Robot exposes two layers of DME Medicare Fraud

This is a call between a Medicare scammer and a robot. Two robots, actually.

My apologies for the length of this call – it’s a little more than 20 minutes. The entire call is pretty funny, but if you want to just skip to the interesting parts, here is a summary:

At 5:30 – “Is this a robocall?” confused and finally gets sucked back in at 7:20

At 8:45 – Layer 1 of the fraud is exposed (offering a back support at no cost to you – “it is your right to receive it as being a medicare holder”)

At 14:45 – Layer 2 of the fraud is exposed (coaching us what to say to the DME Hotline agent, then doing a “cold transfer” to manipulate their statistics)

This call came to my elderly father and was intercepted by these Jolly Roger Bots. If you are caring for your elderly loved-ones, I highly recommend you subscribe to the Jolly Roger Telephone service so (1) your loved-one doesn’t get scammed, and (2) so the scammer wastes time with a bot and doesn’t have as much time to call the next victims.

This call is funny and entertaining, but like so many of these calls, this one is educational as well. Actually, I think the “DME Hotline” and Medicare would both be interested to hear about this scam. As with most Medicare scams, this company wants to “give” you a back or knee brace at no cost to you. Of course, Medicare will pay for it so it’s free, right? But this call gets very interesting once they qualify you as an elderly person with Medicare and a doctor willing to state that you need a back brace. The scammer then says he’s going to transfer us to a “Medicare Adviser”, but he tells us to tell them we are responding to the TV ad. This is very important to the agent. We must state that we are responding to their television advertisement or they will not help us.

So was the first telemarketing company hired by the producers of the Television advertisement? The TV station? Who else would benefit from this. The “Medicare Adviser” is the DME Hotline (Durable Medical Equipment Hotline). I don’t know if they have a reputation for scamming Medicare or not, but they are certainly getting scammed by an offshore call center pumping traffic into their hotline. And these scammers are trying to manipulate the response rate from the TV ad.

Meanwhile, the bots did a great job keeping four agents busy. For most of this call, we prevented these scammers from calling someone else. I don’t know if both sets of agents were scammers though. The second set was duped by the first set.

Again, this call is pretty long and you may not be interested in listening to the whole thing. Just listen as you do other stuff, or skip to the parts referenced at the top of this posting. If any of you have connections at the DME Hotline, they might be interested to know their TV ad response statistics are wrong. And I’m sure Medicare already knows about the other fraud.

Thanks again for listening everyone!