Identity Fraud

With senior citizens increasingly being the victims of identity fraud, with a nearly 24 percent increase in cases from 2012-2014 when 2.6 million incidents were recorded, Medicare will be issuing new Medicare cards to its more than 57 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries. Currently, Medicare cards have the users social security number printed on the card. Congress set an April 2019 deadline to have all users receive new cards but Medicare has recently announced that users will start seeing new cards issued as soon as April 2018. The new cards will have a MBI (Medicare Beneficiary Identifier) printed on the card instead of the user’s social security number. The MBI will be an 11 character combination of randomly generated numbers and upper-case letters. Medicare users are encouraged to destroy their old cards when the new card arrives. While the effect is still almost a year away, the Administration is working diligently to make this change which is expected to decrease the amount of senior citizens falling victims to identity fraud.