Virginia Man Says His Personal Information Was Stolen After Enrolling in Obamacare

Obamacare may be the Personal Identity Theft Act. A Virginia Beach, VA man tells WVEC TV that after he enrolled in Obamacare via Healthcare.gov, he suspects that his family’s personal information was stolen.

Rich Guillory tells WVEC that he signed up for healthcare at Healthcare.gov. The following day, he started getting calls at home from people who offered to help him find health insurance. The mystery caller knew his name and his phone number. They called from two different numbers.

The mystery caller persisted, trying to contact Guillory seven times. When Guillory called the number back, a woman answered and said she did not know what he was talking about. He called another number that the mystery caller left, and that one was answered by a different woman. She claimed that she had received four similar calls.

Guillory answered one of the mystery calls and asked the person on the other end of the line about their calls and phone numbers. The person hung up immediately. The mystery caller appears to be “spoofing” — making it appear that they’re calling from one phone number, when they’re actually calling from another.

Just this week, Americans learned that some of the Affordable Care Act software was written by a firm that has connections to the government of Belarus.

U.S. intelligence agencies last week urged the Obama administration to check its new healthcare network for malicious software after learning that developers linked to the Belarus government helped produce the website, raising fresh concerns that private data posted by millions of Americans will be compromised.

The intelligence agencies notified the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency in charge of the Healthcare.gov network, about their concerns last week. Specifically, officials warned that programmers in Belarus, a former Soviet republic closely allied with Russia, were suspected of inserting malicious code that could be used for cyber attacks, according to U.S. officials familiar with the concerns.

The software links the millions of Americans who signed up for Obamacare to the federal government and more than 300 medical institutions and healthcare providers.

“The U.S. Affordable Care Act software was written in part in Belarus by software developers under state control, and that makes the software a potential target for cyber attacks,” one official said.

Cyber security officials said the potential threat to the U.S. healthcare data is compounded by what they said was an Internet data “hijacking” last year involving Belarusian state-controlled networks. The month-long diversion covertly rerouted massive amounts of U.S. Internet traffic to Belarus—a repressive dictatorship located between Russia, Poland, and Ukraine.

“Belarusian President [Alexander] Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime is closely allied with Russia and is adversarial toward the United States,” the official added.

Americans’ personal information could be used for anything from identity theft to impersonation for the purposes of infiltrating any number of facilities across the country.