Tech Support: How to protect yourself from COVID-19 scams

Yahoo Finance’s Tech Editor Dan Howley shares tips for how people can protect themselves from coronavirus scams.

Video Transcript

- Welcome back to Yahoo Finance's On the Move. We want to turn things over to Dan Howley for his tech support segment on ways you can protect yourself from coronavirus scams. Dan, hack it out.

DAN HOWLEY: Oh, I'm hacking it out right now, baby, just like the old school. I'm going to take a little bit of light in here, do away with my hacker get up for one second, and just kind of give you guys an idea of how hard it is to get a baseball hat out of a hoodie. There's a lot of hackers right now and attackers using the COVID-19 and coronavirus pandemic to take advantage of consumers. And as you look for more news online, they are targeting you. But there are ways to fight back.

The number one thing to look out for right now when it comes to attackers and hackers is stimulus check attacks. Basically, what they're trying to do is look at your check, which could be as much as $1,200 for an individual or $2,400 for a couple, and what they're doing is setting up these little microsites that are meant to ape the design of federal and state sites. Basically what happens is they tell you to enter your banking account information, your routing number, and then they reroute where your check should be going from you to themselves.

Now, this is something that's going on across the country, and there's a number of other scams in the same vein. What happens is fraudsters might send out emails asking you to send them your bank account information because they can get you your check faster than the federal government might be able to, and then they're also robocalls asking for your bank account information. And again, all of this serves to reroute your check to the fraudsters, and then you never see it.

There's other types of scams going on too. There's snake oil salesmen out there right now that are offering cures to the coronavirus, or COVID-19, as well as a potential treatments. But the important thing to note is there are no cures for it right now. They're working on vaccines, and there are no widely available treatments. They are offering these, and they are asking for payments, and then if you end up sending the payments, you get nothing in return.

Another way they try to get you is by offering at home COVID-19 or coronavirus tests. Those simply don't exist. They're just trying to take your money, and they will take it and run, and you'll never hear from them again. Another type of attack is just the classic phishing scam, and what they do here is they send you an email saying, here's more information on COVID-19 in your area, on coronavirus in your area. Click this link. Download this file. But what happens is you click the link, and it downloads a file any way, or you download the file, and you kind of, you know, cut corners for the hackers if you want, and what happens is they'll end up injecting some form of malware onto your machine. What that does is either allows them to get access to your personal information by swiping it straight off your computer.

It can also allow them to steal some of your bank account information. They can say things like, this is an email from the Center for Disease Control, but it's not. It's from a hacker. A lot of times, you used to go look for spelling errors. They're even better at sending these out now, you can't tell the difference, so if you do get an email from someone, you might want to reach out to them, see if they purposely send you an email, even if it comes from friends or family. One of the big things that they might try to do is set up your computer as a form of botnet. So if you download this file, it ends up turning your machine into a zombie. And then what they'll do is collect all these different botnets that they've infected, these computers, and attack an individual website as something called a DDR west attack, and that takes the website offline, so it could be your local health authority site that you are unwittingly becoming a participant in targeting.

And then finally, one of the big ways that they like to attack people now is through ransomware. What ransomware is is it injects a file into your computer, locks it down entirely, encrypts it, and then they'll send you a message saying, reach out to us, use Discord, which is a popular chat app or something along those lines, WhatsApp, Wechat, and send us Bitcoins, send us gift cards, any way that's not really traceable, and then we'll unlock your computer. There are ways to fight back against these though, and the number one way is to stay vigilant. Don't click on any links or download any files from anyone you don't know, and, if again, it is someone you know, reach out and make sure they actually wanted to send you a file to download.

You can also, if you become a victim of a scam that ends up taking your stimulus check, reach out to local law enforcement, reach out to the FBI. If you've been hit with ransomware, definitely contact the FBI, because they're trying to actively break up these rings, and they want to know more about these kinds of attacks. And finally, if you do get hit with a ransomware attack, don't pay. Never ever, ever pay the criminals. All that does is emboldens them, and don't forget, they're criminals, so they will not unlock your files, and that's the best way to protect yourself right now amid these coronavirus scams.

- Dan Howley, that's valuable information. I'm sure we're going to post that so people can watch it again, but it makes you long for the days of a friend in Nigeria winning the lottery and just needing to use your bank account to shelter the funds. All the best to you, Dan Howley, thank you very much.