Scammers Trick People into Donating Bitcoins to Fight Coronavirus
Mar 20, 2020 at 08:38 //
News
A group of scammers are posing themselves as the World Health Organization's Solidarity Response Fund to trick people of their money. They accept Bitcoin donations supposedly to fight COVID-19, buty tests and fund research.
The scheme was discovered by Chester Wisniewski, a security specialist, who published the information on his Twitter page. Scammers have got it right, having posed themselves as the organisation that actually exists. WHO has really established the Solidarity Response Fund to raise funds for combating coronavirus. The difference is that the real organization accepts only fiat donations and does not accept cryptocurrency.
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Some organizations indeed try to attract investments for research and assistance in combating coronavirus with cryptocurrency. Coinidol.com, a world blockchain news outlet, reported that Dutch Red Cross accepts Bitcoin donations. They involved a cryptocurrency exchange as an intermediary to give people a chance to donate digital money.
A group of enthusiasts from the bitcoin community have established a research group CoroHope to crowdsource money for developing a vaccine against COVID-19. Despite digital community is still able to work through the Internet, it has still suffered badly from the pandemic. Naturally, they would also want to put some efforts into finding a way to get back to normal life.
Unfortunately, some people are by far not that altruistic and all they strive for is filling their pockets using the panic and chaos as a disguise. Recently, a new live coronavirus spread tracker called “CovidLock” appeared on the web. However, some time later it appeared that the tracker is nothing more than ransomware targeting Android smartphones. Besides, there has been an increase in the number of domain names using the words “coronavirus” or “COVID-19”, with many of them belonging to scammers.
Meanwhile, statistics show that there are 236,877 of COVID-19 cases worldwide with 9,828 deaths.
As we see, panic promotes the growth of scammers and fraudsters, which is not good, but natural. It is easier to get away with any kind of crime while people are busy with saving their lives. So all of us must be careful in order to keep both our health and our money safe.
OhNoCryptocurrency via https://www.ohnocrypto.com/ @coinidol.com By Lana Smiley, @Khareem Sudlow