Medicare scams take a beneficiary's Medicare number — usually by offering a new card, free equipment or a genetic test — and use it to bill claims the beneficiary never sees. Consumers report a median loss of $283; the Justice Department's June 2025 takedown alleged $14.6 billion, including a scheme using more than a million stolen identities. Real Medicare cards are free and mailed automatically.
A call, during the eight weeks when a call about your health cover is completely plausible. A new Medicare card. A free knee brace. A genetic test that will tell you what you are at risk of. A better plan.
None of it costs anything. That is the design.
What is wanted is your Medicare number — and unlike a bank card, that number is not something you spend money with. It is something someone else bills money with, for years, in transactions you are not part of and will not see.
The consumer damage looks trivial: 78,763 reports to the FTC in 2024, a median loss of $283. The damage on the other side does not. The Justice Department’s June 2025 takedown charged 324 defendants over more than $14.6 billion, including one alleged scheme that billed $10.6 billion using the identities of more than a million Americans.
Those are two different crimes joined at one point: the phone call that got the number.
And the most common version of that call has an answer that requires no judgement at all — real Medicare cards are free and mailed to you automatically.
Open enrolment runs 15 October to 7 December. Millions of people are genuinely expecting contact about their cover, and a call about your plan is not surprising. The FTC has published a warning before this window every year since at least 2019.
Something offered, not sold. Nothing triggers the instinct that guards a wallet, because nothing is being taken from it.
The whole transaction. No payment is requested — and the absence of a payment is what makes the request feel administrative rather than acquisitive.
Where it could have stopped
Real Medicare cards are free and mailed automatically, and Medicare only asks you to verify information if you contacted Medicare first. Nobody legitimate needs your number to send you a card. Hang up and call 1-800-MEDICARE if you want to check — the number on your screen can say anything.
A short scripted confirmation that you agreed to receive something. It exists as the audit artefact — the thing produced if anyone asks whether you consented. One 2025 indictment alleges these recordings were generated with artificial intelligence.
Marketing organisations pass beneficiary lists to the suppliers who do the billing. The person who called you is usually not the person who bills.
Equipment, tests, monitoring services. HHS-OIG maintains a specific alert about beneficiaries being signed up for remote patient monitoring without authorisation.
Or never. The most common way a beneficiary discovers this is being denied something they need because the allowance was already used.
Nothing is being taken. Every defence people have is built around money leaving. This call asks for a number and offers a gift, and the shape of it is not the shape of a scam.
The timing is genuinely plausible. During open enrolment, an unexpected call about your plan is exactly what a legitimate broker also does.
The caller knows things about you. The FTC’s alert says so directly. Marketing datasets and breaches supply names, addresses, ages and conditions — and being known feels like being verified.
The item is often real. A brace arrives. A test kit arrives. It is unnecessary and it exists to justify a claim, but its physical existence retires most of the doubt.
The consequence is invisible and delayed. Nothing appears on a statement you read. There is no moment of realisation, which means no moment of reporting.
And the audience is defined by age. Everyone over 65, with a number they must give to real providers constantly, in a system whose paperwork is confusing by design.
Unusually for this site, much of it is domestic and licensed. The June 2025 takedown charged 96 doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists and other licensed medical professionals among its 324 defendants, across 50 federal districts and 12 state attorneys general’s offices.
The structure that recurs is a division of labour. Marketing organisations generate beneficiary numbers and consents; suppliers submit the claims. That separation is what makes the recorded consent call so important — it is the document that connects the two halves and makes the billing look authorised. The alleged use of AI to manufacture those recordings in a $703 million case is the clearest example on this site of a fraud control being defeated by generating the evidence it asks for.
It is transnational at the marketing end. Two of the five defendants in that case were owners and executives of Pakistani marketing organisations.
And it is industrial in scale. Operation Gold Rush alone: 19 defendants, $10.6 billion in claims for urinary catheters and other durable medical equipment, the identities of more than one million Americans across all fifty states. Medicare paid approximately $900 million of it; HHS-OIG and CMS prevented approximately $4.41 billion.
All of that is allegation. An indictment is merely an allegation and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
The FTC publishes a Medicare Open Enrollment warning every autumn, and the 30 September 2025 edition contains the single most useful sentence in the whole category: real Medicare cards are free and mailed automatically. Anybody who calls offering a new or updated one, and asks for a number to process it, has identified themselves.
The Justice Department's June 2025 health care fraud takedown charged 324 defendants over more than $14.6 billion in alleged fraud — the largest in its history. Two of its cases matter to consumers rather than to insurers: identity theft affecting more than a million Americans across all fifty states, and a $703 million scheme in which AI was allegedly used to fake beneficiaries' recorded consent. All of it is allegation.
In 2024 US consumers filed 78,763 health care fraud reports with the FTC, losing about $80 million with a median of $283 each. The same year's federal takedown alleged $14.6 billion. Both numbers are real and they describe two different crimes wearing one name — which is why advice written for one is useless against the other.
On the call. Do not give the number. If it might be real, hang up and call 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227) — the FTC’s own advice, because the number on your screen proves nothing.
If you actually want help choosing a plan, the route is your State Health Insurance Assistance Program, which is free and impartial, or Medicare.gov. That matters: “never talk to anyone about Medicare” is not usable advice for someone who genuinely needs to choose a plan.
If you gave out your number.
Understand what cannot be undone. A Medicare number is not routinely reissued the way a card number is. Monitoring is the realistic defence, which is unsatisfying and is the actual position.
If you are helping an older relative. Ask whether anything has arrived that they did not order. Unexplained equipment is the most reliable early sign, and it is the one a visitor can see.
Not to the caller. This is one of the few schemes on this site where the person who speaks to the victim is at the beginning of a supply chain rather than at the end of it.
The number goes to a marketing organisation, which packages it with a recorded consent and sells it on. The supplier submits claims, and Medicare pays the supplier — through the ordinary claims system, into an ordinary business account, in a payment that is indistinguishable at the point of transfer from a legitimate one.
That is why enforcement here looks so different from the rest of this site. There is no mule account and no crypto wallet at the critical moment; there is a company with a billing number. The money is recovered, when it is recovered, by clawback and forfeiture from businesses — over $245 million in cash, vehicles and cryptocurrency seized in the 2025 takedown — and the more effective intervention is earlier: CMS prevented over $4 billion from being paid, and suspended or revoked billing privileges for 205 providers.
The other half of this story
Our sibling site Clean on Paper explains the supplier companies that do the billing — why an entity with a real registration and a real bank account is the most useful thing a fraud can own.
No agency publishes a line item for most of the schemes on this site, so these charts show the official categories that contain this scheme. Each series is labelled with the agency's own category name. See how the mapping works.
No. Real Medicare cards are free and mailed to you automatically — that is the FTC's own wording, and it settles the most common version of this scam without any judgement. Nobody needs to call you to issue one, and nobody needs a payment to process one.
It means your details are in a marketing or breached dataset, which is where these lists come from. The FTC's alert notes specifically that callers may already have some of your personal information. Knowing your details is the cost of entry, not a credential.
Call 1-800-MEDICARE and report it, and start reading the Medicare Summary Notice or the claims list on your Medicare account for anything you did not receive. Unlike a bank card, a Medicare number is not routinely reissued, so monitoring is the realistic defence rather than replacement.
Because the harm arrives later and sideways. Claims billed in your name can exhaust an allowance for equipment you actually need, and put things in your records that were never true. It is medical identity theft, and HHS-OIG treats it as its own category for that reason.
Usually the item is real and unnecessary, and it exists to justify a claim. The Justice Department's 2025 takedown charged 49 defendants over $1.17 billion in telemedicine and genetic testing claims, and a separate case over $10.6 billion in claims for urinary catheters and other equipment. Those are allegations.
Your State Health Insurance Assistance Program gives free, unbiased counselling, and Medicare.gov is the official site. That matters because "hang up on everyone" leaves a real need unmet — people do want help choosing, and there is somewhere to get it that is not whoever called you.
Report it
Reporting is what produces the enforcement data on this page. Find the right agency and phone number for your country on the report page. If money moved in the last few hours, call your bank first.