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Treatment center scams, including impersonation and patient brokering, are widespread.

Call centers and even some treatment centers use keywords to impersonate other programs online.

These call centers, and some individuals working in or adjacent to recovery, receive kickbacks.

Body brokering, as it's called, is illegal, constituting a felony in some states.

Imagine you’ve been struggling with alcohol addiction. Every waking moment is spent either drinking or thinking about drinking. You don’t even want to drink anymore, but you just keep doing it. In a rare moment of lucidity, you decide it’s time to get help. This opportunity for help may come only once. Your life depends on getting genuine help right now.

But what if the person who answers the phone when you call is a salesperson, not a qualified admissions agent, and gets paid for every person they send to a specific program? What if the center offering the highest kickback this month provides a low quality of care or cuts you loose too soon? What if your family has spent their life savings to get you this care?

Situations like this are troublingly common. What’s behind them, and how can patients and their families avoid being scammed?

The Patient Experience

The following composite scenario lays out many of the practices involved in this kind of impersonation and the patient brokering that often follows.

A woman—we’ll call her Melissa—decides to seek help for opioid addiction. She googles a trusted treatment center in her town—we’ll call it Hometown Recovery—and dials the number that appears at the top of the page.

When an agent answers, Melissa breathes a sigh of relief. She believes she’s talking with someone at Hometown. The agent neither confirms nor denies Melissa’s assumption and asks what kind of insurance she has. If Melissa had Medicaid, that would likely be the end of the call. If she had private insurance, the agent would recommend a specific program “based on her insurance.”

But let’s say Melissa doesn’t have insurance at all. The agent offers to get insurance for her, for free. Melissa suspects something is off. She asks, “Is this Hometown Recovery?” The agent says, “We work with them. I can get you there,” and keeps asking questions. Melissa presses, and after she asks several times, the exasperated agent says, “Yes.”

Melissa accepts the........

© Psychology Today