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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [00:22]
Vanessa
of $45 for three months, $90 for
- [00:23]
Patrick Coughlin
six months or $180 for a 12 month plan.
- [00:25]
Vanessa
Required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees.
- [00:27]
Patrick Coughlin
Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes.
- [00:29]
Lily Houston Smith
Me slow when network is busy. See terms.
- [00:34]
Patrick Coughlin
To track back a scam phone call that had maybe originated in Myanmar or Bangladesh and hopped across three other countries before it actually got to an AT&T or Verizon account, means you have to essentially go and get the equivalent of a subpoena, work in a bilateral agreement with law enforcement in multiple different countries to track down the bad guys, who, by the way, when you do find them, they've already packed up and moved and gone on to a different phone number, gone on to a different bank account. And so it's just, it's a really wicked problem that requires, unfortunately, some complex solutions.
- [01:15]
Vanessa
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to so youo Parents Are Old. This week we have Patrick Coughlin, who's written an amazing book called the Dark side of the Boom, which is talking about AI. He is also the founder of Savvy Security, which is a security firm that he is going to tell us all about in terms of how we can protect our parents with some of what he's come up with. He's been in the security field for a long, long time and he's going to talk to us about scams like what the hell is going on in this country that we all have to live in perpetual fear of somebody coming to digitally rip us off and reach into our, you know, metaphorical pocket. So welcome, Patrick.
- [02:04]
Patrick Coughlin
Thank you, Vanessa. Thanks for having me.
- [02:06]
Vanessa
Yeah, no problem. I'm excited to talk to you because I was so upset that my mom cut off her home phone because she was getting so many calls from not only telemarketers but actual scammers that she just thought, I'm going to get rid of this thing. And, you know, now it's been, let's call it a decade since, since she's had a home phone. There's all sorts of people all over the world that she's new from her life, might want to call her, say, my spouse died or just like, hey, how are you doing? Are you still alive? You know, all the kind of calls you get later on in your life, she's been really cut off from them because she has just a cell phone that not all those people would have that number. So that's where I come from. Where do you come from in terms of scams and why you're fascinated by stopping them?
- [03:01]
Patrick Coughlin
I started my career shortly after 911 and was focused on how terrorist groups were using the Internet to launder money, to communicate, to spread propaganda, to recruit new members. And from there I evolved to look at cybersecurity solutions for enterprises to protect big Fortune 500 companies. And the through line really is around looking at how bad guys use technology to do harm. And about two years ago now my mom, who is 73 years old and lives in Kansas, got a call on her phone and Apple said it was coming from Courtney, my sister. And so she answers the phone and she swears she hears my sister's voice. My sister says, mom, they've got me, I'm at Walmart and if you don't pay them they're going to kill me. And then she hears a blood curdling scream. And then a man comes on the phone and says, we need $1,200 over PayPal right now or your daughter's dead. And that moment sent me down a rabbit hole of looking at what has changed in the underlying sort of scam and cyber criminal economy that what used to be targeted at three letter government agencies and then it's sophisticated enterprises was now being targeted at little Beth Coughlin in Kansas. And so what had changed and who else was being hit with these types of attacks and that sent me down that rabbit hole. And I spent two years looking at sort of the CD underbelly of the Internet and how these scams are operating. And in a past life that may have culminated in like a briefing in some windowless conference room in D.C. but given that I don't have my security clearance anymore and I'm just a private citizen, I figured, well, maybe I should just put this into a book. And yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about it. The spammers and the scammers knocked your mom offline and we want that because that's when the bad guys are winning.
- [05:08]
Vanessa
And so who are these bad guys? You know, I recently looked into the case of Jen Shaw, who is a real housewife in Salt Lake City, who was on Bravo and at the same time that she was like, you know, buying her birkin bags or whatever. She's running a boiler room, essentially that is calling up various, you know, mostly older people saying, like, do you want to make some extra money? I can help you set a website and get affiliate links and blah, blah, blah. You know, she ended up going to prison, but, you know, okay, you have a sense that she's, she's got a couple people in Utah, New York, she's got different people who are calling up, who are working together. Does that still exist today? Because we also hear, and you get into this in your book a lot about what's that These calls are coming from Asia.
- [06:01]
Patrick Coughlin
I think the question is of who is behind this is, is super interesting. And in the book we kind of use a, a trope that we call sort of the five Families of Fraud. We look at Eastern European scam groups that typically specialize in investment scams. You can go to Southeast Asia. There's entire scam in the borderlands between Myanmar and Thailand where the government just doesn't really have any authority that pop up. And they specialize typically in things like romance scams. You can go to West Africa, the original birthplace of the Nigerian prince email scam, if you remember those from, from 20, 25 years ago. Well, they've evolved. The groups there have evolved and they focus on workplace and task scams that almost sound like similar to what was being run out of Utah there. So each of these sort of geographical organized crime syndicates kind of has their specialties.
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Vanessa
Tell me more about that.
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Patrick Coughlin
Yeah, so I think India is a really interesting example where, you know, over the last 20, 30 years, we, we outsource a lot of our customer service call centers to places like India. And so you have these huge office parks that have sprouted up all over different cities in India. Large companies like Microsoft or Amazon or banks have outsourced their customer service teams there. And so you've got call centers that are operating there. But right next to Microsoft's call center might be another company called something like, I don't know, Digital Galaxy. Or they have these like sort of innocuous, sort of semi legitimate sounding names. But then when you walk in, sure, it looks just like a call center of any regular company. But instead of answering customer questions, you've got people sitting in those booths who are actually carrying a quota and charged with scamming Americans, often seniors out of their hard earned savings.
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Vanessa
And so do the same people work at them? Is it like, oh, okay, I'll just bring my resume over there? Or it's like, no, no, no. The People who work at like Galaxy Quest are like lowlifes.
- [08:11]
Patrick Coughlin
Well, so it's interesting, like in the book two week profile of a few of these employees and the way they talk about it is, you know, I graduated from university, I had a business or a computer science degree. I didn't get the job at Microsoft, but I did get a job at Galaxy Quest. Yeah. You know, and they tell their parents I got a, I got a job, I'm working in tech. And it's just a slightly different basket of tasks that I'm doing every day.
- [08:42]
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- [08:59]
Lily Houston Smith
hey guys, producer Lily Houston Smith here. Before we get back to Vanessa and Patrick's conversation, has anyone else been getting a lot more spam calls lately? For the last week or two, I've been getting four or five a day. It's so annoying. It's mostly people calling me saying I've been pre approved for debt consolidation loans or that they can help me with my tax debt.
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Scam Call Representative
I'm contacting you because you may be eligible for a partial pay installment agreement which can help reduce or resolve your tax debt. There are a few program updates on the way. So I want to take a few minutes to go over your options with you before any next steps.
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Lily Houston Smith
I don't have any tax debt. Now here are some of the scam calls that Vanessa's been getting on and
- [09:39]
Vanessa
off for a year. I have been getting these calls from spoofed numbers. So it's from like a 917 or 347, like someplace, you know, in New York. And it's like a couple of seconds of dead time. And then somebody comes on that says, mary, do you have pain? Which is my mom's name, right? I'm like, and they're, they're Asian. You can tell. And they're in a room with a lot of other people. Cause it's really loud. And I've never played it out to be like, yes, I have pain. Like, what is this? Do you want to charge my credit card $1,000 and send me some OxyContin from China? Like, what? What the hell is going on there?
- [10:21]
Patrick Coughlin
Yeah. And what's interesting is often I would say in the more sort of sophisticated scam syndicates, as we call them, sometimes those low level callers, the outbound callers, actually don't know what the real jig is.
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Vanessa
Okay, interesting.
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Patrick Coughlin
They think they are just business development reps at a legitimate pharmaceutical company.
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Vanessa
Oh, my God. All right.
- [10:43]
Patrick Coughlin
And then you have, as you move up the chain in these organizations, you know, from sort of the outbound callers who get. Get the interest hooked, then you've got the closers. You may get transferred to somebody else. If you stayed on the line, you may find you get transferred to somebody else who's maybe a little bit more in on what the con is. And their job is to, is to close the deal. And then you've got, after you, they sort of close the deal. You may get transferred to a banker or somebody who actually handles the. The transaction. And each person is a little bit more read in on the level of the crime that is being conducted here. But had you stayed on the phone with that initial caller, you may have found that, that she absolutely believed she was selling some sort of pain solution.
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Vanessa
Oh, my God.
- [11:23]
Patrick Coughlin
To your mom. And she was just doing her job. And these groups look like the sales organization of a legitimate Fortune 500 company here in the US and I think that's what's really scary.
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Vanessa
You're getting all this information, I guess, partially from the media, but do you also talk to people in the government and people who are trying to stop scams? And are there people who are trying to stop scams in the government?
- [11:49]
Patrick Coughlin
There are, There are. In the. Look, in the book, we. We talk about why this is so hard for law enforcement. There's a couple reasons. I think the first and foremost is we actually don't understand the scale of this problem. The government agencies have estimated that we lost in 2025 almost $200 billion to scams and fraud as Americans.
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Vanessa
Okay.
- [12:13]
Patrick Coughlin
Roughly 50% of that is being lost by senior citizens. So senior citizens make up less than 20% of the population here, but they account for almost 50% of the losses every year. Now, the reason for that actually has nothing to do with seniors are less tech savvy or they're more vulnerable. The reason is because seniors actually hold more than 50% of the wealth in this country. And scammers know that. So they're a target because there's savings, there's money there. And what happens, why this is so hard to stop is when you get scammed, often you feel shame, you feel foolish, you feel taken advantage of. And the result of that is you don't report it. Digital fraud in this country is not only the fastest growing crime in the country, it's also the most underreported crime in the world. One in 15 victims actually reports it to official authorities. One in seven victims never tells a single soul that they were scammed. And so when we don't have actual reporting and accurate reporting, it's hard to invest in the problem in the way that you need to to match the scale. And so our law enforcement agencies are severely under equipped, under trained to help sort of stop this and support this and support victims. We have regulation that isn't even close to where it needs to be in this country to help clamp down on the ecosystem of technology players that traffic this fraud to our devices and to our social media accounts and to our home phone numbers. And so the underlying problem, I would say, is we have an under reporting problem, which means we can't resource the solution effectively.
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Vanessa
Okay.
- [14:06]
Patrick Coughlin
And then it's, it's an international issue to track back a scam phone call that had maybe originated in Myanmar or Bangladesh and hopped across three other countries before it actually got to an AT&T or Verizon account. Means you have to essentially go and get the equivalent of a subpoena, work in a bilateral agreement with law enforcement in multiple different countries to track down the bad guys who by the way, when you do find them, they've already packed up and moved and gone on to a different phone number, gone on to a different bank account. And so it's just, it's a really wicked problem that requires unfortunately some complex solutions.
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Vanessa
Yeah, I mean, I wonder why there aren't more politicians who are heated up about this issue. I mean, what would play better? We know that the electorate is older anyway, right? In most places. Why not say, hey, I'm going to try to clamp down on these scammers and I'm going to make sure you don't get all these calls. It would be so easy. It's such a gimme. Unless they can't actually do it. I guess that's the next question, which is how do you stop this? You know, I tend to be somebody who believes that we have the technology to do a lot of things that we just choose not to do. So I don't know how you would do this though. Do you say like, no more spoofing numbers? Or you know, does the telecom know when somebody's calling me from a 917 that's actually coming from Myanmar? Or can we stop it? How do we stop it?
- [15:43]
Patrick Coughlin
Yeah, there's a lot there. First of all, I also agree this feels like an issue everybody can get behind. I don't care where you are.
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Vanessa
It's a bipartisan issue.
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Patrick Coughlin
It feels like a bipartisan issue.
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Vanessa
Nobody's pro scam.
- [15:57]
Patrick Coughlin
Yeah, time when we need some things that bring us together. Can't we rally behind this problem which I think affects everybody? It was a big reason why I've spent so much time digging into it is I feel it's mind blowing to me that we can't seem to rally behind is a universal problem here that is getting worse in an unprecedented way. So that's sort of thing one, thing two in terms of why can't we stop it. The reality is I'm trying to think of how, how sort of like nerdy to get with you right now.
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Vanessa
Go for it.
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Patrick Coughlin
Go for it. The incentives in the system, and you talk a lot about power and power dynamics. You know, the incentives in the system are not structured in a way to stop the problem. If you think about how AT&T or Verizon get paid, they get paid to connect calls, they don't get paid to verify calls.
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Vanessa
Okay.
- [16:56]
Patrick Coughlin
The entire global telecommunications infrastructure going back, you know, 150 years was built on the idea that the person calling must be the person who the, the receiver wants to hear from. There was no need to verify and it was all about connecting the calls. How quickly can we connect them? How accurately can we connect them? The, the incentives. Nobody gets paid to stop a fraud call in this, in this country. You do get paid to connect the call. So that's sort of the challenge with the incentives. The only other thing I'll say is there used to be about less than 100 telecommunications carriers in the world. And so getting all them to sort of work together was easier. Now there's this thing called voiceover IP VOIPs where you can sort of create Internet based telephones. There's hundreds of thousands of VoIP providers all across the world and we do a pretty good job of policing them in the US and making sure there aren't shady ones that are onboarding calls from suspect characters into our telecommunications infrastructure. But we're one of the richest countries in the world. We can afford to police that. You go to other countries in the world, they cannot. It's a total whack, a mole game of trying to sort of clamp down on the VoIP providers. And all the scammer needs is one. Because once you're onboarded somewhere, once you get that on ramp into the highway of phone calls in the world, you can traverse Your way to AT&T, Verizon and ultimately your mom's or your phone call. And the caller ID is often just an editable field. They can put in whatever the heck they want for you.
- [18:48]
Vanessa
Right. So we can't actually stop it.
- [18:51]
Patrick Coughlin
I'm telling you why it's hard. I think, like all things, there are solutions. It just requires priority, it requires focus, requires somebody, a politician, a regulator to make this a top five issue. And I do think there are politicians who are moving regulation forward that will help. And really that's all we can ever hope. In cyber security, there's never a panacea, there's never one single solution to make the bad guys go away, because it's always a cat and mouse game. The hope is, I guess if we're the mouse and they're the cat, the hope is that we are arming the mouse more and more so that, you know, you're containing the problem, you're giving them more tools to keep up with the bad guys. And right now we are way behind. The criminals are innovating so much faster than regular citizens and consumers are arming up to protect themselves.
- [19:43]
Vanessa
But there's, I mean, aren't these guys are about to be out of business because AI now, they can just robocall a thousand people, right?
- [19:51]
Patrick Coughlin
Yeah, I mean, that's what's fundamentally changed. I mean, that's why, you know, when my mom got asked for $1,200 to save her daughter's life, which seems like an absurd calculation on its face, but the reality is if my mom had paid that somebody would have been like ringing a gong in a, in a scam compound in, in Myanmar and like high fiving because they had just got such a huge score. It has gotten so much cheaper and easier to deliver targeted attacks at scale because of AI, because you can clone a voice, because you can generate, you know, scripts for these call centers like that that are customized to, you know, a grandma in the Midwest or a professional in New York. And you can sound exactly like the people that they want to trust and you can do it cheaply and easily.
- [20:42]
Vanessa
And so what happened to your mom?
- [20:44]
Patrick Coughlin
Well, so my mom actually narrowly avoided the situation. So what happened is my mom gets the call, she's on the phone, she luckily sees her iPad sitting on the table, by the way, at the time of getting the call. You know, her first thought was, oh my God, what the heck is PayPal? You know, I'm not sure. Do I have PayPal? Do I have a password? So the way she tells it, she actually started putting on her coat and getting her purse, even though it was after 5 o'. Clock. She was going to go to the bank to get the money, and then just sort of luckily sees her iPad on the table, texts my brother in law and says, oh my God, what are we going to do about Courtney? And my brother in law is like, what do you mean luckily? Responds right away, what do you mean? She's in the shower. And my mom's like, no, wait, what? And he's like, yeah, what's the problem? And so my mom in the moment, realizes something is up, hangs up the phone, calls my sister, confirms it, calls me, and she was shook to the core. I mean, if you ask her about it today, two years later, there's a trauma there. Because while everything about that call was fake, the emotions and the impact of it were real. And she swears she heard my sister's voice and she couldn't understand how could something like this happen? And so while my mom was in many ways lucky, you know, there are hundreds of thousands of people in this country that have received a similar call in the last 12 months that weren't as lucky. And the, the mental fallout, the mental health fallout, the anguish, the trauma that comes from that often lasts way longer than after the money is gone.
- [22:18]
Vanessa
It's such a violation. I mean, it is as though somebody has pickpocketed you or like come in and robbed your house, right? Like, it is that kind of feeling. And particularly if you have a connection with the person, like a romance scam or something along those lines. And it's just so sad because people are so lonely, you know, that they're looking for, for anybody to talk to. In some cases.
- [22:48]
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- [23:19]
Patrick Coughlin
Look what TJ Maxx dragged in.
- [23:22]
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- [23:26]
Patrick Coughlin
We are digital, we are downloadable, we are streamable.
- [23:30]
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- [23:33]
Patrick Coughlin
Pull yourself together.
- [23:34]
Vanessa
We have work to do.
- [23:35]
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- [23:39]
Lily Houston Smith
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- [23:52]
Vanessa
I like to complain about banks. And one of the things I like to complain about is how difficult they make it to close an account, you know, take the money out, et cetera. And I recently had a situation with Citibank where I was trying to get to be the power of attorney on my mom's IRA accounts, which, you know, I figured out. Okay, I took in my power of attorney. We talked about getting on to my mom's accounts. The power of attorney for the IRAs, well, that has to go through somebody in Texas who's outsourcing it, probably to India. Right. They've disaggregated themselves so much that nothing can really be done at the branch. That's complicated. And I said, well, why are you guys doing this? Because, just so we're clear, when somebody's trying to get the power of attorney over an 84 year old's IRA, it's probably not because things are awesome at the moment. And, you know, everybody's bringing notarized legal documents. It's not as though we're pulling a fast one. And you see me here, I'm at your bank, which my parents banked at for 50 years, which I've banked at for 30 years. Literally. They had me Xerox my driver's license, the back of my driver's license, all of these different forms, blah, blah, blah, and send it off to Texas. And I'm like, why are you making me do all this? And they said, well, it's because of scammers.
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Patrick Coughlin
A generous interpretation of what the banks have put you through is they're trying to protect your mom from scams.
- [25:24]
Feeding America Announcer 2
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- [25:24]
Patrick Coughlin
The reality is, though, it's a great example of how archaic the systems are, because nothing about all of those hoops you had to jump through and administrative bullshit that you had to deal with, none of that. What happens when your mom shows up at the bank and says, I want to take out $150,000 because I want to buy an Airbnb in Tampa? Because that's what a scammer has told her to say. What guardrails do they put around that scenario? And the threat has moved is my point. Right. Those guardrails, and they made it so hard for you, represents the threat from a decade ago, from 20 years ago. What are the guardrails that we're putting in place that represent how the fraudsters and the scammers are operating today, where they're able to go upstream and essentially attack the emotional state of your mom and convince her to walk into that bank and say, I am who I am, I want all my money out. And then she goes and buys gold bars and gives it to somebody in a Toyota sedan outside her house.
- [26:31]
Vanessa
Yeah, yeah. She goes to the Starbucks and drops off.
- [26:35]
Patrick Coughlin
Yeah.
- [26:35]
Vanessa
Her life savings in a paper bag. Right.
- [26:38]
Patrick Coughlin
That's right. Well, it's incredibly frustrating. It's ridiculous that these banks make it so difficult. Obviously you don't. You shouldn't have to name the specific accounts. It's a terrible process to get power of attorney, and nobody's thinking about which specific accounts. You're just trying to get the process done and they can make it easier. But the point is, we need to apply the same level of critical thinking and all that sort of work that went into creating those policies at your bank. Why aren't we thinking about how we apply those policies to the state of the threat today?
- [27:08]
Vanessa
Yeah. So what do they do? I mean, I feel like, again, it's not only disaggregated, you know, many banks now they're. The banker that you used to bank with for 20 years. Years is no longer employed because they've made cutbacks. Right. So it's just an anonymous teller, you know, maybe a manager who, you know, you've never seen before has been brought in in this reorg. And what do they know? They don't know your mom. They don't know. It's totally weird for her to be sitting here saying, I've decided I need to pull all this money out. What happens in that scenario?
- [27:41]
Patrick Coughlin
Yeah, I mean, so this is, this is a large reason of why we're working on what we're working on. I mean, if you look at the, the phone makers, the device makers, if you look at the telecommunications infrastructure, if you look at the banking providers, you know, they all have a set of structural incentives that sort of makes it easy for them to look the other way whether they want to or not in these scenarios. Right. And so, you know, we need as consumers a new level of protection. There has to be something else that comes into this equation that, that helps arm everyday people in this country with the kind of tools they need to keep up with the threat. And so that's, that's what we're building at Savvy. It's why we built the free tool Scam Wise, which is available@scamwise.com if anybody wants to look at it. That's my little shameless plug. But it's a free product. It's totally free. It's totally open. You don't have to give us an email or anything. And you can plug in a suspicious text message or suspicious email. So I think we need new tools is the point, because we're banging our head trying to get these legacy, archaic players to change, and it's not working.
- [28:45]
Vanessa
Okay, so it's scamwise.com I see. So you can basically upload like a picture of somebody being like, hey, you have unpaid toll booth.
- [28:55]
Patrick Coughlin
We get those a lot.
- [28:57]
Vanessa
Or, yeah.
- [28:58]
Patrick Coughlin
Medical bill that you're. That's like, wait a minute, didn't we pay this from, you know, Quest Diagnostics or Medicare? Huge targets for scammers in especially targeting senior citizens. A text message that showed up. You don't know if that's real. The pictures of physical mail, an email that you got forwarded to submitted scamwise.com and so we're seeing thousands of these every day that are coming from all over the country and just helping give people a second opinion and some recommendations about what to do quickly to try to figure out the veracity of these messages.
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Vanessa
So what about Savvy? This is more of an app that you're developing now?
- [29:35]
Patrick Coughlin
Yeah, yeah. And so Scamwise is if you have a question, you can bring it to us, and we'll try to give you the best, fastest answer about sort of the suspiciousness of whatever you're looking at. That's what Scamwise is. Always free, always open. Savvy, we're building a suite of tools that try to stop these things from reaching you before they ever do. Right. So how do we build better filters, better firewalls around your communications so that you don't have to shut off your device. You can keep your device on. You can keep the communication channels open that you've had for years and built reputation around, but you can have an extra level of protection that will filter out all the crap and the noise that right now makes it really hard to use these things.
- [30:17]
Vanessa
How is it different from other scam filters, like a Robo Killer or like, things that you can put on your. Your phone?
- [30:23]
Patrick Coughlin
So I'd say, first and foremost, the reason why my mom doesn't use Robo Killer is not because she doesn't necessarily need it.
- [30:31]
Vanessa
She doesn't like the name. Yes. Yeah.
- [30:35]
Patrick Coughlin
You know, it's not meant for her. The reality is it's not built for her. It's not meant for her. And so part of what Xavi is doing is how do we bring the same level of cybersecurity sophistication that you would bring to an enterprise or to a government agency or to a cybersecurity guy like me? And how do we make that accessible, easy to use, easy to implement for my mom and for everybody else who right now is kind of flying blind.
- [30:59]
Vanessa
Outside of that, like, what are your top tips for somebody who's like, I just want to know a few things that I can tell my mom to do today or that I can do for her today.
- [31:10]
Patrick Coughlin
So there's a story about this guy named Stanislav Petrov, okay? He was a colonel in the Soviet army in 1983. His job was to sit in a bunker and look at potential nuclear weapons coming at the Soviet Union. And he did this every day. And one day he sees the machines lighting up and saying, oh, my God, there's five nuclear weapons coming at the Soviet Union from America. And the protocol was, in that moment, he's supposed to push the button that sends all the nuclear weapons from Soviet Union to the US and there's an amazing documentary about this called the man who Saved the World. In that moment, the bunker, all the phones are ringing. The other officers are saying, we got to push the button, we got to push the button. But he's thinking to himself, something doesn't look right. Why would America send just five nuclear weapons? They know we're going to send 5,000 back at them. Something's not right. And so he like describes it as an out of body experience where he's able to sort of like pause, think rationally, and then come back in the moment and say, this must be a false alarm. And he's the man who saved the world that time because he was able to step out of the moment.
- [32:18]
Vanessa
So this is like Cuban Missile Crisis. Cuban Missile Crisis, yeah, this is the Cuban Missile Crisis. Okay. I have just studied this with my daughter.
- [32:26]
Patrick Coughlin
Okay.
- [32:27]
Vanessa
For eighth grade history.
- [32:29]
Patrick Coughlin
So. Yes, exactly. Step one is to try to recognize when you are in these moments is to be aware that these are how these scammers operate. And so if you are feeling these overwhelming emotions of urgency because somebody just called you or texted you, take a breath. Don't be afraid to hang up. Don't be afraid to step away from it and think. We call that a hot zone moment. And then the second thing is get a second opinion. So step out of the moment and get a second opinion. Easier for some than others. You know, scammers love elderly people that live alone. It's a great target because they're isolated. It's harder for them to just turn to somebody and say, hold on, this is happening. And somebody say, wait a minute. That doesn't sound right. And that's one of the reasons why we Created scam wise. We want to make it so easy for somebody to just like get a second opinion no matter where they are. But, you know, you can ask somebody, you can hang up the phone and call your bank using the number on the back of the card instead of whatever number they told you to call. So get a second opinion. And then the third thing is really gets back to what I said at the top of this conversation, which is we need to talk about what is happening in this country with digital fraud. We need to remove stigma and shame. And so now if you hear a friend of yours has been scammed, if something has happened to you, you know, don't talk about it in the way of like, I got duped or, you know, I fell for something. The reality is these are criminals and they're committing crimes. And so we need to place the blame on the scammers and not on the victims.
- [34:02]
Vanessa
Right? Okay, let's get on all that. We need to get on that. I really do think it's an emergency and we should get on all of this now. And we also need to turn some politicians to our side so that we can get a critical mass behind us. But thank you so much, Patrick. We so appreciate you coming on. So your parents are old. Everybody should check out Patrick's book called the Dark side of the Boom. It's an excellent book that gives you a lot of this history really vivid and also explains how you can keep yourself and your elders safe. So thank you, Patrick.
- [34:41]
Patrick Coughlin
Thank you, Vanessa.
- [34:45]
Lily Houston Smith
Thanks so much everyone for listening to another episode of so youo Parents Are Old. Vanessa and I are going to be taking the next few weeks off, but do not worry, we'll be back in July with brand new conversations. In the meantime, stay safe from scammers and remember to take care of yourselves.