Sophisticated scam targeting clinicians with DEA licenses
This email below has been confirmed as malicious or fraudulent by the Information Security department. If you have received this phishing email, do not open any attachments or follow the link(s) in the message; simply delete the email.This phish is being done by telephone and is targeting clinicians with DEA licenses.
The email below was written by one of the targets of this scam, in an effort to spread the word and help others avoid the stress of what he went through. As he mentions below, some of his colleagues fell for the scam.
“I would like to spend a few minutes telling our clinicians about an ongoing and more sophisticated scam targeting clinicians with DEA licenses saying our license has been used for drug trafficking and we are now under investigation by DEA. This happened to me yesterday and it was awful. I eventually reported it to the FBI because they were impersonating DEA agents – real names of DEA staff as I was trying to figure this out while I was on the call (my alarm bells were going off but I was also so stressed by what they were saying – a large package was delivered to Texas with massive amounts of methadone, hydromorphone, suboxone, etc under my DEA #, NPI#, license #). They never asked me for money, DOB, SSN, but it scared me and told me they would call me back in 2-3 days to tell me if they found the people trying to steal my identity. They asked if I had ever lost credit cards, my phone, if I had family, friends in Texas or had traveled to Texas recently. They gave me their agent badge numbers, the case number “against me”. I called my univ. lawyer who helped to figure out it was a scam but sadly, there are a few docs here who gave $. Apparently, they will slowly try to gain trust over a few calls and then ask for money to “clear your name/license- preserve your livelihood” so you don’t have to report this false allegation later with the medical boards, etc. They started with calling my clinic and talking with my clinic manager – it was quite elaborate. The info they did get out of me was about where I had lived (luckily – I didn’t give actual detailed addresses) and my cell phone number, but I closed all my accounts to ensure no one opened an account, etc. Not how I thought that I was going to spend my Monday afternoon. ”
Best regards,
Jim