Greg's Corner

New pharmacy scam taking hold

A new scam has popped up around the country that involves your prescription medication. For many communities, gone are the days when you went to your local corner drug store. Now, many of us get our prescriptions from national retail chains like CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart and that’s what the scammers are betting on.

According to reports, scammers are posing as employees of the big pharmacy chains. The scammers are then calling their victims and telling them that the victim has a prescription ready at a pharmacy they don’t normally go to. The scammers will then ask for personal information like your Social Security number, driver’s license information, and health insurance information.

While the report we’ve seen doesn’t explicitly state it, we believe that Medicare recipients are probably more targeted in this scam than people with private insurance. With all that information scammers could either bill phony items or procedures to Medicare or they could use the information to obtain prescription narcotics to sell illegally. Or the information could be used for identity theft purposes.

If you receive a phone call from a pharmacy you don’t normally use, ask them what the prescription is for and what doctor prescribed it. If it’s for something you don’t normally take, hang up and call that pharmacy directly. Do not use the phone number that the scammer used as that can be spoofed and you could be right back talking to a scammer. You can also just tell the caller that’s not your prescription. Your insurance won’t be billed unless someone picks up the prescription and pays for it.

Never volunteer your personal information over the phone because once it’s out in the wild, it’s near impossible to get it back.