plans are required to record sales calls.
Legitimate contact does exist. Your own plan may write to you, and does so mostly by post. If you asked us to call, we call. What none of them do is arrive unannounced demanding a number in the next two minutes.
The one move that always works
Hang up and dial the number yourself, from your own card, your own paperwork, or the official site.
That single habit defeats essentially every version of this, because the entire method depends on you staying on a call you did not initiate. Caller ID can be forged trivially. A professional manner costs nothing. Neither survives you putting the phone down and calling a number you looked up yourself.
You do not need an excuse, and you do not need to be polite about it. “I don’t take calls about this — I’ll ring my agent” is a complete sentence.
If you already gave something away
Act the same day, and skip the part where you feel foolish.
A Medicare number. Ring 1-800-MEDICARE and report it. Watch your statements for claims you do not recognize, and report those too — billing fraud is the usual use.
A Social Security number. Place a fraud alert or a freeze with the credit bureaus, and report it at the federal identity-theft site.
Bank or card details. Telephone your bank immediately; the number on your card, not one you were given.
You enrolled in something. Ring us or 1-800-MEDICARE. Enrollments obtained improperly can often be undone, and there are established routes for exactly this. The sooner you say so, the more of them are open.
Report it even when nothing was lost, at the federal complaint line or your state’s insurance department. It is how patterns get found.
This is not a failure of judgment
Worth saying plainly, because shame is what keeps most of it unreported.
These scripts are written by people who do it full time, tested across thousands of calls, and refined on what works. They are designed to be convincing to alert people, and they are aimed at moments when you are distracted or unwell or expecting a call about something else.
Being taken in by a professional operation says nothing about you. Not reporting it is the only part that makes things worse.
Embarrassment is the thing these operations rely on most. The scripts are written by professionals and being taken in by one says nothing about you.
Where to check this independently
Nothing on this page is advice about your situation, and none of it replaces the free sources. The Medicare Plan Finder, 1-800-MEDICARE, your SHIP counselor and HealthCare.gov are free, independent, and show plans we cannot sell.
Healthbase is a licensed insurance agency, not a government agency and not connected with Medicare or any federal or state program.
