Fake cures, scams, phony medications and price gouging: Predators prey during coronavirus
Three weeks ago, Lorina’s cellphone rang. Seeing it was a local call, the 61-year-old Riverside resident picked up.
“There is no shortage of people trying to cash in on this crisis, unfortunately,” Nick Hanna, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said in an interview. What they’re after, DeFrancesca said, is personal information such as Medicare numbers, which they can use to bill the federal government for procedures that aren’t performed and costly equipment that isn’t needed. They aren’t constrained by ripping off only Medicare, he said; armed with this information, “they could use it for any sort of financial fraud scheme.”
She reported the exchange to a hotline listed in the newsletter, and worried. She’s received no kit; nor has she gotten any of the expensive and unneeded medical equipment that fraudsters commonly charge to the federal government, she said. California leads the nation with about 2,000 reports to the FTC of fraud, identity theft and other scams related to the coronavirus outbreak, 800 more than Florida, the state with the second-most complaints.
“It’s good for the public to do their research,” Baxter said, “but I’ve had good success with the product. I haven’t been sick in seven years.”The FTC is also warning of robocall and imposter scams, which con artists have injected with references to the coronavirus “to make things a little more scary,” Vaca, of the FTC, said.
“These are not stupid people,” he said. “People work hard for their money, and these people work hard to steal your money.”Keith Lawrence Middlebrook, a small-time actor and bodybuilder, advertised to his 2.4 million Instagram followers both a pill that inoculated people from the virus and a cure for the disease it causes. His Instagram videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
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