2020 has seen millions of people lose their jobs and many more stuck at home rather than being at work, at school or around town like usual. You might think that this would have decreased the prevalence of certain crimes as homes are occupied by people more frequently and businesses are empty.
Perhaps not surprisingly, home break-ins and muggings have decreased in 2020 in many areas while business burglaries have increased. Many businesses were dormant and empty for weeks at a time during quarantines and many suffered breaks-in and theft. Homes on the other hand have generally been inhabited from quarantines or because people are no longer working, attending school or able to travel around town.
Thus, home robberies have decreased although package theft from outside homes has conversely gone up. Online and phone scams related to COVID-19 and cybercrimes on the other hand have increased.
A Mixed Bag
First the good news. Many crimes have in fact decreased
in 2020 largely due to lack of opportunity. Home burglaries, robberies, muggings and property crimes in general are down in 2020 over 2019 figures.
On the other hand, violent crimes – murder, shootings, aggravated assault – have all increased throughout the year compared to 2019 statistics.
While many people are spending more time at home whether in quarantine, working from home, taking classes from home or are out of work, some crimes of opportunity have increased during this same period.
COVID-19 Scams
Numerous scams related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic have been noted:
- Theft of government COVID-19 stimulus checks and payments.
- Fake emails and phone calls from scammers pretending to be from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other relevant organizations claiming to offer information on COVID-19 but that actually contain dangerous links or viruses that can infect your computer and steal personal information or more from you.
- Phishing (fake) emails claiming to be from the World Health Organization (WHO) or the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund with a fraudulent payment link to send money for charity.
- An increase in phishing emails from scammers pretending to represent a charitable agency soliciting money, food and clothes for COVID-19 assistance.
- Fraudulent offers for coronavirus vaccinations and home COVID-19 testing kits.
Ongoing Cybercrime
While some crimes are COVID-19 related, others are Internet-related in general that may or may not have a relationship to coronavirus but are piggy backing on people’s vulnerability:
- An increase in the usual phishing scams from people pretending to be a bank, PayPal, Amazon and other popular websites and businesses many people use.
- Scammers claiming they have record of a person’s online search history and will expose it to everyone in their contact list unless they pay a ransom of sorts.
- Fake invitations on Zoom and other online apps that have become highly utilized in 2020, for the purpose of stealing your identity.
- A large increase in the number of online searches being done for information on package theft suggesting that porch piracy has grown significantly during 2020 during the pandemic.
Avoiding COVID-19 Scams
Institutions such as banks don’t send important emails. They send a letter in the mail. And they certainly don’t email you asking for passwords, bank account details and things of that nature. If you get an email from your “bank” asking for any personal information it’s guaranteed to be fake.
Phone calls. If you receive a phone call that you believe might be fake, check the caller ID that appears. If you aren’t sure, ask for the person’s direct phone number and tell them you’ll call them back later. Then you can check the number or even call the company’s head office directly. If the caller start pushing back on giving you a return number or name, it’s likely you’re being tricked.
Check the email sender. Don’t click on anything but if you hover your mouse over the email sender name you’ll see the actual email address and scammers will not use the legitimate URL of a bank, insurance company, PayPal, etc. Often they cloak (hide) the email address but it appears in full if you hover your mouse over the address.
Look for clues. Spammers often don’t speak English as their first language and many times the ones who do don’t write very well either. Look for spelling and grammatical errors in emails. Look for fake looking logos. If it’s a company you do business with and they refer to you as Dear Sir, Dear Customer, or Dear Jane Smith (ie. they copied your full name from your email address), it’s a scam. Even if the grammar is fine and everything looks good, the email might still be fake.
Companies you don’t deal with. My mum has only been online for several years and is still finding her way around. She recently asked me about a PayPal email she received. The thing is she doesn’t have a PayPal account. So it’s clearly fake. I had to explain how these scams work. I routinely get emails from banks I have never had an account with.
Don’t click on any link. If the email is fake, clicking a link before ensuring the email is legitimate can compromise your online security and personal details.
Package Theft
Package theft is a term that came into common use several years ago largely due to the increase in online purchases and home delivery of more and more goods that we used to buy in store. As more packages got left at people’s front doors or on the side of the house when they weren’t home, the more the prevalence of package theft: Thieves brazenly walk up to a person’s front door and steal their package(s).
A quick check of Google trends confirms a 250% increase in the related search term package theft prevention in the past 12 months:
Package theft brings up an important question: If you arrive home and find that a package that was supposedly delivered is missing, will you call the police and report it as a crime or will you simply contact the sender and deal with them regarding getting a replacement? Currently, package theft isn’t nationally tracked as a crime so it’s likely that many instances will never be reported. Thus, package theft is possibly much more common than it appears to be.
So even if 2020 will be known as the year of COVID-19, multiple lockdowns, and more people spending time at home, it will amazingly also be known as a year where porch pirates stole even more frequently than they did in 2019, even with people at home.
Summary
While certain violent crimes have largely decreased due to lack of opportunity, many other crimes have increased due to the circumstances of COVID-19. While home burglaries have gone down significantly with more people at home, package theft from homes continues to go up.
While many businesses were shut down during quarantines, for staff illnesses and other COVID-19 related reasons, an increasing number of them suffered break-ins and thefts.
And many new COVID-19 specific cybercrimes involving fake emails and ongoing phishing scams from people pretending to be major corporations and charities has made it increasingly difficult for consumers to figure out who to trust.
When in doubt, don’t click on a link in an email before first checking it out to look for clues that it’s fake. And if you don’t want to spend time and effort to do that, pick up your phone and call the institution in question or forward the email to their legitimate email address on their website and wait for their confirmation that the correspondence is legitimate.
Rarely, I have received a scam email pretending to be from an organization I do deal with and almost got caught taking it seriously. Sometimes the fake emails look very real so be careful!