The American Heart Association (AHA) warned of a scam in which people are identifying themselves as AHA CEO Nancy Brown and/or AHA chief mission officer Meighan Girgus and contacting individuals for job interviews.
The AHA said the unidentified people are not Brown or Girgus and are sending text messages seeking private information such as a social security number. They have also asked some people to cash a check and wire them money.
“If it seems too easy to be real or too good to be true, it probably is,” AHA assistant general counsel M. Lewis Kinard said in a news release. “The bottom line is: Be skeptical.”
The AHA said it does not ask anyone for account passwords, personal identification numbers, social security numbers or other personal information. Individuals who are contacted should not provide personal or financial information via phone or email and should report the attempted fraud to authorities.
“Your report may be the last one they need to go after whoever is doing this, or it may provide an important data point that is missing,” Kinard said. “It does help, even if it doesn’t seem like that right away or mean that you will get your money back.”
The AHA cited other recent examples of scams, including when people claimed to be from the “American Heart & Stroke Association” and tried to sell families fraudulent insurance. In addition, a company referred to as “American Senior Benefits” called seniors and urged them to purchase a free medical alert system, which was fraudulently identified as being AHA-endorsed. When the seniors spoke to a live person, they found the system required an ongoing monthly maintenance fee.
Several websites are also fraudulently claiming to provide online training, such as AHA-compliant CPR training, even though the training centers are not AHA-authorized. Another website advertised having answers for sale for a training course exam, which was found to be a scam seeking to steal credit card information. The AHA mentioned that people were arrested for selling training course completion cards to individuals who had not taken the courses.
Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.