UnitedHealth Group Paid $22m to Scammers...Which Was Also A Scam
Satire Journalism is given a run for it's money by real life
The Frontier Psychiatrists is a health-themed newsletter. Often, I write in a humorous voice or use satire to make points. But, much as the writers at the Onion learned many years ago with their coverage of face razors and their ever-expanding blade count, the absurdity of the real makes this practice quixotic, at best. I will have some policy suggestions at the end, so keep reading.
Prior Change Healthcare coverage is here. and here. and here. and here. and here. and here. and also here.
Today, I bring you the news that seems more suited for a Clubhouse conversation circa 2021. There has been a Rug Pull.
These Rug Pulls phenomena were familiar in the early (and every other day) of the NFT craze, where a project would get spun up, a discord server would be created, a project would be “minted,” there was hype, there were Twitter spaces, there were rooms on Clubhouse, and then…boom! The discord goes dark, the promise of a community that would get to use their token for a video game proved nothing but a scam! My wife,
, even served on the council of good citizens then revived one such community, the Noundles from its scammy founder, vanishing in the night.It was a scam, and you are not getting your Bitcoin or Ethereum back. It turns out, honor among thieves? Still Lacking. United Healthcare got Rug Pulled, and so did the cyber attackers who hacked Change Healthcare. It turns out the RaaS Platform and health professionals who are in-network with Insurance have something in common. Just because services are rendered does not mean you are getting paid.
ALPHV/Blackcat gets other cyber criminals to render services, in this case, ransom attacks. They even have a preferred affiliate program! Think of this like being part of Optum Pay Premium. The hackers who stole between 4 to 6TB of all of our personal health information—think of this as “America’s chlamydia testing history”—and were paid, on the blockchain, 350 BTC. Which they dutifully transferred to BlackCat. At this point, BlackCat went dark, shut down servers, and vanished.
Their hacker affiliates were not pleased:
In this case, it seems that the affiliate that stole data from Change Healthcare got scammed. They claim that after Optum paid a $22 million ransom ALPHV suspended their partner’s account and took all the money from the wallet.
Under the username “notchy,” the alleged ALPHV affiliate says that they still have 4TB of Optum's “critical data,” describing it as “production data that will affect all Change Healthcare and Optum clients.”
They claim to have data from “tens of insurance companies” and other providers of a range of services from healthcare to cash management, and pharmacies.
To prove their claim, notchy shared a cryptocurrency payment address with a total of nine transactions, an initial incoming transfer of 350 bitcoins (a little over $23 million), and eight outgoing ones.
The address sending the bitcoin has only two transactions, one receiving 350 bitcoins and another sending them to the alleged ALPHV wallet.
Wow, it’s like the Russians behind the Fame Ladys NFT project scammed UHC. Except we don’t have ArtChick to save us and restore sanity. Yes, I have lost money on NFTs in my life, but at least wrote this parody song about it.
Oh, and Change Healthcare still doesn’t work. UnitedHealthcare got nothing for its money. Neither did we, as patients. Can we have the lawsuits begin already?
Thank you, thank you