‘Corona criminals’ prey on Europe’s contagion fears
The Hague, March 28: From trafficking dodgy surgical masks to peddling counterfeit medicines and running internet scams, criminals are finding ways to profit from the Covid-19 crisis, European police warn. With billions of people under lockdown in their homes and borders shut, police chiefs say criminals are finding it hard to make money out of “traditional” activities like burglary and drug smuggling.
Instead they are preying on people’s fears of the
Covid-19 pandemic to sell them substandard protective goods or trick people out of their cash online, warned Europe’s police agency Europol.
“Criminals are just interested in one question: ‘how can I make more money?’,” Europol director Catherine De Bolle said in an interview. “This is why they are now abusing the pandemic to change their way of working.” Police around the world seized 34,000 counterfeit surgical masks in one major operation targeting so-called “corona criminals” earlier this month, Europol said in a report Friday.
“Fraudsters have been very quick to adapt wellknown fraud schemes to capitalise on the anxieties and fears of victims throughout the crisis,” the report added. In many European countries, police have reported a dramatic drop in common criminal behaviour. Spanish police said there had been a roughly 50 percent drop in criminal offences compared to a year earlier since the country was put on a near total lockdown on March 14.
“There is no doubt that confinement makes crime more difficult,” said the deputy director of Spain’s Guardia Civil police force, Laurentino Cena. Sweden too said it had seen burglaries drop since people were asked to work at home. Sales of street drugs have also dropped sharply in many countries since the outbreak as authorities shut borders and restrict the movement of people.
But the flip side of the coin is a rise in other forms of crime trying to profit on the back of the disease. Austria’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said this week that “we see a decrease in breaks-ins, burglaries, but at the same time cybercrime is on the rise”.
Police have also warned people to be on the lookout for burglars wearing protective masks who claim to be carrying out Covid-19 tests in order to steal from homes, particularly those of the elderly.