Greg's Corner

Stimulus check scams are back

Most Americans received their economic impact payments much earlier this year. This hasn’t stopped scammers from trying to trick people into using the promise of additional stimulus payments into giving up either money or personal information.

Recently, scammers have been texting their victims with messages that state they have pending stimulus payments. The text then goes on to say that if you want to accept these payments you need to click on the attached link. While we haven’t confirmed this if previous texting scams are any indicator, the link will take you to a website that will require you to enter your personal information. Or it could potentially ask you to pay a ‘processing fee’ to receive your stimulus payment. In either case, the stimulus payment doesn’t exist. Ever since the initial economic impact payment were issued, the government has not approved any additional stimulus payments.

Please keep in mind that the majority of federal agencies that deal with the general public do not communicate by text. That’s not even taking into account that if a government office needs to discuss stimulus payments they will refer to them by their proper name of economic impact payment. Anyone contacting you calling them a stimulus payment or stimulus check is probably not with the government. That’s not even mentioning that even if additional impact payments were to be issued you wouldn’t have to pay money to receive them.

In addition to these warnings, it’s just good practice to avoid clicking on links in text messages from people you don’t know. This is a common practice used in several different scams that are designed to either steal your personal information or inject malware into your device. Either of which could lead to a number of expensive and inconvenient problems in the future.