Help: My doctor is billing me by text?

Hey there —

In February, we got a note from a listener in Georgia named Katherine whose husband was battling an infection that involved multiple hospital stays and at-home care — and multiple rounds of billing.

And they started getting some of those bills in a new way: by text. With a click-to-pay link. And *without* some other essentials:

… no invoice, no statement, no documentation. I’m not sure how one is supposed to keep track of payments (sometimes quite large) without a paper or even a pdf trail!

Katherine’s got a point.

Paying right from your phone like that could mean losing track of what you’ve paid and what you owe.

It could also mean paying something you don’t owe — or, worse, paying something you don’t owe to someone you don’t owe: a scammer.

So this week, we’re sharing some topline advice on what to do if you end up in a similar bill-by-text sitch.

Step 1: “Take a step, take a beat, take a breath.”

Who among us hasn’t gotten a text saying it’s your FINAL NOTICE on an unpaid toll — or that you’re being recruited for a high-paying remote job — and for at least a split second, experienced a moment of panic or elation?

That heightened emotion — and false sense of urgency — is what Amy Nofziger, Senior Director of Victim Support with the AARP Fraud Watch Network calls “the common DNA strands of a scam.”

And few things say “urgent” like communication from a medical provider.

Amy describes the thoughts that can get triggered: “If I don’t do this now, I’m gonna go to collections, or my doctor’s gonna know and he’s gonna get mad at me, and I have to see him next week.”

So here’s her advice: “Take a step, take a beat, take a breath, and just think about it, right?”

For one: In almost no circumstance do you need to pay a medical bill *right away.*

You typically have at least a month or two until a medical bill goes to collections. And once you’re contacted by a collector, you have 30 days to dispute that debt, and a whole year before it can even go on your credit report.

Instead of jumping right to payment, call your doctors’ office, ask them if they texted you.

And if they really did, request that invoice by snail mail and pay the old school way, or find it through your online patient portal, just to be safe.

And you’ll want time with that bill anyways, cuz…

Step 2: You should fact check everything! Even legit bills

This is classic Arm and a Leg advice — never pay right away, even when the bill comes in the traditional way. (And not just us: The late journalist and friend of the show Marshall Allen titled his cost-of-health-care book Never Pay the First Bill.)

Because you want to make sure everything on it is accurate.

Which, by the way, means you’ll need to request an itemized version.

Plus, as our friend Katherine mentioned, you’re going to want a paper trail.

That way you can keep track of what you’ve paid, so you don’t get double-billed, and so you can track how much of your deductible and out-of-pocket max you have left.

(Check out our story about a patient named Meagan who was chased for a two-year-old bill she didn’t owe for a reminder about why this is so important — and some motivation!!)

Step 3: Don’t pay on the Starbucks network, and other ways to stay scam-proof

Even if you confirm the bill is real — and accurate — Amy has more scam-fighting advice:

Like: don’t pay anything on a public wifi network, like at the coffee shop or airport.

Scammers are known to set up look-alike networks, and use them to access your credit card info and other personally identifying information.

And Amy says be wary anytime you’re being asked to pay for something in an unusual way — like with pre-paid gift-cards, cash from a crypto-ATM, or you know… gold bars.

“If you feel the hairs on the back of your neck or your heart start beating, that is 100% what you need to be listening to and get out of that situation because you are about to be involved in a scam,” she says.

If you think you’ve been texted by a scammer, AARP has a team of fraud specialists like Amy ready to help. Just call their helpline at 877-908-3360. (You don’t have to be an AARP member — or AARP’s target demographic — to use it.)

You can also report a scam through the AARP’s Fraud Watch Network here, or to the Federal Trade Commission.

And if you want to level up on your scam defenses, check out this Consumer Reports guide. It covers everything from how to spot suspicious emails to how to keep your devices more secure.

Finally, for a bit of vigilante catharthis…

Check out Scammer Payback: They engage with online scammers, pretending to be ripe targets… then turn around and beat the scammers at their own game — a trick they call scam baiting.

The folks at AARP interviewed the ringleader, who goes by “Pierogi,” for their podcast The Perfect Scam, and he shares more tips in this interview with Wired.

Stay vigilant out there!

— Claire