Corona emergency aid: Criminals copy entire ministry website

Criminals have falsified the entire website of the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Economic Affairs in order to apparently redirect Corona emergency aid to their own bank accounts.

This was the result of research by NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung. Representatives of the NRW Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Economic Affairs confirmed this fact.

According to research, the fake website wirtschaft-nrw.info was registered last Wednesday, April 8, which also contains an application form for Corona emergency aid.

The police in North Rhine-Westphalia assume that this is intended to collect applicants' data in order to then enter it on the real application page of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia with changed account details.

The real site was temporarily shut down on Thursday due to previous fraud attempts, but should be up and running again soon.

According to research, the fake site is an exact and complete copy of the real website. The only visible difference is that the fake site has an application form that needs to be filled out.

The fake site is located on a server in the USA, and the person who registered it is hiding behind an anonymization service in Panama. Investigators in the Cybercrime Competence Center of the North Rhine-Westphalian police have been trying since Sunday afternoon to have the fake site taken offline following a request from NDR, WDR and SZ.

Apparently, criminals wanted to take advantage of the Easter holidays for their fraud.

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