Beware of Fake Obamacare Websites, Report Says

Fake Obamacare websites distributing malware are popping up before President Obama’s Affordable Care Act kicks in on Oct. 1. The real website, Healthcare.gov, is trustworthy and operated by the federal government.
Beware of Fake Obamacare Websites, Report Says
Jacqueline Saulsberry, a service coordinator at the Illinois Eye Institute, gathers information from patient Shameka Lewis-Coolidge during an appointment in Chicago, Ill., Sept. 5, 2013. More than 100 nonprofits and related organizations have been recruited by the federal government to sign up “navigators” who can help the 30 million uninsured people who can now gain coverage under the Affordable Care Act. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
Jack Phillips
9/28/2013
Updated:
7/18/2015

Fake Obamacare websites distributing malware are popping up before President Obama’s Affordable Care Act kicks in on Oct. 1. The real website, Healthcare.gov, is trustworthy and operated by the federal government.

The government’s Health Insurance Exchange will also go live at the same time.

Anti-virus software maker Trend Micro published a report saying that phishers and scammers are looking to capitalize on the confusion about Obamacare, including for people who want to sign up for coverage.

“The root problem is that the Health Insurance Exchange isn’t made up of a single, authoritative site where people can go and register for coverage,” it says.

People can apply for coverage at sites run by states, while there are third-party sites offering a sign-up feature.

“When a person starts looking through sites to find one, at this time, they’re faced with the challenge that there’s no official marking or labeling that they can look at on a site to know that it’s an officially sanctioned site,” Trend Micro writess. “A survey of state and third-party sites also shows that official sites aren’t required to provide the ability to verify the site using SSL: many of them don’t provide it for site verification at all, though the Federal site does.”

As a result, the confusion and multitude of websites provide a “perfect environment for identity thieves and other criminals to put together bogus sites to get personal information they can use or sell on the digital underground. And this situation also provides an opportunity for old fashioned healthcare scammers to offer bogus coverage and fraudulent billing scams to more unsuspecting people.”

Trend Micro says that people should never use “a search engine as your starting point when looking for coverage,” and instead, people should go to a “trusted source,” including the federal government or state government websites.

Jack Phillips is a breaking news reporter with 15 years experience who started as a local New York City reporter. Having joined The Epoch Times' news team in 2009, Jack was born and raised near Modesto in California's Central Valley. Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/jackphillips5
twitter
Related Topics