I got a voicemail from the Kroger pharmacist who told me to call her back. It was definitely the Kroger pharmacy number because I’ve had to call it before, so that was not part of the scam.
However, some scammer who knew who my health insurance company was (I get it through my wife, which ads to the creepiness here) tried to get my personal health data from the Kroger pharmacy. They asked for personal info and the pharmacist said she wouldn’t give it to them but would have me call them back.
She told me all of this when I called her to find out what was up. She gave me the number and the first thing I did was look it up to see if it was legitimate because that just sounded off to me.
Sure enough, the first link that came up was a Facebook post (Why Facebook as the first link in the search? No idea.) warning about that number specifically scamming people by pretending to be my insurance company, followed by other links on other websites talking about it being a scammer source, and not just just for health insurance scamming.
They’ve also somehow fucked with the SEO because in between those were legitimate links to my health insurance company, but that phone number is not on the pages.
I feel really bad for anyone who falls for this, because it was clearly just legitimate enough for the pharmacist to not suggest to me that I should be careful about being scammed. I know exactly who I talked to and she’s a cool lady, so I’m pretty sure she would have if she was sure enough.
Sounds like your insurance company has a data leak problem
UnitedHealth had a massive ransomware attack in Feb and millions of people got their data leaked.
Not just them. I’ve gotten 3 letters from providers saying data was stolen and 1 from my ins company saying the same.
It’s a wonder we even try to keep this shit safe anymore where every company with underpaid or incompetent IT/security hold our data.
I was recently in college for IT, and my professors said a couple of times that it’s best practice just to assume that all of your info has already been stolen
I try to protect it but apparently I got a report that my social got stolen recently. Health insurance sucks, we keep getting massive increase in costs, then swap providers, then my data is stored in more and more systems waiting to be breached.
Probably. Sadly, they’re one of the biggest in the U.S. and I don’t get to choose.
They are required to meet HIPAA. If they aren’t make a storm of it and report them.
I’ve received more healthcare provider PII leak letters in the last couple years than the number of appointments I’ve had. Everyone is so eager to come up with some shiny new software to sell in the healthcare goldrush, but so many of them are absolutely terrible at security.
My guess it’s from the Change Healthcare breach back in Feb.
Someone emailed my boss a while back pretending to be me. Asked that my direct deposit be changed. Boss told me he nearly sent it to the accountant but decided he should double check with me first. People are assholes.
One of the best anti-scam advice I was ever given was to always call the number I knew was valid like the one on my insurance card in this instance and verify that way.
That’s part of HIPAA I believe
HIPAA is about disclosure of personal medical details not about what phone numbers to call.
That’s not really correct. HIPAA is a set of requirements that governs everything that touches HIPAA protected data.
It’s also just a good policy in general. Anytime you receive a communication that’s prompting you to do something that you weren’t expecting to receive you should ignore any links, phone numbers, replies, etc. in that communication and instead reach out using a known good mechanism. Doing that one thing stops the overwhelming majority of scams in their tracks.
Don’t feel bad about it.
About three years ago I got a call from my credit card company asking me if I had booked a first class flight from New York to Milan for $2,000 and reserved a five star hotel in Italy for $1,000 a night, plus a few other hundred dollar charges of other things.
I have travelled overseas before but I’m a budget traveller and I wouldn’t spend money like that … plus my travelling days were basically over anyway … plus I don’t live, work or go near New York city, I’m in northern Ontario, Canada!
I cancelled the card immediately and started looking back on what I had done that led to this. The only thing I could point to was that about a month or two before, I had been playing around with a bunch of phone apps and a few Chinese face filter apps I had experimented with and had signed up to trial subscriptions without knowing it which gave my credit card information through Google Play. I’m very careful with my credit card and apply every security feature that is given but that one slip up gave me away. I now layer Google play purchases behind Pay Pal tagged to a limited Credit Card to just that account and with all security, two factor authentication I can apply on everything.
As security minded as all this can be, all security professionals agree that the weakest link to any secure system are the fallible humans (and I’m one of them) who operate this stuff.
I’m somewhat sure that when your pay for a subscription through the play store that it doesn’t send your full credit card information to any 3rd party, it’s google itself that does the credit card transaction
You are partly right … but if you sign up to a service to some of these dumb apps, they will redirect you to different sources to verify a purchase (whether it is legitimate or not). At the time, I was having a bunch of silly fun with my nieces and nephews fooling around with a new phone and finding new apps to play with. I think I got too carried away and wanted to get something to work without being careful enough.
The fun part was in finding some dumb face filter app that turned my big brown brooding middle aged male Indigenous face into a beautiful petite Asian princess that could talk and chat with my nieces and nephews. That was an expensive bit of fun that I paid for later.
Report this to the authorities. The pharmacy should also report it and do an investigation.
The FBI would be happy to look into this. Chances are you are not the only victim.
That’s a good idea. Any idea who I should report it to specifically? Like is there a certain department I need to talk to?
Thank you!
I’d also hit up your state pharmacy board.
Your pharmacy did the right thing by not revealing information and calling you, other pharmacies likely aren’t that smart.
Good idea. Thanks.
Scams are getting pretty wild out there, and pretty convoluted.
Thanks for the heads up for this type of scam, in particular.
Change Healthcare just announced data for 100 million people was stolen when they got breached back in Feb. They handle all kinds of pharmacy stuff so I imagine this will happen a lot here on out.
