Beware the covid scammer

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As millions of families wrap up a summer of isolation, there are scammers around every corner to take advantage of your kindness or to prey upon your vulnerabilities. A recent Wall Street Journal article talks about one of these scams – a robocall that scares, mostly elderly, into transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the scammer’s bank account, never to be seen again.

These scams are all the more frightening because they use real personal data to make themselves seem more believable. The account of one of the victims show the level of detail the preditor had:

“I was terrified, of course,” she said, and quickly called back. She gave the operator her name, and she was connected with the man posing as an FBI agent. He verified Ms. Belis’s name, address and email address and said her identity had been stolen.

All of this data about us is being leaked again, and again, and again, and, in the wrong hands, it can be used to prey on the most vulnerable. In a world where data is actually protected and treated as personal property, not a business advantage, it will be harder for data to be leaked and used in these nefarious ways.

What can you do prior to Rownd coming to market and changing the world? If you get a call asking for ANY kind of bank, financial, or personal information (or a payment), look up their number and call them back. The FBI will never call you and demand payment in the next hour. The same goes for e-mail. Don’t follow links from e-mails to your bank account, type it in yourself. Finally, if it seems too good to be true (free trip, free gift cards, etc), it probably is!

More tips here!