TAKE ONE OF THE WORST PANDEMICS EVER — AND ADD A MILLION SCAMS
On August 7, Paul Galeski glanced down at his credit report and saw a hit from the Small Business Administration. Hmm…that’s funny. I don’t have any business with the SBA. He tried to inquire but couldn’t get a human being, so he fi led a query online. He tried again in September. On October 27, he received a call from someone at his former company, Maverick Technologies, about a PPE loan that had been taken out in his name and the company’s name. ¶ He had sold that company in 2016. ¶ “A payment is due,” the woman in Accounts Payable informed him. ¶ “There is no loan!” Galeski exclaimed. Then he hung up and called the FBI. ¶ If he hadn’t learned about the loan when he did, he would have found out when the full $100,000 was due to be repaid.
Early last March, worry about COVID-19 took hold nationwide. By March 30, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, fondly known as IC3, had received more than 1,200 complaints about scammers trying to capitalize on the pandemic. Phishing campaigns to extract money from first responders, cyberattacks on government agencies, ransomware crashing hospital systems, fake COVID-19 websites that sneaked malware onto people’s devices…. Meanwhile, rapists, pornographers, and pedophiles were taking advantage of children stuck at home on their computers.
The local FBI office swiftly set up an Eastern District of Missouri COVID-19 Task Force, pulling together 18 federal law enforcement agencies to track movement of money and compare case fi les.
By April 21, the complaints had tripled. Soon Google was blocking about 18 million COVID-related phishing emails a day. Hackers from China, Russia, and Iran began trying to penetrate computers in labs that were developing coronavirus vaccines. Health care institutions, desperately working to protect and heal people, became easy targets. Ransomware believed to originate in Russia locked up hospital systems in at least three states and forced system shutdowns at Universal Health Services, which owns 400 facilities across the U.S. and in the United Kingdom. A Chicago businessman was charged with swindling more than $2.6 million from hospitals by pretending to sell them 1 million N95 respirators. Instead of delivering, he bought two Maseratis and a Land Rover.
For individuals, the points of vulnerability were the heightened anxiety, financial need, confusion, and loneliness. You may be feeling relieved right
