BILLINGS — Monday was a normal day for 69-year-old Billings resident Kimard Kunnemann until he got a phone call and almost gave out personal information from his Medicare card.
Now, he wants to warn others about how different this call felt from other scam calls he's received.
“It was a 253, I believe, area code,” Kunnemann said on Tuesday. “They had a lot of my personal information. My date of birth, my address.”
Kunnemann said he believed the caller was with Medicare at first but does admit it was hard to understand whoever was on the other end of the line. He got suspicious when the caller asked for the date he received his Medicare card, and he told them that they should already have that information.
“So, I put them on the spot and they said, 'Yeah, we got it on 2/20.' And I looked at my card and it was not that. So, I knew it was a scam.”
He then called the 24/7 hotline on the back of his Medicare card.
“There’s almost no reason for Medicare to call you,” Kunnemann said.
He said the representative that he spoke with told him the agency won't call you unless they have been hacked and they are calling to let you know, or if you have reached out to them first.
The scam call left Kunnemann feeling agitated, and he wants to warn others how different the call felt because of how much information the person on the other end knew about him.
Banks and government agencies will never call to ask for personal information.
“There’s too many people getting taken advantage of and when you get our age, you know, we have a very limited income and it’s hard to make up whatever they take away from you,” Kunnemann said. “You just have to be really careful.”
