Officials Aren’t Counting The Growing Cost Of Online Obamacare Fraud

Aliya Sternstain | Nextgov | October 24, 2013

Don't ask the federal government how much money citizens are losing to Obamacare Internet scams. Tracking the dollars stolen through fake exchanges and other sites that prey on insurance applicants apparently is not under the administration's jurisdiction. 

The criminals are on top of it though.

Even before the $400 million official HealthCare.gov marketplace opened on Oct. 1, potentially fraudulent sites had reserved various incarnations of "Obamacare" for their homepage name, according to Web researchers. As of Wednesday afternoon, there were about 700 copycat sites, said John C. A. Bambenek, who watches abnormal online activity for the nonprofit Internet Storm Center.

The expectation is that some of these webpages are for hosting bogus insurance marketplaces.