You're between jobs, or you just aged off a parent's plan, or your premiums went up and you went looking for something cheaper. An ad finds you: "Quality health coverage from $99 a month. No medical questions. Enroll in five minutes." The agent on the phone is friendly and fluent. He talks about your "premium," your "network," your "enrollment window." You give him a card number, and a welcome packet with a member ID shows up in your email.

Then you actually get sick. At the front desk, the receptionist runs your card and shakes her head. What you bought isn't health insurance. It's a "medical discount plan," a membership club that promises percentage discounts at a short list of providers, most of whom you've never heard of and none of whom are your doctor. The hospital bill is yours, all of it.

The Federal Trade Commission put out an alert on July 15 warning that scammers are dressing up these discount plans, and outright fake plans, in the full costume of real insurance. They lean on the fact that health coverage is confusing for everyone, so nobody expects to understand every word. As long as the vocabulary sounds right, most people don't ask the one question that matters: "Is this actually an insurance policy?"

The FTC's guidance lists the tells. A real insurer will answer that question in writing, with a policy document that spells out deductibles, co-pays, and what's covered, before you pay anything. A scammer will dodge, rush you ("this rate expires today"), or bury you in brochures that never quite say the word "policy." Two more giveaways: legitimate help enrolling through HealthCare.gov is always free, so anyone charging a fee to "get you enrolled" is a scammer, and a price that seems impossibly low with "no medical questions asked" is low because it doesn't actually cover anything.

The rule: Before you pay for any health plan, ask "Is this insurance, or a discount plan?" and demand the policy in writing. Buy through HealthCare.gov, or check the company with your state insurance commissioner first. If they won't put it in writing, it isn't insurance.

Sources: FTC: Are you getting health insurance? (July 15, 2026) and FTC: Spot Health Insurance Scams

Picture the end stage of an investment scam. You've been trading on what looks like a booming crypto platform for weeks. The dashboard shows your $20,000 has grown to $84,000. You try to withdraw, and your "advisor" says there's a small problem: to protect your funds, you need to hand the next payment to a courier. A real person. At your door. He'll confirm his identity with a password, or by reading you the serial number on a dollar bill.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center issued a warning about exactly this: scammers running fake cryptocurrency investment platforms are now sending human couriers to collect cash from victims, mostly older adults, claiming it's needed to "protect funds" or cover withdrawal fees, then coming back again for "taxes" and "penalties."

The courier is the detail to decode, because it shows up across many scams: fake federal agents who send someone to pick up cash or gold bars "for safekeeping," fake tech support that dispatches a "secure collection agent," fake investment platforms like these. Whatever the story, the shape is the same, and three signals give it away every time.

One: the pickup itself. No bank, brokerage, government agency, or real investment platform sends a person to your home to collect cash, gold, or a debit card. Not for fees, not for safekeeping, not ever. Money moves to real institutions through accounts, not doorsteps.

Two: the spy-movie theater. Passwords, code phrases, dollar-bill serial numbers. It feels official, and that's the point. Real financial transactions don't need secret handshakes; they need paperwork.

Three: the fees to unlock your own money. A real account deducts its fees from your balance. Only a scam demands fresh cash, again and again, before your money can be "released." Each payment is the last one, until the next one.

The rule: If anyone, for any reason, wants to send a courier to collect cash or valuables from you, it's a scam. Stop, don't hand over anything, and report it at ic3.gov. If anyone in your life mentions a "courier," treat it as an emergency: the DOJ's Elder Justice Hotline is 1-833-FRAUD-11.

Source: FBI IC3: Scammers Use Couriers to Collect Cash in Cryptocurrency Investment Scams

A knock at the door, or a call, or a flyer at the senior center: a company is offering free house cleaning, free meal delivery, or free groceries for Medicare recipients. There's just a little paperwork. Somewhere in that paperwork, they need your Medicare number.

Here's what the paperwork actually does: it enrolls you in hospice care. Not a cleaning service. Hospice, the end-of-life care program for people with a terminal diagnosis. The FBI issued an alert about this scheme: fraudsters are signing up Medicare beneficiaries who aren't dying, sometimes without any consent at all, and billing Medicare for hospice services that are never delivered. Recruiters get paid a bonus for every person they sign up.

This one is worse than a stolen fee, because hospice enrollment changes your actual coverage. Once Medicare has you registered in hospice, it stops paying for treatment meant to cure the condition you were enrolled under. People have discovered they were "in hospice" only when Medicare declined to cover the real care they needed.

The tells, straight from the FBI's alert: an unsolicited offer of free services that's conditional on using one specific company. Anyone who isn't your doctor or your insurer asking for your Medicare number. Offers that seem too generous for what's being asked. And on the back end, provider names you don't recognize on your Medicare statements.

The rule: Nothing free should ever require your Medicare number. Treat that number like a credit card, read your Medicare Summary Notices when they arrive, and if you see a provider you don't know, call 1-800-MEDICARE. Report suspected hospice fraud at ic3.gov.

Source: FBI IC3: Emerging Hospice Fraud Targeting Medicare Recipients

You click something ordinary. A link in an email, a sponsored search result, a "sign up for 20% off" banner. The page flickers, the address bar changes once or twice, and then a clean, official-looking screen appears:

"Your browser is out of date. Update now to continue securely. [Download Update]"

Or, just as often, a login page. Microsoft's colors, your bank's logo, everything in the right place, asking you to sign in to continue.

The FBI put out an alert about the machinery behind this moment. Criminals are using something called a traffic distribution system, plumbing hidden inside compromised websites and malicious ads, that inspects each visitor (your location, your device, your browser) and then routes you to the trap built for you specifically. One person gets the fake login page. Another gets the fake update, which is actually malware that can steal banking passwords or lock up the computer entirely. The scary part is that the journey can start on a legitimate website that's been quietly compromised.

You don't need to understand the plumbing to beat it. Two habits cover nearly every case. First: no webpage ever legitimately updates your browser or your software. Real updates come from your device's settings or the app itself. Any page that announces you need an update is lying to you; close the tab. Second: never log in on a page you arrived at by clicking, especially if you noticed the address change along the way. If a login screen appears when you weren't expecting one, close it, type the site's real address yourself (or open the app), and log in there.

The rule: A webpage that offers you a software update is always a scam, and a login page you reached through a redirect deserves zero trust. Close the tab, then update through your settings and log in by typing the address yourself.

Source: FBI IC3: Cyber Criminals Redirecting Users to Fraudulent Websites with Malicious Traffic Distribution Systems

Until next week,
The ScamBrief Team

ScamBrief is part of the Echo Safe family | Helping families stay ahead of scams | echosafe.co

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