The scammers focused on employees of both hospitals and health ministries, offering to sell COVID-19 vaccines that have been approved for distribution in their respective countries. To dupe their targets, the ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/siber-dolandiricilarin-hedefi-saglik-otoriteleri-oldu-2.jpg\")
cybercriminals masqueraded as representatives of either vaccines manufacturers or governmental authorities directing the vaccine distribution efforts.<\/p>\n
In an attempt to seal the fraudulent deal, the scammers targeted both work and personal email accounts of their marks and even attempted to contact them by phone, cold calling and touting fake vaccines. It\u2019s worth noting that the purchase of vaccines is negotiated on either a governmental level or,\u00a0in the case of the European Union<\/a>\u00a0(EU), by a special Joint Negotiation Team, so the scammers\u2019 tactics should raise some suspicions.<\/p>\n Vaccine manufactures were also instrumental in shaping the warning, since INTERPOL based it around the information the manufacturers provided, highlighting other strategies leveraged by scammers, such as the use of fake websites and social media accounts.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we see with cybercrime, usually it is the private sector which has the most information about attacks and trends, which is exactly what has happened with these attempted vaccine scams. Even when a fraud fails, it is important that it is reported to the police so that potential links can be identified and also, as in the case of the alert INTERPOL has issued, to warn law enforcement about these threats,\u201d said INTERPOL Secretary General J\u00fcrgen Stock.<\/p>\n He went on to emphasize that with the pandemic raging on and countries still attempting to quickly and safely vaccinate their citizens, it was essential that the vaccine rollout process needed to be protected from the start of the manufacturing process until the vaccines are delivered.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, INTERPOL and the United States\u2019 Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)\u00a0issued a joint advisory<\/a>\u00a0warning against the purchase of bogus COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.<\/p>\n Cybercriminals have been extremely active throughout every stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, targeting everyone ranging from regular people to various pharmaceutical companies and governmental organizations involved in the vaccine development, approval, and deployment process.<\/p>\n Over the past year, they have deployed a range of\u00a0COVID-19 vaccine-related scams<\/a>, hacked an\u00a0Oxford University research lab<\/a>\u00a0involved in researching ways to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, and even compromised the\u00a0European Medicines Agency<\/a>\u00a0and then leaked stolen vaccine documents.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" INTERPOL has issued a\u00a0global warning\u00a0about organized crime groups that are targeting governments, using bogus offers that peddle COVID-19 vaccines. The warning was issued to all of INTERPOL\u2019s 194 member countries after the international law enforcement agency registered roughly 60 cases from 40 countries. The scammers focused on employees of both hospitals and health ministries, offering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":140897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[53,157],"tags":[95579,78013,93936,95578,70636,95580,68802,92888],"views":112,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140894"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140894"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140901,"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140894\/revisions\/140901"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enerjigazetesi.ist\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}An ongoing problem<\/h3>\n