Medicare fraud and scams in Venezuela

emperorhyspania (42)in #life • 5 years ago

Note: This is a translated version of my latest post, link here

Dear Steemians of the World! It is great to write you again.

The reason why I write this post is particularly unpleasant. In life there is a first time for everything, including bad things or situations that generate disgust, however, these experiences are the ones that make us grow and create thick skin in situations that test our nerves or our principles. I will share with you an experience lived just a few weeks ago and that gave me a lot to think about, I also make the exception that I expose my personal opinions as well as the testimony of a person who went through the same situation as me a year before.

A Great Job Offer

After my previous work I decided to get up and start traveling around the city looking for a new one, this time I would try to be more specific in what I wanted, I understood that had already worked a lot in call centers and that needed new job experiences, I wanted to work as an administrative assistant and, considering my university preparation, also wanted to learn from other areas of insurance, such as car insurance.

For this I updated my profile in Bumeran and created a profile in Linkedin, which seemed to pay off because in the following weeks I received calls for job offers, this caused me a lot of satisfaction, I felt that the time spent preparing myself was giving small, but significant results. Although there were good deals, most were focused on sales by phone (again) and others were really underpaid, none was really worth it.

It was about two weeks ago that at the suggestion of a good friend I attended a job fair in Los Dos Caminos (Caracas), the fair was offered by a new company in Venezuela called BLS (Best Lead Solutions for its acronym). According to the company, they offered an Outsourcing service for several organizations, the campaign that is handled today is sponsored (supposedly) by Medicare, the Social Security program of the United States government, which has under its protection all US citizens over 65, people with disabilities and people with kidney diseases in terminal stages. Specifically, the campaign would deal with prevention services and / or medical supplies, considered one of the insurance coverage as "Part B". I’ll share a direct link for more information: Medicare

The BLS trainers reported that our job was to conduct simply surveys of Medicare beneficiaries, who "by right" were being given a set of orthopedic braces to prevent any type of injury they might suffer at any time. The trainers assured that this did not mean any type of cost for the patients, much less an invoice from the insurance, that this was a benefit granted to them as part of the prevention campaign of Medicare which complies with the guidelines emanated by the World Health Organization ... Supposedly.

But there is a detail about the above mentioned: In order of deliver this benefit to the patients they had to give us during the call their Social Security Number (SSN), keep this in mind because you’ll understand the reason behind this soon.

All this that I explain to you was told to me the same day of the interview, when they also asked me if I was fluent in English, I told them yes, so they proceeded to do a brief oral test; I passed this test and I was informed that because I was bilingual, I would be placed in the section of the campaign aimed solely at English-speaking American citizens, in addition to having a much higher salary than the rest of the employees. Sounds good, isn’t?

They send me a text message to start the training on Friday. To make it short, I only conducted a survey that day, I did not do any on Saturday (which for us was also working), this began to worry me so I talked with my colleagues and coordinators who gave tools and advises to improve my management in calls , mainly because I received negative responses from patients when requesting the Social Security number, who called me a scammer and that I did not work for Medicare, all of this reached its breaking point when I made a small research on BLS and its campaign.

When searching on Google "Best Lead Solutions" appeared not only the page of the above mentioned company, but also a publication on a blog of Wordpress.com written by a person who worked for BLS a year ago, his blog addressed topics such as translations and bilingual companies of Caracas in which it explains the suspicious activities of BLS and its campaign.

On the website Bestleadsolution.com there is no information about the Medicare campaign, it is rather a rather generic site, made from any other, but what I was even more surprised to learn that the BLS headquarters address in Google Maps and Earth (which are supposedly in San Diego, California) is not a business complex in the "Downtown" but a house in a common suburb. Captures down here:

In the blog post they also refer to the social networks of BLS, such as Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook which are so empty and lacking in any kind of personalization as their website; also highlights a mention of the foresaid company in Apestan.com, a website dedicated to the manifestation of complaints of consumers of goods and services in Mexico as well as in other parts of the continent where users claimed that BLS was a ghost company which bought databases to provide glucometers at no cost to diabetes patients in the USA when in fact the insurance does charges them 20% of what this device costs. In the prevention campaign happens the same.

Indeed it is

"This is not an isolated case. In November 2016 several people were arrested in both India and the United States for identity theft, impersonating a US official, money laundering , and electronic fraud. (...) Nearly 300 million dollars have been lost since 2013 due to telephone fraud, according to the Department of Justice of the United States."

References here:

Wordpress Blog

Reuters

Medicare

But those affected are not only Medicare patients, also employees of this "company" are harmed by sub-contracting since the salary in BLS is between 10,000 and 14,000 Bolivars along with a dubious bonus of 1 to 5 dollars in cash, which is a misery considering that the executives of BLS are left with the 20% commission mentioned above, taking advantage of the instability of the Venezuelan currency to earn millions in just one month, also counting the silence of the workers since many prefer to silence before to lose that money that takes sustenance to their homes added to the existing impunity granted by the local authorities.

I will be completely honest here Steemians: My values and my principles are priceless, I fortunately have the blessing of having a good university degree and a job where despite earning minimum wage I can support my family, I made the decision to leave BLS because I had the option of leaving, because I know I can find a better and honest job where can learn to be a better professional and a better person. It has been in these last two weeks where I have been able to reflect on the famous quote of Edmund Burke:

"For evil to triumph, it is enough for good men to do nothing"

And this is the end of this post steemians, here below you can find direct links to the references that validate all the information. I appreciate all the comments, questions, suggestions and recommendations in the comments and above all things, I appreciate the time you took to read it. Until next time!