Milwaukee mom makes $1,675 a week working from home!
If you’ve spent any time online recently, you’ve probably seen a number of pop-ups, banner ads and side bars offering to tell the story of people just like you who have converted their lives as homemakers into successful careers, working online to make thousands of dollars every week doing who-knows-what. Even major, otherwise-reputable websites seem to follow the trend of accepting advertising from obviously shady work-from-home schemes.
The healthcare industry is one of the latest victims of these schemes. By understanding how medical billing and coding scams work and learning to quickly identify them when you see them, you can hold on to your hard earned money and put it towards something more useful, such as a real medical billing and coding certification.
Fast Fact: “Bounty Hunters” Crack Down on Billing Fraud
According to a Reuters report, the FBI estimated that $75 to $250 billion in fraudulent health expenses were paid during the 2009 fiscal year. This was partly due to “phantom billing,” or the process of billing for services or procedures that were never provided. In a speech made in March of 2010, President Obama announced his intention to support private auditors, or “bounty hunters,” that would use sophisticated technology to scan Medicare and Medicaid billing records in order to discover patterns of disreputable claims. These “bounty hunters” would then be able to keep a portion of any funds recovered.
A Brief History of Medical Billing and Coding Scams
Several years ago, a number of financial and entrepreneurial magazines began to declare that working as a certified medical coder and biller from home would be one of the most lucrative home-based business opportunities of the 21st century. Once these reports fell into the hands of scammers, they seized an obvious opportunity: more and more people were looking to leave their 9 to 5 jobs for the promise of a cushy Internet job at the peak of the dot-com bubble, and the medical billing and coding industry was and continues to be a poorly understood field. As such, the scammers began to advertise work-from-home medical billing and coding jobs with the promise of a lucrative paycheck, despite not explaining what the job would actually entail.
These companies depend on your lack of knowledge regarding medical billing and coding. They assume that you don’t understand the value of certification. They trust that you won’t do your own research. They make it incredibly easy for you to get in contact with them, even at unusual hours. They may eventually become impossible to contact. Their representatives sound convincing and eerily “real.” They say that you’ll easily make $40,000 to $60,000 just as a starting point, without even leaving your home. They say that there’s only one catch: you’ll need to pay them a fee, usually $500 or less, so that they can supply you with a “starter kit” that will teach you everything you need to know about medical billing and coding.
They’re lying. The simple truth is that $500 is simply not enough to convert you from a healthcare layperson to a fully fledged medical biller and coder, especially when you consider the fact that most medical billers and coders spend years and thousands of dollars pursuing an education and certification, only to break into a field that pays little more than $30,000 per year to start.
Fast Fact: Scammers, Spammers and Fraud, Oh My!
Medical billing and coding “work from homers” are not the only targets of scams on the Internet. In fact, the largest group of scam complaints, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2007, came from online auction fraud – around 44.9%. Second to online auction fraud were complaints of non-delivery of merchandise or failure to pay for merchandise, which made up 19%. Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of people that fell victim to scams were not specifically targeted by the scammer, but went seeking trouble themselves. According to the ICCC, 70% of people that fell for Internet scams did so during a visit to a website while only about 30% of people fell for scams that came to them through email.
How to Spot and Avoid Medical Billing and Coding Scams
Fortunately, a little common sense goes a long way in avoiding medical billing and coding scams. The old adage “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is” certainly applies here. It’s important to note that some work-from-home medical billing and coding jobs are indeed legitimate. The following tips should help you to avoid the ones that are not.
1. Don’t bother with ads found in local shopper and celebrity news rags, such as PennySaves, Thrifty Nickel, Examiner, Sun and Globe. Even some major daily newspapers run ads for medical billing and coding scams. The ads typically state that you can earn $40,000, $50,000 or even more per year with absolutely no experience. They’ll ask you to call a 1-800 number for more information.
2. Be wary of advertisements for complete starter kits that give you “everything you need” to start a medical billing and coding business from home. These ads are usually found online, but they also tend to show up in financial and entrepreneurial magazines. The ads say that, for between $4,000 and $10,000, you’ll receive training, marketing materials, software and lists of healthcare practitioners. Some of these companies are reputable. Most are not.
3. Watch out for medical billing and coding work-from-home “resellers.” These companies sell rebranded versions of well known medical billing and coding software programs, typically through personal websites and eBay. The programs are very basic despite their inflated prices, and are nowhere near robust enough to support a home-based medical billing and coding business. Once you realize that the software is poor, you’ll end up calling them and complaining. They’ll reply by saying that you need to upgrade your software, effectively doubling your costs. The software can be easily found in its original format elsewhere for a fraction of the price.
4. Stay away from medical coding and billing work-from-home software companies that claim to double as clearinghouse companies. They offer a deal that sounds good on the surface: you buy their software in exchange for a discounted clearinghouse service, with the stipulation that you’ll only submit claims through their company. But what happens when this company goes out of business, which happens frequently with these types of companies? You’re back to square one, with no recourse aside from finding a new job.
5. Thoroughly research any medical and billing work-from-home opportunities that you find, even if you’re referred to one by a trusted friend (remember, your friend could be on the unfortunate end of a scam as well). You can do this by checking out the company’s ratings with the Better Business Bureau. This will reveal whether any complaints have been filed against the company, and whether those complaints were properly resolved.
6. Conduct a few simple Google searches for the company’s name. Often, this will lead you to sites such as Ripoff Report, where individuals file complaints regarding scammers. If you find even a single negative story from a current or former employee, it may serve as a red flag.
7. Browse the online forums of medical billing and coding professional organizations, such as the one maintained by the American Association of Professional Coders. These forums often contain stories from individuals who’ve either fallen victim to medical billing and coding scams or who’ve found real success by working from home in the industry.
8. Be on the lookout for medical billing and coding training scams. Although these are commonly offered online, they sometimes take the form of live courses in which the instructor promises more than they actually plan to provide. For example, one story on Ripoff Report describes a woman who charged her students $750 for tuition and $450 for books, promising to prepare them for AAPC certification examinations. None of the students passed their exams, and none received the additional training they were promised in the case of failing.
Fast Fact: Don’t Get Scammed
In 2001, the Federal Trade Commission recovered over $500,000 from Data Medical Capital, Inc., permanently banning the company from selling business ventures. The reason – selling bogus medical billing business opportunities. The FTC has since been on the lookout for similar operations, but it’s still possible that you may come across a scam business opportunity that claims to offer you thousands of dollars a month for performing medical billing and coding from home.
What You Should Do if You Think You’ve Been Scammed
Unfortunately, many people fall victim to medical billing and coding scams without initially realizing it. If you suspect that you’ve been scammed, you should take some important steps that could allow you to get your money back and protect others from falling victim to the same scam in the future:
- If you heard of the “job” through online advertising, contact the website that was running the ad. Many sites accept advertising without thoroughly assessing the legitimacy of the company offering the ad. They’ll thank you for alerting them to the scam.
- If you heard about the scam through the mail, contact your local post office.
- Tell about your story on a site such as Ripoff Report. Remember, your goal at this point is to prevent others from being scammed as well. When you publicize your story, you ruin the scammer’s reputation.
- Contact your state’s Attorney General, as well as the Attorney General of the state in which the scammer is based.
- Contact the Better Business Bureau to file a complaint.
- If you’d categorize the scam as an “easy money” or “get rich quick” scheme (which is probably the case), contact the National Fraud Information Center to report the medical billing and coding scam.
- Contact the Consumer Protection Office in your area.
- Contact the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC looks for trends of unfair practices and deception, which are trademark qualities of many medical billing and coding scams.
About our expert. Jan Jacobs has worked in medical offices since the early 1980's. Ms. Jacobs has worked for M.D.'s and D.O.'s in primary care and specialty care. She is employed as a senior medical biller and has been at her current job for nearly 10 years, where she uses three different billing systems.
