Revisiting scams from 20 years ago

0:01 This program is designed to provide general information with regards to the subject matters covered. This information is given with the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial, legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek the services of confident professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas. The information contained in this podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for individual professional legal advice. The podcast information was carefully compiled from vetted sources and references. However, Rose Resources outreach to safeguard the elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall victim to a scam. Let's talk about scams. It's the must listen show for anyone who wants to protect themselves and their loved ones from scams. Every Tuesday, eight am Pacific time on K four HD Radio, Joyce Petrowski, founder of Rose, and her guests will provide valuable insights and practical tips on how to recognize and protect yourself from scams.

1:14 And now here is your host, Joyce Petrowski. Good morning, everybody, my name is Brian Watson, community outreach specialist for Rose Resources Outreach to safeguard the elderly, and thanks for tuning into Let's talk about scams. Joyce asked me to fill in today and it's my honor and I hope to inform and entertain you as today's discussion is titled Revisiting scams from twenty years ago. So many years ago, I attended a rotary fundraiser Rotary Club of America, huge service organization located all across the country. My dad was a rotarian, and they were having a fundraiser out in California up in the mountains, and they were boiling shrimp.

2:07 It was called a shrimp feed, and so you could eat as much shrimp as you want and it was a great time. Met a lot of nice people and met other rotarians. And I met a rotarian from the Bay Area, and he happened to be a dentist, and I started telling him what I did for my career and back then, this was back in the nineties, in mid nineties, and I was an IRS special agent. So this dentist from this Rotary club invited me to speak at his rotary club, and I was very honored, We had breakfast. I spoke for about twenty minutes about kind of the things I did as an IRS special agent, but I also talked about tax scams. So it was the first time I kind of went out in public and did fraud prevention. And if you've ever been to a rotary club, they're great. You eat, you learn some things, you meet some people, and they laugh at all your jokes.

3:05 And not that I was trying to be a comedian, but if you're going to have if you're going to do a speech, you got to have a little fun. So they laughed at my jokes. So this ended up being the starting point for my path to public speaking. Just to give you a numbers, how many numbers I've done in terms of presentations, I've done forty rotary clubs, so I never envisioned that. Plus I've done probably two hundred other presentations for a variety of different groups. And I've learned I enjoy warning people about scams. So I want to tell a story from two thousand and four. I was invited to give a fraud prevention presentation that was hosted at a local church. It was this forum that they do, I believe once a month where they get a guest speaker, and they had four hundred people there.

3:58 And the local newspaper actually covers the topic of the forum and what was discussed at the forum each month. So my mom actually cut the article out of that newspaper. I have it right here on my wall. It says forum speaker advises how to avoid scams. I like, and that's such a mom thing to do, to clip the article, because that's what moms do. But the great thing about this article it has a picture of me and I had no gray hair. So when I do in person fraud prevention presentations, I like to show this picture because I was a naive looking thirty something year old with no gray hair, and it always gets a laugh from the audience. And the other thing that's very important about this article is it illustrates how much scams have changed over the last twenty plus years. I read the article, I can tell you what's in it. Three big things from two thousand and four as it relates to scams.

5:08 First of all, we talked about phishing. Joyce and I are always talking about phishing scams. Those are unsolicited emails meant to trick you into thinking you're dealing with a government agency or a bank or some other authority and they get you to provide financial information or pay money. So that was number one phishing. The second thing I covered in two thousand and four was identity theft. Is identity theft still a problem today. Yes, you've got to guard your identity, but sometimes you can do everything right and a data breach will expose your personal information, but you still got to monitor your credit, just respond to any notices, and just be very aware and guard your information, especially guard your social Security number, in your date of birth, passwords, just that personal information. And then the last thing I spoke about in two thousand and four were Nigerian email scams.

6:12 And yes, there were Nigerian email scams over twenty years ago, and they're going to persist because they work, They work, people fall for them. Just last month, my mom's neighbor received the Nigerian email scam and she printed it out, gave it to my mom. My mom gave it to me, you know, just so I it helps me stay aware on what's going on. So, yes, these Nigerian email scams still persist, persist. But here's the big deal. Twenty years ago scammers were not very organized, and frankly, they were not that good at what they do. Scams were not so prevalent. They were very very easy to identify. Times they were typos or grammar errors, and in most cases you could tell that it was written by someone who was probably born in another country. So scams just they existed, but they weren't a big deal. And also, twenty years ago, the financial losses related to scams were much smaller. In my observations, you know, scammers seem to be happy to get a few thousand dollars and then kind of that was it. It went away. So let's fast forward to now twenty twenty six, things have gotten much much worse.

7:38 Most of these scams are actually operated by what we call transnational organized gangs. These are criminal organizations that are organized, they're well financed, and they're skilled at stealing money. They are absolutely professional. Many, if not most, of these criminal organizations actually operate outside the United States, which makes it very difficult for our government agencies to investigate them, to shut them down, to get money back, and most importantly, to prosecute them. And these organized gangs know this. And what also I've noticed is probably The biggest thing is today's scammers are ruthless financial predators. They will not stop until they take everything you have. Where back in the day scammers seem to be happy to get a few thousand dollars. Today I have met people that have lost in excess of a million dollars in a scam, and it's absolutely brutal. They are heartless, ruthless, brutal people, and they will they will take everything. It's unbelievable.

8:58 You know. The scams they use to are the ones Joyce and I talk about on a regular basis, the phishing emails, the smishing text tech support scams, pig butchering, and of course the old classic phone scams. And the big thing with the scammers of today versus the scammers of twenty years ago, they are using scripts like they're either typed out or on a computer screen, and they're basically playing the role of someone else, and they will find what you're interested in, whether it's travel or sports or animals or whatever it is, food, you know, wine, and they'll tweak the script and they'll follow the script so they know how to get you. And the thing with these scripts is they're constantly changing them when something works, they use it. When a certain thing on a script doesn't seem to gain any traction with the victim, they won't use it. And then these days scammers demand payment through cryptocurrency.

10:11 The most common, the most used cryptocurrency is bitcoin. They like to use wire transfer, they like to use the peer to peer transfers, that's the Venmo in the Zell And they also like the prepaid cards. And if you think about it, twenty years ago, we didn't have cryptocurrency, we didn't have zell, Venmo, PayPal or things like that. And then to top it off, we had cell phones twenty years ago, but we didn't have smartphones. Now pretty much everybody has a smartphone now, all ages. And when you carry this thing around, you're basically carrying around the equivalent of a portal that can get access to all of your financial information. And then today it seems like everything we're expected to do has to be online. You know, the days of just getting something in the mail, paying a check and sending it back. It's tough. I know this, like dealing with doctor's offices for myself, for my mom.

11:21 Every time you go to a new doctor, you've got to create a you get access to the portal, you have to have a username and a password, so you might have dozens of user names and passwords, and they make you change them all the time. You're getting inundated with emails. It's a perfect scenario for scammers to get us, and it's absolutely tough in terms of scams. We are dealing with a national crisis. I'm not being dramatic. I'm basing this on what I see on a daily basis. I constantly am reading articles about people getting scammed. I'm meeting people they get scammed. I'm meeting people that tell me their relatives or friends have been scammed. Everybody has a scam story. Hoping it doesn't happen to you, your family member, friends, her neighbors is not a fraud prevention plan.

12:17 We have to be mentally prepared to expect scams to come our way, whether it's from phone calls, text messages, or emails. You know, Joyce and I have shared the example of a lady that got scammed. It was a phone scam and the caller claimed to be from her bank, and you know, the caller ID I'm pretty sure had the name of her bank pop up. I don't know if it was luck or if it was planned. It doesn't matter. The caller on the other end of the line said, ma'am, we've identified an insider at your at our bank. I'm with this security department. You need to listen to me carefully, do exactly what I say, or you're going to lose your money. And in this scam, this fake security department employee convinced her to withdraw most of her money and deposit it into a cryptocurrency ATM using a QR code that they provided. And it was absolutely horrible scam. And I've spoken to this lady and she's a very smart lady and just feels horrible about it.

13:31 So in a situation like that, what you need to do is hang up the phone. Okay, So that means see what you tell the scammera is. I appreciate you reaching out to me. This is very important. I'm listening to what you have to say, but I'm going to make sure this is legitimate. You hang up the phone, then you get your wallet out and you find your debit card or your ATM card, call the customer service number on the back, and then you ask to be transferred to the security department. If it's legitimate, you've verified it and saved yourself a lot of time. But most likely it was a scam, and they'll say there's nothing wrong with your account. So the reason I bring this up today is just last week I met somebody who's a gentleman who knows a lot about scam prevention, and he shared a variation of that story. Because the criminals know that all of us in the fraud prevention world are telling people to hang up and call a verified number.

14:37 So this is the new twist that the scammers are doing. When they do that, they say, all right, let's call your bank. Let's call the bank number together. So while they have you on the phone, the two of you are on the phone, they actually ask for your verified number. Pretty smart, huh. So they have you flip out your card, open your card, slip it over, and they dial the number and they actually get the voicemail for your bank, and then right at the last minute, they switch lines and add a scammer. It's extremely ingenious. So you think you're doing the right thing, you think you're calling your bank directly, but they're just getting you transferred to one of their fellow scammers. So that's why with this particular bank scam, the phone scam, hang up the phone and you dial the number. Okay, it's these scammers are just unbelievable.

15:39 So I wanted to share that little story. So when it comes to scam prevention, you got to educate yourself. You've got to stay current with the latest trends and tactics that the scammers are using. We want everybody to sign up for our monthly email. It doesn't cost any money. Joyce sends it out usually at the beginning of the month. It has all the latest scams we're seeing. We include some articles, maybe some short videos, some links that you can do. It's worth spending, you know, fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe even ten minutes is all it will take just to read everything and read the articles. It's an investment in your future. It's a way to secure your money.

16:29 And then we want you to share this email with your friends and family and anybody else. You know, if you don't like it, you can unsubscribe. But you know what, I think you're gonna like it because I have my family signed up for it as well, and these are good conversation starters. So we can talk about scams and not insult anybody's intelligence, because if we're just sitting back and hoping things don't happen to us, we're like sitting ducks. We've got to be prob we got to be mentally prepared. The scammers are coming after us. And I say all this not to scare people, but we just have to be have a healthy skepticism. So any call that comes in, any email, any text, you can slow down, read it carefully and ask yourself is this a scam or is this legitimate? And then the one last thing I'll mention about our email list. On Tuesday mornings, we send out a little mini version of it, more like a bite size email. It'll have just one single topic. And the great thing about that is just we're keeping scam prevention in our minds by just spending a few minutes each week.

17:46 That's all I have today. Joyce will be back next week with another amazing topic. I really appreciate you investing your time by watching Let's talk about scams today. Share this information with the people that you know and love and tell them to tune in next Tuesday morning. Until next time, I'm Brian Watson signing out, thank you very much. Well, that's all the knowledge for this episode. Tune in every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio at KFOURHG dot com as Joyce explores a variety of knowledge. So you have the power to make scam protection your healthy habit, and until then, feel free to reach out to Joyce and let's talk about scams.