Medicare and Medicaid are losing billions of taxpayer dollars to criminals because they can’t keep pace with their high-tech scams, a Post investigation has found.
International criminal networks employ hackers who steal sensitive patient data then sell it on the dark web or use it to then bill for fake medical equipment or services in people’s names.
Scammers even use AI voice bots to coax info out of seniors on the phone, posing as US healthcare workers, often from thousands of miles away in Europe or Asia.
They use the same techniques on the insurance companies, with one Philippines-based outfit going as far as training AIs to speak like American old folks when insurance companies called about suspicious claims, according to feds.
“The fraud schemes I’m seeing — it blows me away. It’s frightening how sophisticated these things have become,” Gordon Schnell, a partner in the healthcare fraud whistleblower law firm Constantine Cannon, told The Post.
“The scale of the money that CMS [Centers for Medicaid and Medicare] doles out every year is enormous. Even if they lose sight of a relatively small percentage of it, it’s still billions of dollars.”
In a March 2026 report to CMS, cybersecurity company Pindrop detailed how fraudsters use cloned voices to authorize transactions, working “at machine speed.”
AI-enabled campaigns deploy automated voice bots to probe Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems — those automated telephone menus whenever you call a large company or a government agency — to test security and then escalate to a human agent, where they attempt to trick the human agent into releasing account data.
“Synthetic identities built from breached data are used to establish coverage under fraudulent pretenses, or to fabricate consumer consent,” the report found.
Last month, The Post reported on a jaw-dropping “phantom catheter” scam carried out by the Russian mob in which they made off with $1 billion.
Incredibly they had allegedly been able to purchase 30 medical supply companies across the US which were already enrolled as Medicare providers, then used them to fraudulently bill Medicare. They attempted to bill $10 billion, mostly for urinary catheters, using the stolen patient data of over one million Americans, which triggered 400,000 complaints, according to prosecutors.
The scheme was brazen and most of the fake reimbursements were blocked, but not before gangsters had laundered huge amounts through banks in Israel, Turkey and China, prosecutors charge.
https://nypost.com/2026/07/13/us-news/criminals-scamming-billions-from-medicare-using-fake-ai-voices-hacking-data-all-without-setting-foot-in-the-usa/