A million people in the UK have volunteered to help the NHS deliver medication to those in isolation, while an army of sewing bees are voluntarily stitching scrubs to provide essential personal protective equipment for health professionals. Across the country, the coronavirus pandemic is bringing out the best in humanity. But the crisis has also given scam artists and criminals the climate of fear they need to profiteer from people’s anxieties.
Since the start of the coronavirus crisis, the internet has been awash with scams. Counterfeit masks and latex gloves, fake home testing kits, sinister goods such as preventative drugs and fictional vaccines are making appearances online and being sold to fearful customers through dubious texts, emails, calls and social media adverts. Law enforcement bodies are slowly playing catchup to the potentially dangerous scams spreading both on the open web, but also the dark web.
In the last two weeks alone, cybersecurity provider Mimecast has seen over 59,700 maliciously spoofed coronavirus related websites pop up on the internet. Of these sites, 302 were selling home testing kits, while 44 of them made reference to a coronavirus cure. (There is no such thing). The firm has spotted a large spike in domains and subdomains relating to the words ‘Covid’ and ‘corona’ over the last two months. Elad Schulman, vice president of brand protection at Mimecast says he is seeing 6,000 Covid-related domains being registered every single day. Some of these websites are legitimate but many are malicious and lead to sites selling masks and gloves, while others are offering vaccinations, cures, fake news about the pandemic and credential theft attempts through PayPal spoofed payment links.
Schulman says people are being directed to these sites via text messages and emails. “People are getting text messages with all sorts of offers from numbers which they don’t know and [numbers] which are impersonating organisations, for example the Centres for Disease Control and the World Health Organisation,” he explains. “You’re also getting emails from organisations or from domains which look legitimate.”
As of April 14, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has taken down nine domain names and social media accounts selling fake or unauthorised Covid-related products which include self-testing kits, ‘miracle cures’, ‘antiviral misting sprays’, and unlicensed medicines. “We are investigating a large number of allegations of non-compliance relating to the selling of medical devices for use during this Covid-19 outbreak,” says an MHRA spokesperson. The spokesperson adds that it’s not sensible to buy any products that claim to “treat or prevent” the coronavirus unless they have received regulatory approval. The UK's National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC) says it has taken down 471 fake online shops selling fraudulent coronavirus related items.
New apps are also drawing in victims, despairing for a cure or some form of protection. McAfee Labs has identified several Android applications using keywords relating to the pandemic, ranging from ransomware samples to spy-agents. It found one app that claims to send you a free facemask, but instead steals the user’s contacts list and forwards on an SMS trojan directing them to download the app. Raj Samani, chief scientist at McAfee says that there was some low-level volume of threats really early on in the quarter, but from the end of February, he began to see a greater prevalence of people using coronavirus as a lure.
“There's a lot more volume, there are a lot more emails. But in amongst the volume, there are also some very capable threat actors i.e. ransomware gangs,” Samani explains. “It's almost as if we've kicked over this hornet's nest and every threat, every scammer, every criminal's come out and going 'Oh, yeah, we'll use Covid as a potential lure as well', so you've got the full gamut of potential threats out there.”
There’s a simple reason why there’s so many Covid-19 scams circulating: because they work. People are buying into these scams on an unprecedented scale. On Friday, the national fraud reporting service Action Fraud revealed that 862 people in the UK had so far fallen prey to Covid-19-related scams, with victims being defrauded out of a combined £2,120,870. The agency identified emails giving away free shopping vouchers purporting to be from Tesco and messages claiming to be from HMRC. Earlier that week, the National Crime Agency arrested two people illegally selling home testing kits and took down a website selling non-existent personal protective equipment circulating through phishing emails.
Read more: The UK’s lockdown roadmap and rules, explained
Stephen Lea, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter who has previously investigated the psychology behind scams, says historically there has always been the idea of a ‘miracle cure’ for health issues people face. “Miracle cure scams are often targeted at people who've been identified as suffering from serious or even terminal illnesses, and they're always around,” he explains. In the past these scams were directed at a small number of people. “But we're now in a situation where a much higher proportion of the population than normal is potentially vulnerable.”
“They're driven partly by fear, but partly by a different emotion – namely hope. The offer of hope in a situation where there appears to be no hope is liable to stir up powerful emotional forces and thereby override normal defensive mechanisms,” Lea says. In research Lea has completed, he’s found people will often subject themselves to scams even when they know it’s likely they’re being defrauded. “Miracle cure scams play on the same sort of calculus,” he says. “There's a good chance that this is rubbish. But just suppose it was OK – it would be fantastically worth it.”
But the touting of untested medical products and treatments can have hugely dangerous side effects. Back in March, US president Donald Trump hailed the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine a coronavirus treatment during a press conference. Trump’s words led countries to begin stockpiling the drug, of which there is no scientific evidence that it’s effective against coronavirus. A small preliminary study testing the efficacy of the drug was halted in Brazil after a high dose of the drug was associated with an irregular heartbeat and 11 people died. Shortly after Trump’s comments, people had begun seeking the drug out online; two people in Nigeria died overdosing on the drug, while a man in Arizona died after ingesting chloroquine phosphate, an additive used to clean fish tanks.
Chloroquine, bogus testing kits and protective equipment are also being sold by suspicious accounts on social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram, who are both playing whack-a-mole to try and take the accounts down. Samani says that some accounts post ads, claiming to have the treatment for coronavirus, offering to supply it to people for Bitcoin. While Which? observed the anti-malarial drug being sold on eBay. The European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol found people selling masks and medication on Telegram and on the peer-to-peer ecommerce site Openbazaar, which is currently hosting a coronavirus epidemic mask shop. The agency found masks being sold for the price of €41 (£36) for ten N95 masks to €14,853 (£12,961) for 30,000 FFP masks – which give the highest amount of protection. There is no telling whether these masks exist or are even legitimate.
“We are aware that individuals on social media are claiming to sell coronavirus testing kits for home use,” says an MHRA spokesperson. “We are currently investigating a range of suppliers that could be selling or advertising products falsely claiming to prevent, detect, treat or cure coronavirus. These investigations are being assessed on a risk basis.”
There’s also a hidden side to the coronavirus scams. Vendors on the dark web have also seized on the public’s desperation and have begun switching from their usual array of items to hand sanitiser, face masks and most recently chloroquine. According to Europol, there has been an explosion of coronavirus antiviral medication, fake masks and testing kits since the beginning of March, Samani also found one post on the dark web selling the blood of a person who has had coronavirus, after reports emerged that blood could be a potential treatment for coronavirus.
“Criminals will stop at nothing to make a profit. Some of the counterfeit products distributed by them risk lives and the safety of some of our frontline workers in healthcare and other essential sectors,” says a Europol spokesperson. “Europol has been monitoring the situation since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis and is currently supporting several operations across the EU to combat the distribution of counterfeits during the pandemic.”
Law enforcement agencies always seem to be playing catch-up, with criminals constantly changing their techniques, but crime relating to the coronavirus pandemic appears to be magnitudes greater. Now, the police aren't just trying to take down low-level threats, but serious organised crime, too, and they're all trying to cash in on the public's confusion and coronavirus fears.
Ultimately, the old sage if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is, rings just as true for something like coronavirus. “Be super wary and cautious of any communication that promises Covid-19 cures or processes payments. People really need to be vigilant, especially now, we need to be verifying the authenticity of any communication or request that we get,” says Adenike Cosgrove, a cybersecurity specialist at Proofpoint.
Instead of opening links from emails, navigate to the official NHS website, and don’t enter your bank details into sites claiming to sell coronavirus cures, testing kits and face masks. Rather than getting swept up in the panic, really analyse what that website, email or text message is claiming to do. “Really, just be cautious. Do not trust everything that you see in an email,” Cosgrove advises. “Verify, verify, verify."
Alex Lee is a writer for WIRED. He tweets from @1AlexL
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK