← Drop Dead Serious With Ashleigh Banfield
Drop Dead Serious With Ashleigh Banfield
Nancy Guthrie: Sheriff Flags Disturbing “Wrench Attack” Report To Investigators | 135 Days Missing
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A
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B
Hey everyone, I'm Ashley Banfield and this is drop dead Serious. And I've got something dead serious to talk about. Wrench attacks. This is sort of new in our lexicon of covering true crime, but there is an intersection with the Nancy Guthrie story that makes this first of all pretty perplexing, but also essential discussion. Because it affects all of us. And it's new, but it's very, very old and traditional. And it's almost as though this kind of crime is that is old is new again, and I'll explain that in a minute. But first let me just describe why wrench attacks are being mentioned in the same sentence as the crime that was committed against Nancy Guthrie. For starters, we still seem to be pretty much in the dark about what happened to Nancy Guthrie over 135 days ago. The Pima County Sheriff's Office doesn't give any updates, and the last thing we heard was a week ago a mother's search group in Mexico, south of the border in Sonora. They said that they had received a tip that Nancy Guthrie was buried south of the border in an area that was considered like killing fields, in an area that these mothers had found 12 unmarked graves before. They did not find Nancy Guthrie. They searched, and it was serious enough that the Mexican authorities helped and supported this group in their efforts to actually run down this tip. And this mother's group said that they're going to continue. But apart from that news, again, right back to the old what you got for us now, Sheriff Nanos and the Pima County Sheriff's Department and the FBI and the task force that was put together to investigate how in the ever loving God, Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her bed and just vanished. Who was the guy on her doorstep? Is he part of a bigger syndicate? Is he a one off? Is he some guy who used to work there at some point? Everybody's had their theories, right, but nobody up until now had heard the theory of wrench attacks. Effectively, what a wrench attack is, is pressuring someone through physical violence to give up information like a password in order to get into someone's accounts and rob them blind. Almost think of it as though you're walking out of the grocery store and about to get into your car and someone comes up behind you with a wrench about to club you in the face and says, give me your password or I'll knock you out. That's sort of what this is. And effectively the reason this is making news is because a research group called Certik, and I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, C E R T I, capital K. So Certik or Certik, this group who by the way, no slouches, these guys are really smart, comprised of some of the top academics in from American universities. They've come out with a report, report pretty recently that describes what these wrench attacks are and the rise of them in 2026. And they listed out a couple of them. They listed out one that happened to a Chinese national in Turkey. They actually included Nancy Guthrie in their study. And they talked about a guy in the UK just back in March with the name Silly Tuna. I know that's a silly name, but the crime is dead awful. And effectively these are schemes to kidnap people and torture them until they give up cryptocurrency passwords, at which point the thugs make off with tens or hundreds of millions. These thugs are typically very low level local thugs that have been commissioned by high level criminal enterprise networks that are global and operate online. I know this kind of sounds fantastical and like the plot of a movie, and it really seems like it is and probably should be a movie because we all need to know that this is real. We've all feared being hacked. We've all feared having our identities stolen and our finances wiped out and our credit cards being taken over. You know, our, our financial fears have been mostly digital and mostly we worry about people coming through, you know, the series of tubes that is the Internet, and then stealing from us. But these guys do it different. They go old school Tony Soprano, they literally come up behind you with a wrench and threaten to beat the out of you until you give up your passwords so they can access the money real easy and they don't have to get all smart and sleuthy. You know, hacking is kind of like passe. Attacking is the new kind of financial crime. And so that's effectively what this group Cirdik has outlined, that this is a kind of a new trend and it is happening. Let me give you a couple of examples of what's happened. And listen, if you're squeamish, this is not for you. I read this and I just thought, dear God, what did these people go through at the hands of these horrendous, evil, sadistic criminals? But in this particular case, just back in March of this year, someone who went by the handle Silly Tuna. So I'm going to read for you. The longtime crypto figure and indie game developer was physically forced to hand over approximately 25 million in I think a kind of cryptocurrency. The attack involved weapons, kidnapping and rape threats with the victim reporting that he was held down by four assailants. Funds were rapidly laundered across multiple chains and converted into Monero. All right, that's Silly Tuna. That's the least of the different incidents. Let me read you what happened to Yong Wang in Istanbul, Turkey, January, just January of this year. Young wang was a 38 year old Chinese entrepreneur reported missing on January 24 after arriving in Istanbul, Turkey. Yong Wang was found buried vertically in a shallow pit with his hands and feet bound and his mouth sealed. The investigation established a revenge motive linked to a prior crypto asset dispute with wallet extraction. Before his execution, 10 suspects, including one woman, were arrested in China following the issuance of an Interpol Red notice. This case marks the first verified crypto related homicide of 2026. And then there was another incident of an Italian national who came to New York City. This guy was worth apparently tens of millions in cryptocurrency, accepted an invitation to someone's very expensive townhome, at which point he was kidnapped and held in that town home for three weeks and tortured myriad ways, right? Pistol, whipped, beaten, assaulted, electrodes placed on him. He was dangled over a stairwell within an inch of his life. But I don't know how this guy somehow withstood all this torture and held out and then escaped, escaped this townhouse in Manhattan and blew down the street until he could find some help from, I think there was some security agency or, or a policeman and ultimately NYPD showed up at this townhouse and grabbed a guy in his bathrobe yeah, he's not the only guy who's charged. There's a couple of others who are charged and I think there's still one who they're seeking. But I can't wait to hear how this case is charged and, and prosecuted and adjudicated and what happens to people who do this. Because there is a special place in hell for people who torture. And by the way, what kind of people are they? I mean, I know we cover the worst of the worst, right? But when you think about prolonged torture at some point, don't your better angels knock on your door at any point in three weeks of this? Like when you're filling up that vertical grave where Yong Wang was murdered? At some point, don't you think I've got to stop? Apparently not. Apparently those better angels don't exist with these people. And that's why it's important for us to know about them and know about this trend. But what does this mean for you and what does it mean for the Nancy Guthrie case? So I'm going to talk about a lot of that because with Nancy Guthrie, you might be saying to yourself, well, did Nancy Guthrie have millions of dollars of cryptocurrency and did that guy break in to threaten her for a password? I can't tell you that my go to default would be no, that an 84 year old grandmother living in Arizona probably wouldn't be into the crypto world. But I can't promise you that. I don't know that for sure. And I can tell you the police surely aren't saying so if that is the case. No one has ever mentioned that. But there's another element in this study by certic, by this group that incorporates Nancy Guthrie because they call it a proxy target attack. So you got your wrench attack in which you grab the, you know, the crypto millionaire or billionaire and. And you threaten that guy within an inch of his life until he gives up passwords. Or you get the proxy attack which is adjacent to the wrench attacks, and the proxy attack is getting somebody connected to that guy with the money and threatening them and letting that guy with the money know we got your son, daughter, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, mother, father, aunt, you name it. And so Nancy Guthrie came into this study because perhaps it might have been someone else in the family. Someone like Savannah with a lot of money. Maybe Savannah has crypto. Don't know. No idea. And maybe it isn't even about crypto. Maybe this was just sort of an adjacent kind of attack threatening to get Access to money. Now, we've heard a lot about the threats of ransom, right? One of them was a total faking liar. And a guy in California was arrested and alleged to have jumped on this tragedy to, you know, grift a little money for himself in a. In a ransom scheme. As far as the actual perpetrators, we still don't know if that was a real ransom scheme. We know that Savannah and her family said they'll pay. They'll pay to get their mother back, no matter whether dead or alive, right, to celebrate with her. But still no indication that for sure it is ransom based, this crime. Right? And the other connection here to Nancy Guthrie is that the Pima County Sheriff's Department has weighed in on this very notion. Sheriff Chris Nanos has acknowledged this study, has acknowledged this new trend of crime. Let me just read from Mike Ruiz from Fox Digital. This is what he posted on X. Wrench attacks Update. The task force investigating the suspected abduction of Nancy Guthrie in Tucson is aware of a new cyber security report that analyzed a rise of wrench attacks as well as proxy target attacks in which the victim of the violence is more a vulnerable relative of the person criminals are looking to extort. And so when asked about this, Sheriff Nanos actually declined to discuss this actual report, but did say this to Fox Digital, that he had flagged this report, that he knew of it, that he'd read it, and that he flagged it to the investigative team. I assume that means the task force, I do not know. But whomever it is, under Chris Nanos or with the FBI that still may be working on the Nancy Guthrie case, apparently that file landed on their desk. So wrench attacks and then these proxy target attacks. This is conversant now in this investigation. But this proxy target attack can't be ignored. Is it part of this growing criminal enterprise trend called wrench attacking that this group has studied? Well, there's a guy who I know who takes security really seriously and is well versed in this new element of criminal thuggery, this new trend of how to get to us, how to get to our money. Less about getting smart online and hacking us, more about going old school Tony Soprano and attacking us. And it's Spencer Courson. And you may have heard from Spencer Courson before because I've spoken with him. Based on his history as a United States Marshal. He was a former U.S. army Ranger, former Special Deputy U.S. marshal. He runs Corson Security Group. So this is his business. He also does threat management. He's an expert in threat management and he's the author of the Safety Trap. So I asked Spencer to weigh in on the Nancy Guthrie story with regard to this new study and this new concept of wrench attacks and that concept of proxy target attacks, but also how this also affects the rest of us going forward. Because lest you think it doesn't affect you, it does. Here's my conversation with Spencer. Spencer, it's always good to tap your incredible wisdom in this area of security. It's kind of an area of security that a lot of us really hadn't thought about until recently. It's digital security. And it doesn't mean protecting your bank account. It means protecting yourself, throat and your neck from, like, physical torture, pain and suffering.
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C
It's important for people to realize that digital assets do not only live in the digital world because the access to those digital assets is us. And one of the things that bad guys have realized is that, hey, it's really difficult to crack the code, but it's really easy to put pressure on the person. And anytime they can convince you to give over your password or your username or your credentials, you have just made it. I mean, the path of least resistance is always going to be the weakest link in the chain. And you can have all the safeguards in the world, but if you're not protecting yourself, what good are those safeguards going to do for you?
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B
I'm going to get to the association with Nancy Guthrie's case, and it really kind of came out of the blue for me to hear about wrench attacks and Nancy Guthrie in the same sentence. And I'll get to that in a second, but not before I sort of touch on the fact that we seem to have come full circle. You know, in the 90s, we started hearing about hacking. We all panicked about having, you know, our personal information hacked, our financial information hacked. We started setting up whatever security systems we could to be hack proof best we can, identity hacking, all the rest of the. But now it seems like this is just good old fashioned mobster stuff. Like mobster. It's just come right back to the bare essence of threatening people with pain and suffering.
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C
You're 100% right. The playing field changes, but the game remains the same. It used to be pressuring people for their lottery tickets or their gambling or this, that, or the other thing. And like you said, it used to be don't talk to strangers and never get into strange cars. And now we literally call strangers to get into their car. It was, you know, you think of catch me when you can, and he Was like counterfeiting checks, and then they went to, like, travelers checks, and then they went to credit cards and debit cards. I remember the first time that an ATM machine, like an access teller machine came around where you could put this card in and put it in a code and get cash. And it was this whole new world. But with every advancement in technology, with every advancement in testing, with every advancement in any kind of protocol, whether that be drug testing or penetration testing or access control, there will always be people who will exploit the vulnerabilities inherent to those systems. And the onus is on us, to whatever realm in which we operate, to participate in our own protection and to understand the most realistic risks that we are most likely to face so that we can put the safeguards in place to keep those risks from becoming a reality. Anytime I'm asked, hey, what is, like, the biggest threat that anyone can face? I always tell them it's the one you worry about the most, but work on the least.
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B
Well, that makes me realize that any one of us is vulnerable to a kidnapping. I mean, look, I don't open my door to strangers, but they grab you on the street. You know, a lot of the people who've gone through these horrifying wrench attacks have been grabbed or have been coerced into meetings that they thought were legitimate, and the door locks behind them, and suddenly there they are having electrodes attached to them for three weeks, some of them buried vertically, and then eventually, with the torture becoming too much, they give up the code and they're killed anyway. These are just terrifying Tony Soprano kind of scenarios. And I almost wonder, like, what are we to do about that? Because we all have our digital finances in place, and it's all about a password. So what are we supposed to do in this new age of protecting ourselves?
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C
Well, like I said before, you want to audit yourself with honesty. To basically simply say to yourself, hey, if I was going to attack me, how would I do it? If I was going to break into my home, how would I do it? And then audit? What does your public Persona look like? Most of us don't realize just how much personal identifying information we share online, through social media, or just in general interactions every day. And while that singular thing that you share may not be the reason that you are targeted, all of those things you share are pieces that those who would want to attack you are using to see just how high their likelihood of success would be in targeting you. So the best thing that any of us can do is to a audit yourself with Honesty, assess your risk, and then put the safeguards in place to reduce that risk from becoming a reality.
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B
I've often said that we all need safe words. I hate to say it, but we literally need safe words so that if your mom calls you and is asking a weird question, you ask for the safe word. You know? But then again, if mom's got a gun to her head or electrodes on her fingers, like, my God, there's a difference between, like, wrench attacks and proxy attacks. And I'm going to get into that because with Nancy Guthrie, it seemed more like a proxy attack than the wrench attack, but they all based themselves on the same thing, and that is hurting you or hurting someone you love.
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C
I want to touch on something that you just said earlier, because I think it's really important about having a safe word or a duress word. And the difference between the two is I had a client who had their daughter call, and she had been in this relationship with a guy that she was really infatuated with, but that the parents didn't really like. And so she calls her mom one day, and she's on speaker, and her dad's listening, and she's basically saying to him or to her mother, hey, look, I know you don't like him, but it's me or him, it's him or you. And I hope you can break. You know, I hope that you can learn to love him, because if not, I'm going to have to cut you off because I'm infatuated with him, and that's just the way things are going to be, and blah, blah, blah. And what they didn't realize was that he was basically holding her hostage, making her read this script that he had written out because his obsessiveness with her had gotten so out of control, and she was under real duress. And so I think it's really important to have a safe word, like you said, like a proof of life word, like, hey, how do we know this is really you? To verify if someone needs to, hey, can you venue me $100? Or, hey, can you wire me this? Or, hey, can you wire me that? But hey, like an authentication phrase. But then there should be something that you would say that the other person wouldn't know, but the person you're talking to or listening in would know. That means you're under duress so that you can communicate what needs to be said. Hey, I'm not feeling too well. I had a peanut butter sandwich today. Because they don't know that you're allergic to peanuts. So something that your family. And this is part of just a standard emergency family readiness plan that I highly. That I tell people when we talk about participating in your own protection to put into place is to have not just a safe word, but a duress phrase that you can use that would let people know that, hey, I'm not okay.
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B
And a duress phrase that's not so bizarre that your captors are gonna say, that's enough.
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C
It has to be something that you can, like, you know, all right, you know, tell mom I love her, but Mom's, you know, something.
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B
Right, right. Something that would make sense to the attacker, but.
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C
Right. Like if you always refer to your grandmom as like, Mima, you know, tell grandma my lover might be a good way to communicate a duress word.
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B
Right. Or tell Mima I love her if you normally say grandma. Exactly. Yeah, that's a really good point. Okay, let's talk a little bit about this. This study that certik, and I hope I'm getting it right, and it's not certik, but it's C E R T I, capital K. This, this, this.
- [23:40]
C
I'm with you. I believe it's certik.
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B
Okay, so this, this group, you know, some pretty heavy hitting academics involved with this study and this group called certic, they put together this sort of assessment of something called wrench attacks. I'd never heard of wrench attacks before. It makes me think that you're trying to undo something, but it's really not. It's literally like walking up to somebody with a wrench and cracking them over the head. It goes back to the old Tony Soprano. Inflict pain, get what you want. But, you know, describe from your perspective, from a security perspective, what your assessment of wrench attacks really are and how serious we need to take them. Regardless, if you're Nancy Guthrie, if you're just Joe Schmo or Ashley Banfield, sure.
- [24:25]
C
So the term wrench attack, I believe comes from a web comic which demonstrated a hacker with a wrench in his hand threatening a person for their username and password. And what that has basically come to mean is what I said earlier, that the criminals understand that cracking the code can be really difficult.
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B
But.
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C
But applying pressure to the person can be quite simple. So the best way to think about a wrench attack is threatening or using the threat of violence on an individual so that they give up their access or credentials to a digital device or a digital platform or some kind of a security system. Login credentials and it basically, therefore would not set off any alarms because they would have the necessary username and password or correct password phrase in order to access that system. Because I know on my bank account if I put in the wrong password more than twice, it's going to shut down. Or if I'm using my ATM card and I put in the code more than twice, it's going to shut down. And so by exploiting the intelligence that the primary user has, you are able to access their accounts without setting up any red flags. And therefore you can clean them out or make the transfers or do whatever crime you want to do without alerting the authorities and have time to get away before the person that you threatened or attacked or compromised has time to report you.
- [25:59]
B
So it's like we don't have to fear the hacker so much anymore as the attacker. It's just easier.
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C
Or the hacker who is also an
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B
attacker, a hacker attacker, a physically violent person. Which leads me to the next element of this, and this is that this group has assessed that there are these global organizations that operate online and they hire the local thugs. So effectively they've got this criminal network of, again, I'm just gonna say mobsters, who seemingly have some of the thickest skin out there to be able to torture people at the level that we've been seeing. Tell me about this case in New York that you know about. This poor Italian guy who just went through absolute, utter hell.
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C
Yeah, I believe his name was Michelle Carteron. He was an Italian crypto guy, had millions of dollars in crypto and was known to go to these conferences and go to these events that are cryptocentric and promoting this kind of bitcoin over that kind of crypto or what have you, and had interacted with someone at one of these events, had publicized that he was going to be traveling to New York, and this bad guy and his associates were like, okay, we're going to trap him. And so they rented this townhouse, and they're like, hey, you're in New York. You know, let's meet for lunch. You know, come over. Oh, I rented this great place. You have to come and see it. And he's like, oh, yeah, great. Love to. Come on over. And then, you know, shows up when
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B
he's a great place. This is like a serious money place, like $30,000 a month, this apartment, eight bedroom apartment.
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C
Because they're trying to sell, Right, Exactly. Throw them like, listen, we're not these, like one of you. Right, Exactly. It's, it's, you know, the. It's the, the champagne effect.
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B
Yeah.
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C
But as soon as he walks by
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B
suggesting I have just as much money as you, I'm not in it for the money.
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C
Exactly. And as soon as he walks into the door or into this townhouse, you know, he's great. Hey, yeah, come on in. As soon as he walks in, one of the thugs shuts the door behind him and he hears the bolt, you know, thratch, and he's like, oh. And for the next three weeks, they tortured him to get his, I think it was his username, password to his coin, his coinbase wallet. And somehow he was able to withstand three weeks of torture and was able to escape one day and is literally like running down Mercer and is, you know, in a bathrobe, torn and beaten and whatever gets the attention of a police officer and was able to be rescued.
- [28:40]
B
And when you say tortured, I mean this is three weeks of like electrodes, of being pistol whipped, of being physically assaulted, of being hanged over a, I guess, multi story staircase and being threatened with being dropped. I mean, just psychological torture, physical torture. And I guess he had what, like around 30 million in criminal.
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C
It was a substantial amount, I don't know right off top, but 30 million sounds somewhere between. It was a lot. It was a lot. And it's just one of those things where, you know, hackers require a certain skill set, but using a wrench attack, like, I don't, I don't know how to hack, you know, a coinbase, but I know how to use coinbase. And so if I have within me the, the ability or the capability to, much like old, old school gangsters would, you know, go out and break someone's leg if they were laid on the vigil. It's the same criminal element. And, you know, hey, you'll get a percentage or it's a flat rate or whatever. And these people who have no problem applying violence, don't care who they're applying violence to. It's. They're getting paid to do something they love.
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B
I mean, we've literally regressed to a half century ago when the mob just brought fear into their business model. Like fear and pain. And that's where we seem to be at again.
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C
Yeah, I mean, think of like the first 45 minutes of the first Rocky movie where the Italian gangster is mad at Rocky because he's being too soft, because he wouldn't like break the guy's thumb or hit him in the knee or whatever to get the money for the Vigeo. And yeah, we have literally come from 1976 to 2026, full circle. 50 years later. Yeah, right back to doing the same exact tactics, just on a different, you
- [30:31]
B
know, boy, it takes a certain kind of person who can inflict three weeks of torture. Not to say they're not out there. They certainly are. But, my God, there's. There's that case in, I think in Turkey where a guy who was captured again and threatened, I think his name was Yong Wang. This is in January of this year. 38 years old, Chinese entrepreneur. He was reported missing January 24th. Found vertically buried. Oh, just the thought of it, right? Just vertically buried. You almost think that they're just terrifying him and torturing him psychologically, saying you're not going to be able to breathe in a minute. But he was vertically buried. His hands were bound, his feet were bound, his mouth was sealed, and it was a crypto asset dispute, apparently. But they got 10 people, including a woman, arrested them in China. So I don't know if that, you know, look, fight fear with fear, whatever the penalties are going to be. I bet they're worse in China than they are going to be here in America. But, my God, we really need to start looking at how are we going to treat these people if we want to get ahead of this kind of new wave of crime.
- [31:39]
C
But also, like, don't be someone who feels the need to brag about what you have. Yeah, I mean, I see this with preppers. I see this with the nouveau riche. I see this with a lot of my clients are persons, whether in the tech or the finance or the entertainment world, who are making that transition from private person to public figure. And one of the things I have to really instill in them and get them to understand is that what you used to be able to do when you were, you know, indistinguishable from what you have and who you are from everyone else is completely different. When everyone knows you, but you don't know them. That parasocial relationship that exists on social media where we are constantly sharing to our thousands or in some cases, millions of followers who are just, you know, hanging on everything we do and know everything. Like, we don't necessarily remember what we posted last week or a month ago or what we said about this movie, but they do. And so like I said before, that little thing or that one thing that you shared, okay, so now I know when your birthday is. Now I know where you went to high school. And now I know when your anniversary is. Oh, now I know what your first car was. Now I know what this was. Well, all of those answers are going to be questions to username challenges. If I want to reset your password.
- [33:04]
B
Yeah.
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C
Or now I know where you live. Or now I can track where you vacation or your favorite restaurant or the gym you go to.
- [33:12]
B
So now we're just giving Kardashians who, you know, when they were attacked in Paris and robbed and bound and, you know, thrown into the bathroom, I think it was. Didn't Kim Kardashian say something about how her life has changed and how she's going to now manipulate her image online, what she's going to show online? I mean, listen, these are. These are influencers, you know, the very first of the major influencers. But even Kim Kardashian realized something's got to change.
- [33:37]
C
There was a famous boxer that was on Chris Williamson's podcast Modern Wisdom a couple weeks ago, and he would had this threat and he hired security. And Chris was like, well, you know, man, what kind of a price tag does 24,7 Security look like? He was like, oh, it was like six figures. He was like, it wasn't worth it. Like, he was like, I'll never use security again. I was like, dude, it's the worst thing to say. Anytime. I was like, anytime you're a public figure in a public facing, all you should say is, I take my security very seriously. Don't say what that entails, don't say what that costs. Don't say who does it or what you do, but just promote that protective posture. Because now anyone who may want to approach or target or make contact with this individual goes, oh, he hates security. So my likelihood of success just went up. So when you are buying Bitcoin and it says, hey, do you want to tweet this, this, this exchange? No, no, you don't want to tweet that exchange. Or hey, do you want to. Do you want to screenshot this to Instagram that you just made this transaction? No, no, you don't. Don't. You can communicate to your. To your close friends and your family in a non public setting what it is that you do, but there is absolutely no need for the rest of the world to know that.
- [34:54]
B
Yeah, and it's shocking how many details. I mean, just think of like the true crime audience watching this right now. We're Sleuthers. You know, we take frame by frames of videos and we find clues. And that's what criminals do too. They take frame by frame and word by word and they put together the puzzle of your life. But when it comes to Nancy Guthrie, you know, it just doesn't feel like 84 years old that she's, you know, got a big crypto portfolio or a crypto wallet. But that doesn't mean that she didn't belong in this study, because they put her in this study and they talked about her being a proxy target. And that's a different element of this. You may not be the target, but you are connected to the target. So the same thing still applies, you know, terrifying and inflicting pain on someone you love who may be the target.
- [35:44]
C
Exactly. This is something that we saw a lot in the 90s and in the, in the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With Daniel Pearl. Exactly. Kidnapped for ransom exploits where, hey, this guy's an oil executive. We know that that oil company has a kidnap and ransom policy that's underwritten by Lloyds of London. We're going to kidnap this executive so that we can demand money from their parent organization or in Afghanistan, we're going to target this journalist because we know that the New York Times will pay for that, for that ransom.
- [36:25]
B
Or I want to, you know, in a true definition of terrorism, I want to affect change politically. Therefore, I'm going to do this and threaten to do this if I don't get what I want politically. So, yeah, I hear you.
- [36:39]
C
We saw this with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, where after he had targeted so many high profile individuals, started writing to the newspaper saying, hey, you will print my entire manifesto or I will send more bombs. So anytime that you can leverage the vulnerability of one person to exploit the financial stability of a more affluent affiliate, you'll see that as a proxy target attack.
- [37:08]
B
The Zodiac Killer did that, too. They wanted the manifesto printed as well, or they were going to take out kids in the school buses. It was like just absolute terror. So with Nancy Guthrie, like I said, I don't know if at 84 years old, she had a crypto portfolio. She certainly could have, because Nancy Guthrie was a smart cookie. She was politically astute. She was, you know, she was on her email regularly. She was very aware of what was going on around her. She wasn't a little old lady in that respect. So she very well might have dabbled in crypto. But I think maybe the more likely scenario, as is sort of these researchers discussed, was that the target would have been maybe Savannah, because she's so much wealthier and so much more prominent, and that this proxy attack, you know, would have included Savannah's mom. It's something we discussed early on in the case, but we didn't discuss it in this vein of wrench attacks and proxy attacks when it comes to the world of crypto. But certainly crypto made its way into this story.
- [38:11]
C
Well, absolutely. And even those people who used Nancy's disappearance and was able to camouflage it as a target of exploit or an opportunity to exploit, the family was doing that very thing. Hey, give me a million dollars in crypto. Give me 50,000. And the family at that point was considering paying until the FBI came in and was like, hey, no, this is some quack in San Francisco or wherever he was.
- [38:38]
B
The California guy who's charged with this, I can't wait for that to be adjudicated, because he should be in for a world of hurt, given what he piled on.
- [38:47]
C
Had that been a legitimate kidnap for ransom, that 100% would have been a proxy target attack. You're correct.
- [38:56]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that this is a. I mean, listen, I always think it's just so incredibly tragic what the Guthrie family is going through and what Nancy Guthrie must have gone through. In the end, there may be this greater benefit for, you know, society as a whole to understand, like, you're not safe necessarily in your home. You're also not safe digitally, financially, or any other way that you think there might be a vault because it's just a password.
- [39:28]
C
I think if there's any silver lining to whatever it is that happened to Nancy is that it helped to underscore just how much we need to participate in our own protection and that we do not need to live in fear, but that we do need to employ a healthy sense of skepticism and a moderate dose of vigilance. And that if we are going to have security cameras, that we make sure that they are operational and that we have the subscription for them, and that we have motion lights that are functional. And that if we are. Just employ a regular 9pm routine where every night, you make sure the doors are locked, that the alarm is turned on, that the windows are locked, that the motion lights are turned on, and use that time to audit the cameras that you do have in place so that you can take stock of who does what, when, where, why, how, and with who, so that a baseline begins to form, so that those anomalies that you may observe become much more readily obvious to you during that review.
- [40:32]
B
So if you had to put together, like, you know, just a preliminary checklist for anybody watching right now who's thinking, oh, great, now I've got wrench attacks to deal with in my. In my life, what Are the first. Other than locking your doors and making sure someone can't get into your house, what are the. What's on the checklist of how to keep yourself safe. When you think you're digitally safe, financially safe, how are you really supposed to keep yourself safe now?
- [40:56]
C
So do you remember, like, math class when we would do the binomials of foil? Like the first outers, inners, last?
- [41:02]
B
I don't. I had metric.
- [41:05]
C
Oh, Canada, we had metric for like two weeks. They tried that and they were like, yeah, America's giving up on this. So there is a math binomial formula called foil, F O I L. And it's you do the first, then you do the outers, then you inners, and then you do less. I use that for conducting an assessment in everyday life. So first, what are your first impressions? If that's of your home or if that's of you or that's of your lifestyle or if that's of whatever you do, what are the first impressions? That kind of, hey, if I was on the outside looking at you, how do I occur to the world around me? Do I occur as oblivious? Do I occur as wealthy? Do I occur as someone who is serious about my protection? Am I someone who. It doesn't take my security seriously? Just so that you have a baseline of understanding of how you occur to the world, then I would just go out or over. Outside, I would just look at if it's your workplace, if it's your home, if it's your school, if it's the trail where you run or the gym that you go to, what do the outsides of that look like? Is there access control in and out? Does it promote a protective posture? Does it demonstrate to someone who may want to target me that there's too many obstacles or there's too many cameras or it's too public or it's too well lit, that I would. As a bad guy, I would have a higher likelihood of success targeting someone else. And then inside, okay, what are the insides of all those things look like? Can I see? Do they have good line of sight from inside? If I'm walking to my car, can other people see me? Or do I have to go down these dark stairwells to get where I need to go? And then L is for lass. I have a buddy of mine who's a comedian. He always tells me when he sees something and it's weird, he's like, oh, that's weird. And then if he thinks about it like two or three more times, he goes, oh, that's my subconscious telling me I've got to write a joke about this. So for you, lasting impressions, if something getting back to what I said earlier, where are you most likely to be targeted? That thing you think about the most, but work on the least. So treat that as first, outers, inners last. And if you just apply that simple assessment framework to anything you do, you will dramatically increase your certainty of safety.
- [43:22]
B
Spencer, I want to think that if we're reverting back to the old school thuggery of the mob and just inflicting sheer pain and suffering to extract what other wealth you can from people, those kinds of people aren't necessarily super clever. And that the police will be one step ahead of them or on their heels so quickly that this too shall pass. I mean, is this going to be a trend that we finally realize? If the. If the smart ones are the criminal conglomerate, that they're international, the dumb ones are the ones who are trying to carry it out. And since they just think about thuggery, they're not going to think about all these other things. And we will have a fighting chance 100%.
- [44:09]
C
And the best thing that any of us can do to circumvent that initial dynamic of being engaged with these people is to trust your gut and never forget that being polite is a courtesy, but protecting yourself is a priority. Your unwillingness to offend someone should never be stronger than your willingness to defend yourself.
- [44:30]
B
Oh, it's a really good mantra. And I always suggest as well, call Corson Security Group.
- [44:36]
C
We're here to help.
- [44:38]
B
Thank you, Spencer. I appreciate it.
- [44:39]
C
Thank you, Ashley.
- [44:40]
B
My great thanks to Spencer Courson. My God, that guy knows his business. And I call him early and often, and I will be doing so again. We'll continue to follow the Nancy Guthrie case. Like I said, so few updates from Pima county and none from that task force and nothing from the FBI. But here is my hope that silence doesn't mean that nothing is working under the surface. Remember I mentioned the duck paddling under the surface? Everything's calm and quiet on the surface, and the paddles are going like mad underneath. I just hope that that's still the case. It's very deflating, and I cannot imagine what it's like for the Guthrie family with very few updates. I assume they're getting more than we're getting. But 1-800- call FBI if you know anything. Put it out on your socials. 1-800-call FBI if there's anything that has cropped up in the last 135plus days that doesn't sound right to you? And you just think there might be something there? 1-800-Call-FBI because they're still running down those tips. Thank you everyone, so much for listening. Thank you for watching. Thank you for subscribing. I really appreciate it. Does me a solid if you'd hit the subscribe button, if you haven't already. Truth isn't just serious, folks, it's drop dead seriously.