One form of identity theft that is quickly increasing, is medical identity theft. Each year, more than 250,000 and as many as 500,000 people have their medical identity stolen. Who would have thought that someone would be looking to steal your medical identity?

Most who commit these crimes are non-medical personnel who work in the industry as support or clerical staff and have access to social security and health insurance policy numbers. This data is used either for the perpetrator themselves or it is given to associates or sold to criminals looking for information of this type. There are groups of criminals who are profiting from this type of theft by paying crooked providers to file false claims to the insurance companies and collect millions of dollars in payments.

At times people do steal this information for their own benefit when they can not afford healthcare, however, this is not the majority of the thefts commited at this time. Yet, with so many millions out there who are uninsured, it is thought that this type of theft will continue to quickly grow as more and more turn to finding a way to get the healthcare that they need, yet they do not have health insurance. They are also able to create the false documents needed in order to get unsuspecting providers to treat them (driver license; health insurance card; etc). So be very aware that medical identity theft thieves are growing in number and it is just a matter of time before your information is being used.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Articles Concerning Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.