New scam tries to fine you for leaving your home during quarantine
With the country now being six months into the quarantine, you would have thought we would have heard of all the coronavirus scams by now. Yet, here we are posting about a new scam with COVID trappings and a little fake governmental fear to boot.
Tech news website The Verge has posted a blog entry about how one of their editors who is working at home, received a scam email. The mail claimed that the editor left his home three times in one day during the lockdown and needed to go online to pay their $59 fine. The email went on to say the fine needed to paid to the editor’s gov.us account and gave a gov.us web address to click on to pay the supposed fine.
This is actually a pretty clever scam. The gov.us web address appears like it’s coming from an actual government agency. However, anyone can buy a .us web address. Legitimate federal government web addresses end in .gov so seeing a gov.us address could fool some of the people all of the time. Plus, the scammers aren’t asking for a large amount for their phony fine. Potentially, someone may just click on the email’s link just to pay what they think is a nuisance fine.
The trick here is that gov.us isn’t even a real website. The web address in the email was actually disguised to take any likely victims to what The Verge called a spammy website. The website The Verge listed has since been taken down but more than likely the website was designed to infect your system with malware that could wreak all sorts of havoc on your device from ransomware to identity theft. In order to avoid pitfalls like this, if you’re on a computer, you can hover your mouse over the address without clicking on it to see where it will actually take you.
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