Fraudsters prey on coronavirus fears, scam people through emails
(representative image)
By Sunny Daud
It is almost two months now since the first case of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) surfaced in China’s Hubei province. Since December, the death toll on account of the coronavirus has risen to 1,380 in China alone, with three more deaths reported outside the mainland—one each in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Japan. More than 65,000 persons across 25 countries have contracted the infection, as the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that the outbreak poses a “grave threat” to the world.
Now, there are scamsters preying on people’s fears about the outbreak.
There is a simple phishing email detected by security firm Mimecast, showing attackers disseminating malicious links and PDFs that claim to contain information on how to protect yourself from the spread of the disease.
Fraudsters prey on coronavirus fears, scam people through emails
That fake page consists of the official current homepage of the WHO, with a supposed pop-up window on the screen to verify your email. The user is prompted to fill up their details on the page.
After one gets an email in their inbox, that is when the risk of the account getting hacked becomes real.
When one goes through that email, one also is directed to a link which shows up an attached document listing out safety measures to save from contracting the coronavirus infection. A link to ‘download’ shows up, clicking on which gets the account hacked.
Fortunately for discerning readers, the scamsters have made numerous grammatical and spelling errors that can’t escape the naked eye.
Anyone who is concerned about coronavirus might get scammed by these fraudsters. The fraudsters understand that anything about coronavirus has a global audience as everyone wants to take precautions to keep them from contracting the deadly infection.
(Sunny Daud is an intern with India TV News Desk)
