How bad actors are taking advantage of coronavirus chaos

Yahoo Finance’s Ethan Wolff-Mann joins Zack Guzman to break down what to look out for as the coronavirus crisis provides fresh opportunity for online scammers to target struggling Americans.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Welcome back to The Ticker here on Yahoo Finance. Right now, we are seeing the S&P continue its gains, trading at session highs, which, admittedly, are not all that much, right now up by about 0.2%. We'll keep our eyes on those moves and bring you the updates as we get them.

But, right now, digging into the way that hackers and other scammers out there are taking advantage of the global pandemic, would you believe it if I told you that there were people out there who are trying to take advantage of the situation? We're seeing scams rise and some very interesting anecdotal evidence of all of this out there right now. For more on that, I want to get to Yahoo Finance's Ethan Wolff-Mann who has the details. And, Ethan, what are-- what are really the worrying trends we're seeing develop out there right now?

ETHAN WOLFF-MANN: Well, so there's-- there's a few things. And I'll break it down in two different ways. Right now, we've been seeing some interesting, kind of bizarre piggybacking on the kind of labor market chaos, which is interesting. One cyber security firm I talked to expected sort of this fake resume with malware tucked in to be something that is a growing concern.

This is something that happens routinely. Another company told me that about 1% of all emails to HR have viruses and other malware, but that there's all of these sort of new, innovative, pretty expensive malware that isn't yet able to be caught by a lot of these filters. And so this is something that they're seeing happening, happening right now.

And, as people apply for new jobs and more resume and get thrown around, this could be a problem. And, on the converse side of this, people are worried that there could be a lot of scams towards individuals who are looking to get job offers. So that's sort of scary.

But the craziest thing, which we saw last night, and I dove into this a bit today, is, in Washington state and a few other states, there have been-- the quote is "hundreds of millions of dollars have been taken from unemployment benefits." That is just bananas. I mean, that is a huge, huge number.

Obviously, we're talking $2.2 trillion in the total amount. So it's-- you know, it's not everything, but this is a lot of money that has been able to be siphoned off, mostly because states do not have the time to check all of these things. They need to make sure that money gets to people.

And so, very cleverly, a lot of-- a lot of these claims were filed by these scammers using old information like from breaches like Equifax and other kind of major, major kind of hacks. But the thing for me here is we have had a huge problem in explaining to people why it's bad that all of these so scary numbers get hacked well now we know why

because of all the fraud I guess there's a difference between outright fraud and then some of these scams that we are now more privy to, when you think about the Nigerian prince or whatever fake emails might be sent our way. But now also, on top of that, fraud, another thing to watch out for as well.

Are the attacks just as much, in terms of quantity or, perhaps, maybe even quality, on the more personal front right now, emails getting sent to individuals, rather than maybe companies or government entities?

ETHAN WOLFF-MANN: That's really hard to say. We've-- we've seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that this is true. But some of the firms that I talked to said that a lot of this stuff has kind of maintained pretty flat. It is especially difficult to say because there's a lot of-- a lot of shame associated with reporting that, hey, I got scammed on something. But we know that the, you know, the FTC and other government agencies have been for sure upping their communications about potential scams.

Generally, actors respond to the, you know, crisis du jour. And, right now, with so much chaos in the labor market, public health worries, this really makes a ripe time for various sorts of scamming. And a lot of people's guard is not where it otherwise might be. And so I think that's something, which will, when sort of the dust settles, we will see, probably, a very large uptick in the rear-view mirror.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, a lot-- a lot on top of mind in terms of the health front, maybe not necessarily focused on fraud front as well, but nothing to be ashamed of. You know, scamming can happen to the best of us. All right, Ethan Wolff-Mann highlighting that, I appreciate you bringing us that.