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- [00:01]
Beau Friedlander
Brian Denny's wife has a folder. It's not a physical folder. It's just what she calls it in her head, a place she puts the messages. Once a week, sometimes more, a woman she's never met reaches out to tell her that her husband is in love with them.
- [00:15]
Brian Denny
Hey, I'm in a relationship with your husband. I think you're a terrible person. I want you to die. I want you to give him a divorce.
- [00:22]
Beau Friedlander
Brian's wife has learned to skim them. She knows what they're going to say before she reads them. She also knows something the women sending these messages don't know. Her husband has no idea that they exist. 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? A few weeks ago, I sat down with Ethan Merritt, a younger guy, Army National Guard, who came home from deployment and found that scammers had lifted his photos and were using them to run romance scams out of Nigeria. Ethan actually tracked them down. Catfished the catfisher, found the house. The Bait Bites Back is the name of the episode. I think it's funny if you haven't listened to that one. Go back and listen. It's a great story. But while I was talking to Ethan, I kept thinking about an earlier conversation that we had in an earlier avatar of this show with Adam and Travis back in the old days. Someone I spoke to a while back. Well, we did. Who's been living inside this problem for years? Former U.S. army officer Brian Denny unwittingly became the face of thousands of romance scams. Brian, welcome to the show.
- [02:02]
Brian Denny
First, let me say thank you for allowing me to be on today. I'm always happy to talk about romance scams and what I know of them. I really learned the hard way through my exposure with romance scams.
- [02:13]
Beau Friedlander
You are a colonel, as I understand it.
- [02:16]
Brian Denny
Yes, sir, that's correct.
- [02:17]
Beau Friedlander
Okay. That is a big deal. It's our first colonel.
- [02:20]
Brian Denny
Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate the recognition. I always like to. I'm really just a soldier.
- [02:35]
Beau Friedlander
Brian spent 26 years in the military. Think about that. You go in at 22, 23, you don't really know who you are yet. And the army answers the questions for you. Here's who you are. Here's what you wear. Here's how you're addressed. Here's how you address people. Here's what you're for. And there's something genuinely clarifying about that. Must say, I always wanted to do it, and I Never did. My grandfather was in both World War I and World War II. Go figure. This idea that your identity isn't something you have to construct is interesting, though, especially for scams, right? So it's given to you, it's conferred. But here's the thing about an identity that's conferred. It can also be taken, and I don't mean metaphorically. I mean your name, your face, the story people tell about you, all of it. It's more portable than you think, more detachable from you than you want. Brian Denny spent 26 years building his self inside one of the most identity rigid institutions in the world. Sorry, but that's how I see it. Anyway, when he got out, he did what everybody does. He made a LinkedIn and put up a photo, wrote a little bit about himself, put himself out there for the first time as a civilian, as just a person. And he. And he had no way. He had no way of knowing that someone not awesome was waiting for exactly that.
- [03:50]
Brian Denny
I was updating my LinkedIn profile, as a lot of people do. I'd never had one. And so I got a contact very quickly from a lady in Canada. And she said, hey, I'd like to talk. I'm looking at your profile. And I. I was naive enough still, so I said, yes. I said, here's my phone number. If you'd like to talk, give me a call. And I really, quite frankly, I just assumed it was all about a job or something. They were. They were looking for an army guy to do. And she reached out and said, hey, you know, I think we've been. We've had a conversation over the last couple of. Couple of weeks. I'm like, nope, I hadn't been talking to anybody. And. And I asked her to explain. And she said, well, you and I have been talking, and I'm going to send you some pictures. She sent me several pictures that I recognized as me off of Facebook and some army photos that the army had taken of me when I was deployed. And then she said, I'm going to send you a pair of tickets. She sent me plane tickets that had my name on them, where I was flying into Montreal. She said, you're supposed to be in Syria right now.
- [04:58]
Beau Friedlander
Plane tickets, his name, Montreal. A woman in Canada who thought she'd been talking to him for weeks. Somewhere out there, another version of Brian Dunny was at work. Same face, same name, same photos, telling her, he's in Syria and he needs help getting home. You know, from Ethan Merritt, that that's never going to happen. That way. So anyway, he's standing in his kitchen or wherever he was, holding evidence of a life he didn't live, a relationship he wasn't in, a trip he never took. So the thing about this moment, and I've heard a lot of scams and stories, is that this isn't really just fraud. Something stranger than that someone has been out in the world being him, making promises in his name, building something with his face that he had no part and no knowledge of. That's something different than identity theft. It's more like identity Occupation. It's Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
- [05:46]
Brian Denny
Kind of people are being duplicated.
- [05:49]
Beau Friedlander
How do you know my name? I didn't tell you my name.
- [05:51]
Brian Denny
It looked right. Abby, you're looking at it as if it was human. It was not human. Now the classic fear begins to grow. Invasion of the Body Snatches. I think she was trying to put the pieces together. I think she had been told by her daughter, hey, this isn't real. You're not talking to this guy. And her daughter went on LinkedIn, found my image, and said, this is the guy that you're talking to that says he's talking to you, but I'm sure it's not that guy. And she reached out. In fact, she was quite, quite decent about it. She quickly came around to the, yep, I've been scammed without a lot of evidence, without going to be having to go to some strong links to explain that to her. And, and a lot of people don't get there that quickly. But yeah, she, she put it together pretty quick. And, and she said, go to Facebook, put your name in your. In the search bar and see what happens. And I did. And they were double digits of my pictures and fake profiles that came up is your picture and your name, exact spelling, same picture. I mean, not, not different pictures of me, but the exact same picture in my name came up again, double digits. And I. And at that point it's like, okay, what's going on? What's happening? What is, what is happening here?
- [07:16]
Beau Friedlander
So what is your understanding of what happened, Brian?
- [07:20]
Brian Denny
You know, I'm a guy in a uniform. I'm a guy with a son in his scout uniform. And then it's me and my son with our horses in North Carolina. And really, from those three pictures, this guy and I'll. And I say this guy, but it's really not a guy. It's teams of guys. It's organized criminals. It's guys working in an Internet cafe across the ocean in a place like Lagos, Nigeria, that this is a full time job for them. But if you get these three pictures, it's easy to build a story about a guy who's in the service, doing great and wonderful things, Troop justice in the American way and all that stuff. You know, recognized credibility in the army. And he's got a boy and he's a widower and his son's at boarding school and all of a sudden now, you know, his son's been injured in a horse riding accident and, you know, he needs money to help him because he's overseas and can't access his funds. And from that, you know that those three images, you can spin a pretty good web.
- [08:22]
Beau Friedlander
A man in uniform, a father, a widower with a son at a boarding school, and horses back home in North Carolina. I mean, you could write that story yourself. But that, that is not just a scam. It's a create. It's creative fiction. It's, it's. It's a fully realized, emotionally loaded character designed to resonate the loneliness, the fantasy of someone good, solid, someone who has already proven he can sacrifice for something bigger than himself. Perfect, right? Brian didn't build that character. He just lived his life and put some photos on the Internet. Someone else took them and then made a story that really worked. Have you been able to figure out exactly how many people were using, you know, or how many profiles there were out there that used your pictures?
- [09:13]
Brian Denny
So when Facebook still responded and talked to us, they had said I was the in the top three most replicated profiles on social media. I can tell you it is not, it is not something that you want. Unfortunately, it's me, and I don't like it. And I find that, you know, people that I've worked to defend and protect, you know, now I'm being taken advantage of with, you know, my image and my uniform. My credentials are being used to hurt people. And that. That bothers me. And so I want to do something about it. And so I wasn't trained not to fight back. And the army did a pretty good job, and my folks and grandparents did a pretty good job in North Carolina raising me and teaching me to fight back and to stand up for myself. And, you know, that's kind of what I'm doing.
- [09:57]
Beau Friedlander
You said you talked with Facebook. What happened?
- [09:59]
Brian Denny
No, it was really an interesting relationship. Did not get very far in terms of reporting the profiles. What we did get was a sit down meeting. 3 sit down meetings that ranged from we've never heard of romance scams to oh, my, Yep, this is happening. Wow. Okay. And at the end of the day, even when I would report profiles, at best, we only ever had a 33% or so deletion rate where they would take profiles down that I reported with my images.
- [10:37]
Beau Friedlander
Brian has been to Facebook, and Facebook, a company worth, I don't know, at the time of these being somewhere between hundreds of billions of dollars or more, whatever. With more engineers in most countries have soldiers managed a 33% success rate on removing fake profiles of a guy who was sitting right in front of them and. And showing the evidence that these were fake? 33%. It's pretty crappy. That's a failing grade in school. Right? Look, we're gonna get into why that is, what's actually broken in the system, and what, if anything, can be done about it. But before that, while Brian has been fighting this institutional war, the meetings, the reports, the deletion requests, out in the world completely separately, something else has been happening. There are women, real women, who have spent weeks or months or in some cases, years, believing they were in a genuine relationship, making plans, sending money. And then there's people in scam compounds who are forced traffic to perpetrate these scams. And there's Brian and there's Ethan. The people whose identities have been used in these scams. In a scam like this, it turns out almost everybody is a victim. How does it affect a life like yours, for instance, where your profile's just out there?
- [12:02]
Brian Denny
I would say I'm lucky to a degree. I mean, most of the time. I mean, this does consume a chunk of my life. I mean, no doubt about it. I'm a bit resentful. Other people that do this and have, you know, used my image to abuse people. I get really upset when I think about the number of people that have lost. I mean, and as you go through and kind of look at it, you realize people have given away money they don't have. People have given away their life savings. People have given away, you know, their parents money, their inheritance. I mean, they forfeited everything to be, you know, involved in someone that they've never met. And that's tough. It's. It's only been in, like, the last, really, six months or so that I realized the toll that actually is taking on my kids and my wife. You know, my kids get messages like I do in the messages from people you don't know column. They get those, you know, on a regular basis going, hey, I've talked. I'm talking with your dad. I'm in a relationship. I want you to ask your mom to divorce him and this kind of thing. And My kids are 16, 19, 21 and 23. And so they, they get this and they, they, they, they have been in, they know what's going on. But my wife gets on a weekly basis the hey, I'm in a relationship with your husband. I think you're a terrible person. I want you to die, I want you to give him a divorce, stop taking his money. I've talked to your kids and they love me and they want me to be their new mommy. And my wife deals with this. I mean I, I wish I could tell you I'm exaggerating this, but I'm not. My wife deals with this every week from someone who says, I'm in a relationship with your husband. And my wife will go, oh, when was the last time you saw him? And the answer is, well, we've never actually met. And it goes from there. And, and she, God bless her, tries to, tries to say you're with a scammer. And it's always, hey, I know he said you would say that. And so, you know, and there's really, once people are committed to this, it's really hard to make a difference. I will tell you, it is hard to talk someone out of that relationship. I'm the lucky one. I get the hey, I'm just trying to confirm. I think I've been scammed. I think I was talking to somebody that, that was using your image. Those are the easy ones. I mean it's tough and eventually, you know, and I do find myself, you know, you're breaking up with somebody and telling them, yep, I'm sorry this has happened to you, but my wife really gets the, the, the venom filled ones that are really terrible and she deals with that fight. Fighting. This is a part time job for me. I say I'm retired, but I do work. I've got a number of different activities, but this is my most significant part time job is trying to stop this. But for the guys that I'm fighting against, there are groups of guys it had, this is their job 24, 7. This is what they do every day. This pays the bills. And so, and they're good at it. They're good at manipulating people. They know what to say and you know they're going to send out 100 emails to people. Of those hundred, they may get 25 that actually respond back to them. Of the 25, they may be able to establish a conversation with, with maybe 10 of the 10, two will give money two or three will give money, and that's all it takes.
- [15:29]
Beau Friedlander
How widespread is this across the armed forces? Have you met other service members? I mean, probably, maybe not with as many. You seem to be the star of that particular situation, but are there other ones?
- [15:46]
Brian Denny
So I have met a number of guys across the military, people that I know and I worked with, you know, half a dozen guys that have had this happen to them in some way, shape, form, or fashion. The images have been used and. And they've spoken about it and tried to do something about it. But it's almost like the number of guys that come forward and say anything is almost like the number of ladies, you know, or people. Victims that come forward and say anything, because there are male victims on both sides as well. I mean, people are embarrassed by it. And I was embarrassed by it. I didn't talk about it for six months after it started happening to me. I just didn't want. I mean, I couldn't believe my images and something like this. And I was mortified. I was horrified. I was embarrassed. And. And then when you do decide to do something about it, what do you do, you know, that can make a difference? And you start to look at your options there and go, wow, this is going to be a really frustrating fight that will never end. You know, I love it when I meet people, go, hey, is that still going on? It's going to happen. It's going to go on for the rest of my life. The images won't change, the pictures won't change. As long as people give money to those images and pictures, this will be a successful con, a successful scam, long after I'm gone. There's no end date to this.
- [17:06]
Beau Friedlander
So, Brian, you know what I'm reminded of here, oddly, are all the people who find images of themselves becoming memes. You know what a meme is. So it could be I'm having a bad day, and it's just a person having a really unique facial expression. And one thing that you have in common with some of these memes is they didn't sign up to be memes, but their image is being used over and over and over again, and you'd think there'd be legal recourse. I have a friend whose daughter was. Was three or four, and she was on a swing and looking very grouchy, and it turned into a meme. It really blew up. It went viral. And to this day, I think it's an issue for them. The difference is maybe even negligible because some people have experienced serious stress, anxiety, from being out there in that way. And you can't get that toothpaste back in the tube once it's out there. There are efforts, and I'm sure you're familiar with them. Right now, between Meta and Onlyfans, which is an adult content creator website, there are these venues that are trying to at least tackle revenge porn and the use of imagery of minors. And they are tagging them and they're able to track that. Is there anything like that happening with the FBI or any other law enforcement with regard to someone in your situation?
- [18:43]
Brian Denny
I don't believe so. I certainly think, you know, what's happened with my images and other people that are used like this goes well beyond what we would call fair use. Right. If you post something out on the Internet, it's fair use. It's just like a stock photo. But most of the time stock photos aren't meant to or aren't used to conduct fraud, impersonating individuals with the intent of fraud, commit fraud, and this kind of thing. So when the, when I was having a dialogue with the FBI investigators that opened up my case, the term fair use came up a lot. And it's not like Facebook hasn't been warned or told, hey, you know, this is enough. This is. This guy.
- [19:24]
Beau Friedlander
So, you know, it's not fair use. It's a garbage argument. It's not fair use.
- [19:28]
Brian Denny
Yeah, exactly.
- [19:29]
Beau Friedlander
Do you know why there hasn't been any legal action? I mean, what's the problem? What is it going to take?
- [19:36]
Brian Denny
So basically, the social media giants, dating sites, Facebook, Google Meets, everybody can hide behind the Decency and Communication act. And that's in section 230, which basically holds the guys and gals that run these large bulletin boards, you know, they are not liable for what gets posted on the bulletin board. They are not responsible. And so they can hide behind that. And this was made in the 80s. It was to support the standing up of the Internet and this kind of thing. So, you know, they didn't want to, you know, tarnish the created creativity there and keep people from being able to stand up the Internet. And, you know, wonder what people might post. And. And here we are in 2023 and it's still in effect. And you can't hold the social media giants liable for what gets posted on their platform.
- [20:40]
Beau Friedlander
At some point, you know, the scam will age out. This one, the Brian Denny scam will age out because you'll be able to post a picture of yourself in 10 years and say, this is what I look like now. And you're being sold a guy from 2016. Good luck with that.
- [20:57]
Brian Denny
Honestly, I would love to think that's a true statement, but I don't think so. If it's so hard to talk to people now. And, I mean, I've done any number of podcasts and videos and stories I post picked, hey, this is my wife. These are my kids. And still, like, the last lady talked to my wife, the first thing she said was, yes, I know there's scammers that use his identity. He's already told me all about this. And so, okay, they have all the evidence, they have all the pieces there, and if they still don't buy it, you can recycle old pictures of me or whoever, as long as there's pictures to be posted.
- [21:35]
Beau Friedlander
This goes to the idea that I was getting at before, and you are actually kind of a meme, but in the romance scam column, and it doesn't sound like you can get the toothpaste back in the tube. Now, I do believe the technology exists to do it. There's not the impetus to do it. To tag photos and say, this is a scam, and the likelihood of this being a scam is high. Could then be something that's passed on to dating sites and to social media sites, and they can say, what? When this image occurs, we automatically delete it because we know it's a scam and they're not doing that.
- [22:18]
Brian Denny
You are exactly right. Those two things. You're exactly right, Two very important things. The technology exists. In fact, Facebook, you know, halfway into our relationship with them, said, hey, give us the pictures that are most used in scams, and we will identify them in our system, and we will prohibit accounts from being opened using those pictures. And we did that, and we saw no degradation in the number of fake profiles. And we saw fake profiles with those pictures still being used. And they were like, well, if you shade it or change it or manipulate it, you know, the algorithms don't pick it up. And so we. We built a couple of fake profiles using those same images. And every time we did it, the. The algorithm still said, hey, this is Brian Denny, and this is his suggested friend group. And it was all people that I don't know, but people from Lagos, Nigeria. They had it completely. The algorithms were smart enough to still identify the pictures even after we black and white and them or shaded them or manipulated them. It still knew who I was. And it still. And it. It based a recommended friends list of scammers that had used my images to produce fake pages. I mean, so yes, the technology absolutely exists to do what you're wanting to do, prohibit fake profiles from being started. But it's up to those dating sites, as you said, that want to not have fake profiles on them. It's up to sites like Facebook that say, we don't want fake profiles, we're going to eliminate them by ensuring our algorithms do this. And there's no impetus to do that.
- [24:00]
Beau Friedlander
Facebook removes fake accounts constantly, hundreds of millions of them every quarter. And in just the first three months of 2024, they took down 631 million fake profiles in one quarter. That's not a small operation. They have the technology. But why is Brian Denny still reporting that 33% success rate? According to documents reviewed by Reuters, Meta's finance and safety divisions have known for years that fraudulent ads, and by extension fake accounts that run them, represent a pretty big revenue Source. In a 2025 internal presentation, executives explicitly discuss the trade off between what they call the violating revenue money from illegal deceptive activity and the cost to enforce it. Violating revenue, that's their term, not a critics term, not a regulatory term. Their own internal language for the money they make from scammers. Meta's own Systems reportedly identify 15 billion scam related ads every year. And the company continues to serve them because internal projections showed that roughly 10% of Meta's 2024 revenue, around $16 billion, came from prohibited or fraudulent sources. And that revenue far outweighed any expected fines. $16 billion. Now Facebook will tell you, and they, they do tell you, it's. It's on their website that they prohibit fake accounts, that they prohibit fraud, that they prohibit romance scams. Specifically, their community standards say that they aim to protect users and businesses from being deceived out of their money. They aim to. I aim to be a billionaire. Has it not happened yet? I actually don't. I don't want to be a billionaire. Seems like a waste of time anyway. There. There's also a Section 230, the law that says that platforms aren't legally responsible for what users post. It's a problem. It's been a problem since the very beginning, but they didn't know it was a problem because the things that were making it a problem didn't exist yet. It was written in the 1990s to help the early Internet get off the ground without being crushed by liability. Courts have repeatedly found that even when Meta fails to remove fraudulent content it knows about, Section 230 shields it from consequences. So when Brian sits in these meetings with Facebook, all three of them and walked away with 33% deletion rates. That wasn't incompetence, it was the system working exactly as it was designed to work. The fake profiles generate engagement, engagement sells ads and the law says nobody has to clean it up. But, and Brian knew this and that's why he went to Capitol Hill.
- [26:50]
Brian Denny
So I, I think one of the things that I've, I've tried to do is one working to start a not for profit that talks about this. I, I do interviews, I do the podcast, I do, you know, again, I realized it's a double edged sword. The more I put my picture in my voice, you know, I realize it's probably going to be used by nefarious people to create more products to scam folks buy. But the other side of that is I'm sure, I'm confident, I'm positive that we've kept people from being abused through this kind of scam by talking about it, providing information about it, by sharing what, what we've learned by starting a site. We've been to the Hill three times now to talk to congressional representatives about romance scams just to make sure, hey, this, this affects the constituents in your district to the tune of, you know, this kind of dollar sign, it's a national problem to this kind of dollar sign. And so you've got to start thinking about, you know, how do we stop it, how do we slow it down? And if social media giants supported guys like me and most all the most social media giants rely on people reporting fake profiles and if they took action on those fake profiles, we could get rid of a lot of the little fish. I mean just by me going fake, fake, fake, take action on it. And that would allow the federal government to look at the bigger fish and target them.
- [28:22]
Beau Friedlander
The problem though is that there's almost nothing people can do other than limit as much exposure as they can on anything public, which most people don't do. And even if you as a person try to limit your exposure, that doesn't mean that all of your friends and family members don't find ways of posting pictures and everything else about you online.
- [28:41]
Brian Denny
It's, you know, I watch my four kids and their technique. So in dealing with this one, my youngest daughter doesn't have a, isn't allowed on social media. So that, that's pretty easy. My 23 year old kid, my son is not on social media at all, doesn't care for it. One daughter, nationally ranked equestrian, you know, in the college, in the horse riding, she has a profile, she is very savvy and very suspicious about things. And so she does, she does good. My middle daughter, nothing on, nothing on social media, not into it. So they're either really smart about how to handle it or they, or they have ditched it completely. And for kids in their early 20s, I'm surprised that, you know, to find kids that can cut it off and just not have anything to do with it. My kids have seen enough and they just cut it off.
- [29:35]
Beau Friedlander
So you have your nonprofit, you're taking meetings in Capitol Hill, you're talking to the social media companies. What advice do you give us just everyday people?
- [29:46]
Brian Denny
Well, I can, I can say I don't post a lot of stuff on Facebook anymore. I don't share so freely. This is what I'm doing, this is what my family's doing, you know, that kind of thing. I, I'm, I'm definitely close hold about that kind of information nowadays, I just don't share it with people anymore, which is, you know, unfortunate. It's really not about protecting me. I know that every interview, every, every podcast, every time I'm, I'm doing something to talk about this, there's more exposure to me, which is good in terms of helping people get, you know, involved in romance scams. But I also realized that snippets of anything I say, pictures, or of any video that I do also can be used and, and used again to go back and voice over and take advantage of people by the scammers. One of the very first times in D.C. talking to congressional representatives about romance scams, we took a picture in front of the White House. Within a week, that picture was used to start a fake profile talking, you know, again, another fake profile. Looking to make contact with people and take advantage of people.
- [30:50]
Beau Friedlander
Well, the bigger problem nowadays is going to be that somebody listens to this podcast and takes a recording of it, feeds it to an AI voice generator, and you will find sometime in the future, Brian, I don't doubt it. Your wife being forwarded a voicemail from you that isn't you, your voice. It'll be your voice. Right, but it won't be you. It may already be happening. Just as you know, your voice is on the record in podcasts, as you were saying, and on other media, and, and that can be grabbed. And then all they, a scammer has to do is change the words and have AI say, hey honey, I'm really looking forward to seeing you New York, but I don't have money for the tickets right now. Can you send me some Money.
- [31:39]
Brian Denny
It's as simple as that.
- [31:50]
Beau Friedlander
So your organization advocating against romance scammers, how is it going?
- [31:57]
Brian Denny
Really well. You know, I say really well. I could say that because it provides us an outlet to talk about what we've learned about romance scams. And we get a lot of people that log on, you know, Google advocating against romance scammers. We've got a Facebook page. I mean, if the bad guys are on there, why aren't we? And we've got a lot of good input coming into the site. The FBI agent that opened up the case on me, started the case for me, is on our board, and we've got a number of other board members who are dedicated to really bringing awareness to romance scam. So we do a lot of. A lot of work. There's a couple of resources in terms of how to report romance scams and things like that, but it is really page where you can get information and kind of talk to other people who have. Have kind of been through the process here. But again, our number one thing that we can do is spread the word and talk about it. Everything else from, you know, bringing justice to some of these folks to change the 230, those are goals that require a lot more work. But, you know, quite frankly, getting on and talking about romance scams is a pretty easy thing for us to do at this point in sharing the information about what happens. And what we like to do is have the victims provide an outlet for them to talk. I'm kind of convinced that there's certainly not a lot of these crimes that are reported, which is unfortunate. So that metric never really gets to recognition that it ought to get. I think it's embarrassing to people, like a lot of these crimes might be. And so people. Victims don't report it. I think reporting it is. Helps draw the attention to it that we really need. And reporting and talking about it is often very therapeutic to kind of get it out on the table and move on.
- [33:46]
Beau Friedlander
When Brian and I first talked, going to Capitol Hill felt like shouting into a very large, very expensive building. But in 2023, Americans reported losing 1.4 billion to romance scams. That's according to the FTC. And the median loss per person was $2,000. Here's the thing about that number. It's almost certainly wrong, not because the FTC made it up, but because 64,000 people reported romance scams in 2023. In a country of 330 million people. People don't report this. They don't. They're embarrassed or they Just have their process and get over it. In June 2025, the House of Representatives passed something called the Romance scam Prevention Act. HR 2481, if you're curious, passed by a voice vote, meaning essentially nobody stood up to object. Bipartisan, quiet. Really. Not a lot of headlines. So what does it actually do? It requires online dating platforms to notify you if someone you've been messaging has had their account suspended or banned or for fraud. Specifically fraud. So that's it. If the app finds out that the person you're talking to for however long is a scammer, they have to tell you. They have to include the banned user's profile name, a statement that they have been using a false identity, and a warning not to send them any money. Failure to comply gets treated as an unfair or deceptive practice under the FTC Act. Is this a sweeping overhaul of Section 230? No. No, it's. It's not. It's not doing very much. The. The bottom line is you're talking about psychology here, right? Brian told us something about the psychology of these scams, about how the scammer prepares the victim in advance. He said, if you ever talk to my wife, she'll deny it. She'll say it's a scam. That's just what she does. The lies preloaded to survive the truth. And one of the reasons it works so well is because the platform itself never says a word. The account just disappears. No explanation. The scammer opens up a new one, and on it goes. The victim is left wondering what happened. And sometimes the scammer reaches back, and from the. From the new account with a story about what happened, it just keeps going and going. They might even claim it was a scam. But here's what I keep thinking about. Brian said the images won't change as long as people are giving those images money. He said it was a statement of fact. Not despair, self pity, just, this is the world we live in. His face is out there, and it'll always be out there somewhere. Right now, at an Internet cafe somewhere, or a scam compound, someone's using it to tell a woman in Germany or Ohio or New Zealand that he loves her and that he's coming home and that he just needs a little help. Brian can't stop anyone from doing that. In fact, no law can stop that. What a law can do, what a notification requirement can do, what transparency can do, what a podcast can do, is make it a little harder, make the lie a little less comfortable to live in, and A little less believable. Okay, final coda here. If people want to learn more about advocating against romance scammers, where should they go?
- [37:03]
Brian Denny
So you could just Google that up just like it sounds. AARS or advocating against romance scammers. We've got a website, we've got a Facebook site, and, you know, you can sign in there and kind of see what we do and see what we're about. If you've been scammed or want to talk about your experience, have a loved one that's currently being scammed. I mean, we're happy to provide information and get you going down the right road there.
- [37:29]
Beau Friedlander
Thank you so much.
- [37:31]
Brian Denny
Thank you.
- [37:33]
Beau Friedlander
Okay, this Tinfoil swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline, is extremely simple. If you are in an online dating environment, I don't care which one it is, stay in that dating environment. Do not go to WhatsApp, do not go to Signal, do not go to Telegraph, and do not meet them right away either. Spend some time, kick the tires, poke around, make sure you're actually talking to. Not only that you're talking to a real person, but do the regular stuff too. Because if someone seems to be too good to be true out of the box, oh, my gosh, you know what it's going to be like in week three. Come on. We don't want the Barbie doll or the Ken doll version of romance. And at the end of the day, we want want all that human imperfection. So this week's Tinfoil swan is lean into the human Date somebody who might suck a little bit, but is pretty good otherwise. Don't go after the person who says everything right because they're probably wrong or even a scammer. Okay, that's it. Stay safe, have a great week, and we'll see you next week. Thanks. Foreign. What the Heck is produced by Beau Friedlander. That's me and Andrew Stephen, who also edits the show. What the Heck Is Brought to you by Deleteme. Delete Me 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.
- [39:36]
Bill Kerr
From artificial intelligence to the gig economy to global volatility, the economy is changing at a dizzying pace. Enter the Managing the Future of Work podcast, the chart topping and critically acclaimed podcast from Harvard Business School. Hosted by me, Bill Kerr and by Managing the Future of Work project Co chair Joe Fuller, this show explores technology trends, demographic changes, the rise of the care economy and many other forces transforming the landscape of work. We'll highlight the insights of business leaders, technologists and experts like Business Roundtable's Kristen Silberg on corporate workforce strategy and Khan Academy founder sal Khan on AI education and the future of work. With more than two and a half million downloads and close to 300 episodes, there is something for everyone. Follow HBS Managing the Future of Work on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now.
- [40:41]
Reza Sachew
Have you ever wondered why Reese Witherspoon founded hello Sunshine? Or where Kevin o' Leary got his start? Or even how Alex Earle became the most accessible founder to someone who may not even consider this space? Enter the Founder Mindset, a new podcast from Harvard Business School Foundry, hosted by me, Reza Sachew. As a leading educator in entrepreneurship, I've built multiple high profile companies and mentored thousands of students and founders through the realities of starting and scaling ventures. And with the Founder Mindset, I'm sharing those lessons with you by sitting down with world class entrepreneurs including Witherspoon, o' Leary and Earl plus Tim Ferriss and many more to break down exactly how they commit, decide and and build for impact. These aren't surface level interviews. Each episode I challenge my guests to revisit their toughest moments, their boldest decisions, and the mindset that carried them through. Follow the Founder Mindset wherever you get your podcasts.