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.
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.