Door-to-door visitor offers free meals or cleaning and secretly enrolls you in hospice care
Strangers knock on your door offering free cleaning or meals in exchange for signing Medicare paperwork, then enroll you in hospice care you don't need and bill Medicare for services never provided.
Also known as: hospice enrollment fraud, Medicare hospice billing scam, free services for Medicare enrollment scam, home health care recruitment fraud
Already happened to you? Do this in the next few minutes
- 1 Call your bank or card's fraud line right now. Use the number on the back of your card — not any number from the message or caller. Ask them to stop or reverse the payment and freeze the account.
- 2 If you paid by gift card, wire, or an app (Zelle, Venmo, Cash App): contact that company immediately and report it as fraud. Acting fast sometimes recovers the money.
- 3 Report to the FBI at ic3.gov and the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov. The sooner, the better.
What to do right now
- 1 Do not sign any Medicare-related paperwork from door-to-door visitors — legitimate care providers are referred by your own doctor, not by salespeople offering free services
- 2 Review your Medicare Summary Notice and Explanation of Benefits every quarter for charges from providers you do not recognize
- 3 If you find unfamiliar hospice or home health charges, call 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227) immediately to dispute them
- 4 Before accepting any free service tied to Medicare, look up the provider on Medicare's Care Compare tool at medicare.gov/care-compare
- 5 Report Medicare fraud to the HHS Office of Inspector General: call 1-800-HHS-TIPS or visit https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/report-fraud/
- 6 Report to the FTC at https://reportfraud.ftc.gov and the FBI's IC3 at https://www.ic3.gov.
Red flags
- ⚠ A stranger comes to your door offering free cleaning, meal delivery, or other home services in exchange for signing Medicare enrollment paperwork
- ⚠ The offer is described as a 'Medicare benefit' — real hospice benefits are ordered by your own doctor after a terminal diagnosis, never pitched by a door-to-door salesperson
- ⚠ Your Medicare Summary Notice shows charges from a hospice or home health agency you never contacted or chose
- ⚠ A provider claims you qualify for hospice care without a terminal-illness referral from your own physician
- ⚠ You are pressured to sign documents on the spot or told the offer is only available today