Burton Kelso

Burton Kelso joins us to talk about what we can watch out for during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At your forecast.

Looks like mostly a beautiful week ahead.

Jodie, back to you.

>> in a report released by ibm this week.

Ibm found a 6000 increase in spam-related e-mails related to covid-19 since march.

Many are trying to get their hands on your relief check from the irs.

Technology expert joins us to show us what to watch out for during this covid-19 pandemic.

>> barton.

Welcome.

>> thank you for having me.

>> it's been a long time.

For quite some time we could spot these scammers, there would be broken english or something that tipped us off.

How are they taking their game to the next level?

>> they're started to use grammarly to check their grammar.

At the same time, it's easy to fool people during the pandemic.

Some of the scams you're starting to see are phishing e-mail scams trying to get you to sign up or to log into a specific website to check on the progress of your relief check.

Other e-mails phishing scams and text scams come in the form of scammers letting you know that a loved one is in the hospital with covid-19 and that you need to send money or a message in order to make sure they get medical treatment.

When you're dealing in crisis, people count on you to react.

>> what can you tell us in trying to avoid the scam.

I had a friend whose phone was taken over and her credit card.

There's so many things out there.

How can we try to avoid the pitfalls?

>> probably one of first things people need to understand about cyber crime is 99% of cyber crime requires user interaction.

As long as you don't click on text messages or phishing e-mails you are safe.

The next thing people need to understand is most of your information is out on the internet because of large scale data breaches.

So you have got to do investigation on your own to make sure your information is not out there.

There's a great website i can share called cyberlytica.

You can go to that website and will allow you to type in your passwords to make sure that your password isn't leaked out on the dark web.

If it's leaked out, obviously you want to change it to make sure that criminals can't get to your information because cyber criminals use a process called credential stuffing.

Where they stuff your e-mail and your passwords into online accounts to get access to them.

It's always important to stay on top of the password and make sure your information isn't on the dark web.

>> they're so good.

We talked about the irs.

People call all the time saying we're the irs.

Give us your social security number.

What are you seeing as far as all that goes right now?

>> well it's the same thing.

People don't really think about the incoming calls.

They just respond to it.

So the irs calls coming in aren't tax related because tax time has been pushed back.

They're more about people wanting to get access to your relief check.

So again, pay attention to those phone calls and make sure that you're not giving out personal information because that's how criminals are able to hack into your account and get access to your data.

>> absolutely.

Barton kelso, thank you for joining us.

Great information on stopping the