Thinkstock/TimArbaev The Clinton County Sheriff's office is warning residents to be careful right now as common scams are making its way around the area. On Wednesday, the Clinton County Sheriff's office made an announcement on social media warning residents about scams going around the area that have been reported to them. These common scams effecting Clinton County residents include people calling and offering fake Medicare benefits, and a Facebook hack that ends up being a gift card scam. See the full statement from the Clinton County Sheriff's Office below: FAKE MEDICARE BENEFITS OFFERED Medicare fraud or health insurance fraud has been a long-time problem which seems to elude government and industry efforts to curb. Just trying to figure out the extent of the fraud results in widely varying estimates of its scale, with different sources reckoning the cost at seven to ten percent of our health care costs. With the US health care costs (in a normal year) pegged at $3.6 trillion, the loss figures in the scores of billions. The World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit researching and educating on data privacy, concluded much of this fraud is enabled by the use of stolen personal information. In other words, the filing of phony claims using the information of real people.