Scammers are cloning Medicare.gov before open enrollment opens, the FTC warns

Search for Medicare.gov this autumn and the first result may not be Medicare.gov at all. In a consumer alert dated September 28, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection staff said scammers and dishonest businesses sometimes pay to appear at the top of search results, and that some of them are built to pass for the government’s own enrollment sites.

The timing is deliberate on the scammers’ side. Open enrollment for Medicare drug and health plans is days away, and the FTC published its warning ahead of that rush rather than during it. Medicare’s own enrollment window opens October 15, and the Marketplace follows on November 1, so the alert lands in the stretch when millions of people begin comparing plans for the coming year and are most likely to type a question into a search bar.

Look-alike addresses and borrowed logos

The alert describes the trick in specific terms. Impostors use web addresses that look similar to government website addresses, and they add keywords and official-looking logos to make visitors believe they have landed on the real HealthCare.gov or Medicare.gov when they have not. Both federal sites are named in the FTC’s text, so the imitation is not limited to Medicare alone.

The FTC’s language is about resemblance, not about a technical copy of the government’s servers. A page can borrow a seal, a color scheme and a near-identical domain name without touching the real site, and the paid placement at the top of a results page does the work of making it look endorsed. Anyone who clicks through and starts entering personal details is then handing them to a business, or to a fraudster, that the government never vetted.

That distinction matters for how the alert advises people to behave. Because the paid slot is the delivery mechanism, the FTC’s guidance centers on how a visitor arrives at a site, not only on how the site looks once it loads: typing a known address directly, and recognizing the label that marks an advertisement. The alert also says dishonest businesses, not only outright criminals, buy these positions, which means the paid result can belong to a lead-generation outfit that is merely posing as the official source.

Two enrollment calendars, one scam season

Medicare’s annual period runs from October 15 through December 7, according to Medicare.gov. During that window beneficiaries can join, drop or switch a Medicare Advantage plan, and coverage chosen in time takes effect the following January 1.

The ACA Marketplace runs on a different clock. HealthCare.gov lists November 1 as the first day to enroll in or change a plan for 2027, December 15 as the last day for coverage beginning January 1, and January 15 as the close of the period. The FTC alert covers health insurance generally, which is why it names both sites. A Medicare beneficiary and a Marketplace shopper face the same search-result problem on different dates. People who finish a Marketplace enrollment between December 16 and January 15 see coverage begin February 1 instead, per HealthCare.gov, a reminder that the later window leaves more weeks for a fake page to collect an application.

For scammers, two overlapping seasons mean roughly three months in which millions of people are legitimately looking up plan information online, many of them searching for the first time in a year and unsure which address is the correct one.

Free help the alert points toward

The FTC does not leave readers with only a warning, and the list it supplies is notable for how little of it is commercial. Every entry is a federal site, a federal phone line or a federally funded nonprofit network. It lists official channels: Medicare.gov and the Medicare line at 800-633-4227, HealthCare.gov and its line at 800-318-2596, and two counseling networks that sit outside both agencies.

One is the State Health Insurance Assistance Program. Its site, shiphelp.org, describes a national network offering one-on-one counseling on Medicare enrollment, coverage options and costs, with no charge for the service. The other is Senior Medicare Patrol, which operates in all 50 states and territories with federal funding from the Administration for Community Living, and which says its role is to help beneficiaries, families and caregivers prevent, detect and report health care fraud, errors and abuse.

In the alert, the simplest instruction is also the central one: the FTC says people should type the site name they want rather than trust a result that happens to sit first on the page, and should read the small label that separates a paid ad from an organic listing. Those two habits cost nothing and apply equally to Medicare.gov and HealthCare.gov, the two destinations the scam seasons of October and November are built around.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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