Americans lose $145M to coronavirus scams
According to the Federal Trade Commission, Americans lost more than $145M to coronavirus scams. Yahoo Finance's On The Move panel weigh in.
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: Melody, you're looking at coronavirus fraud, which apparently has been pretty sizeable.
MELODY HAHM: Yeah, normally it's tax season we have to worry about, right, Julie, especially when it comes to elderly folks who are easy targets for scams here. But Americans have actually lost more than $145 million to fraud-related charges in the coronavirus pandemic. That's according to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC received around 206,000 complaints from consumers between January 1 through September 22.
Of course, the average loss was about $300, which during this period of time where so many folks have been laid off, lost their jobs, furloughed, that's a significant chunk of change, right? But the real number of fraud is likely significantly higher than federal figures are reporting, of course, because they don't reflect those scams that have been unreported by customers. We can anticipate there being a continued flurry of these, although the spike did happen earlier in the spring season.
