Scammers Bill Fake Medical Equipment to Your Medicare Account
March 21, 2026
Medicare scams don't wait for open enrollment. They run year-round, but they peak when tax season gives scammers a convenient pretext. "We need to verify your Medicare information for your tax return" is a line that works in February. It wouldn't get a second thought in August.
FTC Do Not Call data shows 21,712 complaints in the medical and prescriptions category, spread across 7,808 unique phone numbers. That makes it the sixth-largest complaint category overall, representing 3.8% of all FTC complaints in the database. Those numbers almost certainly undercount the actual problem.
Scam reporting skews younger. Filing an FTC complaint requires going to a website, finding the right form, and completing a multi-step process. Seniors targeted by Medicare scams are less likely to file complaints for several reasons. Some don't realize it was a scam. Others feel embarrassed. Many don't know the FTC accepts complaints about unwanted calls.
Research on elder fraud consistently finds that only a fraction of incidents get reported to any agency. When 21,712 complaints appear in the FTC database for medical scams, the actual number of calls reaching seniors could be ten or twenty times higher.
The complaint-to-call ratio for this category tells the story. Each medical scam number averages 2.8 complaints. Government impersonation numbers average 3.2 complaints each. That gap suggests medical scam victims report at lower rates, not that the calls are less frequent.
The Tax Season Medicare Pitch
Scammers combine Medicare and tax season in three specific ways. The most common approach uses a recorded message claiming your Medicare benefits need to be "verified" or "updated" before you file your taxes. The call asks you to confirm your Medicare number, date of birth, and Social Security number. With those three pieces of information, a scammer can bill fraudulent medical services to your Medicare account or use your identity for tax refund fraud.
A second variation offers a "free" back brace, knee brace, or DNA testing kit and asks for your Medicare number to "check eligibility." These calls sometimes reference tax-deductible medical expenses to make the pitch feel seasonal. The caller bills Medicare for equipment you don't need and may never receive.
A third approach claims that Medicare is issuing new cards with updated security features and asks you to verify your information to receive yours. Medicare did replace Social Security numbers on cards in 2019, but that process is long finished. Any call about a new Medicare card in 2026 is a scam.
The geographic pattern for medical scam complaints mirrors the broader FTC data with one notable skew. Florida generates disproportionately high complaint volume for this category relative to its overall population. That tracks with Florida's large retiree population and its status as one of the states with the highest Medicare enrollment per capita. California and Texas lead in raw numbers, as they do for nearly every complaint category, simply due to population.
Medical scams and government impersonation scams frequently share infrastructure. Entity relationship data shows phone numbers that appear in both categories, using the same number to make IRS threats on Monday and Medicare pitches on Wednesday. The same call center often runs multiple scam scripts targeting the same demographic.
The combined weight of government impersonation (65,002 complaints) and medical scams (21,712 complaints) represents over 86,000 complaints from categories that disproportionately target people over 60. Add in tech support scams (2,230 complaints) and lotteries/prize scams (3,663 complaints), and the senior-targeted total exceeds 92,000 complaints.
Medicare communicates primarily by mail. If you receive a call claiming to be from Medicare, hang up and call 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227) directly. Never give your Medicare number, Social Security number, or bank information to an inbound caller. You can look up any suspicious number in the search bar above to see its complaint history, scam category, and how many others have reported it.