The New York Police Department (NYPD) is looking into online scams that involve threatening to infect an individual\u2019s family with COVID-19 if they refuse to pay those targeting them, The Daily Beast reported Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The scam, part of the tidal wave of malicious cyber activity during the coronavirus pandemic, involves the cyber criminals using phishing emails to play on fears of the virus to pressure individuals to give them money or cryptocurrency.<\/p>\n
The Daily Beast reviewed a sensitive NYPD document dated April 20 that warned that \u201cthreat actors around the world have flooded the internet with COVID-19 themed phishing scams in attempts to capitalize on fears of the virus for financial gain.\u201d<\/p>\n
The NYPD did not immediately respond to The Hill\u2019s request for comment on the report.<\/p>\n
John Miller, the NYPD\u2019s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, told The Daily Beast in a statement that \u201cthe commercial scams, trying to defraud institutions out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, are complex and layered. These are of great concern because of the amounts of money involved and the fact that the person who pays needs these supplies to protect patients or customers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The New York Police Department (NYPD)...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24215,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24214\/revisions\/24215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}