IRS and Medicare impostor calls

What official IRS and Medicare pages say about unexpected calls, and where to report them.

Written November 12, 2026.

Callers and texts that pretend to be the Internal Revenue Service or Medicare are a long-running problem. In the FTC’s October 19, 2026, older-adults report, government-impersonation scams were among the top fraud types by aggregate reported losses for people 60 and over. Older adults were also 15% more likely than younger people to report a loss on a government-impersonation scam. In no-loss reports, the FTC noted that phone scams described by older adults were often about messages impersonating Medicare, banks, Amazon, and the FTC itself.

Those are reported patterns. They are not a prediction about your phone. The official IRS and Medicare pages below tell you how those agencies say they contact people, and where to report a fake call.

What the IRS says

The IRS publishes consumer alerts on tax scams and a page on how to know whether it is really the IRS calling or coming to the door. In plain terms, drawn from those official pages:

• The IRS generally makes first contact about a tax debt by mail, not with a sudden demand that you pay today by gift card, wire, or cryptocurrency.
• A caller who threatens arrest, deportation, or an immediate raid if you do not pay a certain way is a very strong sign of a scam.
• The IRS has a dedicated page on gift-card scams and a page on scammers posing as the IRS. Use those pages, not a number a stranger just read to you, to check the warning signs.

If you actually need to reach the IRS, use a phone number or address from a notice you already received in the mail, or from IRS.gov’s tax scams section and How to know it’s really the IRS calling or knocking on your door — opened by typing IRS.gov yourself. You can report IRS impersonation and phishing through the IRS’s official reporting channels linked from those pages, including report phishing.

What to know about Medicare

Medicare maintains official pages on fraud and on how to report Medicare fraud and abuse. A caller who claims to be from Medicare and then asks you to pay a fee, confirm a Social Security number “to keep your benefits,” or buy a card or device you did not request should be treated as suspicious. Hang up. Look up the official contact information from Medicare.gov’s fraud page or from a statement you already have, and start there. Official reporting information is at Reporting Medicare fraud and abuse.

Medicare fraud and a fake “Medicare” phone call are not the same problem, but the safe habit is the same: use official numbers and sites, not the contact information in an unexpected call or text.

A simple rule for both

1. Hang up or delete the text. You can call back later if you want to, using a number you already had.
2. Do not pay with gift cards, wires, cash apps, or cryptocurrency to “clear” a government debt on the spot.
3. Do not give a one-time passcode or bank-account password to the caller.
4. Report the contact to the IRS or Medicare using the official pages above, and to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

A credit freeze does not stop an impostor call. It may still be worth having, for separate reasons, if you are worried about new accounts. See how to freeze your credit.