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November 12, 2013 - We've been warning our readers for several weeks now about the immediate threat of identity theft for anyone attempting to sign up for heal insurance at www.healthcare.gov. Specifically, the sight has never gone through end to end security testing and does not have online security features in place to protect personal information from hackers. Anyone who enters their information into the site's database faces the very real risk of having their information stolen. As it turns out though, anyone attempting to hack the website may be expending a lot of needless effort. You may just be able to place a phone call to them in order for someone to give you another person's social security number and other personal information.
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The video below is a report out of Missouri about a woman who was trying to sign on to healthcare.gov. She forgot her password so she called the exchange. On that call, she was told that her personal information - including her SSN - had been given to three other callers.
The report should concern everyone, but especially anyone who has already entered their information online. It is very clear that employees of the healthcare exchange have not been thoroughly trained on proper data security. What is less clear is what, if any, employee policies have been put in place by the healthcare exchange to prevent additional breaches such as the one described here.
If the exchange is tracking how many times it is giving out by phone the personal information of consumers who have registered with it (and they obviously are), then it is advisable for anyone who has registered with the exchange to place a call and ask if their information has been released. Anyone receiving an affirmative response should immediately place a fraud alert or credit freeze on their credit file. This may also be something that anyone registered with the exchange may want to do anyway, simply as a precaution.
More importantly, since the government is tracking the release of information, it would seem that there is a moral obligation to proactively notify every consumer whose information has been handed out via a phone call. That isn't happening right now. The question is, why not?
Here is the video.
byJim Malmberg
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