My Mom Gets Medicare Calls Every Day. Are Any of Them Real?
TL;DR
- Unsolicited Medicare calls are barred by federal rule: plans and their agents cannot cold call, robocall, or text someone who did not ask to be contacted.
- So a Medicare call your parent never requested is either a scammer or a licensed agent breaking 42 CFR 422.2264, and neither one deserves her Medicare number.
- The calls spike now because plans cannot market next year’s coverage before October 1, and open enrollment runs October 15 to December 7.
- People reported losing about $920 million to government impersonators in 2025, up from $789 million in 2024, per the FTC.
- One step today: open Settings on her iPhone, tap Apps, tap Phone, and turn on Silence Unknown Callers.
Your mom’s phone rings four times before lunch, and all four are Medicare calls. A benefits review. A new card. A plan that costs less. An eligibility check that expires today. She wants to know which ones she’s supposed to answer, and you don’t have a good answer either.
Turns out there’s a clean line between the real ones and the rest, and it has nothing to do with how the caller sounds.
Almost none of those Medicare calls are legal
Medicare Advantage and Part D plans, plus the agents and brokers who sell them, operate under a federal rule most people have never heard of. 42 CFR 422.2264 spells out what they may and may not do to reach a beneficiary who hasn’t asked to hear from them.
Unsolicited phone calls are on the banned list. So are robocalls, text messages, and voicemail drops. The rule goes further and names the workarounds: no calls based on a referral, no calls to someone who attended a sales event unless they gave express permission, no calls to “confirm you got our mailing.” Door-to-door is out. Direct messages on social media are out.
What is allowed? Mail and email. That’s the reason your mom’s kitchen counter is buried in glossy envelopes every October while the phone is supposed to stay quiet.
So when a stranger calls selling Medicare coverage, there are only two possibilities. It’s a scammer who was never going to follow the rule, or it’s a licensed agent breaking it. Your mom does not need to figure out which. Neither one gets her Medicare number.
Why the calls got worse this month
The timing isn’t random. Plans cannot market next year’s coverage before October 1, under 42 CFR 422.2263. Open enrollment then runs October 15 through December 7.
Scammers know that calendar as well as the industry does. They start early, while nobody legitimate is allowed to be calling yet, because a September call about “your 2027 benefits” sounds plausible to someone who’s been seeing enrollment ads. It also means the field is clear. Every real plan is sitting on its hands until October 1.
A Medicare sales call before October is a bright red flag on its own. Say that to your mom once and it’ll stick better than any list of warning signs.
The three calls that could actually be real
Not every call with the word Medicare in it is fake. There are narrow exceptions, and knowing them keeps your mom from ignoring something that matters.
Her own plan can call her. If she’s already enrolled in a Medicare Advantage or Part D plan, that plan is allowed to call her about plan business. Same for a company that already covers her for something else. Worth knowing: the rule requires them to tell her in writing, at least once a year, that she can opt out of those calls. If she’s tired of them, she can.
A call she started. If she phoned 1-800-MEDICARE and left a message, or mailed back a reply card, the return call is fair game. The regulation is explicit that returning a call the beneficiary initiated isn’t unsolicited contact.
Her own agent or counselor. If she has a broker she chose, or she made an appointment with her state’s free SHIP counseling program, those calls are expected. She’ll know, because she wrote it on the calendar.
Boil it down to one line for her: if she didn’t start it, it isn’t Medicare.
What the caller is actually trying to get
The pitch is a plan review. The target is her Medicare number.
That number is the key to medical identity theft. Somebody bills Medicare for a back brace, a knee brace, genetic testing, or diabetic supplies she never received. She may not find out for months, and it can tangle up real claims later. Some callers push further and go for her Social Security number, her bank details, or a card number to “cover the shipping.”
Two pitches are worth naming out loud because they’re everywhere right now. The first is the flex card or benefits card that supposedly comes with a plan switch. The second is the new Medicare card: a caller or a text says her paper card is expiring and she needs to request a plastic chip version. AARP has flagged this one repeatedly. Medicare cards are paper, none of them have chips, and hers doesn’t expire. The last real card change finished in 2019, and nobody has to ask for anything.
The money behind this isn’t small. The FTC reported that people lost about $920 million to government impersonators in 2025, up from $789 million the year before. Imposter scams overall took $3.5 billion and were the single most reported fraud category, close to one in three reports.
Give her one sentence, not a lecture
Long checklists don’t survive a ringing phone. One sentence does.
“I don’t take Medicare calls. Send it in writing.” Then hang up.
That works because it’s true and because it ends the call before the persuasion starts. Real plans can mail her anything they want, so she loses nothing. And she’s not being rude to a person doing a job. She’s ending a call that federal rules say shouldn’t have happened.
Tell her not to say “take me off your list,” not to press 2, and not to answer any question with yes. Every one of those confirms a live human picked up, which is exactly what the dialer is measuring. Silence is the only response that costs them anything.
Cut the volume on her iPhone
Talking is half of it. The other half is fewer calls reaching her at all.
Turn on Silence Unknown Callers. On her iPhone, open Settings, tap Apps, tap Phone, and switch on Silence Unknown Callers. On older iOS versions it’s Settings, then Phone. Anything not in her Contacts goes straight to voicemail without ringing. It still shows up in Recents, so nothing disappears.
Then fix Contacts, because that switch depends on it. Add her doctor, her pharmacy, her actual plan’s member services number (it’s printed on her insurance card), and close family. Ten minutes here prevents a month of “I keep missing calls.”
Turn on her carrier’s free filtering. AT&T has ActiveArmor, Verizon has Call Filter, T-Mobile has Scam Shield. These block or label known scam numbers at the network level, before her phone lights up.
Those three help, and they leak in a predictable way. Medicare lead operations rotate through numbers fast, so a fresh one nobody has reported yet rings straight through, and Filter Unknown Senders sorts texts without reading them. That’s the gap Not Today is built for: it checks incoming numbers against a community database of numbers other people have already reported, and it filters texts by keyword, so the words these campaigns lean on (“Medicare,” “flex card,” “benefits review”) get caught no matter which throwaway number sends them.
If you’re setting her phone up from scratch, we walked through the full checklist in this guide to setting up a parent’s iPhone, and there’s more detail on what Silence Unknown Callers does to real calls here.
If she already gave out her Medicare number
Move, but don’t panic. Nothing gets stolen from a bank account with a Medicare number alone.
Call 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227) and report it. Then log into her account at medicare.gov and read the recent claims, or check the next Medicare Summary Notice that arrives, looking for equipment, tests, or visits she never had. Dispute anything that doesn’t belong.
Report the call at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Then call the Senior Medicare Patrol at 877-808-2468 or visit smpresource.org. SMP is a free, federally funded program with counselors in every state whose entire job is helping people untangle exactly this. Most families have never heard of it.
If she also handed over her Social Security number, that’s a different and more urgent set of steps, and we laid them out here.
One more thing to warn her about. Victims of Medicare fraud get called back, sometimes by someone claiming to be from Medicare or a law firm offering to recover the money for a fee. That’s the recovery scam, and it’s the same crew working the second half of the list.
Get the phone quiet before October 15. Then she can spend open enrollment reading her mail and calling the numbers she chooses, which is how the whole thing was supposed to work.
Not Today is a free spam-blocking app for iPhone. We built it to catch spam before it reaches you, using keyword rules, a community database of reported numbers, and optional AI detection. No account required. Download on the App Store.