Doctors’ offices, clinics and hospitals are a fruitful hunting ground for identity thieves, who are using increasingly sophisticated methods to steal patient information, lawyers and privacy experts say.
Recent disclosures that hospital workers snooped into the medical files of Maria Shriver, Britney Spears and George Clooney highlight the vulnerability of patients to the merely curious and the criminal.
Legal experts say lawbreakers use medical information to get credit card numbers, drain bank accounts or falsely bill Medicare and other insurers.
I wince every time a health insurer or financial institution pretends it can verify my identity by ascertaining my birth date, address, mother’s maiden name, and the like. That sort of information is not hard to come by. You can go to your local public library and find it out for tens of thousands of people. So can fraudsters, although they can spare themselves a trip to the library by subscribing to databases that make this sort of information available online.