What you should know about the spike in Medicare-related spam calls

LEHI — “I was getting a million phone calls,” Katie Sandberg said of all the calls about Medicare plans and support she’s been receiving recently.

Okay, a million is an exaggeration, but looking through her phone’s call log, we can see she’s getting harassed by dozens of unwanted calls, daily. Near as she can guess from the calls that she hasn’t screened, when she turned 65 and signed up for Medicare, her name landed on some sort of call list.

“There’s been an update to Medicare, and would you like to see if you qualify for these updates,” Sandberg said of the calls she receives, pitching some sort of Medicare-related product.

Worse, she said, is the calls all come from different phone numbers with different area codes. So, she can’t block the spam. She put her number on the National Do Not Call registry but that didn’t help. She also downloaded two apps that claim to cut down on spam phone calls.

“And that didn’t help,” Sandberg said. “And I thought, ‘I’m beyond. I don’t know what to do,’ and I know that you investigate a lot of things.”

“I have heard a few cases of people getting calls,” Jackie Smith, program director of the Utah Senior Medicare Patrol, said.

Smith said there is something Katie, and everyone else, needs to know about unsolicited calls trying to sell you on Medicare plans and support.

“Insurance agents are not supposed to make calls,” she told KSL TV.

Medicare’s website spells out all sorts of rules that apply to people representing Medicare plans. They can’t ask for your personal information over the phone. They can’t come to your home uninvited. They also can’t call you unless you’re already a member of the plan, or you’ve given them permission to contact you.

“If she called an agent and they’re calling her back, that’s fine,” Smith said. “But I can’t think of any other reason that they’d be calling her, other than an illegitimate call or a scam.”

So, the news about trying to block the calls looks bad for Sandberg. It seems that the people calling are already rule breakers, so it can be tough to get them to follow other rules such as honoring the Do Not Call registry and other measures.

“I’m not the only one who gets these calls,” Sandberg said. “I hear other people do too.”

There is one other potential solution for people getting bombarded with calls. You can set most phones to only ring if it’s a call from a number you have saved. Sandberg has toyed with that, but she said it doesn’t work for her, because she was missing other important calls.