The creation of just about any gigantic welfare program has a reliable potential for creating a correspondingly gigantic opportunity for fraudsters — and ObamaCare is looking like no exception, with a vengeance. Federal and state officials as well as private advocacy groups have been warning for months about the coming deluge of scammers going on the prowl for people’s sensitive personal and financial information, but that doesn’t make it any more welcome, via The Hill:

State insurance regulators are encountering sites designed to mimic ObamaCare’s enrollment portal, the online hub where millions of people are meant to purchase healthcare coverage.

Attempts at imitating healthcare.gov have met with cease-and-desist letters; the sites could confuse consumers seeking to enter ObamaCare’s marketplaces.

In New Hampshire, the insurance commissioner reportedly cracked down on one webpage last week that could have been mistaken for the state’s insurance exchange.

And regulators from Washington, Pennsylvania and Connecticut are warning the health insurance industry against creating sites that might mislead the public.

And, merely to reiterate at this point, the federal government’s giant exchange orchestrating the insurance markets for 30+ states is going to be subject to all that and more, as scammers and hackers get to work on cracking into the glitchily-secured data hub into which thousands upon thousands of Americans are [attempting to begin] inserting their personal and financial information. From House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers last week:

And yet, the Obama administration has provided virtually no information regarding the real time readiness for implementing the hub’s security controls necessary to ensure that no data breach occurs. …

Shockingly, the Hub was slated to be last tested only two weeks before it was supposed to be fully operational.

Evidence that the exchanges and the hub were not ready on October 1 is already mounting.

Within the first few days of operation, thousands of Social Security numbers were accidentally emailed to an insurance broker. Exchanges immediately began experiencing technical difficulties as enrollment began and information technology experts have pointed to the hastily constructed software design as a leading cause. It is hard to imagine the hub is not experiencing similar technical problems. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that the hub was making inaccurate determinations of eligibility for federal subsidies – calling into question the viability of the whole system.

Unfortunately, the administration still seems to have their hands full trying to simply fix the disaster that is ObamaCare’s online enrollment process; one does hope that they’ll manage to get around to providing more security controls in the near future.