Technology and Education and their role in Scams

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 competent 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 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. Hi, I'm David staying active mentally, thing chess. Those are all very important things. I'm seventy two, but I'm going to keep on learning. I'm going to keep on moving. I'm gonna keep on living my life. Healthcare for David's next move. Learn more at AR twelve health dot com. Hi everybody, welcome back. I'm Joyce Petrowski, founder and board president of Rose Resources Outreach to safeguard the elderly. Don't forget to get on our website at w or Roseadvocacy dot org. You can find our social media channels at the top of the homepage, scroll down to the bottom, and you can sign up for our email and or mailed newsletter.

1:58 We do both. Two great things with the email newsletter is that you're going to get scam information and tips and information about Rose. But every Tuesday morning, you're going to get a Tuesday tip at nine point fifteen Arizona time, and you might look at it for a few weeks and say, you know what, I already know these tips. Well, that's great. It's reinforcement, but it also by seeing scam information reoccurring every week in your inbox, opening up, just taking a quick few minutes to read through it that helps reinforce your scam prevention habits, your healthy skepticism and making it a habit so the next time you're contacted, you're more apt to think scam okay, what do I need to do in order to determine if this is legitimate or if it really is a scam? So today we have a we have a guest patch Coglin. He spent more than twenty years building teams, products, and companies that protect governments and fortune five hundred enterprises from the most sophisticated cyber threats. He co founded true Star Technology, a security intelligence platform acquired by Splunk and now leads Savvy Security, where his team built scam wise, a free tool that gives anyone an instant assessment of a suspicious message. When

3:29 his seventy three year old mother was targeted by an AI powered voice impersonation scam, Patrick turned his expertise toward a question most cybersecurity professionals never ask, Why do smart capable people fall for scams in the first place. What he found wasn't a. Technology problem, It was a human psychology problem, fueled by criminal organizations operating at a scale most people can imagine his debut book, Dark Side of the Boom House Scale Hijack The AI Revolution exposes the networks behind the global scam epidemic, the psychological tactics they've weaponized, and what families and communities can do to fight back. Patrick is a Georgetown Saint Andrews and Stanford alum, and he lives in Los Angeles with his wife's son and dog. So let's welcome Patrick.

4:24 Thank you, Joyce. That was a great introduction. Very happy to. Be here, Thank you, and thank you for joining us. Happy to have you, and I'm looking forward to this conversation because the one thing that I really liked about your bio was what he found was not a technology problem, it was a human psychology problem. I think that's where a lot of people, including the government, fail when it comes to trying to prevent scams. So you spent over twenty years in the cybersecurity in cybersecurity protecting governments and Fortune five hundred companies. So what made you shift your focus to protecting just everyday people.

5:10 Yeah, I think, Joyce, if you sort of if we take a step back and look at my career in the last twenty years or so, I think the through line or the threat is. I've really focused on how bad guys used technology. I started my career actually looking at at the time this is again twenty plus years ago, looking at terrorist threats and groups from threats from terrorist organizations and how terrorists were potentially using the Internet to launder money, to communicate, to recruit, and then over time that sort of parlayed into looking at how bad actors were using technology as a channel and a mechanism to target government agencies, and then later enterprise is to steal information, to steal money, whatever it may be. And then about eighteen years or eighteen months ago, two years ago, my mom, as you said in the introduction, got one of these fake kidnapping calls where you know, she she's sitting at home in one day her phone rings and it shows up and says it's coming from my sister Courtney, and she answers the phone and she thinks she hears my sister's voice and sort of a blood curdling scream and a voice that says, Mom, they've got me. And then a man comes on the phone and says, we've got your daughter at the at the local walmart in Oletha, Kent,

6:43 where I grew up and we're going to kill her in the parking lot if you don't pallace twelve hundred dollars immediately. And you know, by a lucky sequence of events and some fortunate sort of moments, my mom sees her iPad sitting on the table while she's on the phone, and she thinks to text my brother in law, my sister's husband, and say, you know, but she's still caught up in it, and she says, what are we going to do about Courtney? She believed absolutely, And you know, luckily my brother in law is there and answers right away and says, what do you mean Courtney's in the shower right here with us. Yeah. So that sort of provided the just enough of a spark of doubt that my mom was able to sort of step back from the situation, hang up the phone.

7:32 Something didn't feel right. Called my sister, realized this was fake. And by the time she called me, you know, she was shook to the core. Joyce like you can imagine, you know, how how destabilizing that is. Couldn't believe that that this could happen. How could it happen? The phone said it was Courtney. It sounded like Courtney, And after we calm mom down, what was going through my mind is, well, what has fundamentally changed in sort of the underlying economy of cyber criminals of sort of the bad guys on the web that they could target little Beth Coglin from Kansas like this, somebody did some work to figure out, you know, who she was, who her daughter was, what the phone numbers were, what the voice was potentially, and that that twelve hundred dollars would have been the starting ask for a life, and that somebody would have been really happy. It would have been a huge score for that scammer if they got twelve hundred dollars for that work.

8:35 And so for me, it kind of invigorated some some latent analysts and intelligence skills that I had used earlier in my career, and I kind of went down a rabbit hole and I saw what you've been seeing for for a long time, which is cyber criminals are now sort of taking the same level of sophistication and scale that they would have pointed at enterprises and governments and are now point it at seniors, the elderly families. They're really all demographics and so That's what really drove me to say that the threat has shifted from governments to enterprises and now to living rooms in kitchen tables of the really Americans. And that's that's what I want to spend the next chapter of my life on, is helping to to stop this this rapidly accelerating problem.

9:26 Yeah. I mean it's every year, you know, when we see the statistics come out, and right, the statistics are just on what's reported, and we know that there are so many more people that just don't report, especially in this older adult population, the sixty plus population. That don't report. So it's just the actual losses in number of victims are just exponential based on you know, but the the numbers. That are reported. And you know, you live in California, you guys are always in the top three for the statistics. You have a huge population just to begin with, but Arizona is always in the top ten and we hover right around somewhere between fourth and sixth.

10:11 So we don't have. As big a population as California, but we have a big retired population. And it's just, you know, it's amazing how much information can be found online about people. I don't think we realize everything that is considered public information. So it's and there's go ahead. I'm sorry, well, I was just going to say, I mean, what you hit on with the underreporting is actually a big part of the problem. In fact, digital fraud is the most underreported crime in the world. If you look at residential burglary or any other sort of type of crime, shoplifting, whatever it may be, digital fraud is exponentially underreported compared to those and a lot of that is because of, unfortunately, the shame and the stigma it's involved when you talk about a scam victim, and we can talk more about that, but the impact of that is this underreporting means we're under resourced from a law enforcement perspective, we're under educated about the problem because we don't have our arms as a society, as a country, as a state, whatever it may be, around the real scale of the problem. And so part of what we advocate for, and I know

11:43 you do as well, is we've got to sort of bring down this level of shame around talking about scams and fraud so that we can really understand the full scale of the problem and then we can start to really implement the right scales. Oh absolutely, you know, I was just looking at. Somebody. You know, I'm sure you. Guys have those nextdoor apps and stuff. I had gotten a notification I had commented somebody had posted their experience with a scam, and it was that they knew from the beginning it was a scam, but they kind of just wanted to see what their game was, so they engaged to a certain extent and they spelled it out in the post.

12:27 And I had just. Commented and said, you know, thank you for sharing. It's always good to get this information out and just be careful with engaging because they can trick you so quickly and easily. But there were people on. There that were saying, who would I can't believe people are so dumb to fall for this. And I'm telling you, Patrick, it takes all I can do not to just rip into those people, because it's like you make a decision out of an emotional state and then you come back and think about it logically and rationally. I think you're somebody else could say the same thing about you exactly, And that's what people don't. They just don't think about it right, and they don't lead with empathy and you know, and they're just very judgmental people.

13:20 And I hate to say it, but you. Know, you very well could be the next one on this next stoor app that's going to be posted. Well, you wouldn't post because you'd be very embarrassed after you've just been shaming everybody. Well, you know, it's funny. I when I so again. I sort of worked in government and then enterprise security, and there's this big cybersecurity conference every year. Let me tell the story where it's called RSA and it happens in San Francisco and cybersecurity people get together and I remember about ten twelve years ago, you know, at the time when companies would get hacked, this was still kind of a new thing. And what people in the cybersecurity community would do when it company got hacked with they would go on social media. They go on Twitter and kind of throw shade at the company and say, oh my god, I can't believe that company got hacked. What were they doing? They didn't have their policies figured out, the program must have been weak. And then at this RSA conference, the director of the FBI came and he gave the keynote speech and he said something that was really important. He said, there's there's two types of companies in the world, companies that have been hacked and companies that don't know they've been hacked. And and what that did is it changed the entire conversation. So now the cybersecurity community. You know, if you started blaming the victim of an enterprise attack, it kind of showed that you didn't really understand how the attackers worked, and that maybe you weren't educated about how big and important and really sophisticated this problem had become.

14:51 Well you can take that right into scams against you know, individuals, that's right. And so I think we're approaching this moment and we need to turn the tide where if you say, you know, I can't believe somebody would be that dumb, it actually kind of says more about you and what you really know about the nature of this threat than it does about the victim. Yeah, I mean, you can look at anything with hindsight's twenty twenty, right, If you already know how the whole situation worked and everything, well, then yeah, sure you could say you know, yeah, I would do this, But when you're in the midst of the situation and emotional.

15:35 You have no clue what you would do. Right when you think about it like this, like when you know, if you're unfortunate enough to be in a situation I have in my life where your house gets robbed, you know, awful situation. Your neighbors come over and they say, Oh my god, what can we do? How can we help? That's awful. But if you're in a situation where you been scammed and money has been stolen from you, the response can't be oh, how could you be so stupid? You know, we have to change that conversation till the looks and smells more like blaming the actual perpetrators of the crime, right, not the people that were the victims of.

16:19 It, right, absolutely, you know it's. Yeah, it's uh, I had something in my head. I hate it when that happens every now and then it comes in and then it goes right, it goes right out. I'll think of it when we get onto another topic here. But so, you you wrote a book about artificial intelligence, voice cloning, deepake videos, all of that stuff. But in the book you. Say only half a percent of scammers ever face consequences. Yeah, yeah, And I get that a lot from people, Well, are they finding these people? You know?

16:59 Are they And actually I just recently listened to somebody in Arizona that's running for one of the political offices, and I asked the question, I said, when are we going to start talking about scams against seniors? And he immediately went into, oh, my gosh, do you know that the majority of the people that perpetrate this, they've been kidnapped and they're trafficked, and they're over in these other countries and this is just And I'm sitting there to myself going, yeah, that's awful, But why do you automatically go there, Why are you not having some empathy for the people that are in your own backyard that are losing their life savings? And it's just And I even brought up education, and they immediately went to, well, yeah, education, and I'm like, oh my gosh, yeah, I mean I just I had to sit on my hands.

18:02 Yeah, I mean, you know, look, the the one of the things that that you know, I did over the last two years or so is I spent a lot of time looking at the different groups that are behind these these attacks, and the picture is as complex and varied as you would expect. Right, Sure, there are awful situations where, you know, particularly this is common in Southeast Asia, although it's it's moving across geographies where it's all over yeah, where people that are working in these compounds have been trafficked and scammed themselves to come to those places thinking they're getting some great job and they end up you know, getting you know, having their passport taken and winding up in some some like windowless cubicle where they're having to like just scam sixteen. Right. But there's there's there's plenty of other situations where you've got you know, real organized crime groups, some that have been around for a long time that have you know, done drug trafficking or human trafficking, that have now looked at the profits that can be generated from digital fraud to their yeah, the fraud. Yeah, and so so there, you know, there are certainly those examples where the scammers have been scammed and they deserve attention and empathy. But let's not forget that there are also real criminals behind these attacks and they need to

19:36 be certainly held to blame and we need to talk more about how we bring them to justice. Yeah, you know, and it's it's hard also, I mean the ones that are here in the States, right, they have and I guess it depends on the country as well, but they have a better chance of getting caught. Our law enforcement, our lawyers, judges, all of that. They're very they're very knowledgeable. They know how to investigate, they know how to prosecute. They're constantly getting trained in all these new avenues, you know, the cryptocurrency, the artificial intelligence. But a lot of the scams, like you said, are in some other country at least that's where it initiates, and that's where the main you know, ring of people are.

20:30 So yeah, it's going to be harder because now you have to then start working with this other country. We can't just go in and say, hey, we're going to arrest these people and take this down. You got to work with these other countries, and some of those countries it's just not top of their radar to want to shut these places. Down, and they don't have the resources. And you know, if you look at like a typical like let's just say a phone call scam, like what may have happened to my mom or what you talked about, you know on this channel, you know it was probably initiated in one country through some and I won't get two technical, but through some sort of voice over Internet protocol device.

21:11 It may then have been you know, transited through a couple of other countries, a couple other hops before it actually got onto the US telecommunications infrastructure and was routed to my mom's phone. So, if you think about the law enforcement perspective, they've got to go and work with every country. It was a transit point, and you got to get you know, sort of the equivalent of international subpoenas and the alignment across law enforcement agencies, and it's got to fit with their priorities. As you're saying, they have to have enough resources to then care enough about it. And you got to do that in multiple different countries, across multiple different languages, across multiple different technology providers. And so it's no wonder that it's so hard to track these folks down. It's no wonder that, you know, out of a thousand scams, you know and scammers, a handful are actually brought to some level of justice.

22:04 Every Right, Yeah, it's uh, it's kind of like the money mule, right, It's it's the money mule with having not actually well like you said, going through taking that voice and having it go through all these other countries before it hits the United States telecom. Right, And yeah, so the money, the money is just as hard to follow too, and because it will you know, it will transit through a variety of different hops in different countries, across different platforms, and as you say, with mules, you know, sometimes those mules are totally unsuspected. Sometimes those meals themselves have been a victimi of scam. Yeah, and so then you you know, law enforcement, you know, has a situation where they don't actually have a criminal, they just have a victim.

22:48 They have a. Victim, right that got involved in this. And that's something you know that we talk about, you know, is you might think you're helping somebody out and unknowingly you're now. Involved in this process. Right. But so, what are your thoughts. On why the older adults are so heavily targeted? Oh, I'm so there's a you know, there's a trope out there that says seniors and the elderly are disproportionately victims of scams because maybe they're not tech savvy, or maybe they're as we talked about before, maybe they're not smart, maybe they've lost a step, they have some cognitive cognitive going on, and I would say it's possible, but there's no research out there that suggests that the reality is the senior citizens in this country are are disproportionately targeted, as you said, because senior citizens hold over fifty percent of the wealth of this country, right, so they make up about twenty percent of the population, but have over fifty percent of the wealth in their retirement savings and whatever that may be. And so the scammers know that the scammers are simply just going where the money for the money, and so you know, I think that's exactly what's driving it for scammers. They know there is savings

24:20 to be had. There's plenty of research that shows that actually, you know, millennials and gen z win hit with the same style of attack or hit with the same style of scam, will also fall victim. The scammers just know there's not as much money there going after a teenager or a young twenty something. There's just not as much savings, and so they will put more resources, more personalization into going after a senior citizen that has tens hundreds of thousands of dollars in their retirement savings because they know that's money that they can access if they can crack that emotional and psychological nut effectively. Right, Yeah, no, absolutely, And you know you're going to get some because this is a wide like you said, it's twenty percent of the population, but you're getting you're going to get some people that know nothing about technology in this age group. You're going to get some people that know a lot about technology, that's what they spent their career in, right, But you're going to get a lot of people on all different you know, throughout that, and you're going to get some that don't really want to learn anything new and some that are okay, you know, learning some new stuff. But you know, sometimes I hear in our presentations when and they're they're not meant to scare people, They're meant to provide information. And you know what we tell people at the beginning of each is that you know, this is not a one size fits all because we have a thirty six page resource packet

25:52 that talks about different things that you can do to protect yourself. And it's not a one size fits all, right, because everybody's person situation is different and their risk adverse is different as well. Some people are like, I don't want to go through the process of doing this because I'm okay with this risk. Well that's their choice. Yeah, that's exactly their choice. And the last thing we want to do is come in there and say no, you have to do this, you have to do this, and you have to do this, and don't do this, and don't do this and don't do that. You know, it's like being in kindergarten again, right, and you know I'm in that age category as well, And trust me, I don't want my kids coming to me and telling me what I can do and what I can't do. Right, My response would be I was in elementary school and I abided by the rules.

26:41 I was a rule follower. You know. I don't need it almost sixty one years old, sixty one years of age, someone telling me I can do this and I can't do that. But I think what you do is so important because we talk about this in the book that you know once. We spend a lot of time talking about the problem and probably you know, scaring folks, hopefully hopefully appropriately. We do talk about solutions, and you know, a key part of that is how do we how do we ingrain some new rituals and new behaviors in ourselves and our families and as individuals, and a lot of it is just recognizing that the threat has changed, and you know, we are seniors, are families are a target now in a way that they warn't ten, fifteen, twenty years ago.

27:38 And it's a big reason you know why I'm I've sort of moved into the everyday people side of this and the family side of this is because you know, there used to be a time when consumer cybersecurity was actually the big dog. And you know, if you go back in time and Norton and McAfee, these were these companies that were kind of the icons of the early Internet. And then what happened is enterprises started being targeted, and a lot of the investment and the focus shifted to how do we protect government and enterprises? As enterprises became more digital, government became more digital, there was just there was more for the bad guys to target there. There was more sort of gold at the end of that rainbow for them. But now what we're seeing is because AI and you know this is not an indictment of AI.

28:36 You know, there's a ton of benefit from that psychology. But one of the side effects is it has made these bad actors who aim to look like us talk like. Us, so and it more easier for them like us. Right, This is what AI does in positive ways and helps us do things on our behalf, make us more productive. Well, it also helps those who wish to deceive us be more effective and efficient. And so now they can take those tools and they can target us individuals, families, seniors in a way that they weren't ten or fifteen years ago.

29:16 And so we do have to recognize that the problem has shifted or a target like we warn't in the past, and so we have to find ways to sort of teach ourselves some new tricks, educate ourselves differently so that we can really rise to the level of defense that we need. Yeah. Absolutely, So in you. Shifting your focus, you came up with you and your brother, Is that correct? Yeah, came up with a product called scam Wise. Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about that.

29:56 Yeah. So, so I'm a cyberse security guy. My my brother Ryan, he is uh five years younger than me. He he's been a consumer products guy. So he has worked at places like Apple and spotify and build products that are used by millions of people. And so one of the things I knew I needed when when sort of turning my head to this was I'm an enterprise guy, I'm a government guy. I'm not a consumer guy, and so I knew I needed some help. And uh, you know who better to turn to, uh in a situation where we're trying to build better digital defense for families than my brother. And we built our first product along with the great team at Savvy, is a free scam checking tool. And again this is this is a piece of the solution, Joyce, not the entire solution, And we can talk more about how I sort of think about the role the technology plays alongside education and other things.

30:58 But you know, one of the things that we we found is is sometimes it's hard to ask for a second opinion. You know, there are plenty of seniors and elderly that live alone, or you're caught in a moment where you're by yourself, you're moving fast, and it's easy to kind of just get caught up in the moment. And what we wanted to provide folks is a very simple and easy way to to start to get a second opinion on things, and so scam Wise, which is available at scamwise dot com. It's totally free. You don't have to put in an email address or tell us who you are, so so it's completely private. We don't ask you to register or set anything up. And you can you know, take a screenshot of a text message and submit it that you've gotten. You could forward an email to submit at scamwise dot com. If you see an email that's come in and is I don't know if this is real or not. You can take a picture of physical mail which we see a lot you got to you got to bill in the mail that looks like it's coming from you know, your your local government or a medical provider that you thought you made that copey and you can submit it to scam wise.

32:10 What you get back instantly as is a verdict on the suspiciousness of that and some some next steps. And we will go out and we will check the IP address that email came from, We'll look at the phone number, we'll do a bunch of sort of checks, and we'll also really analyze the behavior in the message. Because scammers have their own tells, you know, they play on urgency and fear and love and greed, and they impersonate agencies and brands and people that we trust. And so, you know, the goal with scam wise was really about can we just put something out there for the community that they can use to start to practice these behaviors around getting a second opinion, around verifying, around what you call healthy skill epticism, and put it into play a little bit in their daily lives all the time. And and it's been it's been great. You know, today we're the we're the fastest growing scam checker on on in the country.

33:12 You know, we see. Thousands of suspicious messages a day, and you know, we're really proud that we're we're helping people sort of identify potential scams. But also, you know, we we get feedback sometimes that we've also helped people realize when something is actually real. We had somebody who left the testimonial last week that said, you know, I had gotten this refund check and I wasn't sure it was actually a refund check, and I put it in and it said, you know, this looks legitimate. You know, here's what to do to make sure. And I did, and it turned out it was a real refund check, so I cashed it. So sometimes it can work both ways. You know, it can help you understand what's bad, but can also help you focus on what might be real and potentially good.

33:58 So you said a few things. It helps you get a second opinion, which is good because it makes you stop and think, and which is going to if you've got gotten into an emotional state, more chance you're going to get out of that emotional state. But then with this refund that this person put in and it said that it actually looked legitimate, here's some next steps. So what would those next steps have been? You know, typically it sort of depends on what the actual scam is, but typically it's a version of what we call sort of a second channel verification. Okay, it's, oh, you've got a text that says Wells Fargo is telling you there's fraud on your account and gives you a kind of a strange phone number to call back. Well, instead of calling that number, flip your card over and call the number on the back of the card and ask what's going on. It will tell you to Similarly, if you've gotten an email from a brand that you may have used in the past that looks like it's that maybe it's from Apple. It's saying you need to reset your credentials. It will point you to the support, the actual numbers to call back and to verify. So things like this where it's a second channel verification, give you a reason to sort of pause and not just

35:28 sort of blindly follow the instructions that are coming at you in the moment, and to sort of step back and step out of that moment and find a different way to verify the communication. Okay, there's a lot of these types of products out there. I normally don't in all honesty, I normally. Don't pay much attention to them. And same thing with like surveys that people have. Take this survey to see whether you're susceptible to falling for a scam.

36:09 Yeah, And I'm like, Okay. So someone scores low and they think that they're good, they're not going to fall for a scam, So they're gonna let their guard down. Yeah, and they're not gonna think about it, and so guess what, They're gonna fall for a scam. So I don't like those surveys. I know some people use them. I just think it's better to go in the mindset of anybody. I don't care how smart you are or whatever. I always I often say, you know, scammers don't send you an IQ test and then want to see your financials to only go target the people. On the low end of the IQ and the high end of the you know, the that has the most wealth.

36:51 No, now will they will they do stuff on social media with different things, absolutely, you know, those games, whatever, you know, But it's just really getting people to understand that everybody's a target and everybody can fall victim to a scam. You're human and you're emotional. But the other thing with the technology and like with what scam wise is and I've never really. Use those told people to use them because. In my opinion, technology is not the end all be all, Because when you read all of these statistics and you talk to a lot of different people, the number one thing they say is social engineering plays a huge part in scams. Well, social engineering has nothing to do with technology.

37:48 You could have the best technology out there, but scammers one will figure out a way around it, or they're going to use the social engineering to get you to bypass the technology, right, and so so that's the one thing or not. The one thing that's one of the things that I really like about the way you have set up scam wise is that you understand that and that you're giving them Okay, well this is what our opinion is. But and based on this is this opinion, you should go verify through these other channels. And so I really like that because it's getting people one to not rely one hundred percent on the technology, it's getting a second opinion, but then going out and gathering the information so they can make the decision whether this is legitimate or or not.

38:50 Absolutely. I mean, and look, there's there's we talk about in the book. There was a study that was done with a group of PhDs who work in AI and they were brought into a room and they were showed they were shown deep fakes or fake images next to real images, and their ability to identify what was real or fake. And these are people who live, eat, sleep, breathe AI was barely better than a coin flip. Okay. So I don't believe that there are people out there who just aren't susceptible to scams. I think that's false.

39:30 It's a false narrative, and we should do nothing to perpetrate that I'm just as susceptible, and I can tell you all the stories I have about me, you know, almost falling for scams and how good they are. So this is a wicked problem that requires a multi dimensional solution, and that solution is education, it's technology, it's government regulation, and we can talk about that whether we want to or not. But there are things that we need to do to solve this very challenging problem. And I would say technology cannot be the only answer, and certainly scam Wise doesn't present itself to be the panacea to the problem.

40:10 But what I will say is is we do need better technology coming at this problem, and we need more education, and we need all more of everything that I just talked about, because I mean, we're losing the battle right now. I mean, we look at the data. It's off the charts in terms of how much money Americans, how much hard earned savings Americans are losing, the volume, the sophistication, the dollar, the average dollar amounts, and scam losses continues to grow. And so we've got work to do on all fronts here. And part of what we're trying to do with scam Wise and Savvy is move the ball forward on the technology front for everyday people. Technology that has advanced dramatically, for enterprises, big companies, governments. We need to bring some of that into the family so that we can arm folks with a little bit more as they as they stand up to these threats. And that can't exist by itself. It has to sit alongside changes in behavior, changes in mindset, and change education.

41:15 Yeah. Absolutely, you know it's I really like what you said, No one thing is the end all be all right. There definitely is a lot more technology stuff that can be done. But you know, it's like it's it's. Not like you come out with this new technology and then Okay, that's all we need to do. We can stop. No, you got to constantly evaluate it and enhance it. I mean, how many it seems like once a week we get notification from our mobile phone saying there's an update available. Right, They're patching security flaws, they're coming up with new things. The one thing I wish they would stop doing is changing the way everything is done. You know, it's like it's like, can you use because it's.

41:59 Hard to learn the new behaviors. Then if it's always sort of moving around and yeah, yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, yeah, but I guess there's got to be a reason why they do it. Maybe the new technology they're they're implementing it doesn't work obviously the same way the old stuff does. But I mean just knowing. That, you know, the bad actors are going to be out there trying to bypass you know, that technology, but the education right around it and in government regulations. When these people do get caught, they get sentenced to like seven to ten years and they're out in three to five on good behavior. What are they doing. They're going right back into this because they know where they can make millions of dollars. Yeah, yeah, but you know the you remember the Nigerian prints kind of email scams of sort of like the late nineties and early two thousands, and your audience may remember those, you know, when when sort of free email came out Hotmail and Yahoo and things like that, these scams started to come and you know the reason why those scams sort of stopped working in that form. Sure, there were some technology changes. In fact, the email providers did some interesting things to do a better job of sort of understanding what was scams and spams, But really it was because as a society, we educated ourselves about those scams, and they became like the punchline on like late night TV talk show hosts, and like everybody kind of talked about it and understood what that scam looked like,

43:31 what it sounded like, and they talked about it with each other, became kind of a joke like, and that's how we beat that scam. And the challenge we have now is that with this technology, the scammers are iterating so fast and there isn't just like this this sort of one scam that we have to figure out. It's it's really the entire way that these scammers work. And so, you know, we're not going to be successful if we don't have, you know, a rapid educational system constantly learning, constantly trying to understand and unpack what's happening here and teaching people new tips and tricks for how to deal with it, alongside a rapidly innovating technology ecosystem that's also helping to provide an additional layer of protection.

44:15 Absolutely right, It's yeah, it's it's crazy. We've got about five minutes or five minutes left, So is there anything else that you want to. Talk about with maybe scam wise or. Yeah, sure, so you know scam wise, I would just say, you know, I use it all the time. I think for your for your viewers and your listeners to the extent it's helpful. There's plenty of ways to submit data to it at scam wise dot com. I would say, you know, more than that, I'm I'm really excited to be working with you know, a new set of partners and to really understand this ECO says them, and and working with folks like you to to bring the broader picture forward around the level of problem that we have in this country. And and I do think that there are there's a role for smarter policies here and and we we have to to resource this problem effectively with more education in our law enforcement. We need more folks who understand how these attacks work and can respond to them.

45:32 We need different laws that that sort of categorize, uh, these perpetrators and these criminals in the right way and that allow us to prosecute them in a more efficient way. And and you know, we need more responsibility for the big tech platforms that are trafficking this content to us. And yeah, absolutely, you know they some of them do a better job at weeding out. But I can't tell you how many I know there's scam fake profiles on Facebook that I get friend requests from all the time, and I'm just delete, delete, delete. And and now that I've mentioned Facebook and we're on this is going to be out there. I hope they don't shut the account down.

46:21 I got shut down about a year ago for like three months, and it was just like, come on, guys, we talk about how to prevent scams, you know. But anyways, you know that's. What I mean. And look, we need we need real partners in this. And and look that the technology platforms have a variety of incentives that they're they're juggling. But but you know, without a doubt, the initial contact from scammers now is made almost in the majority of cases on social media, especially for the highest dollar scams that we see now, it will intersect with phone calls or text messages or over to what's happened, whatever it is.

47:07 But but there's a role that social media platforms can play in helping to police this content better. There's a role that telecommunications companies and our carriers can play and helping absolute So everybody's got skin in this game here, and and and you know this is what I like to say about uh digital fraud, and and you know in AI, there's a it would be hard to get consensus around whether AI is going to save us or destroy us or or I. Think it's still too new to figure it out. Too new, So I we don't need to all agree on on what the future impact of AI is to agree on there's a real problem happening right now. And it doesn't necessarily mean that AI is good or bad, but it's a side effect, it's a downside.

47:59 It's dark, it is and we have to look at that. And we have to look at that. So let's let's we can all agree this is a problem. This is the problem that affects all of us. I don't care what your politics are, I don't care where you're from. Right, so we can kind of hold hands as a country, as a culture and and and wade into this problem. And it would be good for us, because I promise you this isn't going to be the last problem from technology or the last problem from AI. Right, So let's get let's get a little bit of muscle memory and working together to solve these big problems. Yeah, No, absolutely, you know, and you know a lot of times when I'm looking at new policies right that they're looking especially in the state of Arizona, right and they're doing a lot with like deed fraud here and stuff, and I look at the ones that are you know, the bills that go in there, and I'm like, well, that's that's not going to stop it because the scammer's just going to do this. And that's where I think a lot of policy makers they whether I don't think they realize it until after the fact, but they just put a band aid on.

49:04 The situation totally. You have to look at it and go, Okay, well, if I want to do this, then how are the scammers going to get around it? Yeah, you kind of have to go back to the initial point, right. I don't know if I ever shared with you our anatomy of a scam. Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. We just got early on got really we were always behind the eight ball trying to talk about all these different scams. And it was like we and one of my advisory board members, a brilliant guy, is the one that came up with this, you know, we you know, we just got to talk about scams in general and how they operate. And so I think we've done an awesome job at figuring that out and really getting you know, these older adults to understand it.

49:48 To understand it, and giving them simple, giving language. Exactly the. Empowering them to be able to say, I can do this, I don't have to throw away all my technolo, I can use this. I feel safe, I know what I'm going to do, right Yeah, And. That point maybe that's just the last point real quick is is you know, in cybersecurity we talk about there's this type of attack called a d DOSS, a denial of service attack where you know, a hacker will go to a website and try to throw so much traffic at it, malicious traffic at it, that good traffic can't get in and the website is sort of knocked offline. Right Yeah, I think what's happening right now, what we're at risk of is we're getting hit with so much stuff, so much noise, so much scams that the risk for us is that we take our digital devices and we throw them in the trash and we step away, and we're kind of denied the service and the power and the potential of technology. I think the better answer is no, how do we create a world where we can sort of safely wait into the digital numbers and preserve the promise of what it has for all of us in good ways and mitigate the downside?

51:00 Absolutely So, Patrick, thank you so much for coming on. And I'm looking forward to more conversations and uh online and offline as well. So, but I do have time running over a little bit. One's going to come on here in a minute and say you're over time. So thank you, Joyce, thank you for the work that you do and and really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you here. Yeah, no, thank you again. Patrick. Take care all right, take care. All right everyone, Thank you for joining in. Wow, lots of great information, especially the Patrick's on the same page as as we are. You know, it's it takes a lot of different roles and to try to make this, to try to put a dent in these scams. Don't forget to go to our website at Roseadvocacy dot org.

51:51 You'll find all our social media channels, scroll down to the bottom, sign up for the email or the mailed newsletter, and don't forget to hit subscribe. So you get notifications as to what the topics are. Going to be next week. Brian Watson will be back with you guys next week, and then I'll be back the week after that. Take care and see you in a couple of weeks. Thank you. Well, that's all the knowledge for this episode. Tune in every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio at KFOURHD 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.