Medical Identity Theft
Categories: Tech
Meet Katie. Katie is a healthy 32-year-old with a great job, excellent health insurance, and a snazzy sense of style. One day, Katie comes home from that great job, checks the mail, and is shocked to find a bill for a several-thousand-dollar knee replacement surgery in her mailbox. “New knee?” she frowns to herself. “I didn’t get a new knee.”
Katie has just become a victim of “medical identity theft.” Someone has stolen her private medical insurance information and passed it off as their own so they could get themselves some medical treatment. In this case it’s a new knee, but medical identity theft can be used for everything from surgical procedures to outpatient check-ups to prescription drug coverage. It’s become more prevalent now that most of our PHI (protected health information) is managed digitally.
So what can she do about it? First things first, she needs to call her insurance company and report the fraud. That’s definitely step one. It might take a while to get this mess cleared up, but it should be fairly easy for her to prove that she has not, in fact, recently installed a brand-new knee. Then, once the insurance confusion is straightened out, she should also make sure her PHI is accurate. We don’t want her medical records to indicate she’s got bad knees and has had major surgery...when she hasn’t.
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scam the venue switches from the great outdoors to cyberspace never gotten an [A wooden hut appears]
email from a Nigerian prince who's temporarily down on his luck and if
you'll just wire him three hundred bucks in cash immediately well immeasurable
riches await you it sounds like a little good to be true there right yeah and it [Man gives thumbs up in room]
is well usually that Nigerian prince is an overweight balding guy named Jerry
living in his mom's basement in a suburb just outside of Cleveland he'd love
nothing more than to hook a sucker you and take that 300 bucks [Jerry on his computer]
off your hands but many times the scam is much more intricate than that often
its identity thieves who are trying to con you into releasing private
information such as your social security number or credit card information mm-hmm
that's out there well they might try to convince you that
their Amazon support or your bank or your long-lost uncle Yusuf who just [Person flicking through e-mails]
needs a few personal details before he can FedEx you your large inheritance
don't fall for any of it anytime you're randomly asked to divulge any sensitive
information or pop a wad of cash in an envelope stop for a second and ask
yourself whatever you might be well a fish and then ask yourself whether you'd [Cash burning]
like all your hard-earned money to be sauteed or flame-broiled good stuff...