The FBI is reminding us that various scammers are preying on people online during the crisis. Their release talks about extra vigilence with respect to some of the garden variety scams one sees every day like phishing and spoofed email but also notes crisis-specific frauds like promotion of fake virus tests or fake cures. You can see the full press release at the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center’s Website.
You may have gotten “sales” calls that caller ID showed as coming from your own neighborhood (or not too far away) but turned out not to be from the number that was shown. Perhaps you called that number to give the scammers a piece of your mind (as one understandably irate patron recently did after getting such a call that showed Maxwell as the purported caller), only to find that the people at that number had no idea about the call.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a few articles and blog posts about this sort of scam:
If you get such a call, the FTC recommends reporting it to them and to the FCC: