The Federal Trade Commission has put a specific date on its next public warning about Medicare fraud. On September 29, the agency will host a one-hour virtual roundtable built entirely around the con artists who work the open enrollment calendar — the weeks before, during and after older adults and their families sort out next year’s health coverage. The timing is deliberate: Medicare’s annual enrollment period opens October 15, and complaints about healthcare-related scams reliably climb in the weeks that follow.
The FTC’s Roundtable Brings CMS, SHIP And SMP Into One Call
The FTC’s own event listing lays out a single-hour panel, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern, pairing the commission’s consumer protection staff with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the State Health Insurance Assistance Program network and Senior Medicare Patrol. FTC attorney Matthew Schiltz will sit alongside CMS officials Dennis Sendros and Gina Zdanowicz and SMP/SHIP resource center director Brandy Bauer, with consumer education specialist Gema de las Heras moderating. The session is open to the public over Zoom or by phone, at no cost, with nothing sold — four separate oversight bodies sharing one call because their individual complaint lines have been logging the same pattern of healthcare-related fraud from different angles. The FTC’s listing frames the discussion around three things: how the scams work, how to spot and stop one in progress, and where to find free, reliable help comparing actual coverage instead of a phone pitch.
Free first-hour card: After a scam call or identity theft, the order of the first steps matters most. Keep the free first-hour action card on hand.
How Open Enrollment Scams Work, From Cold Call To Fake Plan
The FTC’s event description spells out the mechanics in one sentence: scammers “work overtime” during open enrollment to steal money and personal information, or to sell so-called health plans that cover “few — if any — medical expenses.” In practice, that shows up as robocalls claiming to represent Medicare directly, offers of a replacement Medicare card that require a Social Security number to “process,” and pressure to enroll immediately before a supposed cutoff that does not actually exist. A newer version of the same fraud starts with a web search rather than a phone call. An FTC consumer alert on searching for health insurance warns that the first paid result for terms like “Medicare enrollment” is sometimes a lead-generation site with no government affiliation, built to collect contact details and resell them to whichever licensed agent bids highest.
Why The Weeks After October 15 Draw The Most Calls
Medicare’s own open enrollment window runs October 15 through December 7, the single annual stretch when someone already enrolled in Medicare can switch, drop or add a drug or Advantage plan for the following year. That compressed deadline is exactly what makes the season profitable for fraud: real insurance agents, real plan mailers and legitimate robocalls from licensed brokers are already flooding phones and mailboxes, which makes a fraudulent one easy to miss. Anyone who misses the December 7 cutoff generally has to wait for the next open enrollment to make a change, and that same sense of urgency is what scammers borrow when they invent a “special enrollment period” that is supposedly about to close. Caller-ID spoofing makes the pitch harder to screen out on sight, since a scam call can display a Washington-area code or even the real name of a state agency, which is why the FTC’s general scam guidance emphasizes hanging up and calling a number looked up independently rather than trusting how a call appears on a phone screen.
SHIP Counselors And The SMP Hotline Are The Free Alternative
Every state runs a State Health Insurance Assistance Program office, and every state also has a Senior Medicare Patrol chapter — both federally funded, both free, and neither one selling a plan. Brandy Bauer, who directs both resource centers and is one of the FTC’s panelists, oversees the programs that field calls after the damage is already done: a plan switched without consent, a bank account debited for coverage that turns out not to exist. On the FTC’s own consumer scams listings, Medicare and health-insurance impersonation sits inside a broader “Government Impersonators” category that the agency tracks year-round rather than only during enrollment season — a reminder that the September 29 roundtable is aimed at getting ahead of a pattern regulators already recognize, not reacting to a single new incident. Anyone who has already handed over a Medicare number, a bank account number or a payment can also file directly with the FTC’s fraud-reporting system, the same intake that feeds the case data regulators cite when they describe open enrollment as a recurring high season for healthcare fraud.
What Happens In The First Hour After A Scam Call
The FTC panel is built around prevention, but prevention only goes so far once a caller has already collected a Medicare number, a Social Security number or a bank routing number. What happens in the sixty minutes after that realization — who gets called first, what gets frozen, what gets written down — often decides whether the damage stays contained to one phone call or spreads into open credit accounts.
The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit lays out the first-hour recovery plan alongside the free credit-freeze steps and a fraud evidence and report log, so none of those decisions have to be made from memory in the middle of a stressful call.
Read the 9-page kit in The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit.
AI-assisted research and drafting; reviewed by an editor.
