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Scam alert

Nothing about your Social Security raise requires you to confirm anything

Every announcement season brings a wave of calls, texts, and letters asking people to verify, activate, or unlock their increase. All of them are fake, and they work because the request sounds procedural rather than alarming. Find out everything you need to know about the latest Social Security scam.

The scams that take the most money from older Americans are rarely the frightening ones. The frightening ones — your benefits are suspended, an officer is on the way — get reported and hung up on. The expensive ones sound like administration. A pleasant voice, a reference number, a short form to complete so your increase can be processed on time.

So it’s worth stating the rule in advance of the season, in the plainest terms available.

What the agency actually says

The Social Security Administration publishes the standard on its own COLA page, and it is worth reading twice: its services are free of charge, and “no government agency or reputable company will solicit your personal information or request advanced fees for services in the form of wire transfers or gift cards.”

Two halves of that sentence do different work. The first — free of charge — kills the entire category of pitches offering to file, expedite, or maximize your benefit for a fee. The second names the payment methods, and the payment method is the tell. Nothing legitimate in the federal benefits system has ever been settled by gift card.

The three shapes it takes in the autumn

1. “Confirm your COLA.” A call or text arriving in the days after the October announcement, offering to walk you through a verification so your increase isn’t delayed. There is no verification step. The increase is calculated centrally and applied to every record at once.
2. “Your notice couldn’t be delivered.” An email or text with a link to view your COLA notice. Your real notice appears in the Message Center of your my Social Security account in late November, and you get there by typing ssa.gov yourself — never through a link someone sent you.
3. “You’re owed back pay.” The most effective of the three, because sometimes people genuinely are. Real retroactive payments arrive by direct deposit into the account already on file, followed by a mailed notice. Nobody calls first to collect a processing fee, and nobody needs your bank login to send you money.

The one habit that defeats all of it

Hang up and call back on a number you looked up yourself. Not the number in the message, not the number the caller reads out, and not the number at the top of a search results page — those get bought. Social Security’s own line is 1-800-772-1213, and your my Social Security account is at ssa.gov.

That single habit costs you ninety seconds and defeats essentially every version of this, because the entire scheme depends on you staying on the call they started.

If it already happened

• Report it to the Social Security Office of the Inspector General at oig.ssa.gov/report or on the fraud hotline, 1-800-269-0271.
• If you gave up bank details, call your bank the same day. Speed matters more than anything else at that point.
• If you gave up your Social Security number, start at usa.gov/identity-theft, which walks through the specific steps in order.
• Tell someone. The shame is the scammer’s best remaining asset. Reported early, most of this is recoverable; kept quiet for a month, most of it isn’t.

And if you’re reading this for a parent rather than for yourself: the useful conversation isn’t “be careful.” It’s agreeing on one rule in advance — we hang up and call back — so that in the moment, there’s a script to fall back on instead of a decision to make.

Claim → source

Claim in this story	Source
SSA services are free of charge; no government agency or reputable company will solicit personal information or request advance fees via wire transfer or gift card	Social Security Administration, Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Information
COLA notices are available in the my Social Security Message Center in late November	Social Security Administration, Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Information
The cost-of-living adjustment is applied automatically to benefits payable in January	Social Security Administration, Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Information
SSA Office of the Inspector General fraud hotline: 1-800-269-0271; reports at oig.ssa.gov/report	Social Security Administration, Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Information
Identity theft recovery steps at usa.gov/identity-theft	Social Security Administration, Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Information
Fairness Act back payments are deposited to the bank account SSA already has on file, with a mailed notice following	Social Security Administration, Social Security Fairness Act: WEP and GPO update