Scammers out in force to make a dollar from frightening times

Scammers, charlatans, hucksters, grifters – they all come out of their hidey holes in times of strife.

Last week we were treated to a new episode in the unfolding epic of addled celebrity chef, Pete Evans and his vexed relationship with medical science.

Not content with pushing a diet of the type that promises adherents will live longer if they eat like humans did during the Stone Age when the average life expectancy was 27, Paleo Pete excitedly told those dumb enough to listen that he was in possession of a light source which had “recipes” that could fight the “Wuhan Coronavirus.”

This led to the delicious prospect, at least in my mind of an excited minion bursting through the doors of the Oval Office with a furrowed brow POTUS sitting at his desk trawling through dark pandemic death toll statistics.

“Mr President, Mr President … Pete Evans has a lamp.”

It would be funny except for the fact Pete Evans has more than 1.5 million Facebook followers.

If you’ve ever wondered how many idiots there are in Australia, I’d suggest that is a pretty decent guide. We could call it the Evans Australian Idiot Index. It could really come in handy.

Meanwhile in the US, Alex Jones from Info Wars was flogging a toothpaste superbly branded “Superblue Silver Immune Gargle” that he claimed killed the SARS/Coronavirus family at “point blank range.” SARS and Coronavirus are not family. They’re not even related.

Jones received a fairly curt directive from the US Food and Drug Administration and then another even shorter cease and desist missive from the US Trade Commission and alas, the miracle gargle is no more.

It is no surprise that the pandemic has scrambled many brains in the televangelist movement, all of whom recite The Bible while fixing a hypnotic gaze on our television screens but never, ever mention Matthew 19:23-26. Funny that.

Some have gone down the aged old path of making a quid out of other people’s fear and misery.

Charismatic preacher Jim Bakker has been flogging colloid silver for some time, claiming all sorts of dubious medical benefits. More recently, he has gone a step further describing his silver (and only his) can be used to treat COVID-19.

If you believe that, I’ve got a state room on the Ruby Princess to sell you. Going cheap. No queues for the buffet.

If it’s a character reference you seek for Bakker, there is none better than one provided by the late leader of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell. Falwell described the evangelist as a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.”

See, I would have said the Spanish Inquisition, but Falwell is closer to these things than I am. Or he was.

The granddaddy of all the charismatic set is Kenneth Copeland, a walking, Bible thumping example that money can get you almost anything with the exception of successful Botox treatments.

Copeland, who possesses a 1000-yard stare that could bend titanium, dismissed COVID-19 as no worse than the flu early doors and ordered his followers to break iso and park their backsides at one of his many churches. If they fell ill, he said, no worries. What better place to be for a quick laying on of the hands healing?

When the pandemic took a turn for the worse and Copeland was forced to clear the pews, he urged his followers to touch their televisions as a means of vaccination by proxy.

This all might be fine except for the fact that this creepy creeping Jesus has now exorcised COVID-19 on three occasions. His latest attempt involved a chant ending with him making a farting noise with his lips, amusingly imitated by his devotees, claiming he had summoned “the wind of God”.

“COVID-19, you are destroyed forever, and you will never be back.”

That was last week. Just looking at the infection rates in the US today, a fourth Copeland exorcism can only be days away. If at first, you don’t succeed …

When the virus started having its dreadful impact on the US, Copeland insisted his followers continue tithing (donating a fixed percentage of their incomes or assets to the church) even if they had lost their jobs. Copeland has an estimated net worth of US$760 million. One big, fat camel trying to pop his head through the eye of a needle, right there.

These are highly entertaining grifters who practice a cocktail of medieval sorcery and extreme capitalism but elsewhere there are more genuine concerns about organised crime syndicates setting themselves loose on the world.

There is more spam and more junk being delivered to our emails every day. The worst of these are phishing emails which seek to trick the receiver into passing on personal information like bank account details, PINs et cetera. Spam filters help but they can create a false sense of confidence.

These are not the old Nigerian Prince-type scams. They are becoming increasingly sophisticated. I note the surge of new domain registrations ending in .gov.au. Not registered by our federal government but from con artists on the make.

Suffice to say, if someone you don’t know and have never heard of wants your personal details (name, address and date of birth is sufficient to commit identity fraud) then it’s a good idea to delete the email. Don’t look at it, don’t read it. Send it to straight to the cyber junkyard.

In the US, an app surfaced which offers those who download it the ability to identify others with COVID-19. If you’re wondering how it works, it doesn’t. When the user clicks on the app to download it, the computer shuts down with an ominous blue screen. That’s it. Pay the ransom or go and get yourself a new laptop. Even if you do, files not stored on the cloud will continue to be inaccessible.

And then there are even more insidious scams we barely know about and have virtually no control over.

There are reports of dodgy Chinese based companies flogging COVID-19 test kits for under $100.

It’s illegal to sell this stuff in Australia but that’s no real deterrent. The test kits are relatively harmless for users in that they stand no chance of suffering any immediate harm but the tests themselves are unreliable, throwing up great swathes of false positives and false negatives.

The danger is that people will rely on these tests and, confident of the results, will go out into the community to spread an infection they don’t know they have or go badgering an already strained public health system for no good reason.

The world is being swamped by bootlegged personal protective equipment, especially dodgy N-95 respirators and surgical masks not made to standard. Most of this junk is coming from profiteering companies in China and plays into chronic shortages of PPE around the world.

It’s bad enough the People’s Republic of China kicked this pandemic off, lied about it and under reported their infection rates and deaths by hundreds of thousands. Now an army of Chinese fraudsters are seeking to profit from it.

These are frightening times and there will always be those who seek to profit from a fear that is real, almost tangible. So much so that if you thought about it for long enough, you’d go looking for the Silver Gargle Toothpaste just to take the edge off the anxiety.

This column was published in The Australian 16 April, 2020