If you’ve had an email account for more than a week you’ve probably received an email claiming to be from a lawyer, minister, widow or other such person who asks in broken English for your assistance in getting a sum of money, usually in the millions of dollars, out of their country before it is seized by the government. For your help you will receive ten percent of said funds. All this anonymous person needs to complete the transaction is your full name, date of birth and bank account information. In reality, all you receive for your trouble is an empty bank account. Countless people have let their greed and stupidity make them victims of these scams, known as a Nigerian 419. While this type of scam is not limited to Nigeria, that country is where the scam supposedly originated and it has a reputation for being the center of email scams. The article of the Nigerian Criminal Code dealing with fraud is 419, hence the term – Nigerian 419.
Back here in America it is the government pulling the scam. The state exchange in Washington has crashed multiple times and is now creating problems for people by debiting their accounts either at the wrong time or by debiting the account twice. One woman logged on to her checking account last week and found it almost $800 in the negative. Checking the invoice on the exchange website was not possible because the website was down again. And the help line was reportedly not working either. Some people resorted to posting messages on the exchange’s Facebook page to get someone to contact them. I have been unable to locate any reports of even one person having their funds returned to their bank accounts.
Such is the exchange in one state. Imagine this kind of problem on a national scale. We have no way to know yet what will happen since that section of healthcare.gov has not even been built yet. But it won’t matter, since the healthcare.gov website was designed and constructed without any security in mind at all. More than one online security expert has warned the public to stay away from the website or risk having private information stolen. And most people are unaware that, unlike private companies, the federal government is under no obligation to inform the public when it has been hacked. Between hackers stealing private information and the government itself randomly debiting bank accounts, it seems clear to me that the new center of the Nigerian 419 is now going to be the Obamacare and exchange websites. The scammers in Nigeria aren’t going to like this at all. By the time they get your information and try to empty your bank account either a hacker or the government will have beat them to it.
This would almost be funny, were it not so serious. The online scam artists have some serious competition from the American government. Go figure!
Definitely not funny. When the healthcare.gov site starts storing bank account info I’m certain we’ll see all kinds of billing problems.