Protect Yourself From COVID-19 Vaccine Email Scams

(KNSI) – With the COVID-19 vaccine in high demand, you may be seeing emails landing in your inbox with empty promises from scammers who are after your personal information. George Corte is a security consulting expert with NetV Pro and has some common red flags to look for.

“Well, the first thing I always tell people is to just take a step back from that, typically, the emails are going to have a couple indicators. A lot of them are getting better. But what you’re looking for is, who is it from? Hover over the sender’s email address and see, is it actually coming from the person that it says it is? Is it coming from outside your company? Or is it even coming from just a Gmail account? Last time At last, but the next part would really be look at the content of the message? Is it trying to get you to act immediately? They’re trying to trick you or put a sense of fear into your mind that you need to respond to this without having a chance to really think or ask anybody about it.”

He says to make sure that the email is coming from who it says it is, and don’t click any links, even if it says it’s coming from your own company’s HR department.

“If you just hover over those links, one of the things that it will do is typically show you where that link is taking you to, if it’s going to a legitimate address of a government site or your company’s website. That’s one thing, but if it’s going to a URL shortener, like Bitly, or something like that, that’s being used to hide the address. Definitely stay away from it.”

Corte says to never trust something that you’re not familiar with in an email and never take it at face value.

“If they’re saying, hey, you need to register for free vaccines, do a search and see if it’s getting to you in an email, there’s probably a news report or something like that, that you can verify it separately. If you’re concerned about the links in an email, you have to go to a search engine and type in the agency that this message is supposed to be from and do a search on their webpage. They should have that same information there as well.”

The government says you don’t have to pay to get on any list for early access to a vaccine, and no one is going to ask you for personal information like bank account or social security numbers. When in doubt, Corte says, delete the email.

To learn more about NetVPro, click here.