What can we do to stop overseas scammers?

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. Understand 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. And now here is your host, Joyce Petrowski.

1:19 Good morning, everybody, My name is Brian Watson, community outreach specialist for Rose Resources Outreach to safeguard the elderly. Joyce is not available this week. I'm filling in this week and then two more weeks after that and then so today we have a guest. We were having a little bit of technical issues. Want is Ken still with us right now? There is okay, beautiful, Just want to make sure we didn't lose them with internet issues. So today we have the pleasure of having a guest. Ken Westbrook is the founder and CEO of Stop Scams Alive. They are a five oh one c three nonprofit whose mission is to significantly reduce scams in the United States. Their focus is to stop scams at the source before they reached the consumer in the first place. So last year in twenty twenty five, I heard Ken speak on a webinar and there were several different guests, but his presentation really stood out to me because I was impressed by the detail of the information he shared. I used to work with the irs, so I'm all about numbers, so numbers tell a story, and I thought it was super helpful to me, and I thought his information would be super helpful for our audience, and I'm a big fan of collaboration. We all have to work together, build each

2:49 other up, share information, and we all have different areas that we focus on, and I know Ken has some just great information. So Ken, good morning and welcome to the show. Good morning to you. Thank you for hosting me today. Sorry about being laid a little bit, but I'm looking forward to having a good discussion with you. And by the way, I'm a numbers freak too, so if there's two, if we get too geegee for anybody. I apologize for that in advance. But numbers, as you said, numbers are really important. They really are because you know, especially when we look at the FBI's Elder Fraud Report or any data from the Federal Trade Commission, we can see that the trend is not good in the United States. The numbers are getting worse every single year.

3:34 Yeah, and we're Jen. Let's start out, was what was your reason for starting Stop Scams Alliance? Well, so my personal story is I didn't know all that much about scams. You know, I saw I read stories about them in the news, of course, and I knew that they were an issue. But in February of twenty twenty three, my mom was scammed. She got a pop up on her computer that said that her computer had been hacked and she needed to call Microsoft, and when she called the one eight hundred number, she was talking to criminals who ended up stealing most of her life savings. So with that incident, I started to look into this situation and I became really alarmed because it wasn't only my mom. It's millions of moms and millions of dads, and millions of even younger people are now being scammed at industrial scale. And at that point, I, given my government background, I figured I just need to throw my hat in the ring and help safeguard the country from this attack.

4:38 Now where did you learn that most of these scams are originating from? Well, my background, my professional background is in the CIA. I served there for thirty three years as an analyst, and so I'm familiar with foreign threats and how to analyze them. And what I did after my mom scam was to look at the US government data, but even more importantly British data and Australian data, and the British government, for its part, in twenty twenty two, declared scams a national security threat and they said that it amounts to many of the most of the crime complaints that they get now in the UK are scams instead of other types of crimes. And then they go on to say that about seventy percent, by their estimation, is foreign based.

5:29 And so with that I started to poke around and ask the government about this, and privately they all tell me that in the US they think it's about ninety to put the case out there that most scams are foreign originated and the countries involved are China, the ethnic Chinese crime gangs in South East Asia. West Africa is a center. Also India is a center in South Asia. But the bad news is that this business model has gotten to be so lucrative that it's now starting to spread around the world. It used to be Southeast Asia based.

6:15 Now scam centers are popping up in South America, in the Middle East, even in Europe. So it's really spreading like wildfire. When I do in person public presentations talking about scam prevention, I always get the question, you know, why don't we just go after these people? What is the challenge with these overseas criminal organizations. Well, so the thing is that US law enforcements jurisdiction ends at our border. So when you have mainly a foreign origin crime, these people are mainly located in other countries outside of our jurisdiction, and they're attacking us via the Internet and via our telephone system, and so it's now difficult for our law enforcement. Not that they don't try.

7:07 They try really hard to go OCCASUN sees money. There was a recent seizure, a very large seizure of cryptocurrency from the Southeast Asian Crime GAG. And they can also sanction the countries or the criminal groups involved, but when it comes to putting them behind bars, they had to depend on the cooperation of the foreign countries and they're not getting enough of that frankly. So at the beginning of the show, you had mentioned the United Kingdom and Australia having success in combating scams, and you said one of the reasons they were treating it as a national security threat, something that I've seen you write that we need to do here as well.

7:48 What are some specific examples of things that the UK and Australia. Australia are doing right well. So the first thing I would say is that they've recognized that this is a major problem, and they've prioritized their government to fight back. In both cases, in the UK and Australia, there's someone in charge of fraud policy, whereas in the US, if you ask who is in charge of fraud policy, the answer is nobody. There was a recent Goio report actually that said that there were thirteen agencies of the US government that has some jurisdiction over scams, but none of them have a strategic plan. There's no overarching strategic plan. The US simply has not recognized the size of this problem. At the federal government level.

8:34 In the UK and Australia, they have In the UK the Homelands excuse me, the British Home Office is in charge and they actually have a former member of Parliament who's in charge of fraud policy. In the case of Australia, they've assigned the responsibility to the Treasury Department, so there they have an official who organizes the Australian government to fight back more effectively. So that's number one is just to recognize the problem and put somebody in charge. The second one in both cases UK and Australia, they have created mechanism mechanisms to centralize data from victims, from banks, from social media, from telecom companies, so that they can get a better threat intelligence picture. We haven't done that in the US either, And then the third piece is a little more complicated. It would take a little more time to explain, but basically it has to do with putting measures in place to know who is on the other end of a phone call, who's on the other end of an online ad, who's on the other end of a website, who's on the other end of a text message. We don't have those mechanisms in the United States, but other countries are putting authentication mechanisms in place so that people are more can have a better judgment about who they're communicating with.

9:50 One of the other questions I get from audience members at presentations is why can't our government and the phone companies stop these income scam phone calls, especially the ones where you know they'll spoof the same area code to kind of give it some legitimacy. And you know, the best answer I usually give is, these scammers can spoof, they can do voice over IP, They're very technically savvy in terms of making their overseas phone calls a pure legitimate is our government doing enough with that? Are the phone companies doing enough? What? Or and also you know any of these other big tech companies are what? Are are we doing enough? And can we do more?

10:34 No, they're not doing enough, and yes we could do more. The good news is that. Let me give you a couple of examples of recent moves to do more. In the case of Google and Android phones, starting in March of twenty twenty five, so that would be about nine months ago now, Google started to analyze voice and text messages win the voice and text message is unencrypted on your device. They use artificial intelligence at the edge on your device. It never goes to Google servers. It's all done on your device. What Google does is to detect characteristics of a scam text or phone call and then they warn the user or they take the scam message down.

11:20 And there's been an independent study that shows that's quite effective. So it seems as if Google has found a way using to defend ourselves, and Google has a good stab at how to do that. I haven't seen a reaction from another on the phone side. After some lobbying that took place, the FCC in October released a rulemaking process and they're asking for comments now, and actually the comments are doing a week and I'm working on a reply.

12:05 The proposal from the FCC is to do things like mark foreign phone calls that you know when you're getting a foreign phone call, and maybe even blocking the fore and foreign call if it's pretending to be a domestic call, so it's a call coming from India but it's displaying Los Angeles in the caller ID field, well that should be a sign of a fraud and that call could be blocked. And the overall thing that the SEC is proposing to do is to put more authentication in place in caller ID so that you have a better idea of who the caller is, who's contacting you. So all that's good and Stop Scams Alliance is supporting that and we're replying. We're preparing our reply this week.

12:49 Beautiful. Now, thanks for sharing that, and that's good news because we also we get a lot of questions about artificial intelligence and criminals using it, so it's imperative that the good guys use the AI as well. So with our nonprofit, we recognize that every age group gets scammed, but the older we get, the more we lose. For a variety of reasons from everything that you know being in the fraud prevention world. What is the number one scam affecting older adults. Well, when you look at the FBI data, this is now people who report to the FBI, so it's not everybody does report to the FBI. So it's kind of a fraction of the data, but it's the best we have.

13:36 So if you look at the FBI data, if you look at the number of victims, the number one scam affecting older people is the tech support scam, the one that got my mom. It starts with a pop up on your computer, which is normally delivered by a malicious online ad by the way, and then people it freezes your computer, you can't use it, and people in desperation call the one eight hundred number, which is invariabol red type there for you to because the whole point of the pop up is to get you to call that number. And when you call that number, you are in the hands of transnational organized crime games who are very skilled at separating people from their money. If you look at the FBI data a different way and do it by the dollars loss or the reported dollars lost. The number one scam is investment scams, and most of those are fake cryptocurrency investment scams. So someone is coaxed after a period of grooming, they believe that they're talking to somebody who's skilled a cryptocurrency. They're here to help you, and then they coax you into making a at first a legitimate cryptocurrency investment. Then they move you to another platform where the profits are manipulated, so it makes it look to the victim like they're making money hand over fist, and that prompts to put more and more money in until they put all of their money in and the criminal then pulls the plug and your money's all gone.

15:07 So this sometimes goes by the name of pig butchering. It's the it's the skill set of the Southeast Asian crime games in Me and Mark Cambodia aloos and that's the by dollars loss, that's the number one scam by. Far, beautiful. Thank you for sharing. Now, I've been telling some people a little bit different when it talks to pig butchering, I always talk that it's a long play scam. They build that trust over a long period of time. They kind of casually mention investing in cryptocurrency, almost to get them to ask about it. But I've been telling people that the original small investment is actually fake and that they're showing you a portal because I've spoken to victims who've seen a portal that shows games. But what you're saying is the initial investment in these cryptocurrencies can actually be legitimate.

16:06 So that's my understanding. I could be wrong about that, but I have heard that they often switched you to another platform, and that would be the fake website. Of course, Now what's the first one? I thought it was not legitimate, but it doesn't really matter at some point in this long con You're absolutely right. They get people to start, maybe after another period, to start investing in a website that is manipulated. It's owned by the criminals. It looks like a cryptocurrency website, but it's really not okay. Now on that score, what can we do about it? And let's point back to best practices in Australia and the UK again. In both cases, the UK and Australian governments have national federal level efforts to find those fake investment websites and to shut them down. Beautiful every day. Australia is shutting down many of these things. They've shut down I think over three thousand of them in the last few years. And investment scams in Australia are going down, whereas investment scams in the US are going up like a rocket ship. And it may be other factors involved, like there's education, of course, that could have be having an impact in Australia, but it seems to me that part of the dent that Australia is making in the bad guys profits is the federal effort to find the fake investment websites and to shut them down quickly.

17:34 Now, when I heard you speak at that webinar, the thing that impressed me is you provided you pointed out the stats for the tech support scam, and the thing that jumped out to me was tech support scam losses are one hundred and seventeen times more than ransomware losses. And ransomware seems to get a lot of publicity because district or some entity that gets their information locked up and held hostage by these scammers and then they end up paying these ransoms and losing the money. But your analysis of the data shows that tech support scam is way bigger than the ransomware.

18:20 Yes, if you look at both FBI and FTC data, both the FBI and FTC. Now this is again limited data because it's the data that's reported to the FBI and the FTC, and there's a lot of this is not reported. But nevertheless, both the FBI and the FTC will tell you that ransomware is much less common and much less injurious than the investment scams and the tech support scams and the other confidence scams that go on. Now, one of the reasons that ransomware does get extra attention from our government is ransomware can be the precursor to an attack on our infrastructure, such as shutting down a pipeline or shutting down a hospital. So it's not only the dollars loss in ransomware that's the factor, but our government.

19:10 In twenty twenty three, I think stood up a White House level office and one of their main efforts is to focus on ransomware. So one of our messages is it's time for the White House to start treating consumer losses, which are far in excess of ransomware, with the same kind of organizational effort. You know, the US has domestic task forces to stamp out ransomware, we have international task forces to stamp out ransomware, but we don't really have a task force that's dedicated to focus on consumer losses from scams. What percentage of scams do you think are actually reported?

19:53 You know, we'll never know for sure, But from all the research you've done and the people you've talked to, what do you think that number is? So don't listen to me. Listen to the FTC. They've done some studies, they've looked at the academic research. They think it's between two and six point seven percent. Two percent if a small dollar amount is lost, but someone who loses more money is more likely to report, in their view, and that gets you to the point six point seven percent mark in their view. There's an independent data point, the Stop Scams Alliance, our organization, asked Gallup to do a survey in October of twenty twenty three, and the answer came back from Gallup that eight percent of people reported having been victimized by scams. And when you looked at the number's twenty one million Americans. And then when you compare that twenty one million to the number of people who report to the FBI. It turns out that about five percent of Americans were reporting to the FBI. So I think there's multiple data sources that say five percent plus or minus is about the number of people who actually report. I've looked also at overseas.

21:11 You know, I speak a lot about the best practices in the UK and Australia, but over there they say that they think about ten fifteen, twenty percent of people report, and that's under the best practices where the government's really trying to get people to do that, and they have centralized reporting. So if the country's doing the best at this can only get to ten or twenty percent, it makes perfect sense that we're around the five percent level. So why is the reporting number so low in your opinion. Well, the best data we have comes from a survey that was done by the Global Anti Scam Alliance last year in late twenty twenty five. They found that about five percent of people said that they didn't report because of shame. But they found that about that much larger numbers twenty twenty five percent. We're saying that they didn't report for the following reasons. One is they didn't know how to Two, it was too complicated. Three, they didn't think it would do any good if they did so.

22:14 So when you add up those three answers, that's the majority of the reporting. And shame is another reason for it. So there's a variety of reasons. I can tell you. In the case of my family, but my mom was scammed. My brothers were doing a lot of the legwork to report this, and they didn't want to report it first, and I said, but you know, and their argument was, ken, even if we do, the government's not going to do anything about it anyway, why should we go through the effort. But I prevailed and it did some of the work myself, and so we ended up reporting to over a dozen agencies and companies. And I learned from that experience that it is complicated. It's there's not one place to go, there's several places to go, and everybody asked for different information and by the way, none nobody ever gets back to you. Right, you're really you're you're doing the data.

23:06 What you're doing is you're feeding a data a base, which is good and that allows the government to have better data. But you know, the data show that most people are never contacted and most money is never retrieved. It's very sad, you know. I I do tell people that it is important to report one so that the government has good data, and that sometimes too, a smaller case can become a bigger case, or they can connect the dots on another one. You know, I've done over eighty five presentations, and I always ask that question, what is the number one reason in your opinion that people don't report being the victim of a scam? And I always get the word embarrassment, you know, which goes to what you just said, the shame, right, And then I agree with everything you said there. You know, what's the point.

23:56 It's too complicated. Some people don't even know their skin, so it's it's absolutely it's absolutely brutal. Now, did you ever see the movie The Beekeeper? I definitely saw The Beekeeper? So what was what was accurate in that movie and what was not accurate from from your knowledge of that particular scam. By the way, one time I was speaking at a conference and the person introduced me, uh sit by saying, you know you've all seen the Beekeeper movie. Well, let me introduce you to the real beekeeper, and his name is Ken Westbrook. So that was a nice introduction, kind of the humorous way of introducing right. So the accurate part.

24:43 I think they portrayed very well the beginning. In the beginning of the movie, the elderly person who received a pop up on her computer which led to her being enticed to send money to the scammers and including money that she was holding in a nonprofit for charity purposes, and then the devastating impact that it had on her. She ended up committing suicide. In my mom's case, I mean, it just reminded me so much of my mom's case because she got the pop up on her computer too, and it did have a devastating effect on her as well. She didn't commit suicide, but I can tell you that from the moment that scam happened in early twenty twenty three, her health took a nosedive, and a year later, some FBI agents visited her home to ask her to tell again the story of her being scammed because they were pursuing a case in New York, and while she was thrilled that they were pursuing a case, it brought the whole experience back to her. That evening she had the first of a series of heart attacks that ended up taking her life within a few months. So my family has a lot of doctors in it, and you know, it seems to them, you know, the health she really her health went off to cliff after the scam, and then a year later she was gone.

26:06 I'm sorry to hear that. That's just it's horrible. I mean, yeah, people think, you know, scams is just money, but there are they're collateral effects, you know, like you said, the shame, the PTSD, the playing it over and over. You know. I met a lady in Arizona here who lost one hundred and eighty nine dollars in a jury scam, and it had been months and she told me about it, and she was still beating herself up over it, you know. And most people would think one hundred and eighty nine dollars is nothing, you know, no one wants to lose that money, but you're going to survive. But she was still beating herself up because she was basically said, I was so dumb and is that embarrassment? And that shame?

26:54 And for her that was a large amount of money because she was on fixed income living in a very modest place. So I can only imagine it gets even more when when when there's more dollar dollar dollar losses the other just coming back to the beekeeper. Can you know I saw the preview in the movie theater and I'm like, I have to go see that thing. And when I saw it, I was like, Wow, I could see how people fall for it, you know. And when the lady called in, you know, the scammers hadn't answer for everything because they're professionals, they're organized criminal gangs. But the one thing that jumped out to me that I was like, come on, this can't be real. The scammers happened to be like driving distance from where Jason's da them lived, Yes, and those that thing that I was like, come on there, it's just too convenient, right.

27:47 So I was about to say that, you know, if we go to the things that are not realistic, the call center being located very near their home in the United States is not realistic at all. The FBI says that the call center this is they call these call center scams because the whole point is that get you to call someone to coach you into sending your money. And the FBI says the call center scams originate mainly in South Asia. Pase, excuse me, mainly in India when I talked to investigators India, and.

28:30 Yeah, it's when I work for the I R S. The bane of my existence was the IRS impersonation scam. And most of the people I talked to who had received that call said the caller had what they considered to be an Indian accent. And right, it's just and they're just making thousands, if not millions of calls and just hoping that one person believes it is the I R S. Now earlier, you mentioned pig butchering, which is basic getting people to invest in cryptocurrency. But they're not really investing in cryptocurrency. And it's a tragic scam. I mean, they're all tragic, but the scammers are going for everyone's life savings. It's like a complete wipeout. In Arizona here we've passed a new cryptocurrency KIOSK law that puts in new consumer protections in place. There's a new users can only put in two thousand dollars, the operators are liable for any fraud up to thirty days. There has to be warning signs, and lastly, you're provided a little you need to be provided a receipt to show where that the funds went, like a digital wallet, so that investigators have a starting point. Let's talk about cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency ATMs briefly explained our users, I mean to our listeners who

30:02 are not familiar with what a cryptocurrency ATM is. Well, ATM is kind of a misnomer because normally the word ATM is used to get money out of the machine, and in crypto ATM you can only put your money in, and the point of it is to is to convert the cash money into cryptocurrency, but you can't get money out that way. I applaud Arizona for its recent law, and I can tell you now that there's about a dozen states that have laws that put some kind of restrictions, especially on people who recently establish an account. So that's one of the hallmarks of the cryptocurrency scam is that criminals convince someone to set up a cryptocurrency account and then immediately that also puts a cap of two thousand dollars on new accounts, and even after that, I think it only goes three thousand dollars even after the new period expires. Other states are introducing similar legislations. So there's by my count, there's at least a dozen states that have restrictions, and there's dozens more that have restrictions that are in the legislature under consideration. At the federal level,

31:33 Senator Durbin introduced a law, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. So I don't see much federal momentum to put restrictions in place. Fact, the cryptocurrency industry in Washington is trying to introduce legislation that would force areas. It's much larger and less effective. So this is a debate in our entry about how to handle the threat that's posed by crypto ATM machines. There's a recent requirement from the Treasury Department that outlines the extent to which cryptocurrency ATM machines are used in crime, and they especially point to the harm that's causing to the elderly population.

32:17 Now, thank you for sharing that, and I really appreciate that insight on the misnomer of calling an ATM. And you know, even in Arizona it's called the Cryptocurrency Kiosk Law. So do you think it's more appropriate just to refer to them as kiosks probably, I think so. The Treasury Department, for its part, talks about it in terms of crypto kiosks as well, and then they later on in the document introduced the term crypto ATM just because they're commonly known that way. But I think it's more appropriate to call them crypto kiosks because ATM is totally misnomer. Right. So what do crypto and see kiosks or ATMs offer to society? What are the if you had to argue for it, What would be the benefit to society if there is any?

33:10 Well, just saying I don't argue for them at all, I would note too that the British government, for its part, banned them entirely about three or four years ago. So there are no crypto ATM machines in the UK, and if they are, if they some were installed in the police found them and took them out. Australia also has put pretty severe restrictions on crypto kiosks. In the US, it's being done on a state by state basis, and the good news is that more and more states are doing If there's even some counties that are banning them altogether, I'm aware of that. Happening in Minnesota, for example, So you know, there's nothing wrong with a county saying these things should not be allowed in our county because of the harm that they caused. I did ask one time.

34:00 I talked to someone who was in the business of the crypto ATM market, and I asked him what benefit are they and his answer was they're useful for the unbanked population. So if you don't have a bank account, you might want to be using crypto ATM machines. But I think that that's a pretty weak argument, Frankly, I really do. And then when you actually look at the fees that they charge and also the ext exchange rates. So let's say you had one thousand dollars in cash and you wanted to invest in a crypt one of the thousands of the cryptocurrencies that are out there. You put that one thousand dollars in and you may only end up with six or seven hundred dollars worth of cryptocurrency, so you've instantly lost money. If you wanted to invest in cryptocurrency, you can do it from the convenience of your home computer or even your phone.

34:58 That's absolutely correct. That's the only reason why I don't like the term crypto ATM machines because ATM usually conveys to people a fee of two percent or three percent, whereas the fees charged by the crypto kiosks are far in excess to that and not disclosed very well too. No, and words are important, you know, you know, calling it an ATM is a is a misnomber. I like the kiosk. I have other names for these machines, but I'll save those for another day. You know, some people have also said the name pig butchering is a horrible name because it you know it, it kind of takes a jab at the victims. It's just an awful term.

35:44 I like it in the fact that it gets people's attention and it starts a conversation, and it really wakes people up at a at a presentation or a TV interview. What is your opinion of the term pig butchering and do you think there's a better alternative name for it? Well, it's I have the same opinion that you have, I think I in my writing, I usually use terms the official terms, which are investment scams. Is the term that I see most often used by the FBI and the FDC, So I tend to stick to the official usage of the term. But I do understand completely what you just said earlier that it's a very inflammatory sounding word that really wakes people up. And I tell you, the US and the US government needs waking up on this issue. So I'm not opposed to its usage if it has a positive effect.

36:42 All right, I give you a magic wand, and you can change anything in the way our government handles scams. What would be the first thing you would do? The number one thing I would do is to appoint someone to be in charge of fraud policy in the United States, and that would be best done at the White House level, but it could also be done at DHS or the FBI or dj My preference is the White House because that's what we've done before. When confronted with major societal issues like drugs in the nineteen eighties, we established a White House Drugs are in the White House. It's called Owen DCP. More recently, with ransomware, we talked about this. When ransomware became a threat, the White House established an office called the Office the National Cyber Director to safeguard the US from cyber threats. So in the case of scams. I think we just need to use the same playbook that we've always used in create a White House official or office that focuses on this issue.

37:48 They then could do a better job of coordinating the various agencies than the agencies can do on their own. So that'll be the number one thing that I would do. Thank you for sharing. I'm going to start pushing that, Ken, we need a scamsar at the cabinet level at the White House. Well, if you want to, if you want to help push that, there's a recent bill was introduced on December eleventh by a Republican and a Democratic representative, Representative Shri Bornia introduced a bill that would establish an office in the White House. So that's something that I'd like to bring people's attention to. There is a bill in Congress that would that would create this.

38:30 So we need to start a buzz. I love it, Ken. How does our audience get more information on the work that you guys do. Well, A lot of what we do is on our website. I'm proud to say it's the website's called Stop Scamsalliance dot org and we have on there on the homepage, I have the statements. For the record, I've now written four for the US Congress that explains what we've been talking about today. We also have about half a dozen of eds that we've written for major newspapers that explain it in very short, two page kind of format. And then we have a media page. And on the media page we have some of the presentations that I've given and the podcasts that I've given, so people can dig into those if they want to.

39:12 All right, I'm going to give you the last word. Anything I didn't ask you about that you wanted to share with our audience. Well, So, one thing that just occurred to me is a couple of months ago, the Wilson Center approached me. The Wilson Center is a think tank in Washington, d C. Housing in the Ronald Reagan Building. It was created by Congress, funded in part by Congress, and they asked me to become a distinguished fellow working for them. So I'm now one of the hats that I wear is to work as a distinguished fellow for the Wilson Center. And the reason that they asked me to join them. They normally do foreign policy work, but they've come to realize that scams is a foreign ish foreign threat, and they want to help bring awareness to this and to raise it to the administration's level so that we can get executive branch and congressional action.

40:01 Beautiful, Well, congratulations, that's awesome. So Ken, I just want to thank you one for giving up your time today and sharing your expertise, and I just as a fellow fraud fighter, I want to say thank you because there aren't enough of us and we have to work together and collaborate and share ideas and encourage each other. I learned things today just chatting with you, and it's very motivating for me as well. Gives me some ideas that I can use out here in Arizona. And keep up the good work. And we're going to have to have you again in the future and talk about some additional topics.

40:43 Okay, well, wonderful. Well, Actually, one more thing we're doing is we've raised the money to do a new Gallup survey. You know, we've talked in this podcast about the lack of data and how so a few people report, well you can measure this much better with a national survey, like through Gallup. So that's in the field. Now we're starting We're going to be getting the results back in a few weeks and then a report should be available in May. So that's our contribution to getting more data out there about the prevalence of scams and how they happen and what we can do to raise our defenses to fight back. And I appreciate you very much having me on your show today. I enjoyed talking to you and if they has some follow up, I'm all for it, beautiful.

41:25 Thanks Ken. So this is that's the show for today, everybody. We will be back next week. I'm actually bringing in a former colleague of mine from IRS Criminal Investigation. His name is Special Agent Christopher Shere, and we're going to cover some of the same topics we did today, just maybe from a different angle from an agent who's doing investigations as we speak. So thank you all for watching. Let's talk about scams. We'll see you next Tuesday morning. Thank you very much. Bye bye. Well that's all the knowledge for this episode, Julian every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFORAHD Radio at KFORAHD 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.