Where is the urgency?

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0:50 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 at 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. Good morning, everybody, My name is Brian Watson, community outreach specialist with Rose and I am filling in for Joyce this morning. Joyce will be back next week. Let's talk about scams. We are in the prevention business. We do not want people to be scammed and that's our number one mission, and our primary focus is older adults. But we surely know that every age group gets scammed. But what we do know the older we get, the more likely we are to lose more money than anybody else.

1:57 The stats don't lie, So thank you for tuning in today. This is so important because so many people have financial plans, they've saved, they have an estate, they have a trust, they have wills, they've planned, and they've done everything right and it just takes one really good scammer to wipe it all away. So thank you for watching today. You are doing the right thing. You are protecting yourself, you're protecting your family, and you're protecting others. So today's topic is called what is the urgency? And I'm kind of using an article that I wrote for the Green Valley News recently. Green Valley News is a newspaper in southern Arizona, and I'm very grateful to get to write for them every month on a various scam related topic, and to be very honest, this topic today is it's kind of a little bit of frustration. I'm venting a little bit if you just bear with me, but you'll understand why.

3:05 It's nothing personal. It's because of my care for other people and how much it pains me to see people get scammed. So I recently celebrated August first two years with being with Rose and it's been an amazing experience, and I thank Joyce for bringing me on. And I've got to meet our board and our advisory committee, and I'll tell you we have some very smart, passionate people who really want to protect people in our community. And a lot of our board members and advisory committee folks, it's personal to them because they've had a scammer affect their family or friend or neighbor and they want to get in on the fight. And I'm also over the last two years, got to meet amazing people all over this state. And you know, various presentations I do, or if I do TV or radio or podcast interviews, I've got to meet so many people and I really appreciate them listening to our message and letting us share our warnings.

4:20 And what have I learned in two years. I've learned that very smart people get scammed. Surprised me more than I thought. I really thought I was going to run into people who had lost some of their mental capabilities due to age or illness. It's not necessarily the case. Everyone that I've met is very smart, often very educated. They handle their own finances, but they just got dupe by scammers. But I've also learned the scammers have gotten way better over the last five, ten, twenty twenty five years.

5:01 It's just not fair. If you get in the ring with these people. You need to disengage. You need to end whatever phone conversation is going on. You need to delete emails, delete text messages, you need to wait. All these things that Joyce and I talk about on a weekly basis, taking your time, time as your friend. But here's my frustration. I will be out in the public somewhere and I'll meet someone and I'll tell them what we do at Rose, and they get all excited and say, yeah, we'd love to have you at our church and our social group, at our club, whatever it is, And then I don't hear back from them. And I'll send them an email or I'll leave them a message, but they don't call back, and I get frustrated. I get so frustrated because I know that people are out there are basically sitting ducks, and I and everyone else that rose we see all the scams that are happening on a daily basis, and we know so many people are just they're not protected, you know, and a lot of people figure out scams on their own just using common sense.

6:13 But the scammers get better and better every single day, and you have to have some scam prevention in place. I mean, if you experience what I see on a daily basis and what happens when I do a presentation and someone comes up to me in tears afterwards tell me about their loss, it's very motivating for me to go out and do more presentations. But it's also frustrating when some of these groups just they don't. It's just not important to them. You know. Most people, really, to be honest, don't think about scams until it happens to someone they love or someone they care about. You know, when one of our family members get scammed, what do we do, Well, we go into pade and we ask them all kinds of questions, and we close bank accounts and we try to get the money back, and it's it's it's it's a hard job because the money is a lot of time gone. So you know, we try to claw that money back and sometimes it's possible, sometimes it's not. You know, a lot of the methods now when you send the money, it's just gone. So I've struggled to come up with an analogy as it released to scams, and I came up with a house on fires analogy. If you're sitting at home and the smoke alarms are going off and your house is on fire, you would immediately exit the house

7:44 and call the fire department. Well, scammers are like arsonists. They're sitting outside of your house and they're they're starting a little fire on the outside of your house, trying to burn it down, and we want to warn everyone about that threat. So I know it's not a great analogy, but the scammers are basically trying to burn down your financial house and when it's fully engulfed, you'll get out. But we want you to see those arsonists out, the scammers outside that are being like arsenists, and stop them from even even starting the fire. Like I said, I get frustrated because I'll do a presentation and someone will come up to me afterwards and tell me their story.

8:31 They'll say, I've been scammed. It's affected me. I can't sleep, I stress, I have horrible self esteem. Now I'm embarrassed, I'm shamed, and a lot of times these people are in tears. I remember meeting a lady who got scammed in a romance scam and she referred to him as Peter. She goes, my Peter. We don't even know if Peter was his real name. It could have been anything. It could have been a woman, it could have been a bunch of people working together they're creating Peter. But she had fallen in love with Peter, and she was telling me about it and tears in her eyes. I've seen damage family relationships because of the embarrassment and shame. Someone's lost all this money and then they have to tell their kids, I've lost this money. I mean, that's it.

9:20 It's really really rough, you know. I met a lady who lost one hundred and seventy nine dollars and she was ashamed of it and embarrassed, and to her that was a lot of money, but it wasn't the money. It was the blow to her self esteem. And I just told her it's okay. A lot of smart people fall for scams. I've met people that I've lost three hundred thousand, seven hundred thousand in excess of a million. Last week, I spoke to a gentleman and his dad lost over four million dollars in a romance scam that turned into to pig butchering. He was investing in cryptocurrency and they just took They just kept taking more and more from him. He kept selling assets and they just really tailored their scam to really go after this guy. Guy.

10:16 But over four million dollars, think that's like gental wealth that's just gone. So recently, I had the pleasure of doing a fraud prevention presentation and a local retirement community, and it took me two years to get this thing scheduled. As soon as I joined Rose in twenty twenty three, I approached this community and said, hey, we'd love to do a presentation, and you know, it was just crickets. They didn't get back to me, and I would ask periodically, very nicely, hey are we rated? Just I mean you guys could really use it. It's a huge community. They have a lot of well to do people, and I don't want them to get scammed. So during that two years, I found out from a local bank manager that one of the residents of this community came into this particular branch and he was withdrawing money from his bank account and he told them it was for home improvements. Well, here's the problem. The bank manager knew this gentleman was renting the unit he lived in. You don't make home improvements where this gentleman lived. So the scammers had told him a line to say to the bank managers to prevent them from stopping him from taking money out of

11:47 the bank. Well, this bank manager knew and she wasn't gonna listen to the lie that he was told by the scammers, and she basically convinced him he was being scammed and said, I know you're lying to me about where this money's going. And then I also became aware of a second residence at this big community that was being scammed, And so you could see how I was frustrated that people in this community are getting scammed, yet they don't have the urgency to schedule one of our presentations. And you know, just because you have one of our presentations is not a guarantee you won't be scammed. But I'm telling you it's gonna make you a whole lot better.

12:32 We've got to practice, we've got to be talking about this stuff. So there's a happy ending to the story. As the old saying goes better late than ever. This community did bring me to speak to them, and we had a really full room. Everyone really appreciated it. I got a lot of compliments that the information was very helpful, and that's just music to my years. I wish everybody in the entire community was there, but I'm a realist that's not going to happen. People have lives and other things going on. But there was a room full of people and we sent them home with some practical advice.

13:15 So you know, sometimes, you know, one of the reasons why a group won't won't bring us on to speak is is they're worried that they're going to scare people. And I get it, there's there's some truth to that. But I'm very conscious conscious when I start my presentations, always at the beginning, I warn people. I say, I'm going to tell you some really scary stories about very smart people losing a lot of money. And I don't tell you this to make you feel bad or send you home scared. I do this to toughen you up and make you realize or help you realize what we're going against with these scammers these days. And then at a certain point in the presentation, I say, all right, no more scary stories. And there's a little laugh about that, because you know, it's scary to hear this stuff. And then we always end on a positive note. We send folks home with good common sense advice. You know, a lot of this is not rocket science, it's just common sense stuff. So we've got the presentation done, and it was a good thing because we want everyone to have a scam prevention plan. So what is a scam prevention plan?

14:39 Just doing something? The fact that you're watching us today on Let's talk about scams Bravo, you are doing scam prevention. What else can you do? Sign up for our email list? You go to Roseadvocacy dot org. There's our website right on the screen Rose Advocacy dot Org, and right on the front page there's a blue button where you can sign up for our email list. It comes out once a month. It's free. We just need a name and an email. If you like it, share it with your friends. If you don't like it, you can unsubscribe. We won't have our feelings hurt. And then we also send out every Tuesday a little tip. It's just a smaller version of the newsletter, just to keep this stuff in our mind.

15:31 And then scam prevention also means you have a family member or friend that you can call any time of the day if you're not sure about an email, a text message, a phone call, something on social media. And it also means scam prevention. It goes both ways. People look after you, but you need to look after others. So we want you to look out out for the most vulnerable members of our community. Start in your neighborhood. Is there someone nearby that lives by themselves and maybe he's a little lonely and maybe answers the phone all the time and is friendly and would would not hang up on someone. You reach out to that person and be their phone a friend, and you know, if you want to be part of the solution, please donate our art.

16:26 I mean sorry, to be part of solution. Please visit our website and consider being a monthly donor. I donate monthly to Rose and I just know that money is going to a good cause. Trust me, we run a very tight ship. Nearly everybody is a volunteer. I'm a part time employee, but we keep things our expenses very low. But we do have expenses. So if you consider donating ten or twenty dollars a month, we would absolutely love it. And remember, go to Rosadvocacy dot org sign up for our monthly emails, share this link with anyone else you know, and just watch every week. We're going to keep this episode today basically twenty minutes. We're keeping it tight because we all know you're everyone out there is very busy.

17:22 And remember, practice makes perfect. We practice hanging up the phone, we practice deleting emails. Lie to the scammers if you have to, because they are going to lie to you. And I know a future that's a future episode about practice. That was something that we had in our little Tuesday tips talking about practice makes perfect. Practice doing the things ahead of time, so when you're in that stressful situation, you don't panic. You know that if you get a phone call from the security department at your bank saying your money's in trouble, that you recognize it as a scam, You hang up the phone, you take out your ATM card, flip it over, call the number on the back, call the customer service number, and asked to be transferred to the security department. That's practice things like that, So we'll talk about that more in the future. But lastly, thank you.

18:24 Thank you for tuning in today and listening to my little rant about where's the urgency. I hope it wasn't too negative. I just wanted to express my frustration because what we all see it at Rose here, we get frustrated when people just don't have the urgency that we have. And the urgency is not about us. The urgency is about protecting the people we love. All right, until next time, I'm Brian Watson filling in for Joyce Petrowski. I really appreciate you all tuning in today and we will see you next week on Let's talk about Scams.

19:04 Well that's all the knowledge for this episode. Tune in every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD 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.