Transcript
Darius Kingsley (0:03)
Ruby.
Ben Walter (0:08)
Hi, everyone, it's Ben. On the last episode of our show, we talked to Kylie Nichols about her company, Nickel and Suede. If you haven't heard that episode, please go back and take a listen. She was almost scammed out of $20,000. And unfortunately, fraud, especially targeting businesses, is something that happens far too often. In this episode, I invited Darius Kingsley, head of banking practices at JPMorgan Chase, to share his expertise on the topic. The conversation was much longer than what you hear in the episode, though, and Darius is a wealth of information, so we decided to devote a mini segment to my conversation with him. Darius, thank you for joining me today.
Darius Kingsley (0:47)
Thanks, Ben. Appreciate it.
Ben Walter (0:49)
So we wanted to bring you in because the story that we just heard from Kylie, that's all too common, sadly, and one that you see a lot of in what you do. So could you talk to us a little bit about what you do and why you're close to issues like this?
Darius Kingsley (1:04)
Thanks, Ben. So in my role as head of banking practices, I spend a lot of time on fraud and scams and in particular fraudsters and scammers that are hitting our consumers. They target often the more vulnerable populations. You see them targeting elder and also the youth very heavily. But of course, everyone is targeted and small business owners are these days probably more targeted than ever. And so I work very closely with our risk teams. I visit our branches. I spend a lot of time talking not just with our consumer bankers who help individual customers, but also our small business bankers and try to hear from them the stories and the problems that they're experiencing when they have customers who come in who have fallen prey to a scam or maybe they've just sent a wire and they're not really sure where it went and, and they need help. And so I help try to piece together all of these things. And I'm also working even more closely than ever with government, particularly with the DOJ and the ftc, really trying to wrap our arms around it, not just as a bank, but even as an industry trying to help reduce the number of these scams.
Ben Walter (2:08)
So it sounds like Kylie's company fell for one of these classic, straightforward kind of scams. So what are the most common types of scams that you see tell people sort of what you're seeing out there in the ecosystem?
Darius Kingsley (2:19)
Yeah, unfortunately, that's right. I mean, look, small business owners are busy. You have a lot of things going on. You hire vendors and, or help and you assume and hope they're doing the right thing. And usually they always are. I will point out One thing Kylie did right was soon as she caught it, she contacted the bank. A lot of people sit on this. You probably have your business banker contact information, call them immediately, go to the branch if you can. The, the sooner you act, the better the chance of stopping the wire. For business owners, you're really seeing a lot of the business email compromise scam. It's really easy these days to fake an email and it looks just like someone that you're used to transacting with and they'll often ask you for payment details, for account details, other ones that we see businesses fall for phony invoices. So it's very easy as well these days. Much easier than ever to copy an invoice. You can change an invoice that a vendor sends, change the wiring instructions on it, change the payment information on it and it looks completely realistic. That's a very common one. Stolen identity that always remains a really big one.