Omaha FBI Warns About COVID Survey Scams Popping-Up Nationwide

If you’ve recently gotten your COVID-19 vaccination and then get an e-mail or text asking you to take a survey afterward, beware, it could be a scam.

The FBI is reporting scammers are posing as the big drug companies, Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson and sending out surveys to people who have had their vaccinations asking for follow-up information.

“One way to tell if it’s an e-mail, before clicking on it, hover over the name of the center, if it just says Moderna, Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson, if you hover over that name and it pops up the e-mail address that it’s being sent from, it may very well be a Hotmail, Google, Yahoo e-mail address and not a corporate e-mail address,” said Bryan Van Deun, White Collar Crime supervisor at the FBI’s Omaha office. “That would be one quick indication to tell it’s fraudulent."

The FBI has seen in increase in similar survey scams. Drug companies will never send out a survey after you’ve gotten your vaccination. Van Deun said it’s important authorities know about scams like this.

“One way people could report the survey fraud scam would be to submit it to our internet crime complaint center at IC3.gov,” Van Deun said. “That way they can identify national trends, potential hotspots and then sent it to the appropriate field office for follow-up.”

Other scammers are selling fake vaccination cards online, which could be a federal crime because of the official logos that are often on the cards.