Yep - that’s the biggest red flag for sure. Never have I ever seen a medical practice so eager to give a refund - and so quickly…
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It’s a scam. We always issue checks or we leave a positive balance on the account. Established patients who will be making return visits can ask to be cut a check when they visit the office in person and are informed their account has a credit. Positive balances that exist for over a certain amount of time are automatically issued a check.
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Agree RE: refund checks being a thing—every couple of years or so we pay a bill for a co-pay, not remembering that we paid it while at the appointment—check comes a while later when insurance figures it all out.
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Us too…but it’s the office billing department that figures it out…not our insurance. Our insurance doesn’t give two hoots if we over pay!
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Same here—doctor’s office collects the co-pay, not the insurance, so it’s the practice that sends the refund check.
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We got a check for $89 this week at the synagogue from a non-profit aggregator that claims donations were made on our behalf. Sounded pretty scammy to me, but our admin (who is also an atty) wanted to deposit it. New president and I were both highly skeptical. Told her to check with the treasurer first and to vet the organization. Don’t want to deposit it and discover we’ve signed ourselves up for something expensive.
@Youdon_tsay– I think your spidey sense was right on the money!
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Might want to check if it is one of the workplace charity donation aggregators which workplaces may use when they offer matching of donations to charity as an employee benefit.
We’re going to investigate the source, but didn’t want to deposit it (with our bank info on the back of the check) without vetting first. We have a couple congregants who make contributions through a trust or their RMDs, and we get a tiny bit from people who buy from Amazon via our non-profit link – this is different.
We also just sold our building, which is publicly available info. Security concerns are a real part of life here.
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If it is legitimate, it could be from someone who works at a company that uses a donation aggregator to manage company matching of charitable donations. Such donation aggregators do give the donor an option of what information (e.g. donor name or anonymous) to give to the organization donated to.
UPDATE: I received the check. I Googled the company, which is out of Draper, Utah, and all seems legit.
But are y’all saying that the woman who called, presumably from the surgery center, may be working her own scam by trying to get my cc number? And when that didn’t work she went through proper channels? I never called the surgery center about it, preferring to let it play out as it has, but now I’m wondering whether I misunderstood what some of y’all considered the issue.
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Glad it worked out.
I doubt she was working a scam. It’s possible, but unlikely.
Companies increasingly don’t like to use checks. They could be the victims of fraud. If they aren’t cashed, they have to go through a process to turn the funds over to the government.
With that said, you were right not to provide your info over the phone. Of course, you could have hung up and called the surgery center yourself. But this result got you to the same place. A sigh of relief is in order.