Chinese speakers in the US are being targeted as part of an aggressive health insurance scam campaign, the FBI warns.
In telephone calls carried out in Chinese, the scammers reel in targets under the pretense that they have unpaid bills related to recent surgical procedures.
They use spoofed telephone numbers belonging to the claims departments of legitimate US health insurance providers to add a layer of authenticity to the scam, but that authenticity quickly evaporates.
If, for some reason, targets entertain the conversation about paying for a surgery they almost certainly did not receive, the scammers get them to join a video call. At this point, they present the potential victim with a fraudulent invoice.
When they inevitably decline to pay, the scammers say they will refer the case to Chinese law enforcement – because they definitely have jurisdiction over US healthcare bills – and a separate member of the scam operation then contacts them under that guise.
The so-called representative of the Chinese state demands that the target surrenders their personal information before threatening them with extradition or prosecution in China.
The scammer will then demand payment for bail, and in some cases they tell the victim to download what the FBI referred to as “video communication software” and keep it running for 24-hour surveillance.
While the description of the scam’s premise sounds barely plausible, the fact that the FBI felt compelled to issue an alert suggests that the campaign has seen at least some success.
Healthcare fraud is listed among the FBI’s most common scams affecting US residents, and impersonating a healthcare professional – a category under which this case would fall – is one of the common themes among these campaigns.
The FBI encouraged targets of this scam in particular to independently verify the identity of self-proclaimed insurance reps, and not to hand over any personal information and/or credentials for insurance-related logins.
It also advised not to relinquish control of one’s computer via remote desktop management software, and obviously not to wire money to unsolicited callers.
Per the FBI’s most recent Internet Crime Report, the agency received 859,532 complaints of suspected internet crime in 2024, leading to losses exceeding $16 billion, although a large chunk of these were attributed to cryptocurrency investment frauds and business email compromise schemes. ®