Six Ways Scammers are taking advantage of COVID-19

1. Phishing: Phishing (pronounced fishing) occurs when criminals send fake mail, email, or phone calls pretending they are legit. They try to convince you to share your sensitive information like passwords or credit card details. They pretend they are from an organization you know, such as FedEx, UPS, or even a government agency.

2. Fake Products: Keep your eye on e-commerce websites, social media accounts, and emails from people and stores claiming to sell medical supplies currently in high demand. Supplies might include things like hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and surgical masks. When you make purchases from these fake stores, criminals will keep your money, but you will never see the products you purchased.

3. Fake Charity: Individuals and companies, sometimes with real-sounding names, call or email to ask for donations for people and groups affected by the coronavirus. Some of their elaborate backstories sound extremely legitimate and emotional but completely fake.

4. Medical scams: People are getting calls and emails from people pretending to be hospital workers or medical professionals claiming they treated someone they know for the coronavirus and demand payment.

5. Malware. Think of these malicious applications as Trojan Horses. You download them to your computer or phone for some purpose, and behind the scenes, the program is stealing your personal information. Sometimes these record your logins to banking sites, email, Facebook, etc., and send the data back to the hackers.

6. Zoom Bombing. Lots of businesses, schools, and individuals are using Zoom to hold online meetings. To make it easier, meeting hosts often don’t require a password. Unfortunately, not having a password makes it all too easy for hackers to jump on your meeting and flood your virtual room with swear and porn. They can embed virus code in the image files or stealthily share a file with all the participants that have virus or malware code in it.