In the wake of the catastrophic flooding in Central Texas, federal and state officials have warned about a surge in disaster-related scams.
Some of these scams might be designed to take advantage of vulnerable families who’ve been directly affected by the disaster. Others appear to target the many charitable donors or would-be donors who are trying to help.
Cliff Steinhauer, the director of information security and engagement at the National Cybersecurity Alliance, said scams are common after a huge disaster.
“Scammers will try to contact victims posing as federal government, law enforcement, insurance companies, and contractors to try to trick them into either paying for services that don’t have a payment, such as any federal assistance, or with fake or unreputable contractors,” Steinhauer said. “It’s best to always do your own outreach.
“Any inbound communication – so if they call you, text you, email you – you have to be a little bit suspicious. The federal government doesn’t tend to offer up their services by calling you directly. You have to kind of go to them. And same thing with insurance companies.”
» MORE: Complete coverage of deadly flooding in the Texas Hill Country
Scammers rely on people being confused and overwhelmed after a natural disaster, Steinhauer said. But it’s important to remember that help from the federal government — through agencies like FEMA — do not come with a price tag.
“The government will never charge you any kind of fee, and they do not recommend allowing anyone to apply on your behalf,” he said. “What you wanna do is find the proper government website – most government websites end in .gov versus .com or anything else – and then you can fill out the application on a secure government website.”
There are also scams that try to take advantage of those who want to help people.
“We do also see a lot of scammers targeting people who want to help because there’s a lot more of us out here who have heard about what’s going on and we feel the need to help,” Steinhauer said. “They will create fake social media pages of the victims or of families and try to get people to donate directly to them in that manner.”
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Steinhauer said when donating, you should watch out for brand-new social media profiles that have other duplicate usernames on the same site.
“The better places to donate are going directly to the charity websites themselves,” he said. “Gofundme.com actually has pretty good scam and fraud detection, and they have a donation guarantee so that if you find out that you’ve donated to somebody who isn’t who they say they are, you have some recourse. You can report it and potentially get a refund.”
If you do see something online that looks like a scam, you can always report it to the website.
“The platform that you reported to will investigate if they find that it’s legitimate, they won’t take it down,” Steinhauer said. “But if they do find that is a scam, they will in fact take that down so that other people don’t fall victim.”
