FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on combating spam calls

Jessica Rosenworcel, FCC commissioner, joins "Squawk Alley" to discuss a new wave of spam calls that are taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis.

The authentic looking email from the World Health Organization isn’t real at all but rather clever spam meant to steal personal information.

Callers claiming to be Medicaid and Medicare representatives are offering so-called free COVID-19 tests — as long as you pay with a credit card for shipping.

And then there’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asking for donations, except it’s not the CDC, but a fake website.

Corporate security and consumer officials say these recent examples to exploit the pandemic are just the beginning of a tsunami of fraud.

“Two ingredients of a good scam are fear and confusion, and we have both of those right now,” said Adam Garber, consumer watchdog at U.S. PIRG, a federation of public interest research groups. “So, it’s a playground for people who want to take advantage of others.”

IBM last week discovered a particularly malicious email spam campaign that mimics the World Health Organization. But that’s where it ends. “It is remarkable how threat actors play with the fears and hopes of their potential victims,” IBM’s internal security team said in an alert. “Speaking of prevention drugs and cures in an email that is spoofed to appear directly from the Director of the WHO, in this current situation is expected to be highly successful.”

The company’s alert said victims’ computers are infected and “face the loss of critical personal information. This can have even more damaging consequences once their financial information is stolen and exposed.”

According to an analysis by IBM’s X-Force, a security research team within IBM Security, the number one country where the coronavirus spam emails are coming from is Vietnam. That’s followed by the United States, China, India and Russia.

The spike from Vietnam followed a fake email campaign over the weekend that asked for contributions to a fake WHO bitcoin wallet.

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