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- [00:00]
David Muir
ABC's David Muir, the most trusted anchor in America, the most watched anchor in America. Thank you for making World News Tonight with David Muir the number one newscast in America. Most trusted, most watched David Muir on abc.
- [00:15]
Jack Wilson
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- [00:50]
Beau Friedlander
Last week we talked about where scams begin. The proverbial drop in the ocean that creates the ripple that becomes the tsunami.
- [01:00]
Aaron West
What's happening is that people still don't understand the gravity of this.
- [01:04]
Beau Friedlander
We traced that ripple back to real places, scam compounds, special economic zones and the people human trafficked into them and forced to commit crimes.
- [01:16]
David Muir
What if corporate America stood up and did what was responsible instead of what was criminal based profiting?
- [01:24]
Beau Friedlander
When your phone buzzes with a scam text or message or LinkedIn or Hinge or Instagram DM, there are often two victims in the chat. The person losing money and the person being forced to take it.
- [01:40]
Kathy Stokes
They're destroying generational wealth with this crime and too few people understand that this is happening.
- [01:46]
Beau Friedlander
If you haven't listened to last week's episode, start there, pause, go back and listen to it. This is a three part series on Southeast Asian scam compounds and human trafficking that happens to keep them running. So today we're going to take a step further and try to figure out if this is a problem we can interrupt and if so, how? I'm Beau Friedlander and this is what the hack. The show that asks in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online?
- [02:36]
Aaron West
Earlier this year, Thai authorities launched a.
- [02:39]
Kathy Stokes
Crackdown on cross border scam syndicates operating in Myanmar.
- [02:43]
Aaron West
It cut off power and Internet to the border regions. But has the crackdown truly dismantled these operations? The man behind a massive scam network in Southeast Asia could be facing decades in prison after US Officials seized billions of dollars in bitcoin linked to the operation. Chen Tzi has been accused of using.
- [03:01]
Kathy Stokes
Forced labor to scam victims and he remains at last.
- [03:05]
Beau Friedlander
The Department of justice has indicted 38.
- [03:07]
David Muir
Year old Chinese national Chenji for wire.
- [03:10]
Beau Friedlander
Fraud and money laundering conspiracy and labeled.
- [03:13]
David Muir
As conglomerate of companies based out of Cambodia called the Prince Group as a transnational criminal organization. The government seized 127,000 bitcoin from Chen's accounts worth $15 billion at the time.
- [03:28]
Beau Friedlander
Much of it received from unsuspecting American victims. Okay, let's sit with that number for a second. 15 billion. That's not a typo. I didn't misspeak. It's not an estimate. That's just what investigators are able to see. And that's how this story usually gets told. Big villains, huge numbers, arrests, indictments, seizures. When there are such things, they don't always happen. It sounds like progress, it sounds like accountability. But here's the problem behind that $15 billion are individual people. Last week we talked about how people are trafficked and trapped into these scam compounds and forced to send scam messages under threat of violence. But there's the other side. The people who believed the messages, the people who trusted, the people who didn't think this could happen to them.
- [04:24]
Shreya Dada
I had been divorced for two and a half years. I had taken the time to heal. I had just moved back to an apartment in Philadelphia and had started to go on dating apps.
- [04:37]
Beau Friedlander
This is Shreya Dada.
- [04:38]
Shreya Dada
Like any person in their mid-30s, I felt a lot of pressure to be paired up, have children, you know, start my own family. I've always, always wanted these things. So even though the romantic in me doesn't believe that dating apps are an amazing way to meet a person, I understood that they're the only way I'm probably going to meet anyone.
- [04:57]
Beau Friedlander
We spoke to her in episode 101 of this podcast.
- [05:02]
Shreya Dada
I matched with this person on Hinge, the app, the dating app. At the time, I was traveling and we started talking on this app. And very quickly he moved the conversation to WhatsApp, which I didn't think anything of. A lot of people move very quickly from the app to text or whatever. The conversations were very smooth and easygoing, like a regular start. We got to know each other through the lens of hobbies and shared interests and things like that. And that morphed into three months of some sort of a long distance relationship. I felt good about myself. We said, I love you and, you know, it was a full blown relationship. Within two months, it escalated very quickly. He was even talking about moving closer to each other, the future, visioning like he was talking about all these future things. You know, I believe that if you're A good person, good things will come your way.
- [05:57]
Beau Friedlander
And if you're listening to this and thinking, okay, I know this story. Dating app, charming strangers, Slow build trust. You're not wrong. This story goes exactly where you're thinking.
- [06:09]
Shreya Dada
I found out he was a fraud. This was a scam. I felt very hurt and violated. But when I figured out it wasn't even a person, I felt like, what kind of world do we live in? Like, you know, as a trusting, like nothing so bad had happened to me. It shook my belief system about everything I knew. Do I know anything? Do I know if black is black and white is white or up is down or anything? Can I even trust my decision making process? So it turned my world upside down.
- [06:46]
Beau Friedlander
By the time she realized the person wasn't real, nearly half a million dollars were gone. By making her believe she was investing in real cryptocurrency, even giving her payouts and withdrawals, Shreya was tricked into believing she was saving not just for her future, but for a future together with her scammer. And after seemingly successful investment after investment, you could see why she would be lured to take out a loan to invest even her retirement money. This wasn't a moment of bad judgment. It was a process. Trust was built first, attention came next. Confidence followed. That money moved day after day, month after month, deliberately grown, encouraged to grow, until they cut and ran. That's why crypto investment scams are also known by a harsher name. And I even hesitate to say it, but the other name is pig butchering.
- [07:51]
Kathy Stokes
It's a term that I will not repeat, but it is what I will call a financial grooming scam, akin to a romance scam.
- [08:01]
Beau Friedlander
This is Kathy Stokes. She's the senior director of fraud prevention programs at the aarp.
- [08:07]
Kathy Stokes
In this particular case, it began in Cambodia and now it's spreading across to other countries. And the losses are profound. They're destroying generational wealth with this crime. And too few people understand that this is happening. But it also involves human trafficking. The people that are making the phone call, sending the text, going online with fake social media profiles are enslaved the numbers that we have. And if you look that sort of the best representative sample, I guess it's not even a sample though, is the Federal Trade Commission's Consumer Sentinel data book every year. But it's only representing people who've actually reported fraud. And so many people do. Not because of the shame, because of not knowing where to go, because of trying and failing, all of these reasons. But it does give you a sense of what's happening out there. And in that data, you can see that it's a younger person's problem as much as an older person's problem. However, it's the big losses that are happening at the older person's level that we are so concerned about.
- [09:17]
David Muir
If you think about all types of fraud in the United States, that's friend.
- [09:21]
Beau Friedlander
Of the pod, Gary Warner, a cybercrime researcher who spent years following threads of these scams from a single text message all the way back to the compounds where they begin.
- [09:31]
David Muir
We've really only got two ways to measure that with government numbers. One is that the FBI's Internet Crime and Complaint center receives. If you call the FBI, or if you call many police stations and say, I've been a victim of a cyber scam, they will often refer you and say, make a complaint. At ic3.gov the Internet Crime and Complaint center, ic3.gov categorizes the complaints they've received and tries to put a dollar value on them. And every year around April, they put out an annual report about this. In 2022, their annual report for the first time, showed that crypto investment scams were the number one crime in America. By the number of dollars stolen. It was like $1.4 billion in 2022, went up to 3.3 billion the next year, went up to 6.4 billion the next year. So $6.4 billion is what was reported to the FBI as loss.
- [10:35]
Beau Friedlander
And we know that these losses are being generated in these compounds?
- [10:41]
David Muir
Overwhelmingly, yes. The Federal Trade Commission, they have an annual report that comes out that's called the Consumer Sentinel Data Book. And although there are hundreds of thousands, millions of complaints that come in, crypto investment scams were 4.5% of the volume of complaints that came in. The median loss per incident for these crypto investment scams is two orders of magnitude higher than the median loss for all types of fraud. We encounter individuals who have lost more than $1 million in these scams, sometimes 3 and $4 million.
- [11:22]
Aaron West
What's happening is that people still don't understand the gravity of this.
- [11:26]
Beau Friedlander
This is Aaron West.
- [11:28]
Aaron West
What they understand very clearly. If you talk to anybody out there right now, they will know someone who.
- [11:32]
Beau Friedlander
Has been scammed, founder and president of Operation Shamrock, and someone who's been on the front lines of prosecuting the financial side of these crimes for a while now.
- [11:43]
Aaron West
They will tell you about how their aunt was scammed, their Grammy, their sister, their cousin. They understand that people are getting scammed. They do not understand that this is being run by Chinese organized criminals in an incredibly sophisticated, industrialized way with a much bigger goal than stealing Aunt Terry's $20,000. They're out there with a very organized plan to steal a generation's worth of wealth.
- [12:16]
David Muir
My friend Aaron west runs Operation Shamrock. She and I have friendly, heated debates about whether we should use the term pig butchering. She says pig butchering communicates to the public and helps express how horrible they are. I say, who are you calling a pig? You're referring to the victim as a pig, and I'm not going to do that. So I call them crypto investment scams.
- [12:39]
Aaron West
The term pig butchering is exactly what it needs to be. It needs to really be vile and off putting so that you say, what is this woman talking about? And I need to understand what she's talking about. If I start talking about financial grooming, you think about that does not apply to me. That is never going to happen to me or anyone I know. But if I start talking about pig butchering, there's an intrigue there. And then once you hear what it is, you understand why this violent term is necessary.
- [13:07]
Kathy Stokes
Everybody that uses it acknowledges it, that it's a terrible term, and it really, it denigrates the victim so badly.
- [13:15]
Beau Friedlander
Kathy Stokes again.
- [13:16]
Kathy Stokes
But the people that are using it say that's what gets people, gets people's attention. Others are saying, well, that's what the criminals themselves are calling it. You know, in my book, I never follow what a criminal does to suggest what I should do in a particular arena. I think it's absolutely horrible. And it gets to the narrative change in me. Right.
- [13:37]
Beau Friedlander
So the pig butchering term is an insider term in the factories, in the trade, if you want to call it a trade, that's their term. So if you speak to people who are perpetrating these crimes, and I don't care if you're talking about the confraternities in Nigeria or the operations out of South Africa and Cameroon or Southeast Asia, you're talking about people who are economically nowhere near where Americans are, and they're. And when it's not in these compounds, but it's other, other places where it is, volunteer people are saying, like, I can make $1,000 a day, $3,000 a day from these, what, American pigs.
- [14:23]
Aaron West
Yeah.
- [14:24]
Beau Friedlander
And I don't like. I don't like any of it. But I do think it's important for someone to understand that in the eyes of these scammers, they look like food.
- [14:37]
Aaron West
You're totally right.
- [14:39]
Beau Friedlander
The scammers are wolves. And you're just a little defenseless pig and you don't have a brick house.
- [14:44]
Aaron West
The victims don't have time for federal organizations to be sitting around spending an hour on what we're going to call this. What they need that hour spent on is who's behind this and how are we going to take it down.
- [15:00]
Beau Friedlander
Scams don't look like scams anymore. They look like apps. They look like proof. Fake websites, fake trading platforms, things that live on your phone next to Gmail and your notes app. You see these charts? Profits. Evidence that your money is growing exponentially, even though none of it's real. It's, it's. It's not just theft. It's a long con designed to convince you that you finally found the one person, the one opportunity that changes everything. And once you're inside that bubble, that very, very carefully constructed bubble, you can't see anything outside of it.
- [15:39]
Shreya Dada
My belief is we could all be more vigilant, but in today's world, with technology, there is a scam for everybody. It just requires someone finding out your weak part. Somebody else maybe wouldn't have fallen for this exact type of a scam. But there's so many different types of scams that, you know, intelligent, smart people can fall for. Maybe I could have avoided the scam, but I'm a trusting person. I didn't do that. In my case, this person that I was talking to didn't exist. Was made up by an organization with media from other places and a very planned, compelling storyline. You know, is this person real? And how do I know that they're real?
- [16:33]
Beau Friedlander
Jacob Sims has seen how these scams begin and where they end. Inside regions where entire local economies now depend on keeping people trapped, scamming other victims. He's walked the streets and been inside the compounds, and he's tracked how people are recruited, moved, sold, and trafficked. So, Jake, what happens when in this. I don't love when AI replaces people and tasks, but this is a situation in which it would be a change for the better if AI were to replace these trafficked humans who are doing all this work. What happens when that happens? Does the world lose interest in stopping this rogue nation state, this criminal nation state?
- [17:18]
Jacob Sims
I don't really see why it would. Like, this is still the top form of financial crime impacting Americans, impacting Brits, impacting Aussie. So it's still a major financial form of financial crime also. I just, I think it's worth noting because that has been a theory of where this is going for years and there's no evidence that it's gone that way. The people inside the compounds are definitely using AI, but they're using AI to optimize their labors, laborers. They're not using it to reduce the number of laborers. As AI has advanced, the number of people who are working have, has also advanced. I'm not saying it's impossible that in five or ten years the whole thing exists on a flash drive instead of in scam compounds that certainly, it certainly could go that way. But that trend has not emerged yet. That AI. The real way that AI has been used to accelerate this trend is the ability of large language models to transform the way that translation is being done. It's made speaking in native English over text message almost automatic for most languages around the world.
- [18:23]
Beau Friedlander
With an LLM, you can say to this scammer in this compound who doesn't even really speak English, can give a prompt that says match as far as you can. The way the person I'm talking to is talking.
- [18:35]
Jacob Sims
Yeah. And so that's being used. That's definitely happening. But like the automation of this, there are reports that the very first, like the lead generation, the outreach, some of that has started to be automated. But the level of sophistication and nuance and manipulation, that's happening for someone to be willing to hand over everything that they own to someone they've never met, we're still a little, little ways away from a computer being able to do that.
- [19:02]
Beau Friedlander
So.
- [19:03]
Jacob Sims
So yeah, it could, it could. That is a direction it could go. But we haven't really seen any evidence that that's happening yet.
- [19:11]
Beau Friedlander
Let's talk about why this persists. Why can't the United States, in a nonpartisan way, go just go in and knock these bosses around and free everybody?
- [19:22]
David Muir
The biggest problem in us having a direct impact right there is that we shut down all of the foreign aid that used to support this.
- [19:31]
Beau Friedlander
Gary Warner.
- [19:32]
David Muir
There used to be dozens of NGOs on the ground in Cambodia and in Thailand who had as their primary goal or mission helping to either prevent these people from being trafficked or providing services to help rescue the people being trafficked. And where was all that funding coming from? Usaid. And it's very America first to tell them to go take care of themselves because they're not Americans. So unfortunately, all of those NGOs have lost all of their funding from the US government, which was previously the primary funding source for all of this.
- [20:16]
Beau Friedlander
Yeah, and there's, and there is a, there is a political point of view that says the World's a big bad place and you're lucky you live in a place that's not, not like that.
- [20:26]
David Muir
And unfortunately that big bad place that we're saying, take care of yourself.
- [20:31]
Beau Friedlander
Yeah.
- [20:32]
David Muir
Is the source of so much pain and suffering to Americans as well.
- [20:36]
Beau Friedlander
Well, and that's, that's where I'm wondering where the buck stops. Because if you have a large group of financially independent people who are aging out of the workplace but have plenty of money to support themselves until end of days, end of their days and they're getting scammed. And now they don't have any money and they are essentially a war to this state. Isn't that an issue, isn't that a political issue here?
- [21:08]
David Muir
Right. And the, the numbers I mentioned earlier, about $6 billion being stolen. That's what was reported to the FBI.
- [21:18]
Beau Friedlander
Right.
- [21:19]
David Muir
The true number, I like the number $28 billion as the.
- [21:25]
Beau Friedlander
Why is that potential volume? Why is that?
- [21:28]
David Muir
It comes from a couple places. One is the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has lots of ways of modeling what's happening to people's money by looking at suspicious activity reports and cash transfer reports. And they estimated that elder fraud, which is not all this type of scam, is about $28 billion. There's, there's one report by Jacob Sims that showed how, how prevalent these compounds are. But back in April, May time frame, he put out a paper called Policies and Patterns. State abetted transnational crime in Cambodia as a global security threat.
- [22:14]
Beau Friedlander
That's what we've been talking about.
- [22:16]
David Muir
And this thing is a 60 page expose where as part of it he says These are the 10 individuals that we need to remove. And Chenzu was one of those. But there's 168 references in the bibliography here. This is like what our policy ought to be based on this kind of work. You have these multi billionaires who are profiting off of all of this enslavement. You have corrupt senators, corrupt ministers in the Cambodian government who are willing participants in these scam compounds. And we know who they are. But Cambodia for generations now is ruled by a, it's a single party system. It's kind of like what's going on in Iran right now. You can't just remove the ayatollah and go, now we're free. You know, it's any, any political opposition has been forcibly removed from having any voice in Cambodia. And so it's the question of, we know the current government is horribly corrupt, but there's no one to replace them because they've done such a thorough Job of destroying all opposition through banishment, through imprisonment, through execution. If you speak about these scam compounds, you can be accused of treason against the king and put in prison for life. There is another component that we could be doing something about, and it's our technology companies. How are these victims being contacted? Dating platforms, Facebook, Meta? How are all of the funds flowing through crypto companies? It's primarily stable coins. It's entirely stable coins. USDT primarily. And what we're seeing is our corporate greed that is empowering large crypto exchanges who agree to not play by the rules. And the way Jacob Sims expressed that today. Let me just quote him. He said he called out Meta and Telegram and Tether and Binance, and he said they are operating criminally dependent ecosystems with statutory impunity.
- [25:09]
Jacob Sims
They're operating criminally dependent business models for sure. I wouldn't say, like, they're not creating the ecosystems themselves, but each of those companies, a material portion of their revenue comes from criminal activity.
- [25:25]
Beau Friedlander
Jacob Sims, again.
- [25:27]
Jacob Sims
And so you could say that is a criminally dependent business model.
- [25:33]
Beau Friedlander
In your experience, what are Meta, Telegram and Binance and other companies like Binance doing to stop this? Because it doesn't seem like they're doing much.
- [25:42]
Jacob Sims
Yeah. So, I mean, I think to answer that, I need to go into each company in particular, but I think Meta is a great exemplar of this trend. And what they have done, according to their own internal documents, is that they've set up guardrails that prevent them one from actually meaningfully addressing this. And they focus most of their efforts on creating regulatory misdirection in countries around the world that would prevent the exact sorts of regulations that could actually hem them in. Things like, I'd say, maybe first and foremost, like, you should verify all of the advertisers on your platform because your own data shows that most of the scam ads come from unverified advertisers.
- [26:27]
Beau Friedlander
Done.
- [26:28]
Jacob Sims
And, but Meta, like, if you just go back and like, look, Meta Thompson, Reuters of the last few months, and you'll see dozens and dozens of pages of internal documents have come out that talk about Meta's strategy to prevent countries from around the world from holding that, holding their feet to the fire in that exact regard. And that's Meta. And I'd say they're one of the most egregious sort of abusers of the regulatory loopholes that they have, at least in terms of what's out there in the public domain. But more broadly, Binance is, is playing fast and loose with the Fact that they are not, you know, fully jurisdictioned in the US and there are active cases right now where judges have asked Binance to freeze and seize assets, where they actually have judgments resulting from pig butchering crimes. And Binance has frozen them, but they're not returning the money. And why, like how are they able to get away with, with this stuff? I mean ultimately I don't have the exact answer. We probably don't have time to like speculate on exactly how they're getting, getting through with this. But, but ultimately their, their business incentives, like the bottom line incentives for a number of these companies, like Meta on the social media side, like Binance on the exchange side, is dependent upon criminals. And so if they start making it more difficult or riskier for criminals to engage on their platform, it's going to be really bad for business. And they recognize this and they're clearly doing what they can to prevent this from happening.
- [28:00]
David Muir
What we're talking about is there is a class of corporate citizens in the US who have invested so heavily in politicians. Today on Capitol Hill, the Senate Banking Committee was considering a 277 page long bill to make it illegal for the Federal Reserve to issue a stablecoin because that would compete with corporate interests, including some that belong to very powerful families. But that's the other place we could be making a difference. We talked about USAID needs to be refunded and have these NGOs refunded. But we also have an ability to change this entire world by holding those who control large cryptocurrency companies and telling them you must prevent money from flowing to these scams and to tell the large corporations, you know, we know the story and Reuters last month about Facebook making $16 billion knowingly selling ads to scammers. That's our other play here is what if corporate America stood up and did what was responsible instead of what was criminal based profile.
- [29:45]
Beau Friedlander
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- [29:47]
Shreya Dada
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David Muir
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- [29:58]
Jacob Sims
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- [30:00]
David Muir
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- [30:12]
Kathy Stokes
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- [30:14]
Shreya Dada
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- [30:16]
Kathy Stokes
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- [30:19]
Shreya Dada
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- [30:22]
Kathy Stokes
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- [30:25]
Shreya Dada
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- [30:46]
Beau Friedlander
And so that's the private sector failure. If companies won't meaningfully intervene on their own, then the question shifts to the governments and you know, what tools actually work when we're dealing with a country whose economy is built on a crime, there are no tools for that. So how do you fight back? You cannot sanction a country that is, that is making most of its money from crime because they got plenty of money. So how do you stop this short of war?
- [31:25]
Jacob Sims
Yeah, well, hopefully we can try to stop this with every tool at our disposal without breaking international law. We'll sort of say that up front. But I wouldn't discount sanctions and I wouldn't discount other mechanisms that exist to try to hem in the financial abuses of the ruling elite in these countries. Sanctions may not, you're right, sanctions aren't going to win this. Unilateral sanctions sure aren't going to win this fight. But if you start to see 2, 5, 10, 50, 100, 150 countries that are all experiencing identically aligned interest threats because of this start to move to sanction and indict the elites who are upholding this industry, you can meaningfully deter a country from doing this. So I think coalitional sanctions and coalitional law enforcement actions are, are a meaningful part of this and, and it can go beyond sanctions. You've seen what Thailand has done, what Korea has done, what the US has done and actually indicting the individuals who are at the top of this and starting to seize enormous physical assets. And if you see Indonesia, Singapore, Australia do this, those are the countries. London, I mean the UK is starting to do it as well. These are the countries where both, these are major countries that are being scammed by Cambodia's scam invested oligarchs. They are also the countries where those oligarchs are storing their ill gotten gains. And so that is a vulnerability in this house of cards.
- [33:03]
David Muir
We have opportunities politically, but somebody has to have the voice to demand it. So at Intelligence for good, we're trying to figure out what can we do. And given my technical chops, we said, well, what could we do with technology to help, similar to what you're doing with DeleteMe. Mine is I can disrupt. And so those 65,000 websites that we've identified, we're tearing them down, we're sending takedown notices, we're trying to get them removed. When we find those websites, I have an army of student volunteers who are creating accounts on those websites to learn what is the deposit address that they're asking their members of that criminal website to send them funds to. And we're labeling those and pushing them out to places like Chainalysis and places like Coinbase so that if someone tries to send crypto to one of these addresses, they should be getting a warning that says this address is known to be part of a scam. If you're sending money here, you're likely being a scam victim. And that's the kind of disruption that given my background as an anti phisher and as an email based crimes guy, I know how to take down websites. And so that's what we've been focusing on is how do I disrupt by removing the website and how do I disrupt by getting those crypto addresses labeled and blocked. It's not a magic bullet, but it's what I can do to contribute. And I think that's the thing is what can you do to contribute? If you have those technical skills, reach out to me and I can show you what we're doing. If you're politically connected, talk to your politicians. Make sure they understand how the cutting of USAID impacted this. Creating task forces that don't do anything is not the answer. We need to force regulation into the crypto industry. We need to force regulation into the social media industry. We need to change the telecom rules in many countries. Those SMS messages you're getting wouldn't be possible to be delivered. Those regulations are. Maybe that's something that your listeners can help with, but find a way. Maybe the best thing you can do is go talk to your friends who are in the gray beard club and make sure they understand the potential risk. Find a way you can help. Whatever it is, for me, it's the technology disruption.
- [36:08]
Beau Friedlander
Aaron, you are a former prosecutor and, and I'm trying to understand how you might be approaching this. And I fail every single time. Because here's the problem set you, you're trying to get justice for American victims, but you're dealing with a situation where the people committing the crimes are victims themselves. How do you solve for that?
- [36:27]
Aaron West
Well, I think you solve by taking a small bite of the elephant every single day. I think that if, if I go into this thinking that I'm going to get justice for American victims, that is too lofty. If I'M going to make the digital world a little bit safer every single day. Then I win. And so what I do is I split my roles up into places where I think I can make a difference. And one of the ways that I think I can make a difference is by talking about this all the time. I think that I've, I've done some good work in spreading awareness about what this problem is. And with my group, Operation Shamrock, that I left the district attorney's office to start this non profit, I'm still heavily involved in the law enforcement space. And we are about to have our annual in person conference in St. Louis next week where we will be convening 200 law enforcement officers and probably 25 members of the public sector to talk about how we can work better together and to share tips and tricks in real time. The, the, the problem set is too massive for any one person. It's a. I told two people, they told two people, they told two people set scenario.
- [37:42]
Beau Friedlander
Right? So it's not how do you eat an elephant? You know, one, one bite at a time. It's the we're, we're still in the how do you prepare an elephant?
- [37:51]
Aaron West
Right, Right. A lot of people don't even know that there are elephants out there yet. And so we're. Or they're saying, yeah, they're saying, we don't need to bother with elephants. Let the feds deal with the elephants.
- [38:05]
Beau Friedlander
Well, let's talk about the elephant in the room, shall we? In these lawless zones, this level of scam, that to me is unimaginable, people are being, I mean, the only word I can think of is the term that's, that's used, which is they're being trafficked. It's human trafficking. They're being forced to work there. They're being tricked to work there. This story starts with a text message, a haptic twitch that gets your dopamine flowing. If that's your thing, you give chase. But even if it's not your thing, the exploit is designed to make it your thing. And if you follow those little hits of dopamine far enough, it leads to bad places. Your finances are wrecked, but that communication goes to another wrecked place. Scam compounds. The people perpetrating these scams are also victims, trapped within compound walls with guards and gates and implements of punishment. You can see these compounds from space. They're huge. On one end of the line, someone alone, trusting, needing connection. The victim. On the other, another victim. Someone trapped, typing messages under threat of physical punishment. The crime overlords are in control, no one else is. Money is moving because there's a strong infrastructure with no oversight. Incentives, sure. Systems that reward speed and scale? Definitely. And. And look the other way when revenue streams are dodgy, I guess. So when we ask, how does this stop? The uncomfortable answer might be not all at once. It stops the way it started. With attention, with friction, with people noticing the pattern before they're fully inside it. Because the scariest part of this story isn't how sophisticated the scams are. And they've become mind numbingly sophisticated. It's how normal they've become. Foreign. And now it's time for the Tinfoil swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. In the scam compounds, the crime goes by a vile name that treats the victim like livestock to be fattened up with trust before the slaughter. Whether you call them crypto investment scams or pig butchering, the mechanics are the same. And it revolves around financial grooming. It's cybercrime where the scammers don't want your password, they want your attention. And they're willing to spend months playing the role of a soulmate, a mentor or a friend to earn that attention. Earn it. Then they use the target's own kindness and desire for a better future. Sometimes, you know, do something together to build a brick house of false security around you right before they take the house and everything in it. There's nothing to guarantee that you'll be safe from this. But here's the best shot you got at keeping you and your loved ones safe from this crime. Doubt the winds. The most dangerous moment in this crime process, and it is a process, is when you successfully withdraw money from a fake platform. The scammer wants you to take that money out, take that 500 bucks so you'll feel safe depositing 50 grand. So that's, That's a big one. Scammers use fake trading apps that look professional but are digital shakedown software, basically. So before you invest, check the domain on a site like Intelligence for good. That's Gary Warner's thing. If, if the site was registered three months ago. Also, it's probably not a global trading tool. It's probably a trap. If someone you just met starts talking about marriage, retirement, or shared wealth. Stop. You aren't in a relationship. You're either in a criminally dependent business model or you've had the bad luck of meeting a love bombing narcissist. Either way, cut and run. And while this is sort of advanced, learn about blockchain explorers before sending crypto. I know, but if you're doing crypto, you should know what the tools are. It what it does is it helps you determine if the destination has been flagged by chain analysis or coinbase. And if it has, you might as well strap some dynamite to your crypto wallet and blow it up because you're just going to lose your money. This scourge stops the way it started, replacing small defeats with small victories. By noticing the pattern before you're fully inside the bubble. You make yourself high hanging fruit, right, Instead of low hanging fruit. Because you aren't a pig, you're not food. Not that kind of food. You're a top banana, good apple, a peach, that kind of food. So in short, in this world of scam compounds and pig butchers, change it up. Get yourself on the vegan menu. Yeah, just make yourself harder to hit. And again, you know, one of the ways to do that is to get your personal information offline because it is a lead generation tool for these GAM compounds. And you can do that by using Delete Me. All right, that's it from me for this week. I hope you have a great week. Stay safe. Thanks for listening. What the Hack is produced by Beau Friedlander. That's me. And Andrew Stephen, who also edits the show. What the Hack is brought to you by Deleteme. Deleteme makes it quick and easy and safe to remove your personal data online and was recently named the number one pick by a New York Times wirecutter for personal information removal. You can learn more about Deleteme if you go to joindeleteme.com wth that's joindeleteme.com WTH and if you sign up there on that landing page, you will get a 20% discount. I kid you not. A 20% discount. So, yes, color me fishing, but it's worth it.
- [44:22]
Jack Wilson
Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past 10 years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them. Like our recent episodes on Dante in Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath, and a talk with Sarah Scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts.