Local woman says she was taken in by Medicare scam

GIBSON COUNTY, Tenn. — A West Tennessean receives a phone call that could be part of a billion-dollar Medicare scam.

On Tuesday, Ruth Jacobs answered the phone, even though she didn’t know the number.

“They told me they was involved with Medicare, then they told me they called to see if I qualified for braces,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs says she doesn’t need braces but accepted the offer.

“They said if I don’t take it now, Medicare might not be able to offer it to me now, and I swallowed all of this hook, line and sinker,” Jacobs said.

You might have heard of a similar scam in the news recently. Two dozen people were charged in a scam of peddling unneeded orthopedic braces to hundreds of thousands of people, costing Medicare more than $1 billion.

Jacobs says this isn’t the first time she was part of a scam. She also discovered, on her own, that she was paying for someone else’s car insurance.

Jacobs has a book in which she writes all her expenses.

“When I went to checking that, I could not find a paper on that,” Jacobs said.

She says one of the strangest parts of the new scam is that she talked with a real person.

“They asked me for my number on my Medicare card, and I gave them that,” Jacobs said. “They just didn’t ask me for my Social Security number. I’m leery on that one.”

She has a warning after this most recent scam.

“If you get a call and you don’t know the telephone number, please do not answer it,” Jacobs said.

If you think you’re being targeted by scammers, call AARP’s scam hotline at 877-908-3360 or your local law enforcement agency.