Search and plans

Health insurance paid ads and the Marketplace fakes

Updated 29 September 2026

The assumption almost everyone brings to a health insurance search is that the thing at the top is the government site, because the logo looks right and the address looks close. That assumption is the expensive part. Scammers and dishonest businesses buy the top of the search results during Open Enrollment, they copy the wording and the logos, and the address they send you to is a near-copy rather than the real thing. If you use the link or the phone number out of the ad, you can end up paying for something that is not health insurance, or handing over enough detail for someone to open medical identity theft in your name.

Why Open Enrollment is when this peaks

Health insurance fraud does not stop when enrollment stops, but it concentrates hard in the weeks around it. That is when ordinary people with ordinary jobs go looking for a plan or a better deal, and the search term is generic: health insurance, Marketplace plans, Medicare options. Those are the exact phrases an advertiser can bid on and win, and the FTC's guidance is blunt that scam health insurance operations and dishonest businesses pay to appear at the top of the results for exactly those searches.

The mechanism is worth being precise about, because it is not a random wrong link. It is a commercial purchase. Somebody paid for that position. What they want at the end of it is not to help you find cover, it is to take your details, or to sell you a product that is dressed in the vocabulary of insurance and is not insurance at all. Sometimes it is a lead sold on to another party. Sometimes it is a membership fee dressed as a plan. Sometimes it is a site that collects a social security number and medical history and then sells that.

The tells that take five seconds

There are four things to look at, and none of them take long.

Is there a small Ad or Sponsored label? Every paid placement in a search result carries one. If the result you are about to click is not labelled, you are looking at an organic ranking, which is at least something you can reason about. If it is labelled, you are looking at a purchase, and the FTC's specific advice is to scroll past paid placements rather than read them as results.

Does the address end in .gov? The real Marketplace is HealthCare.gov. The real Medicare site is Medicare.gov. Both are .gov and both are typed with that exact capitalisation. Fake versions tend to use a domain that reads similarly, sometimes with a different suffix, sometimes with a word in front of the real name, sometimes as a subdomain of something unrelated that resolves to a convincing page.

Was the number in the ad? This is the one people get wrong most often, because a real-looking phone number in a real-looking ad feels like it confirms the site. It does not. The FTC's guidance is to type the site name in yourself and use the published number, rather than dialling whatever appeared in the result. If you need help, the numbers are public and free and they do not change during enrollment.

Does it ask for payment or health details to browse? The real Marketplace lets you compare plans without handing over a card. The real Medicare site does not gate information behind a form. A site that wants payment details or your medical history before it will tell you anything is selling something, not quoting.

One general habit covers most of it, and it is worth more than any single check: if a health insurance offer arrived through a search result rather than through you typing a known address, treat it as unverified until you have confirmed it independently. The website safety checker will give you a second read on a specific address if you want one before you type anything in.

What the ad is actually selling

The FTC's own warning on this is that using the link or number in the ad might leave you paying for a plan that is not health insurance. That is worth sitting with, because the version people expect is the one where they lose money on a policy. The versions that are more common are duller. A membership that pays out a fixed amount and covers nothing else. A discount card sold as supplemental cover. A site that looks like a broker and is a lead form. None of these feel like a con while you are in them, which is the point, and all of them take a payment method that does not have the protection your bank card would have given you.

There is a second version where nothing is sold at all, and it is arguably worse. You are asked to sign up, create an account, and enter personal and health information in order to be shown plans. That information is the product. Once a set of medical details is in someone else's hands it is very hard to claw back, and unlike a card charge there is no dispute process standing behind you.

The medical identity theft end

The FTC names medical identity theft as a distinct outcome, not a variant of the scam. It works like ordinary identity theft with a clinical payload: once someone has your name, date of birth, and enough of your health history to answer security questions at a provider, they can be treated as you, be prescribed against your record, or have claims made in your name. The trouble is that it often surfaces late, at a pharmacy counter or a clinic, rather than at the moment you handed the details over.

The practical point is that avoiding the ad protects two things at once, and the second is the one people forget. Not spending money on a bad plan is the small half. Not creating a copy of your medical identity that someone can use is the large half, and it is the half you cannot undo with a phone call to your bank.

Type the address yourself

This is the whole method, and it is not a sophisticated one. The Marketplace is at HealthCare.gov, which lets you compare plans, check your coverage, and find out whether you qualify for savings. Medicare is at Medicare.gov. You do not need an advertisement to reach either of them, and an advertisement offering to save you the typing is telling you something about itself.

The same logic applies after you have bought something. If a broker or an agent contacts you about a plan you were already researching, the reference point is still the same two sites. Check there first. A legitimate enrolment will be visible on your own account when you log in, and a fraudulent one will not be.

Two numbers worth saving

Both are free, both are published, and both will survive you losing the search history that led you to this page.

Medicare is 800-633-4227. If it is a Medicare question, that is the number. The FTC also says to report Medicare fraud at Medicare.gov or on that number, which means the same call does both jobs: you get help and you file the report.

The Marketplace is 800-318-2596. If you are shopping ACA plans, that is the number. The other figures people quote during enrollment, the ones that look like an official line, are exactly the kind of thing that appears in a paid ad, so treat an unfamiliar number as a reason to go back to the site itself.

Free help that is actually free

There is help available that costs nothing and does not require you to enter anything into a form, which puts it on the other side of this from an ad.

Your State Health Insurance Assistance Program is the route if you want someone to sit down with you and go through costs and coverage. It is a state-run service, reachable through shiphelp.org, and it is free. For older adults and their families, Senior Medicare Patrol, at smpresource.org, does comparable work on Medicare questions. For ACA plans specifically, HealthCare.gov has a Find Local Help section that routes you to the same kind of assistance.

Worth noting that these are the routes an imposter will not point you at, because none of them benefit from you filling in a form on a site you have just been sent to.

If you already clicked

Close the page. That is the first step and it is the one people skip because they want to go back and look at the prices.

Do not enter payment details. Do not create an account. If you already entered personal or health information, note what you entered and when, because that changes what you report and it makes the report more useful. If you entered a card number, treat it as exposed and go through your bank's fraud process rather than the merchant's, which for a site you have never heard of may not exist at all.

Then report it. Getting the details on record is the part that helps somebody else, and it costs about five minutes.

Where to report it

The FTC takes consumer fraud reports at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and your state attorney general takes them as well. If the scam involved Medicare, report it at Medicare.gov or on 800-633-4227. Reporting the same scam twice is not a problem; a duplicate report does not dilute the original.

The FTC is running a roundtable on Medicare and healthcare-related scams during and after Open Enrollment on 29 September 2026, with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Senior Medicare Patrol taking part. If your near-miss or your loss came out of this specific pattern, that is the conversation it will come up in.

Health insurance scams run all year and peak at enrollment. The version that costs people the most is not the one that steals a card, it is the one that quietly copies your medical identity. Type the address in yourself, look for the .gov, and use the published number.

This is general safety information, not legal advice. Scams change. If you need an official desk: FTC ReportFraud or IC3.