WFHB

Here are a couple of the latest things to beware of — parents take note! — and a couple of heartening stories about scammers who ran out of luck.

The Federal Trade Commission has just issued a report on the effect of COVID-19 on scams and swindles over the last six months. The fraudsters switched their targets and methods very quickly, to concentrate on the most lucrative con jobs in the new conditions of the pandemic. For instance – we’re all staying home a lot, and are easy to find, plus a lot of people have had their income disappear, at least for awhile, so debt-collection scams have been going great guns.

If you, or someone you know, has filed for unemployment insurance – watch out. There have been massive unemployment fraud schemes hitting states literally from coast to coast. The state of Washington has admitted to paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in fake claims. When claim filings in Washington shot up from six thousand a week to eight hundred thousand a week, and state government departments were working from home or keeping social distance in the office, they got overwhelmed. Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Rhode Island Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wyoming have been hit hard, and now the Indiana Department of Workforce Development has issued a statewide alert.

Stalkerware is a program – a very sophisticated and perfectly legal program – that you can install on your cellphone. Or…and this is the point…somebody else can install on your cellphone. It’s a program that lets another person know who you’re talking to, see your text messages, know your exact location at any given moment – in fact, see whatever you do online with the device it’s on. There are legitimate uses for this kind of program, which is why it’s legal. Parents can track their children with it, and some employers even use it – with consent – to keep tabs on their employees. That’s how it’s marketed.

Today I’m going to tell you a story. Once upon a time – like right now, this very minute – there was an investment adviser in Rochester, New York, named Christopher A. Parris. He was arrested and charged last January with a massive securities fraud. Court papers charge that Parris and his cronies discovered an investment firm which was about to go belly up because it had lost its clients’ money – but the clients didn’t know it yet, and the firm still maintained a high level of trust.