← Mostly Human with Laurie Segall
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- [00:00]
Podcast Host
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
- [00:06]
Kal Penn
Hey, everyone, it's Kalpen. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Hearsay, The Audible, and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Irsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:35]
Super Troopers Announcer
Sophistication, Class. Restraint. Dignity. None of these words have anything to do with Super Troopers three.
- [00:45]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
One, two, three, go.
- [00:48]
Tony Ayo
Barbara in the house.
- [00:49]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Hope you guys aren't too drunk.
- [00:51]
Kal Penn
Already.
- [00:51]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
This Friday, no new info on the
- [00:54]
Super Troopers Announcer
guy who did it.
- [00:54]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Oh, so it couldn't have been a woman?
- [00:56]
Kal Penn
Sexist.
- [00:56]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
You ever see Ocean's 8?
- [00:57]
Super Troopers Announcer
Enough. Super Troopers 3 in theaters Friday. Rated R under 17. Not admitted without parent.
- [01:05]
Jacob Goldstein
This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder. With a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all in one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, E commerce, hr. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow. With your business, thousands have already made the switch. Why not you try Odoo for free at O D O o dot com. That's odoo dot com.
- [01:42]
Firestone Advertiser
Your vehicle doesn't just get you from here to there. It's a bridge to the people and places that matter most. It's how you show up for your family, your community, and everyone else that depends on you. That's why for 125 years, Firestone has been building tires with one thing in mind. To deliver products that are as reliable as you are. Firestone, always dependable since 1900.
- [02:11]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
People should assume, unfortunately. Like assume something's going to go wrong and kind of work work backwards from there, Right? You know, assume that some emergency be like, okay, thank you very much. I'm going to call you back. Right? Your bank will never call you, Right? Your bank calls you hang up the phone, look in the back of your card, call the bank. Right? If you think something's a scam prize.
- [02:40]
Lori Siegel
I'm Lori Siegel and you're listening to Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens. So, Johnny, I'm so happy to have you here today. We had a brief conversation in Davos about the future of identity and fraud, and it terrified Me, but you are the person that people go to to talk about this and you know a lot about the bad guys on the Internet and what they're doing and how they're doing it. So without sounding like major CEO elevator pitch, explain to us common folk what it is that you do.
- [03:16]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
So Secure has built the largest identity verification, fraud prediction and anti money laundering platform in the world. So we build AI on offense to enable enterprises, fintech, financial services, insurance, gaming, governments, marketplaces really give them the tools and algorithms to be able to combat folks that are committing scams, stealing identities, perpetuating different types of fraud. And so we've been at it for a little over 10 years. So we've been studying these problems pretty intimately and have I think a pretty unique seat at the table. At onboarding, at login and account takeover, at money movement, call center digital in branch, we see all different types of attacks. And yeah, I'm excited to be with you today and share a little bit about what we see in the world.
- [04:09]
Lori Siegel
I am curious. You mentioned kind of AI for offense. We hear over and over a lot of tech folks say okay, AI is going to counter AI. AI can do a lot of bad, but it can also do a lot of good. So talk about how you're using machine learning and artificial intelligence to catch, to prevent fraud and why that's a lot better than the old fashioned methods can explain it to us. I would say like we are you know, not in the room at, at the company.
- [04:36]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
We have a lot of security so we know you're not in the room at the company.
- [04:40]
Lori Siegel
That's a, do you have a. I, I guess I imagine you would have a lot of security given and what it is that you do.
- [04:46]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
I was a little, I was a little tardy to this our start here because I was on the phone with our CSAIL going through some more recent changes that we're making. But yeah, it's a, it's pretty, pretty locked down.
- [04:57]
Lori Siegel
Are people trying to, I mean because of what you do and I promise I won't go on this whole thing but it is fascinating because you, you literally protect some of the largest companies from fraud and all sorts of attacks. Like do people try to attack you guys?
- [05:12]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
I think most companies that have something of value are under attack all the time. Fraudsters, we often say they're, they're like water. They find the path of least resistance. They're very good at like testing weak points.
- [05:24]
Lori Siegel
Right.
- [05:25]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
They just will perpetually test and test and test, try to find policy, policy gaps, try to find weak employees. You know, it's unbelievable. You know, Laurie, if you were to start at so cure tomorrow, like you'd immediately be attacked with gift cards. CEO request inbounds phishing attacks. They're very, very, very good at like saying like o see someone on how to LinkedIn change, boom attack. It's a, it's, it's remarkable. But so anyway, so on the solution set, so we do lots of red teaming. So part of the AI on offense is we create a lot of synthetic identities ourselves. We mature a lot of synthetic identities ourselves. We're trying to build and create synthetic identities that kind of permeate throughout the organ kind of ecosystem. We are creating deep fakes ourselves. We are running injection attacks. We have an internal red team that basically is perpetually trying to figure out how to, how to beat our own systems. We also use multiple external teams to simulate similar types of attacks. They go create fake identities, manipulated identities. They go hire forgers to go actual, go build these fake documents themselves. It's a perpetual game of trying to stay two or three or four steps ahead in terms of how we are kind of dogfooding our own capabilities.
- [06:45]
Lori Siegel
It has to be. Every day is kind of its own little adventure. Where you are. Could you take us into your day to day? What types of customers do you have and what kind of threats are you seeing? Obviously they've evolved over the last years. But take us behind these very locked and secure doors and tell us what you're seeing.
- [07:09]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
All customers that move money, right, or something of value are under attack all the time. Fake identities, stolen identities, manipulated identities. Synthetic identities are being used to try to open new accounts, new bank accounts, new investment accounts, anything that can be used to like move money. It could be folks that are perpetuating promo abuse at one of the sports book or prediction markets, right? It could be one of the e commerce and marketplaces that are like, get $1,000, Lori, if you want to become a new driver. Sign up for this new, you know, E commerce subscription. You know, get your first six months free. Any of those things. Fraudsters are trying to steal that thing of value, right? Give 20 bucks, Lori, if you recommend a friend, right? Well, if that fake account then goes and recommends 50 fake friends, right? That's made a thousand bucks. And so you have. All of this is like a game of kind of cat and mouse all the time. So I'd say, like, I think to maybe listeners, there's just attacks going on all the time. Fraud rings en masse are hitting most of the consumer applications that, that, that you deal with. Maybe one of the interesting things that has been more recent, I'd say over the Last kind of 12 months has been the North Korean, you know, it worker attack. That has been something that, that we've seen a huge, prolific kind of acceleration of in terms of employment. We are seeing a, like enormous. Some, some cases, like 80, 90% of all job applications are fake or fraudulent.
- [08:54]
Lori Siegel
Organized crime rates say that. I mean, what, what do you mean? Like coming into where remote jobs, people. So you're. If I'm understanding correct, and please correct me if I'm wrong. So you're saying this is a new deepfake type of scam where you would have someone from North Korea trying to apply for a job here, say in the United States, taking on the identity of taking on a synthetic identity. So a completely different identity using deep fakes. Is that correct? Am I understanding that?
- [09:24]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Yeah. North Korea's estimate about 6,000 workers are operating inside US technology companies right now under fake or synthetic identities. Now the synthetic identities can be, you know, it can be a manipulated version of Lori, like on a resume. It could be a deep fake of Lori, right, That's controlled by someone else. It could be any combination of these things because you get paid, you get a paycheck every two weeks, right? And you can use AI to do a lot of these jobs, like certainly lower level jobs. Many cases, folks are obviously trying to get access to trade secrets and ip and in many cases, folks are trying to get access to code bases or create backdoors for some of these foreign regimes. And so, yeah, I mean, unfortunately the money then goes back to some of these foreign adversaries that are funding weapon programs, that are funding wars, that are funding obviously folks that are not super friendly to the Western world. And we're really seeing it across the board. I mean, there's been some public attacks with some of the large crypto exchanges, but we've seen infiltration to some of the major banks. We've seen infiltration to some of the support centers, and then certainly really widespread. The number of fake job applicants that everyone is seeing is growing very, very, very fast.
- [10:57]
Lori Siegel
You know, it is, I keep hearing over and over again workplace job applicants fraud. So it certainly seems like this is something that's just like, as you're saying over the last year or so is just becoming a completely new attack. Can you walk us through how companies can even look out for that? How, how people even know and is this just fake applicants and. Or is it actually deep Fakes, as in I'm interviewing for a job, but it's not really me. I have, it's a video, a deep fake video. I mean, can you explain kind of very, in a granular way what that looks like and how that plays out especially are these remote jobs?
- [11:33]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Yeah, you know, I'll kind of frame it because it's a similar attack pattern across all of these lawyers. Right. So it's a, you know, if you're applying for a job, you submit, you know, information on your resume. You likely had the resume auto complete the job application. Your resume likely is even fake. Right. The PII is manipulated. The email doesn't really belong to Lori or is brand new. It's, you know, on the resume it's like, hey, Lori somehow worked at Gemini and OpenAI and Anthropic in the last five years.
- [12:09]
Kal Penn
Izzy.
- [12:10]
Lori Siegel
They offer really good, they're all trying to poach. It could happen.
- [12:15]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
So all the best resumes, like, like you see these pristine resumes and they're fake. Like everyone that specific applicant happens to have an IQ of like 150 and you know, has had that many of the best jobs in the world. But so you, you know, again, I think whether it's a fintech application or gaming application or unemployment application, you see a lot of the same patterns. There's geospoofing. So it's like Lori's in New York now of a sudden, Lori's in Vancouver. You see emails that are new, you see phones that are manipulated, lots of MVNOs, you see domain email domains that are higher risk domains, you see fraudsters taking over entire domains. And then, you know, again, as people are kind of going through the process, documents are fake, documents are manipulated. Right. Maybe they're injecting a deep fake image. And so you're picking up lots of little patterns. So like all of our, our hands like have a little bit of a micro shake, right? And so you can actually pick up that in an accelerometer of a phone. So you can actually determine if a phone is being held. You can look at like the gimbal of a camera to actually determine the angle. And so does the angle at that moment match the actual video file that's being submitted? And so even in session you could see these like little shifts that could determine is there actually a manipulation of the video or image. And so it's again, it really becomes a kind of a combination of all these things, whether it's a job application, a sports book application, you know, someone filing their taxes, someone registering to vote. You know, any of these become, you know, attack vectors where, you know, these types of kind of patterns can be used to, you know, unfortunately hide nefarious or in many cases like criminal activity that we're having to counteract.
- [14:06]
Lori Siegel
I mean, and you have to get more and more sophisticated as the attacks get more sophisticated. I want to paraphrase something you said a little while ago. You said to tell a live human from a video feed was visible to the naked eye just two years ago, but it's no longer detectable that way. And establishing trust between strangers transacting online might be one of the most defining conversations of the next couple of years. It used to be in tech that data was gold. Is trust the new gold?
- [14:33]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
You need a lot of data to determine trust. And that's where the machines actually can reason over way more information than our human eyes can. Right. In many of these sessions, we have 30, 40, 50 models Lori running to try to have the machines determine whether they should trust the session or not. And you can be looking at thousands or tens of thousands of elements in milliseconds. Which again goes back to this AI fighting AI in a world where trust on the Internet is really hard to determine.
- [15:12]
Lori Siegel
Can you just tell me. I know you probably have to sign a lot of papers that make it so you can't say a lot about these types of things, but like, what's the craziest thing you've seen? Like, you've just seen some insane things in your career, I imagine. Like when you look back at the movie of your life, what is going to be like the plot point of, of you at this company building this and this thing shocked you? Like what is that scene?
- [15:41]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
I think, honestly, I think some of the like in person stuff, ironically is the most brazen.
- [15:46]
Joseph (Mostly Human Team Member)
Like what?
- [15:47]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Yeah, like we, we, we stopped someone a couple of weeks ago that I think they were in something like 39 different zip codes in like eight or nine different states with like hundreds of different identity documents where this individual had been on all types of these bat like block lists. So they were going into banks, getting stopped and then just going to another one. And so yeah, I think just the, the brazenness that, that we see and, and, and of course that's, you know, that's, that's in person, which I think is, is, is its own unique. Yeah, but online, like we've seen attacks where we will see, you know, Lori's face. Someone pretended to be Lori like thousands and thousands of times in a couple of like, couple of hour period. Across 30, 40, 50 customers. Yeah, again, I think that this is the fun cat and mouse game that we get to play all the time. And yeah, I think just the sheer sophistication of the automation and the number of different attacks people are to perpetuate today and the surface area in the Internet that they're able to, you know, permeate is, is, yeah, to me one of the, one of the most kind of fun parts of the job because we're, I often analogize our work to like special teams and sports. You know. No, no, no one cares about the kickers until something goes wrong. And so, you know, we, we, we very much are playing, I think, a really important special teams role and how the Internet operates. Right. And how, you know, many of these organizations, you know, are, are, are able to provide on the other side of, you know, a beautiful user experience to the good consumer.
- [17:33]
Lori Siegel
Speaking of sports references, you are probably one of the few tech CEOs that I've interviewed who has a background being an athlete of sorts. So didn't I see something along the lines of you learned a very important lesson from totally screwing up a play in college football? Is that did I, I didn't make that up. That's real, right?
- [17:54]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Yeah, I think I was the only two sport athlete in the ACC at Boston College and played football and baseball and yeah, had an amazing, amazing experience. But yeah, my very first punt of my very first game at bc, the kick returner was late coming on the field, I picked my head up and the snap hit me right in the chest. And so, you know, as they say, you should only make some of these mistakes once in life. But yeah, I think a lot of the traits that you learn as an athlete, persistence and grit and hard work and delayed gratification and, you know, having a multi year plan have, yeah, boded quite well in the transition into this world.
- [18:46]
Super Troopers Announcer
Sophistication, class, restraint, dignity. None of these words have anything to do with Super Troopers three.
- [18:57]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
One, two, three, go.
- [18:59]
Tony Ayo
Barbara in the house.
- [19:01]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Hope you guys aren't too drunk already this Friday. No new info on the guy who did it. Oh, so it couldn't have been a woman?
- [19:07]
Kal Penn
Sexist.
- [19:08]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Did you ever see Ocean's 8?
- [19:09]
Super Troopers Announcer
Enough Super Troopers 3. Only in theaters Friday. Rated R under 17. Not admitted without parent.
- [19:18]
Kal Penn
Hey everyone, it's Kal Penn, the host of The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week I'm sitting down with author Matt Dinneman and narrator Jeff Aies to talk about Dungeon Crawler Carl. Matt had one line in a notebook from middle school Alien game show. It took him until 2019 to finally write it, but what came out was an out of this world audiobook phenomenon. We talked about that origin talking cat with a charisma stat that breaks the game and what it takes to voice an entire world.
- [19:53]
Audiobook Narrator
Fiction is bull so you gotta trick me into caring about what you're talking about. And that's always what I have thought of as my job. So as a narrator I always want to keep you engaged by making you feel as if I care as a narrator. And when I do dialogue, I don't want to tell you what the the characters are saying. I want you to hear firsthand.
- [20:19]
Kal Penn
Listen to Earsay the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:32]
Firestone Advertiser
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- [21:01]
Tony Ayo
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- [22:05]
Lori Siegel
Can you give us an inside look at how generative AI is reshaping fraud?
- [22:10]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Yeah, look, I think you know we've been fortunate as I was alluding to to be a part of like a number of these, these waves. But the fraud rings operate like a business. They have P Ls, they make technology investments, they look at their return. And so as the cost of compute and the cost of AI, right? Certainly with even like open weight models, obviously many of the new Chinese models coming out, you have a 10th, the 20th, a 50th of the price to be able to perpetuate and utilize some of these technologies. It's really a shift in terms of the economic incentives for fraudsters because it's been so much cheaper. So I think it's cheaper. You actually do more of it. Right.
- [22:57]
Lori Siegel
Wow.
- [22:57]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
And then a lot of this white collar digital crime doesn't end up getting prosecuted. If you're selling heroin or cocaine or, you know, obviously other stuff on the streets, you're actually seeing a lot of those criminals are moving into this type of like white collar digital crime, right? You're seeing, there's been good reports, I think in Kingston and Jamaica, a lot of the old call centers are now becoming scam centers, right? And you see a lot of this kind of conversion of like traditional street crime is now moving to this type of crime because it's actually so easy. And so like the tools have been made available to everyone, right? You can obviously go and create many of these accounts for free. You don't even have to put in any amount of pii and you have access to this supercomputer, right. That can perpetuate the creation of synthetic identities, right? I can say, hey, Lori lives on the street. Give me, give me, you know, a million fake identities that are all in this zip code, right? Like, here's all these fake documents I have. And so the bearer, the barrier to becoming a fraudster, right, is no longer about capital and in many cases, not even about skill. And if you need the skills, you can go pay 9.99 online in a YouTube video or Instagram or Telegram, and they'll send you a book of how to go run, you know, these scams or attacks. And so these like fraud as a service offerings in combination with AI in combination with the digitization of really everything in our life has created this, you know, effectively unlimited surface area of potential attacks. And so, you know, as I said, fraudsters are just testing, testing, testing, testing. And it's an accelerating kind of rewriting of the rules of fraud because of the new technology capabilities.
- [24:51]
Lori Siegel
I just, I really believe to some degree that way beyond the companies that you help, right? Like these, these multibillion dollar businesses that we all to some degree are going to be living fake lives on the Internet and we don't even realize it. And I came to this conclusion when I realized I had many fake lives on the Internet. And you know, you could say, well you're real, kind of a public figure this or that. But I, as I started digging into my own, I say fake lives. I found there was a lorry selling crypto. And then I connected that Lori selling crypto. It was a lot of my, it was my identity, it was me. It was a whole fake profile that had the pictures of my wedding, this and that, plus a little bit of something else. And there as I started digging, it was so far beyond fake Lori. There was fake this person and fake this person, all these fake people talking to each other. And then I started reverse imaging, you know, some of these images. And this person who was doing this is actually works at a police department in Ohio. And all of these normal people, these people who live in the real world were part of this fake bubble, this fake life of fraud that they had no idea about. And so when I think about the future of AI and what you're just talking about, which is like the democratization of these tools that make it so easy at a time when our identities are out there for anyone, and now it's easy to do it. That's what I worry about, this idea of these fake lives and, and what will be, you know, and the things that we don't even know about that us normal people out here don't even know about.
- [26:24]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Even the risks. I mean our team, there's like open source tools, Lori like cling, which is, you know, there's been a lot of really good videos made on, on X. You know, my team was able to take a public image of me and with a free Software in about 20 minutes go create me replicating whatever it was they were doing. And so Laurie, if someone's trying to go create a fake crypto account with your image, you know, we're having to do a real time search is like, hey, is this an image? That's a public image. You know, I just dramatically, you know, changed the cost and skill to commit fraud as obviously image manipulation, there's voice clone manipulation. Yeah, it's, it's, it is really kind of changed the calculus in terms of, you know, how do you trust, how do you trust people on the Internet? And it's, and it's hitting everything, it's hitting everything from the folks trying to implement age assurance, right, Regulations which has, you know, been a sweeping change of the Internet, obviously, over the last 12 to 18 months. But, like, 12, 14, 16 year olds are crafty. They know how to create deep fakes too.
- [27:31]
Lori Siegel
Yeah, I'd love to play for you. I, I recently, I get scammed. People try to scam me all the time, I think just because I'm a human who lives in this world and is online. But I, I had someone call me recently who said that I got locked out or said that someone was trying to hack into my Google account. And to give you a sense, like, this guy sounded like pretty kind of normal and, you know, and he had some like, good information. But, you know, I guess like 15 years of doing this, I started. The alarm bell started going off and so I just turned the tables on him and I, and I, and I just asked him about why he was doing this, you know, with the caveat that I was like, you're pretty good at this. Like, can you explain to me a little bit? And he did. And so I'd love to, since we're, you know, you, you talk to, you understand threats at a much larger scale. But this is my kind of one little window into it. I'd love to play it for you and get your thoughts.
- [28:26]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
That'd be great.
- [28:27]
Lori Siegel
So what for me are you after?
- [28:30]
K
Yeah, so we're, we're targeting people who have cryptocurrency.
- [28:33]
Lori Siegel
Like, do you ever feel bad about it at all? Or do you ever think you draw you cross the line?
- [28:39]
K
You know, there was a point beginning where I'm like, I was like, is this what I want to do? Like, you know, like, then your life, like, you know, just. It kind of goes around circles and you realize, you know, like, this is. You see, you see how the amount of power I'm able to have, you know, being able to do this and, you know, it just, it just gets you, like, ready to go. You know, it gets you active.
- [29:00]
Lori Siegel
I mean, it's like, it's like an adrenaline thing for you. It's just, I don't know, like, I, Every time I get one of these calls, I think about, like, people I love and like, and, and how it's taken me, like, I mean, just because I've spent a lot of time in tech and in the hacker communities and whatnot, where I'm like, okay, that's what this person is doing. But it's hard for even me sometimes. And I'm like, to be like, whoa, like, that's it. This seems really real. Even though I kind of know, and so I, I just worry about other folks and I cover a lot on artificial intelligence and, and, and so, yeah, you know, I don't think, I'm not looking at this as like a black and white thing of like, you're just like a bad person.
- [29:36]
K
I just, I think it's something that's completely bad. You know, it's, it's something, of course it's against the law, but, you know, it's something that's, you know, like maybe an ethical dilemma, something like that. But, you know, like your, your average grandma, you know, that's, that's not a person I'm taking from. It's, it's not a worry. You have to have if, if your, your own mother going on getting SC'd by somebody like, like mean, getting logged into the bank, blah, blah, blah, you know, all that. I don't, I don't, I don't deal with that type of stuff.
- [30:03]
Lori Siegel
Where do you draw the line?
- [30:08]
K
Crypto. That's it. Crypto is the line. If they don't have crypto or out, you know, I don't care about your Social Security number. Of course, like, you know, I could put all the time to getting your social, creating a bank account under your name, you know, social engineering, you know, like you into verifying your face ID with, with other applications and, and all this, all this other stuff, you know, but that's, that's where you draw the line because, you know, there's, there's no point doing that, that type of stuff with people if, if you're actually taking them for all they have, you know, hacker ethics.
- [30:37]
Lori Siegel
Johnny, do you see any of that?
- [30:39]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
I was actually thinking, I was like, man, you know, it's amazing that he has like his own ethical line like that he's not willing to cross. Yeah, it's amazing.
- [30:48]
Lori Siegel
Yeah. I mean, what was shocking to me was he was so young. And that goes back to kind of what you're saying about the democratization of these tools. I'm sure you're seeing sophisticated hackers organize groups in North Korea, but the folks who are calling me are, you know, maybe part of some of these groups, but they're young, young. They're, you know, I think he said, and who knows, take with a grain of salt, but he was like 17 years old or something like that, which is pretty astounding. So interesting, the spectrum and demographics, right?
- [31:16]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
I mean, on one side there's like, hey, I watched a tick tock video and it said I can go, you know, you know, basically get Free money by doing X, Y and Z. I think there's like, one side of that that, like, they saw, you know, some ad or Instagram or, you know, ended up in some telegram group with their friends. There's also the other side of it, Lori, which is, like, you also have people that are, like, human trafficked into scams where they are actually, like, required to do this. Right. You know, their passports have been taken away, their driver's license have been taken away, their identities have been taken away. They're actually put into these centers. And so even within, like, this branch of, like, all the inbound scammers and phone calls, you know, you have. You have varying degrees of, like, you know, where. Where they're actually coming from, coming from physically and then coming from even in their own life, life events of, like, how they. How they got into that business of,
- [32:10]
Lori Siegel
you know, perpetuating scams, and you stop the scams. But do you ever get a sense of where exactly they're originating from and do reports on the types of folks. Are you working with law enforcement at all? How does it. How does it work? Because you probably have a lot more information into the who behind this, not just how it's happening.
- [32:29]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
There's like a movie everywhere. Everywhere, all the time, all at once. Yeah. I mean, honestly, we see Chinese attacks, we see North Korean attacks, Russian attacks, Armenian attacks. There's Korean gangs. There's. There's stuff that's originating. The IPs are in Kansas that, you know, again, that are using some version of, like, Bangladeshi English. Right. On their device. There's device farms that are sitting in New York or Maine and are obviously being controlled by different parts of the world.
- [33:05]
Lori Siegel
But now, if that's not bad enough, we have AI making its own decision to go attack. Right. So in today's kind of episode of dystopia, you have OpenAI announcing some of the most advanced models just went rogue and they broke out of an AI secure testing environment and launched a cyber attack. What does this mean for your industry? How does this change the game? Are we prepared for it?
- [33:30]
Kal Penn
Yeah.
- [33:30]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
I mean, when you have the labs losing control of their own models.
- [33:36]
Super Troopers Announcer
Yeah.
- [33:36]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
You have a real, real cyber risk that's forthcoming. I mean, I think, you know, Laura, the clip you played, like, that voice very easily could have been all fake. That could have been a simulated conversation. I don't know how much time. You know, I don't know if you've named your chatbot friend that you talked to, but, you know, like, whether it's Claude or You know, or chatgpt, like, obviously you can sit and have a normal conversation with them, right? And obviously I think you've seen some of the simulations where they have two AI agents talking to one another, right? And so you can run little bit to test. There's like little like props that, you know, that you can inject to determine even if that scam is even a human. Right? That could be, that could just be an AI that's running that scam on the back of it. You're assuming that was a young boy, right? That's an assumption you actually don't know. Like, what's that? You know, that's an AI agent that said, like, okay, use 11th grade English. Have a tone of like light, right. Of a shy boy, right. That, you know, has gone astray and like that becomes the Persona of the AI that's perpetuating a scam. It could be an older, Hey, I have it, have this. Be an older gentleman that talks lightly like a grandpa that's going to go and perpetuate this type of, you know, like, obviously all that stuff can be trained and be really, really, really targeted in terms of how they're perpetuating their attacks. But yeah, it's a, it's, it's, you know, for the rest of us that are using, you know, the models from the labs as they're provided. Yeah, it's certainly scary that the labs themselves who are supposed to be maintaining, you know, some of this control. Right. You obviously see lots of stuff as you, you know, as you, as you try to run some of these queries into ChatGPT, they're like, we do not perpetuate fraud. We do not help you steal an identity. You know, we, you know, that that is a violation of our terms. Obviously, it's quite scary if the AI itself is immediately breaking outside of its own constraints.
- [35:33]
Lori Siegel
You know, one of the things that I have seen with someone I love very dearly in my life as they keep falling victim to these things, scams of AI generated Bill Gates talking about Alzheimer's and where, you know, they prey on vulnerable people who are desperate to feel better. And the next thing you know, they're buying supplements and they are charged over and over and over again and it's almost impossible to get off of this. And, and they prey on vulnerability of people who, who are older and, you know, it's my next investigation where I want to figure out who's behind some of these scams. But I'm wondering, you know, I know you quite a bit from the enterprise. But do you see anything like that? How would you measure that type of fraud in comparison?
- [36:17]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it'll be an interesting follow up, Laurie, as you, you dig into some of the origination. I mean, you obviously have places like the scam triangle in Asia, right, Where Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. Right, Are like frequently overlapping, where they have like this kind of like drug producing golden triangle where they have massive scam centers that are perpetuating all of this text romance scams, right? Like lost children kidnapped, you know, kids have been kidnapped. I mean, like, this is like industrial scale, primarily run by Chinese organized crime syndicates that are sitting on the back of this stuff, right? And I gave the example of like, there are, you know, hundreds of thousands of workers that have been unfortunately lured in from different parts of Africa or different parts of Asia for high paying, you know, tech or like translation job advertisements, right? Only to have like their passports taken or their driver's license taken and be basically immediately shepherded into these compounds where they're then kind of handed a script and, you know, put to work. And yeah, so I think people don't appreciate how like the scale and sophistication and the industrialization that actually is sitting behind a lot of these, these, these fraud attacks.
- [37:41]
Lori Siegel
That must be kind of scary for you. I mean, not to get human with you, but like, that's kind of scary for you because you spend your days going after probably the larger ones, the industry, the scaled ones that you're kind of referencing. Are you ever worried at all?
- [37:55]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Yeah, I'd say, like, look, our, our focus is like, there's a bunch of patterns of these things, Lori, that we're focused on, you know, some stopping and predicting the pattern. So whether they come from a North Korean attack or Chinese account or Russian attack or Armenian attack. For us, it's. We're just trying to determine like, this is not Lori.
- [38:15]
Lori Siegel
Yeah, right. Yeah.
- [38:16]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Like Lori comes from an iPhone, she speaks English, she uses Chrome, she's at her home in New York. Like, this is the email that she's had for 27 years. This is her driver's license. Nothing's been manipulated, Right. We're not seeing like, as, as we think about, you know, these, these all the kind of patterns, right? For us, like it actually doesn't really matter what, who and where the attack is originating from. It's all these signals of the attacks, you know, that we're obviously helping our customers stop while at the same time obviously trying to build a really, really, really strong view of like what good consumers look like, but. But, yeah, it's a. I don't know. I try to not think too much about, like, the attacks.
- [38:59]
Lori Siegel
You have to kind of separate it.
- [39:01]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Yeah, my wife says I'm pretty good at compartmentalization of things, and so maybe that one I put, like, deep, deep, deep, deep back in my mind.
- [39:20]
Super Troopers Announcer
Sophistication, class, restraint, dignity. None of these words have anything to do with Super Troopers three.
- [39:30]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
One, two, three, go.
- [39:33]
Tony Ayo
Barbara in the house.
- [39:34]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Hope you guys aren't too drunk already this Friday, no new info on the
- [39:38]
Super Troopers Announcer
guy who did it.
- [39:39]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Oh, so it couldn't have been a woman Sexist. You ever see Ocean's 8?
- [39:42]
Super Troopers Announcer
Enough. Super Troopers 3 Onan Theater Friday. Rated R under 17. Not admitted without peril.
- [39:51]
Kal Penn
Hey, everyone, it's Kal Penn, host of Irsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Wil Wheaton, who played Gordie Lachance in stand by me 40 years ago and now narrates Stephen King's the Body, the novella that inspired it all. We talk about what it's like to return to a story that shaped his life, channeling his memories of River Phoenix in the recording booth and. And why the friendships you have at 12 might be the most important ones you'll ever have. I know Gordie Lachance. I am Gordy Lachance.
- [40:25]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Like, I mean, even when I was
- [40:27]
Kal Penn
a little kid, I was Gordy Lachance when I didn't know it. Listen to Earsay the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [40:38]
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- [41:07]
Tony Ayo
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- [42:11]
Lori Siegel
What is coming next that no one is talking about? Like, be the first to say it here. Like, what is beyond our imagination when it comes to this?
- [42:21]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Look, like companies are vulnerable to attacks. Companies have holes in their authentication systems. They have holes in call centers. They have holes in login. Humans can be socially engineered. Look, I think we spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, I'll give it kind of two parts of the answer. One is like, when you can just have agents running all day, every day testing, like, literally trying to find vulnerabilities. Like, you're gonna see what we see right now, which is like, fraud rates are spiking dramatically. And so as the cost of agents and certainly again, what you're seeing with open weight models is like, it's really expensive to run a Opus 4.8 or Fable 5 model. Like, it's a, that is very expensive to run these types of, like, simulated tests. But as the cost of these models come down, like, basically people can be attacking every vulnerability all the time in these organizations. And so I, I think fraud is only going in one, one direction. I think it's only going up. The, the second thing, which is, like, quite, quite scary is, you know, the risk at some point in the next 10 years of quantum being able to basically break all of these security systems. But that is, that's on the back end of this, right? Which is like, hey, the, the next wave of technology with quantum computing, you know, potentially provides a pretty draconian future in terms of cybersecurity and ability to actually stop some of these models from running rampant. So I'd say the two of those things are, I don't know, the thing that, again, in the back of our mind, keeps us up as we think about what 10 years out looks like in this world.
- [44:12]
Lori Siegel
Let's manifest really quick because we've manifested the dystopian We've seen the dystopian version. We're kind of living through that. And you're doing your best to fight against that. You have a very successful business because of, because of where we are manifest, what it looks like if we get it right, you know, if I, if identity verification in an AI era works, paint that picture for us.
- [44:33]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Yeah, definitely. Look, in any of these models, there's two sides to the coin, right? So obviously, you know, like, if you can get really, really, really, really good, Laurie, at predicting bad, the opposite, like that is only, you know, 10 basis points, 20 basis points, you know, 101,000 basis points. Well, the other like 90% of people are good. And so if we can get really, really good at stopping that problem, you actually can provide beautiful user experiences to the rest of us on the Internet, right? Many of us have gotten used to instant gratification. And so, you know, historically, if you submitted an application, Lori, they'd be like, we're going to get back to you in a week, let us review xyz. We'll get back to you in a week. Now you can actually provide beautiful real time user experiences, right? I mean, we're doing a lot of work right now with the US federal government, right? As they rebuild the front end user interface, right? They rebuild a lot of the government websites, they rebuild how the federal government can interact with US citizens. And a core part of that is identity. A core part of that is trust. A core part of that is authentication. And so the goal, you know, on the good side of things is if we can get really good at partition, partitioning bad and bad actors and all these different types of AI attacks, you know, we can move to digital voting, right? People that are unemployed can get access to real time funds availability, right? People that get marked as unemployed can be presented with jobs instantaneously that could fit their profile, right? And then you have, you know, you can get people back into the workforce, right? It's crazy, Laurie, the amount of time we have to wait for tax refunds, right? That's just, you know, some of that system, some of that's trust. And so look, I think for us it's about providing like a safer Internet, a more seamless Internet, a faster moving, lower latency Internet. And that touches everything from how you buy things in E commerce, right? How you transact with fintech financial services, how you interact with government services, how of course, even you interact with social media properties. And so we believe that if you can really get really, really accurate in terms of identity and trust and age. You can actually provide really incredible user experience to people across all digital mediums. And I think this is kind of the fun part for people at our team because we are citizens, right? We are consumers, right. We want these things for ourselves. And yeah, that is like the counter, right? You have a safer Internet for 13 year olds, right. You have all your age restricted products. Right. Can actually be in the right hands. And yeah, I mean, for all of us, hopefully none of us are getting scammed. None of us lose our life savings, none of our family members lose it. And so that ability to solve both problems is the thing that gets us fired up every day and has for the last decade plus.
- [47:27]
Lori Siegel
To do what you do, you have to be a little bit crazy because that's a wild job and a wild thing to be doing at a fascinating time. Is it personal to you?
- [47:38]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Oh, man, I think, look, I think all, all of us get to like choose what we, what we, you know, what we do in life. And you know, I think this is of all the things, I don't know, mid-20s me and early 30s me and I guess, you know, early 40s, me, thinks it's pretty fun getting to work on a thing that impacts basically every person in the world, right. We processed close to about 6 billion identities last year. We expect this year it's probably going to be, we will probably have processed at some point in time, at some touch point, every single person on the planet that is on the Internet. And so, yeah, I think, you know, obviously a lot of us can work on a lot of different things and this has been a thing that to me has been deeply rewarding and actually being able to work on something that really touches in some form and hopefully benefits the life and some small experience, really everyone on the planet. And I don't think there's a lot of things that, you know, I don't think there's a lot of things you can work on that really touches every single person. And you know, this has been, yeah, this has been the medium, if you will, through which, you know, we're able to do that. And I get a lot of joy and both doing something that is, you know, capitalistic and economically beneficial, but something that's like tremendously societally beneficial and, you know, something that I think really, really has to exist and certainly with the proliferation of AI and acceleration of AI fraud is a thing that, yeah, really, if it doesn't exist, you know, we could be living in a very different, different world.
- [49:15]
Lori Siegel
Yeah, I just want to give the Last quick question to Joseph on our team. So I know Joseph had a question for you. So Joseph, you want to, want to ask.
- [49:23]
Joseph (Mostly Human Team Member)
Thanks so much for, for coming on the pod. I'm, I'm on mostly human team and Lori always lets me ask one question per episode. So it's like my little segment. I'm, I'm curious since a lot of your, a lot of your work it sounds is like on the macroeconomic and corporate scale. I'm just curious. Until quantum computing ruins everything, what can, you know, like what can we, what can like the individual everyday person do in their day to day? What strategy slash tips do you have to get around online, you know, and not be hacked or fall victim to deepfake fraud, you know. And have you ever been hacked? You know.
- [50:08]
Lori Siegel
Oh man, it was a sneaky two, but that's okay.
- [50:11]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah.
- [50:13]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Joseph's learning how to have like part one, part two, part three of his questions.
- [50:18]
Joseph (Mostly Human Team Member)
I get more and more minutes every time.
- [50:20]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
That's good. That means, that means you're asking good questions, Joseph. So it could be going, could be going the opposite direction. Look, no, it's, it's, it's always like, like the consumerism of this is like freeze your credit. So that will cover one part of the world. So if your credit's frozen, someone can't open a credit card in your name, someone can't take out a mortgage in your name. There's a, there's a lot of things, anything that's kind of pulling or running a soft pulling of credit that will all be blocked and will be back in your control. So the first thing is like, like freeze your credit, go through, go through the main bureaus. It's like pretty seamless to freeze and unfreeze, but that's something that I think is super, super important. And by the way, that's not just for adults. For those that have kids like your kid 1 year old, 2 year old, 3 year old, 4 year old, their SSNs can be stolen and used to go create synthetic identities. So it's not uncommon that your kid turns 18 and they have $100,000 of debt and their credit's just destroyed. So not just adults, kids, kids. Freeze your credit for your kids as a part of that, you can set up fraud alerts, right? There's a lot of services. You can set up fraud alerts and there's lots of different kind of identity monitoring that you can do, I think so on the credit side of the house, Joseph, like check your credit reports. I think most people are not Security experts. But like set up Multi Factor Authentication. If you have anything that is like secure, right, that you don't want someone to have access to have Multi factor Authentication. What multifactor authentication means is it in order to be authenticated, you have to have multiple different things. So if you know the username password, Joseph to your XYZ bank account, also require a second factor to get in. So that could be a pass key, that could be an sms, could be a voice call. Always have Multi Factor Authentication. Because if Joseph, you're anything you have that's actually involved in a breach, well, the breach will then give them your username password. And so if you don't have that second factor, they're in like, you know, in, on and off to the races. Obviously. Use strong passwords, don't reuse your passwords, use. I mean, there's lots of, there's lots of different kind of password managers that you can use. Watch out for phishing, right? Lori, you know, had her like antennas up, you know, on that scam call. There are a lot of phishing attempts. They're very good PayPal links, crypto links. They'll figure out, right? Lori, I don't know. You have an ATT call, they'll pretend to be attached. They'll figure out who your bank is. They'll be like, pretend to be Chase. So have your antennas up for phishing links. Don't click on unsolicited links. Try to click in the root of the email. Joseph. Sometimes if you see, and you'll see it says like, you know, the email will look, it'll visually show at Chase. And then if you click on the actual receiver, if it seems fishy and you look at the actual receiver and you click into it, you'll see the root email that it actually came from. And then, yeah, just be smart, right? I mean, don't send, you know, oh, Joseph, you can send me cash in the mail if you want, buddy, but don't send anyone else cash in the mail. Don't send checks, right? There's a reason that the Treasury's like, we're not sending checks anymore. Fraudsters have been buying the keys from the regional mail drop zones. They've been paying off USPS or, you know, workers to get like the main switch key or they've been building or making keys to go steal mail. So don't send stuff in the mail. That's not a good idea. So I know some of those things, Joseph. You may already know some of those. You may be net new.
- [54:19]
Joseph (Mostly Human Team Member)
Thank you Very.
- [54:20]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
But look, I think like, yeah, be. Just be, be, be, be be aware. People should assume unfort. Like assume something's going to go wrong and kind of work. Work backwards from there. Right. Assume that, you know, your child's not being kidnapped when you get a call. You know, assume that some emergency. Be like, okay, thank you very much. I'm going to call you back. Right? Your banks don't. Your bank will never call you. Your bank calls, you hang up the phone, look in the back of your card, call the bank. Right. If you think something's a scam prior. And so, yeah, I mean, those would be on my. Those would be top of my list. Joseph. Of some tips.
- [55:01]
Joseph (Mostly Human Team Member)
Cool. Thank you so much.
- [55:02]
Lori Siegel
That was great, actually. So many tips. That's amazing. So thank you. I really, really appreciate that. And I know folks listening will too. Thanks for your time. Johnny. That was awesome. Wasn't that delicious?
- [55:27]
Podcast Host
So good.
- [55:28]
Kal Penn
Your bill, ladies.
- [55:29]
Lori Siegel
I got it. No, I got it.
- [55:33]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Seriously, I insist. I insisted first. Don't be silly.
- [55:36]
Tony Ayo
You'll not be silly.
- [55:37]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
People with the Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases.
- [55:44]
Podcast Host
Okay. Rock, paper, scissors for it.
- [55:46]
Super Troopers Announcer
Rock, paper, scissors.
- [55:46]
Podcast Host
Paper, scissors.
- [55:47]
Tony Ayo
Shoot.
- [55:48]
Lori Siegel
No.
- [55:49]
Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
The Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card. Visit Wells Fargo.com ActiveCash Terms apply.
- [55:57]
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- [56:26]
Tony Ayo
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Johnny (Fraud Expert / CEO)
Wait, I came in for two things. How is this $47? All right, we're gonna need a plan here.
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