“Obviously, in this day and age, they can do a lot with their Medi-Cal ID number, their driver’s license, the last four digits of their social. “It’s alarming that people are lying about who they represent and gathering all this personal information,” supervising attorney for the Consumer Health Action Center, Sara Lee, said Monday.
When the resident declined, the solicitors said they’d keep coming back unless the would-be-victim changed their mind. But they never received one.Īnother person was approached by people who said they were supposed to sign their brother up for a free cellphone, but they didn’t even know his name. She took information from the resident’s driver’s license and health insurance ID card, entered it into a tablet and told them the phone should have been delivered. One woman claiming to be a representative of the agency told a victim she had been sent from the government to provide them with a new phone, according to summarized reports shared by CalOptima. But CalOptima has nothing to do with those, nor any door-to-door solicitors. There are publicly funded programs that offer phone and internet service. They are among the roughly 984,000 people insured by CalOptima, just under one-third of the county’s 3.1 million residents. Those getting caught up in the scheme represent Orange County’s “low-income population: a family of four making under $38,000 a year or an individual making less than $18,000,” Hunn said. “Unless we had a prearranged appointment with you for some reason, we would never come to your apartment,” Hunn said. The setup is “pure fraud,” Cal Optima Chief Executive Michael Hunn said Monday. Some of those targeted shared their driver’s license, health insurance documentation and other personal records to sign up, according to CalOptima officials.īut no such program exists through the health insurance provider. The scammers tell potential victims they can use their benefits to get a free phone and wireless service. The victims received a knock on the door from someone posing as a representative of CalOptima, the agency providing health insurance to Orange County residents who qualify for Medi-Cal. Fraudsters pretending to offer free cellphone service apparently stole social security numbers and other sensitive data in a scam that has been targeting beneficiaries of subsidized healthcare throughout Orange County since last fall.
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