Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. News

Nearly $12 million stolen in coronavirus-related scams, FTC reports

Georgina Torbet
By

The global coronavirus pandemic has caused not only worldwide health problems and economic issues, but has also lead to an uptick in unscrupulous scammers taking advantage of the situation to steal money and personal information.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revealed that it has received more than 15,000 complaints about coronavirus-related scams, with a total of almost $12 million lost due to fraud. Each person lost an average of over $500, the FTC reports. The most common frauds were related to travel or vacations, with online shopping coming in second.

Recommended Videos

FTC has received more than 15K Coronavirus-related reports from consumers. Consumers reported losing a total of almost $12M to fraud w/ a reported median loss of $576. Latest data now available (posted weekdays): https://t.co/6uLszZGuz3 #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/qM0HVdN4RQ

— FTC (@FTC) April 10, 2020

Related

Karen Hobbs, assistant director of the Division of Consumer and Business Education at the FTC, denounced the scammers this week.

“Scammers have no shame, and nothing — not even a global health crisis — is off limits,” she wrote. “They’re pitching fake coronavirus vaccines, unproven cures, and bogus at-home testing kits.”

The agency has a page on its website about avoiding such scams, including advice to ignore texts, emails, or calls regarding coronavirus testing that claim to be from the government, as well as online offers for vaccinations against the virus or home testing kits.

The agency is also taking action against sellers who are claiming that their products treat or prevent coronavirus, including teas, essential oils, and colloidal silver. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USDA) advises that “there are no approved vaccines, drugs, or investigational products currently available to treat or prevent the virus.”

The FTC has also warned that scams regarding stimulus checks being issued in the U.S. by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are also surging. People who qualify for these payments will receive them via direct deposit in the next few weeks, but scammers are calling people up and pretending to be government officials, or issuing official-looking fake checks, in order to steal money or personal information from the unsuspecting public.

“It’s not surprising that scammers are exploiting confusion about economic impact payments too,” Hobbs noted. “But it’s still shameful.”

If you are concerned about a coronavirus message you’ve received and you want to make sure you aren’t the victim of a scam, check out our guide to how to avoid being the victim of a coronavirus scam.

For the latest updates on the novel coronavirus outbreak, visit the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 page.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
How Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to take on Apple
An Intel Meteor Lake system-on-a-chip.

It seems like Apple might need to watch out, because Intel and Microsoft are coming for it after the latter two companies reportedly forged a close partnership during the development of Intel Lunar Lake chips. Lunar Lake refers to Intel's upcoming generation of mobile processors that are aimed specifically at the thin and light segment. While the specs are said to be fairly modest, some signs hint that Lunar Lake may have enough of an advantage to pose a threat to some of the best processors.

Today's round of Intel Lunar Lake leaks comes from Igor's Lab. The system-on-a-chip (SoC), pictured above, is Intel's low-power solution made for thin laptops that's said to be coming out later this year. Curiously, the chips weren't manufactured on Intel's own process, but on TSMC's N3B node. This is an interesting development because Intel typically sticks to its own fabs, and it even plans to sell its manufacturing services to rivals like AMD. This time, however, Intel opted for the N3B node for its compute tile.

Read more
How much does an AI supercomputer cost? Try $100 billion
A Microsoft datacenter.

It looks like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora, among other projects, are about to get a lot more juice. According to a new report shared by The Information, Microsoft and OpenAI are working on a new data center project, one part of which will be a massive AI supercomputer dubbed "Stargate." Microsoft is said to be footing the bill, and the cost is astronomical as the name of the supercomputer suggests -- the whole project might cost over $100 billion.

Spending over $100 billion on anything is mind-blowing, but when put into perspective, the price truly shows just how big a venture this might be: The Information claims that the new Microsoft and OpenAI joint project might cost a whopping 100 times more than some of the largest data centers currently in operation.

Read more
There’s an unexpected, new competitor in PC gaming
Snapdragon's X Elite PC SoC.

Windows gaming on ARM is becoming a legitimate possibility, and it's not just thanks to the recently unveiled emulation options, but it's chiefly due to the fact that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is shaping up to be pretty excellent. Spotted in a recent benchmark, the CPU was seen beating some of the best processors on the current market. Are we finally at a point where it's not always going to be a choice between just Intel and AMD?

The benchmarks were posted by user @techinmul on Twitter, and the results couldn't be more promising for the upcoming Qualcomm processor. The chip was tested in Geekbench 6, and although it's important not to take these results entirely at face value, it's an impressive show of performance that bodes well for upcoming thin and light laptops.

Read more