BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Phil Labonte @PhilThatRemains (everywhere) Guest: Trilogy Media @trilogymediainc (X) | @TrilogyMedia (YouTube) Art Kulik @ArtKulik (X) Ashton Bingham @ashtonbingham (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL
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Scams and AI Scammers
00:14:30
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| It seems nowadays with the advent of AI that everybody's got a story of somehow getting scammed or some kind of bogus text messages. | ||
| Well, today on the culture war, we're going to talk about it. | ||
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| Check it out. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| So joining us today to talk about this epidemic of scamming, we've got Art and Ashton from Scammed, the show on Fox News, or on Fox Nation, right? | ||
| Fox Nation. | ||
| Go ahead and introduce yourselves. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| My name is Ashton from Trilogy Media. | ||
| My name is Art from Trilogy Media as well. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, thank you for joining us. | ||
| Now, we're going to jump right into it. | ||
| And one of the things that you've got on your one sheet here, you list out the anatomy of a modern heist. | ||
| Why don't you go ahead and have a look for us? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| So basically, I mean, is it something that is targeting, a lot of people have this idea that it targets, you know, older people because they're unfamiliar with the internet or unfamiliar with, back in the day, it was unfamiliar with cold calls and stuff like that. | ||
| Is that kind of still the method that they use or has it morphed into something different nowadays? | ||
| It's a lot of that, but it's just on a different level. | ||
| You used to be able to rely on spotting a spam email by looking at bad grammar, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Whereas now a scammer can just go in and use ChatGPT and generate, you know, hey, pretend like you're a representative of the United Nations with a lottery winnings. | ||
| Give me the script and it looks perfect. | ||
| And this is more than just like phishing where you're trying to get someone to click on a link or that's a component of it. | ||
| I mean, but, you know, and one thing we love to talk a lot about is the stigma behind this kind of stuff. | ||
| Because a lot of people assume that you'd have to be really stupid, you know, to fall for this, or you'd have to, you have to be an idiot to believe that the IRS is asking you to pay your taxes and gift cards. | ||
| It's like when it's on paper, it sounds ridiculous. | ||
| But like you said, with phishing, it is a lot like phishing, where they're sending out millions, billions of these text messages or these phone calls or these emails or whatever it is over the course of a very short period of time, even if 0.1% of them are even engaging with it. | ||
| That's a massive pool of potential victims. | ||
| I think that's the biggest misconception when people think like, why did they target me? | ||
| Why me? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's not about the quality. | ||
| It's all about the quantity. | ||
| They will blast millions emails. | ||
| They will blast millions of robocalls. | ||
| Like Ashlyn said, 0, 0.1% return that, believing that you haven't paid taxes, right? | ||
| You just receive a phone call from local sheriff who said like you owe taxes and they're going to direct you go to target and buy gift cards and pay your taxes. | ||
| So when you say you mentioned phone calls and sending text messages, do they just randomly just say, okay, we're going to go this block of random numbers and we're just going to try calling them. | ||
| We know that the area code is this one and then just have a computer generate the numbers or I don't even think it's that it's that it's that thought through. | ||
| It's literally just databases of phone numbers. | ||
| So, you know, you, and that's how David, your data gets harvested. | ||
| Like, I have specific phone numbers that I have created just for calling scammers. | ||
| And I'll create a phone number. | ||
| I'll talk to one scammer for a while on it. | ||
| And then two weeks later, I'm getting inundated with scammer emails on that number that only exists for me to talk to scammers on. | ||
| So it's very much like a black market in the sense that they're buying and selling data just like they would do here in the States, but they're doing it amongst each other with scammers. | ||
| And they'll highlight potential victims or victims that have been scammed before. | ||
| So it's really just like a marketplace of, you know, your information gets out. | ||
| I've had the same phone number since I was 12. | ||
| I'm 35 now. | ||
| It's not hard to find my phone number. | ||
| I get so much crap, which helps us now because we can just use it to make content out of. | ||
| We can talk to scammers. | ||
| We can do all that. | ||
| But you really have to be proactive to just know what you're looking for and not just assume because they're calling you or because they know your number that like they have good intentions. | ||
| And also you have to understand a couple of things. | ||
| Being in this business, scam baiting for 10 years, we bust scammers, bust the scammers here domestically, internationally. | ||
| We went to India, we went to Nigeria. | ||
| Every single scam originates somewhere, right? | ||
| Overseas. | ||
| If we talk about tech support, pop-up, Microsoft, you open your computer and you see pop-up blinking that you have virus, virus, call this number immediately. | ||
| Anything that with pop-up, tech support, it originated from India. | ||
| We went to India and we shut down a couple call centers together with Mark Robert and Jim Browning. | ||
| And we had a great relationship with locals who will work for scam call centers and work for us double agent. | ||
| And they told us for 30 years, this business, and still so successful, blasting everybody, scamming Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Asians, everybody. | ||
| Bosses will send hundreds or thousands of people to United States. | ||
| They will apply for a job at cell phone companies, AT ⁇ T, or whatever. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And that's how we're going to get another way to get our data. | ||
| Ship it back, send it back, whatever boss wants. | ||
| He has insiders that actually like double agents. | ||
| It's a numbers game. | ||
| They get a billion phone numbers and they send a text message to all of them. | ||
| You know, 99.99% can ignore it. | ||
| They don't care about those people. | ||
| They care about the 1%, the 0.1%. | ||
| You made a point that you've been doing for 10 years. | ||
| How long have you been doing this? | ||
| Yeah, we opened our channel together in 2016. | ||
| 2016. | ||
| So talk about the difference with the advent of AI, right? | ||
| Because obviously AI is a fairly new technology in the past four or five years, maybe even less, that ChatGPT and other AIs have been able to successfully emulate human beings. | ||
| When they first came out, just like the, I like to use the Will Smith eating spaghetti AI video. | ||
| Most people are familiar with it. | ||
| The first time it came out, it was clearly not real. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Which wasn't that long ago. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It was only two years ago. | ||
| And now there's video out where Will Smith is eating spaghetti and it's indistinguishable from real. | ||
| There's no reason for someone to look at the new AI videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti. | ||
| And if they didn't know the context, there's no reason for someone to think that is definitely not Will Smith eating spaghetti. | ||
| So talk about the difference between pre-AI and post-AI and what that's kind of done with. | ||
| AI has created an express lane for brainwashing. | ||
| So I always say that like we spend a lot of time talking to scammers. | ||
| We spend a lot of time talking to victims. | ||
| Talking to victims is 10,000 times harder than talking to scammers, especially when they've got scamming already. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because there's apprehension to it. | ||
| Talking to anyone? | ||
| Well, yes. | ||
| I mean, I imagine it'd be embarrassing to be like, and that's the biggest problem is the stigma is like I said it earlier about like, you know, people say, and I don't have the chat, I'd love to pull it up here. | ||
| I'm sure a lot of people say, like, that's one thing when we go to new places that maybe don't know a lot about scam baiting, we'll say, it's like, well, you got to be stupid to think this. | ||
| It's not, it's not like that. | ||
| You, you, the brainwashing and this, and the, and the, the social engineering and the manipulation that takes place over sometimes months at a time is, is crazy. | ||
| It's unprecedented. | ||
| I think it's a lot harder to talk to victims, A, because it's delicate. | ||
| They're embarrassed. | ||
| They're ashamed. | ||
| They've been told by society that they're an idiot for falling for this. | ||
| Usually the cases that we're paying attention to are not necessarily, I lost $50, I lost $100. | ||
| Or like, I lost tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. | ||
| We've had, I think our biggest case recently was three to four million dollars over the course of a couple of years. | ||
| These people have had their entire lives taken from them. | ||
| This isn't just like, oh, they picked up one phone and their bank account was drained. | ||
| This is months of manipulation of, they'll use anything against you. | ||
| Like Chappie is one of our victim advocates and one of the best scam baiters in the world. | ||
| And she got into this because her close friend took her own life. | ||
| And she found the body. | ||
| And when they went through the phone afterwards, they saw the scam that was taking place that caused her to make that decision. | ||
| And they saw that the scammer found out that this victim had early onset dementia. | ||
| And the scammer was using that against her. | ||
| So it was like a refund scam kind of tech support type of thing. | ||
| But they said, you know, if you tell anyone about this, they're going to lock you away. | ||
| You know that, right? | ||
| Like, you can't tell anyone about this. | ||
| Like, you're crazy. | ||
| They're going to say you're crazy. | ||
| They're going to take your house away from you. | ||
| So give it to me. | ||
| I'll protect, you know, that kind of stuff. | ||
| So they're already broken down. | ||
| They're already full of shame. | ||
| A lot of times we find that they're more willing to talk to us than they are to their own families. | ||
| Yeah, they will rather talk to strangers. | ||
| It's like you can open up to a stranger on an airplane, right? | ||
| When you see the next person that you're not going to see him again. | ||
| Exactly the same concept. | ||
| They will talk to us and they say that, listen, I refinanced my house. | ||
| I cash out my 401k. | ||
| I absolutely broke. | ||
| Nobody, a single human around me doesn't know anything. | ||
| If I will say something, it's just going to be embarrassment for the family. | ||
| And to loop back to the question, the reason why I think AI is that fast track is because you'd be shocked at how many times we'll talk to a victim that came to us for help, but won't listen to us. | ||
| They're still in the scam. | ||
| And this is very common with romance scams. | ||
| There's a lot of very emotional element to it. | ||
| And they don't want to believe when we tell them this is not the person you're talking to. | ||
| You're not talking to Will Smith. | ||
| You're talking to a man in Nigeria. | ||
| Eight or ten years talking to a scammer thinking she is in relationship, giving her every single social security paycheck. | ||
| We meet this person five, 10 minutes ago, and we're trying to tell them the common red flags and why we know this is a scam or maybe we've tracked the scammer by this point. | ||
| But they've had eight years sometimes of talking to this one person that has relationships. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| All this convincing and all this brainwashing they've done. | ||
| So AI just fast tracks all that. | ||
| Now the victims will say, well, I've video chatted with this person. | ||
| I know he's real. | ||
| We're just talking to Elon Musk a couple days ago and we baiting him. | ||
| I mean, we baited 20 Elon Musk on Facebook. | ||
| And this is crazy. | ||
| So we FaceTiming and you can hear the voice. | ||
| You're like, hi, yeah, this is me, Elon Musk. | ||
| How can I help you? | ||
| Yeah, you should, I will give you a couple cars. | ||
| And the conversation goes the way we talk, giving, receiving. | ||
| And I look at Esh and I was like, if we would not be scam baiters, we will believe that. | ||
| Yeah, you point that out. | ||
| That's actually something that's worth kind of drilling down on. | ||
| There was a time where people would get an email or a message on their Instagram. | ||
| And I've seen a lot of these, a lot of them on Instagram. | ||
| Someone will make a remark or they'll say something and they'll try to initiate a conversation. | ||
| And the person that doesn't believe it will reply with something ridiculous. | ||
| And then the AI would act like, or the person, whatever, would act like they didn't say that. | ||
| And it's beyond a misunderstanding. | ||
| It would just, they would continue down the script. | ||
| Those are easy to spot. | ||
| But now with AI, they can actually interact. | ||
| And it's a pretty, pretty realistic or pretty understand. | ||
| It represents a human well enough where you can say, look, it makes sense that you would be taken by this because this looks like a perfectly normal conversation. | ||
| We've had conversations with ourselves. | ||
| We have people that pretend to be us online. | ||
| And they'll go into the comment section and they'll reply. | ||
| Someone will say, hey, I need help. | ||
|
FBI's Online Scam Countermeasures
00:15:30
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| I got scammed or whatever. | ||
| And then there'll be a fake trilogy media account that will respond to it and say, I can help you recover your funds. | ||
| Now, do you think that those are AI or do you think that's an actual person? | ||
| I mean, those references, Esh, it was a person in Nigeria. | ||
| Well, yeah, there's a person behind it every single time. | ||
| Whether or not it's AI initiating the comments, I don't know. | ||
| But the point is they're trying to get you off of YouTube and onto a direct WhatsApp or Telegram chat. | ||
| So they'll make an account and on YouTube, every handle is unique, but your username, not your username, but your channel name is not. | ||
| So like the handle will say trilogy media 679.xyz, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But then you go to the channel, it just says trilogy media helpline. | ||
| And it's got our picture and it's got our cover photo. | ||
| It's got our videos. | ||
| It's all a duplicate of us. | ||
| Message me on WhatsApp for help and it's a phone number and to Nigeria or whatever. | ||
| And then we call it and then they're impersonating us and then we're talking to ourselves about, so yeah, it's they blast this stuff out just like the emails and everything, just to see who's going to respond, who's going to engage. | ||
| In 2026, as of right now, we can create AI, deep fake. | ||
| I can be your mom. | ||
| I will call you and send son. | ||
| I need some help. | ||
| Send me money and I will sound like your mom. | ||
| I will look like your mom. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| And that's why people asking us when we do interviews, what should we do when we have these AI talking to me? | ||
| And we always say, set up a password. | ||
| Set up a password among your family. | ||
| Hey, mom, if it's really you or hey, son, which school did you go to? | ||
| What is my favorite food? | ||
| And you're going to hear like this. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| It's hard to beat the game when it's already, yeah, you're not going anywhere. | ||
| It's just AI is just giving, it's opening the door for anyone to do it. | ||
| You know, just with any tool, it can be used for good, it can be used for bad, and it will be, and it'll continue. | ||
| It's not going anywhere, and it's going to continue to be exploited in this way. | ||
| We try to use it when we can to fight back against it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, you're going to pretend to be a scammer. | ||
| Well, we're going to pretend to be a victim. | ||
| Come and get my money and let's get you in some handcuffs. | ||
| So what's your, so if you get a scammer that reaches out to you, right? | ||
| Or say you bait someone, right? | ||
| What's the, what's the, what's the first thing that you guys are doing to get them to believe that you're actually actually vulnerable, that you're actually a real person that they can actually take advantage of? | ||
| I guess it depends on the context. | ||
| If we're looking to entertain, like in a live stream, or if we're looking to actually, like if we have a collaboration, like this year was huge with our, with our show. | ||
| Law enforcement kind of stuff, okay? | ||
| And you work with law enforcement. | ||
| Now we do. | ||
| Like before, it was impossible because these scams, it's not like a cut and dry crime where one guy robbed a bank. | ||
| Let's arrest him. | ||
| This is a multiple layers of bureaucracy, borders, fake identities, bank accounts overseas. | ||
| Like a victim comes to us and lost money. | ||
| There's dozens of people involved. | ||
| And trying to call the police on a cash mule in the United States was procuring absolutely nothing for years. | ||
| So we stopped doing it, you know. | ||
| But when they call us, or now we're in a, in a fortunate place where our viewers will actually send us their tips, you know, if they get like fake invoices or whatever. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So we can actually proactively reach back out. | ||
| Because usually this stuff is like the scammer will send you a hook and they're looking for whoever's going to bite on it. | ||
| So we just bite on it and we just let them take us through their steps. | ||
| So if it's a fake invoice or it's a spam email, we'll reply to it or we'll call the phone number and we'll be like, hey, I got this. | ||
| What does this mean? | ||
| Is this real? | ||
| And then just let them go. | ||
| Let them tell us what they're going to tell us. | ||
| We already know the playbook. | ||
| Sometimes they surprise us. | ||
| It's rare. | ||
| But they tell us what they want us to do, where they want us to go. | ||
| If we need to social engineer them in a certain direction, like if we're working with law enforcement and we want them to send a cash mule, then we need to avert their primary resources, which would be a wire transfer, a Bitcoin deposit. | ||
| We make up excuses why we can't do that. | ||
| No, you have to come get the cash from me. | ||
| So even though it's an Indian overseas call center, a lot of people don't realize there's a lot of people here in the States that are helping to facilitate those scams. | ||
| So they'll send one of their trusted dudes to my house as an old man to come pick up my cash. | ||
| And then when we have the cops there, they can take him down. | ||
| We in 2020. | ||
| Sorry, no, go ahead. | ||
| In 2020, we started doing confrontations, right? | ||
| Knocking on doors, following, follow the money, you're going to find the bad guy. | ||
| And when you knock on doors, either victim going to open the door or it's going to be cash mule or it's going to be scammer itself. | ||
| So different scenarios. | ||
| Whatever we film, we always give this footage to law enforcement. | ||
| FBI, Homeland Security, guys, this is it, right? | ||
| We got approached by FBI. | ||
| We got approached by Homeland Security. | ||
| And for so many years, it's always special with FBI. | ||
| It's always been their way or highway. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| You guys don't work for us. | ||
| We didn't work for you, but we need raw footage of what you guys did five years ago, right? | ||
| Everything was kind of like, we already get used to it. | ||
| Last year was absolutely monumental. | ||
| First time in the history of scam baiting community where law enforcement, FBI, Homeland Security, everybody got along together. | ||
| Everybody has a big egos. | ||
| My agency is better than your agency. | ||
| And we like, guys, why are we trying to bring these freaking bureaucracy? | ||
| We have scammers that's scamming Democrats, they're scamming Republicans, anybody. | ||
| There is no discrimination. | ||
| We have a mutual enemy, cybersecurity pandemic. | ||
| Everybody got together. | ||
| Shout out to John Montgomery, Sheriff. | ||
| He was like, guys, our community, it's 70, over 70, Mountain Home. | ||
| A lot of elderly people, Chinese mafia thugs pretending to be federal agents coming on doors, robbing elderly people. | ||
| Enough is enough. | ||
| In person. | ||
| In person. | ||
| And this is kind of like how fascinating and smart this scam is. | ||
| If we're talking about tech support, all these bright, amazing brains in India doing bad stuff, bad apples in the family, scamming people, right? | ||
| So if I scam you, I need to move your money. | ||
| So India Mafia works with Chinese mafia. | ||
| Chinese mafia will send thugs to your door, to your grandmother, to your mother, to collect that cash, and then take that cash and either deposit to Bitcoin. | ||
| And that's where our game starts getting in, right? | ||
| We're going to either sitting in the bushes or we're going to rent a car, a house, right? | ||
| Ashton going to get this guy and he's going to be old man. | ||
| How do you talk? | ||
| So we have like literally every single agency working together, cash mule showing up to rob an elderly person, which is Ashton. | ||
| We have sheriff in the garage. | ||
| We have helicopters, dogs. | ||
| We have federal agents with undercover cars watching highway gas station. | ||
| We have eyes on every single vehicle that doesn't have Arkansas. | ||
| If we're doing in Arkansas, who doesn't have Arkansas plates number, right? | ||
| So it's just, it's like a freaking James Bond movie. | ||
| It's like mission sounds particular on paper. | ||
| But like if you told us a few years ago, we'd be doing that. | ||
| We'd be like, what are you talking about? | ||
| It's very weird, but it's cool. | ||
| So one of the things that you mentioned, you were talking about the mules, right? | ||
| If the feds are like, okay, we'll pick up the mule, is there any capacity to reach outside of the U.S. borders and to start to disassemble these organizations? | ||
| Because you guys are talking about the mafia, right? | ||
| So I mean, obviously organized crime likes this type of play because for them, it's a lot safer. | ||
| You're not engaging in strong arming so much as you are engaging in persuasion. | ||
| So there's less risk for the people involved that are the criminals as well as if you don't have a, aside from the mule, maybe. | ||
| But like if you pick up a mule, that's like picking up just a street thug. | ||
| Do you guys have any capacity to actually start, or does the federal government work with you guys to actually start disassembling the organizations? | ||
| Well, how much time do you have? | ||
| Because that is such a deep topic. | ||
| Well, if they take their phone and throw it in a Faraday bag so that the chats can't be wiped, you have a treasure trove of information of who sent them. | ||
| And also, too, not to ignore, like, we're the ones, we go boots on the ground. | ||
| We have the fun of making the content like right there in person. | ||
| But when we're baiting behind the scenes, when we have Chappie or we have Bull or we have anyone of our team that is doing the off-site scam baiting and along the way, they're getting tons of information before we even get to an arrest. | ||
| So the scammers will say, hey, I want you to, you know, you have to pay for this or whatever the scam is. | ||
| You know, you have to put it in this Bitcoin wallet. | ||
| Well, there we go. | ||
| We just got a Bitcoin address. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say, because anything that goes on the blockchain should be traceable. | ||
| You can't trace it. | ||
| And not even just crypto. | ||
| I mean, that's just one example, but like, then there's a reason why there's like, hey, okay, we can't do crypto. | ||
| They're like, okay, well, can you do a wire transfer? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Even though we're not going to, but we tell them yes. | ||
| They're like, okay, you're going to wire it to this overseas bank in India. | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| Now we have an identifying bank account. | ||
| And then we're like, well, we can't send it into national. | ||
| So there's a reason why we can't do each thing. | ||
| They're like, well, now you have to wire it to this LLC in New York. | ||
| It's like some random. | ||
| So there we go. | ||
| We have another identifying LLC we can look up. | ||
| Then we work through every step of their thing. | ||
| Usually they want to send someone as a last resort. | ||
| But by the time we get someone to show up and actually get arrested, we've already identified three, four, five, sometimes in the dozens of mule remotely that are receiving this money. | ||
| And then we get them on scene and you have their phone. | ||
| They're not our first pickup. | ||
| We're not their first pickup, right? | ||
| So just like the one, the video we put a few weeks ago in Arkansas, the guy showed up to pick up what he thought was 60 grand from my old man character, but they went through his phone and like he had picked up how much money in the previous few days? | ||
| Like 1.1 or something? | ||
| Like in the millions. | ||
| In 3D. | ||
| He was just airport hopping, rental car hopping and picking up money from real money from victims. | ||
| So you get the victim identifying. | ||
| So it's like a spider web. | ||
| You identify this one thing, but then you can then reach out to every single hook, spoke on the wheel. | ||
| And eventually if they pull up the Telegram chats and they can subpoena stuff, all that stuff's over our head, but they can start identifying the people overseas that are actually sending them. | ||
| Now, you said if they grab their phone, if they grab their phone and put it in a Faraday bag, is there a significant risk of them, of the person wiping it? | ||
| Or do you think that it would be something that was done remotely? | ||
| Well, you can wipe Telegram and WhatsApp and some of those apps remotely, which is why you want to put it in that bag, because if it doesn't have a connection, it won't be able to refresh itself to show a wiped chat. | ||
| So they can go through the Telegram. | ||
| That's something that was maybe one of the biggest hurdles we had from the beginning is initially, naively going into this, and we would confront a mule. | ||
| We'd call the police. | ||
| He's committing a crime, right? | ||
| Cops show up. | ||
| They don't understand what's happening. | ||
| They're like, where's the victim? | ||
| That's going to arrest us. | ||
| Their first question is, who's the victim? | ||
| I'm like, well, it's me, but I'm not real victim. | ||
| So there really isn't one. | ||
| And they're like, well, what's the crime? | ||
| I'm like, well, it's theft, but it's not real. | ||
| This is fake cash, though. | ||
| And so we spend 20 minutes explaining the scam. | ||
| And it's not an easy scam to explain in 30 seconds to refund scams specifically. | ||
| It's very costly. | ||
| Especially if law enforcement is not educated on this, especially if they have no idea. | ||
| They get reports every single day, right? | ||
| Filed reports by elderly people every single day. | ||
| There is no resources. | ||
| There is no money. | ||
| There is no time. | ||
| I keep bringing this. | ||
| We were in Houston doing our stinghouse operation. | ||
| We got a call from local Houston PD and they're like, hey, guys, big fan of your channel. | ||
| Can our cybersecurity division come? | ||
| Can a group of people come to you and maybe you guys teach us a couple of things? | ||
| We're like, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Three people showed up, two Houston PD and one, another person. | ||
| And we're like, what is the cybersecurity division? | ||
| What is cybersecurity division? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| And he said, oh, you're staring at him. | ||
| This is him. | ||
| And I was like, one person? | ||
| He was like, yeah. | ||
| So can you guys teach us how to track Bitcoin and to see where all this money goes? | ||
| And I look at Ashley and I was like, no wonder scammers so successful in this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The reports just get thrown in a cabinet and nothing's ever done about it. | ||
| Well, you were talking about the past year, right? | ||
| How you've seen a significant increase from the feds. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about that? | ||
| Expand? | ||
| What does it mean as a significant increase? | ||
| Like, obviously, you said there's a little more cooperation between agencies, but do you feel like they kind of just realize that this is a big problem? | ||
| Or do you think that they now have the resources because of the administration or or what's your, what's your guess about it the? | ||
| I mean you can, you can tell about these, but I think, like we, so many doors got shut down in our faces over a decade LA PD, NEW YORK PD Miami PD big, big agencies. | ||
| We have no time. | ||
| We didn't have resources, hun off. | ||
| We sold the show to National Network, to FOX, and FOX is very pro-law enforcement yeah right, so they start treating more serious, more like all right, if you doing it, let us help, let us bring like a sheriff, let let's, let's put connections together and after this, the movement has been created. | ||
| I think we were kind of cursed with that youtuber label that we can't avoid. | ||
| You know um it's, it's a risky thing for, for an agency that doesn't want to be shown in a bad light. | ||
| Uh wrongly um I, I get it. | ||
| I think um, you know we, we worked with them a long time before it was publicly known right, it's. | ||
| Just, we're not really working with them. | ||
| As you said, it's. | ||
| They make it clear that we don't work for you, you don't work for us. | ||
| This is not a, this is not a. | ||
| We want all the evidence we want. | ||
| You give us whatever you want to give us and we'll do our job and you'll never hear from us again is usually kind of how it goes well. | ||
| That's an example though, like the DOJ put out this press release that we were of the 65 million dollar scam ring that was taken down. | ||
| There was like 25 different Um Asian mafia mules and bosses that were all indicted that we were a huge part of. | ||
| We didn't even realize it, so we did. | ||
| It was the very first scam busts we were doing back in 2020 2020, as soon as we started in the payroll. | ||
| That's why, no, they don't, and they don't want the liability they don't want. | ||
| I mean, I get it, but our, our power is not in law enforcement. | ||
| Our power is in awareness and and and eyeballs. | ||
| So we make content. | ||
| We have to make content to do this or we can't do it anymore. | ||
| We have nothing else to do. | ||
| We don't have badges. | ||
| You know so when they were coming to us back in 2020 and 2021, they're like, hey, I saw your video confronting this guy, but his face is blurred. | ||
| I work for the DOJ, i'd like to do something about it. | ||
| And we're like here here, take all, we give all the raw footage we always do, but then the, the phone goes silent, we never hear back from them again testifying, and we said like hey guys, come. | ||
| But even then that was one time and like we didn't know the context, they're like, come testify, there's something happening, we'll tell you when we'll tell you, we'll tell you more when we can. | ||
| And then three years later, there's a massive indictment. | ||
| It's like and the whole indictment credit to them, gave us credit for starting all this uh, but it's like I didn't even realize this was happening until it was done, you know. | ||
| So it was a lot of that, but without the end result, where we'd give all the information and we'd never hear back until last year. | ||
|
Stacking Charges Successfully
00:05:05
|
||
| From your perspective, is that a good thing or a bad thing? | ||
| I mean obviously, it's kind of like well, it'd be cool if, if we were, you know let, if they let us know. | ||
| But do you think that the reason they keep it so quiet is because of the lack, because of a fear of of security, a fear of of the targets being, you know, getting wind of it? | ||
| Or or probably, I think um, because that's standard, that's standard government procedure, to not tell anyone anything? | ||
| Of course is probably why the and i'm probably, i'm probably biased, because our living comes from making content, so I probably can't have like a fair assessment of this. | ||
| But to The awareness is the biggest problem. | ||
| And us working in silence does nobody any good. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Like, we can fight these scams by making people aware of what to look for. | ||
| If they don't have anyone to scam, they don't have anyone to scam. | ||
| So, us making the content and making it entertaining to a degree, which we try to do, more people will watch it. | ||
| More people will learn. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's how that scam works. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's look at what they did this time. | ||
| Oh, that's a new development. | ||
| So, they learn all these things to look out for and then they stop falling for it. | ||
| So, but that's it. | ||
| And it's because of the content that law enforcement came to us in the beginning. | ||
| So, if we didn't make the videos, they wouldn't even know what was happening. | ||
| But that's it. | ||
| That's kind of a constant. | ||
| That's the thing is: all it takes, one sheriff, one police department who will do something that's never been done before. | ||
| Nobody wants to be a guinea pig. | ||
| We pitch our show about scams since 2020, keys so many networks, blah, Got very close with a couple of them. | ||
| Never been done before. | ||
| We don't want to do it. | ||
| Fox came, wrote a check. | ||
| Go do it. | ||
| It's a big problem. | ||
| Everybody getting scammed, regardless of your whatever political beliefs, your culture, religion, whatever. | ||
| Go do it. | ||
| We did it. | ||
| Sheriff John Montgomery took a risk on us in Arizona, Arizona, in Arkansas. | ||
| And after the show went live, all of a sudden we're getting the sheriff from the free state. | ||
| We start going nationwide. | ||
| Our scare, like right now, from your show, we're flying straight to Steve House. | ||
| I'm not telling where. | ||
| It doesn't matter which way. | ||
| So anyways, shut your mouth. | ||
| You're flying somewhere. | ||
| Somewhere. | ||
| Keep your mouth shut. | ||
| So we booked it. | ||
| And that's because of the scammers, not because of the audience. | ||
| Because of the scammers. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So we book like months in advance. | ||
| And all it started because like one successful operation. | ||
| We, we like it has been arrested like over a dozen scammers, prosecuted, and it's just like snowball. | ||
| You know, what kind of what kind of time do the perpetrators look at, right? | ||
| So you pick a guy up, goes through the court system, gets found guilty. | ||
| And again, like I said earlier, it's like, if it's just a mule, you know, they're going to have a hundred more of those guys. | ||
| And if you toss one of these guys in jail, you know, if he goes and does a, you know, a dime or a nickel, like he's going to get out and he's going to go, it's likely he's going to go right back to it. | ||
| So do you feel like, do you feel like the punishments, the time that these dudes do, is it long enough? | ||
| Is it a situation where these people are actually U.S. citizens? | ||
| Are they here on green cards? | ||
| Can they get deported? | ||
| Can they get sent out and flagged? | ||
| Like, what's the actual result for the scammers that you pick up? | ||
| It varies drastically, of course. | ||
| Jurisdiction, the right prosecutor, having DAs that don't have their heads up their asses and actually want to charge them. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| At least they have their shit together in Arkansas, and it's refreshing because they're actually charging, like the one I referenced with the guy that was airport hopping was charged with five felonies just from that one pickup. | ||
| So they're hitting it hard. | ||
| Most other places, yeah, they get a slap on the wrist and it's not really going to do anything. | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| We had to kind of work up to this, right? | ||
| And so now we're in this place now where they're actually charging them with hefty crimes. | ||
| And in Arkansas specifically, where we were at, the prosecutor even like was working with us. | ||
| They're like, okay, so here's what we can do. | ||
| I know your cash is fake. | ||
| He's doing a $60,000 pickup, attempted theft or whatever the charge was. | ||
| But put $500 of real cash in the box too, because then I can get him on actual theft. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| So they can stack it. | ||
| They can do it. | ||
| And because he rented a car, there's another charge there because he's using another person's property. | ||
| He's flying. | ||
| It's interstate. | ||
| So if you're someone that's motivated to actually do something, they can stack the charges. | ||
| And is it long enough? | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| And is it just barely chipping away at the whole organization? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's all, we do what we can. | ||
| Like, you know, we can't just send a cyber virus bomb to the entire call center all the time. | ||
| You know, we can do it, we can, and we can find back, and we can show people what not to do. | ||
| That's honestly the most effective thing. | ||
| Yeah, I was actually thinking that like the big benefit, obviously you want to take criminals off the streets if you can, but I imagine the real big benefit is Fox picking up the show and people watching it because it educates people on not just the way that they do it, but it shows them that they're not alone. | ||
| You can go and find people to talk to. | ||
| I imagine people reach out to you guys regularly nowadays. | ||
| Constantly. | ||
| Your inbox. | ||
| Unfortunately, you can't find the bottom and it's depressing to read through. | ||
|
Pitching Pranks on Single Sunday
00:05:56
|
||
| But yeah, I mean, Fox has an older demographic, so it's a totally different and shout out to Fox. | ||
| Like, look, like you said, we're non-partisan on our channel, on our content. | ||
| It's like, I don't care. | ||
| We pitched to Fox, pitched to CNN, pitched everywhere. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Whoever's going to put time and money and resources into scam awareness is good in my book. | ||
| Fox picked it up. | ||
| Fox took a chance. | ||
| It's a hard show to make because of this very reason with the law enforcement involvement and setting this up and then counting on the mules to actually show up is a whole nother struggle. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's one thing to make shorts, you know, a couple shorts in an afternoon. | ||
| It's totally different to put the resources into like what amounts to a legitimate investigation. | ||
| You have five months. | ||
| We want six episodes and they all need to have law enforcement collaboration. | ||
| Go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That was pretty much what we did. | ||
| I think we did like, I don't know, 15, 20 states, seven, eight international countries in five months. | ||
| We were gone. | ||
| So you guys do international travel yourselves. | ||
| Oh, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I was actually one of you keep asking questions about, all right, we have cash mules, but if you remove them, nothing happened, but the big bosses is overseas. | ||
| We actually changed kind of the strategy in the beginning of everything that we've been doing. | ||
| We went to India. | ||
| We tried to work with Indian government, with Indian cybersecurity police. | ||
| The more those things have been happening in India, we went to India, we put 10 scammers on apparel for one year. | ||
| We had a meeting every single Sunday. | ||
| We did sting operation, preparing operation with Mark Robert, who created all the glitter bombs, Jim Browning, who can get access to every single camera in scam call centers, and us being boots on the ground. | ||
| So we work on one year, didn't miss any single Sunday. | ||
| We created this separation. | ||
| We went to India. | ||
| We brought all these glitter bombs and all these pranks and all these awesome stuff. | ||
| Don't ask us how we got those through customers. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Yeah, that's a different one. | ||
| When everything happened and we executed, we did our pranks. | ||
| We shut down three call centers. | ||
| When Indian mafia found out that we in India, that Americans, these West freaking enemies, came to our house to fuck with us, when it's been something successful for so many decades, they start hunting us. | ||
| They start looking, going through hotels to hotels, and they're all rats on either Telegram group, 50, 60,000 scammers talking to each other. | ||
| So they start blasting our description. | ||
| Fucking trilogy media in town. | ||
| You see them, kill them. | ||
| And make story short, we spend so much time, effort, money, and we found out one amazing thing. | ||
| I mean, it's not amazing. | ||
| The government is involved. | ||
| Is involved. | ||
| Local sheriff, we got Jim Browning, went to the computer, and he gave us breakdown sheets who getting paid. | ||
| They not even hiding. | ||
| It says they have a line item for cops. | ||
| For cops. | ||
| Cops will show up once a month. | ||
| They're going to collect your mother, your father, my mother, my father money. | ||
| They're going to get paid. | ||
| And every single time there is a raid, right? | ||
| Cops show up in the morning and it is empty. | ||
| It's all for show. | ||
| They will do arrest for show and they're going to let them go. | ||
| So we kind of lost faith that we can do anything with international government. | ||
| So we redirected back what we can do. | ||
| We can work with local police. | ||
| We can get cash mule. | ||
| We can cut all these tentacles. | ||
| We're still scared to ever show up again in these jurisdictions. | ||
| And that's the point, too, is we did it in Arkansas. | ||
| Our first operation, we were there for three days. | ||
| By day two, we were getting hung up on repeatedly by scammers as soon as we gave them our zip code. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, because they're like, the word spreads. | ||
| They're like, oh, this is not a safe place for us as scammers, right? | ||
| It's actually very safe for the rest of the world. | ||
| So getting them to come to Arkansas after all this was happening was very difficult. | ||
| And that's like, that's the point. | ||
| That's why we do pride catches too, because, you know, they're going to be afraid to come. | ||
| And these repeat offenders who watch content know what to look for and where not to go. | ||
| And so now, you know, Oklahoma calls us. | ||
| They're like, oh, we don't want scammers here either. | ||
| So let's do it. | ||
| so now it's like a snowball and now we're like the whole year when you start opening the franchise yeah exactly It's exactly what it is. | ||
| We have undercover agents, right? | ||
| Scammers. | ||
| We have good scammers and bad ones. | ||
| The good one who works for us actually and give us information. | ||
| They will be sitting inside of the groups and they will send us screenshots from Arkansas. | ||
| And everybody's talking, do not send anybody. | ||
| We lost already like such important right hands. | ||
| It's trilogy media with cops taking our cash mules, taking our resources. | ||
| Fuck them. | ||
| Not going to Arkansas anymore. | ||
| Send cash mules anywhere in the United States. | ||
| Do not go to Arkansas. | ||
| Code Red. | ||
| And we're like, hell yeah. | ||
| And now we're going to different states. | ||
| Now, if you're watching this, if one of you is a scammer and you want to do something about it and you want to rob somebody, we're going to open that door. | ||
| I imagine, you know, you guys in India probably stick out. | ||
| Oh, no, not at all. | ||
| We got two. | ||
| We made a mistake. | ||
| And this is, again, this is in 2022. | ||
| So, you know, we learn as we go. | ||
| But yeah, we made the mistake of doing touristy shit on day one. | ||
| Oh, we got spotted on day two. | ||
| We got a little comfortable. | ||
| Well, because we had locals, right? | ||
| We were there and we wouldn't have gone without that. | ||
| So we maybe got a little comfortable. | ||
| And like, it's a long trip. | ||
| And we're like, okay, the mission is later this week. | ||
| Let's just take a day and chill. | ||
| We went, what do we go? | ||
| A zoo? | ||
| I forget where we went. | ||
| It's the Seven Wonders Park in Kolkata. | ||
| And then it was the next morning that, because our locals were insiders in these Telegram groups. | ||
| And just to give you a scale, this one particular group had 55,000 members in it. | ||
| And one person starts posting in it that trilogy's in town. | ||
| So that's all of a sudden 55,000 people involved in scamming in some way that now know about our presence and are posting our hotel address in it and stuff. | ||
| So anyway, that's a whole nother story. | ||
|
55,000 Scammers Alert
00:03:16
|
||
| But we do stand out to answer your question. | ||
| That's why when we went to Nigeria a couple of months ago for scam getting even, we had two cases. | ||
| Again, all these romance scam, like I've been maybe four or five African countries. | ||
| African people are so warm. | ||
| They love you. | ||
| They adore you. | ||
| They're genuinely happy when you come and you bring business. | ||
| They just hospitality on a different level. | ||
| Imagine you take this set of skills as a humanity, human set of skills and turn on romance, sexy, and baby. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Did you have your breakfast? | ||
| How you doing, my lady? | ||
| And you say those things that men or women want to hear it, right? | ||
| Especially with the way that nowadays there are so many people that are isolated because of the internet. | ||
| They're isolated from actual people. | ||
| They don't go out and interact with the world. | ||
| They've waited for a couple years. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, that makes perfect sense. | ||
| The point that you were making about the corruption and stuff. | ||
| So there's this guy, Michael Schellenberger. | ||
| He's a writer and an activist and stuff. | ||
| And I heard him on a podcast called Dad Saves America. | ||
| And he was talking about how the corruption in other countries, people in the United States don't understand how corruption actually is, right? | ||
| In the U.S., there's, of course, there's corruption, but it's always behind cool. | ||
| But they're quiet. | ||
| Yeah, it's behind cool. | ||
| Try to keep quiet. | ||
| You'd never see, like you said, you never see people on your Excel spreadsheet. | ||
| He was saying, he's like, look, in India, there will be a person that wants to get electricity for their house. | ||
| And instead of paying the electric, the electric company, they pay the landowner or the landlord. | ||
| And the landlord will take that money and go and bribe. | ||
| He'll take a piece and he'll go and bribe the guy at the electric company to turn it on. | ||
| Or if you're in South America and you get a job, the guy that gives you the job will expect that he's going to take 10, 20% of your pay every week or every whatever as like something like a VIG, right? | ||
| And that's normal in a vast swath of the world. | ||
| You don't have to go far. | ||
| I'm Ishing European guy, right? | ||
| Well, now this is my country. | ||
| Always want to like. | ||
| I was. | ||
| I was, you know, like when your body born in the wrong country and you're sold in a different that was me. | ||
| Always want to be in America, but my body was in the Soviet Union, right? | ||
| So always want to leave that place. | ||
| And you're talking about everything, right? | ||
| Bribes. | ||
| In our countries, in my ex-countries, nobody hide. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you want to corrupt it, right? | ||
| If you drunk driving and you have enough money and cops stop you and you absolutely what obliterated, you put your window a little bit down, you put the cash to the cop and you, drunk as hack, they're gonna escort you back home. | ||
| Yeah, money talks and that's why, like governors mayors politicians, they'd like when they got busted rated, they're like, yeah my my, my toilet is gold. | ||
| Yeah, i'm not here. | ||
| I have like five million dollar cash or euros right here under the table. | ||
|
Bitcoin Atms And Scams
00:15:32
|
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| They're like, okay, that's cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's? | |
| What's the problem? | ||
| Yeah yeah, you know. | ||
| I mean so i'm, i'm in a band and and like we've toured throughout Europe and stuff and it's. | ||
| It is like even in in places where people would think that it's like, it's not like that. | ||
| Like you go to, we play in, like Italy and Milan and in the U.s. | ||
| If you, if you're out front selling a band's merch of a venue or whatever, the cops are going to come along and they're going to shoe you away. | ||
| You go to Italy and the band's inside selling merch, you're given 40 to the venue for selling, which is a huge amount anyways and then out front there's people selling your bootlegs and you can't even go and get them to leave. | ||
| And if you call the cops, the cops are gonna be like, no, it's fine yeah, you know so. | ||
| So we have that too. | ||
| It's called squatter's rights in California, you know. | ||
| But but it it, it is. | ||
| It does speak to the difference of cultures that you see in different countries and it does matter right, like the, the type of that type of brazen, you know, whether you call it corruption or just, you know uh, favoritism or whatever you want to call it, that's something that that you have to deal with internationally. | ||
| Dude, at the Nigeria airport, oh my, how many times did a government official blatantly ask us for a tip? | ||
| We have a, we benefit, like six or seven times before we left the building. | ||
| And not five bucks they're looking for, they want like a tip. | ||
| Like the guy putting my bag through the thing because you have to scan it every six feet, was like like literally, he's wearing a badge and he's like some tip. | ||
| Like I, you didn't do anything. | ||
| Like i'm just here to, I want to go. | ||
| Like our friend went to Nigeria first and she said, all right guys, just do me a favor, do yourself a favor, go to the bank, take one thousand dollar cash in fives. | ||
| You will need it really. | ||
| We landed in Nigeria right Lagos international airport and you have to show them vaccination cards, which is another speaking of vaccination card. | ||
| So we we over, we we maybe got ripped off. | ||
| We went to one of these private companies that charged just a shitload of money. | ||
| Lay it all out for you, because you need all these things to go into the country. | ||
| And when we get there, we met or we were there with a collaborator of ours. | ||
| And he, like, I guess his was not within the timeframe it was supposed to be. | ||
| And the guy was like, oh, you know, we need to send you back. | ||
| This is going to be a big, it's going to be a big problem. | ||
| We've got a problem. | ||
| I think we have a problem. | ||
| He tipped him like what? | ||
| 40 bucks? | ||
| Like, we could have saved so much money by just bribing our way into the country. | ||
| From lending in Lagos International Airport to get to our hotel, which is on a territory of literally like on the airport property. | ||
| On an airport property, you spend so much money because every single person will see, okay, you international, you know, like, oh, you're Caucasian, why aren't you coming to your, come on, and you just get him ripped over? | ||
| The vaccine requirement was a complete and utter horseshit. | ||
| Like, we could have just, we could have honestly just bought our house. | ||
| I got to the point. | ||
| I was so excited. | ||
| And Amishi Europeana was like, dude, enough. | ||
| And when he's trying to grab my guy with his luggage, I just push him away. | ||
| I grabbed my guy. | ||
| My camera guy was like, we're not giving you money. | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| And we just start walking to the exit. | ||
| And you go and people touch you. | ||
| Government officials. | ||
| And what was the design over there in Airport? | ||
| Which one? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No, no, government, don't pay. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| And you were laughing about it, that you're not allowed to give money to government officials. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Anyway, no, I've seen it. | ||
| That is a big sign that you, yeah, that government officials not allowed to take money or bribery, right? | ||
| And that is a big sign that they're not a government official. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's great. | |
| So getting back to the topic at hand, you guys were talking about holiday scam season. | ||
| Like, go ahead and give us a little insight on the difference between your run-of-the-mill normal summertime or whatever scams, as opposed to what kind of increase there is during the holiday season. | ||
| Like, what does that look like? | ||
| I always say that scammers will prey on one of two things, either your hopes or your fears. | ||
| And fears usually is the more common one. | ||
| And that meaning, you know, you get a call from the IRS, you're going to be put in jail if you don't pay your back taxes. | ||
| Like, that's a fear. | ||
| A hope is like, oh, I'm a Nigerian prince. | ||
| He just wants $10 million. | ||
| But before you get your winnings, you just got to pay a quarter million dollars in taxes, right? | ||
| So that's a hope. | ||
| So holidays, I mean, any kind of topical world event will initiate a lot more of these things. | ||
| Holidays, obviously, that's a yearly thing. | ||
| You want to get good gifts for your kids for Christmas. | ||
| They're not saying like, we need you to send a couple bucks to help poor kids and blah, blah, blah for Christmas. | ||
| They're far more in depth. | ||
| Oh, and what they'll do is they'll, like, I mean, again, it all depends on the type of scam. | ||
| They all have their own kind of ways that they go. | ||
| But these like tech support scams, specifically the ones over the holidays, when you get those fake invoices or you get, you know, whatever phishing links or websites of imposter Amazon. | ||
| You know, the domains will look exactly the same and they're not, you know, that kind of stuff. | ||
| What they'll do is they always push for remote connection to your computer first. | ||
| So and they explain to the old person, like, you know, they don't use the term remote connection. | ||
| They just say, we're connecting you to our secure server so we can refund you that money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And as soon as they do that, they have all the control in the world to block out your screen and take control. | ||
| They have you log into your bank and they see how much money you have. | ||
| That's where they start. | ||
| That's their starting block. | ||
| How much can I take? | ||
| Okay, here's what I'm going to do. | ||
| They have this money in savings, this money in checking. | ||
| I'm not going to show them, but I'm going to transfer $50,000 from their savings to their checking. | ||
| And I'm going to have them check their checking account or call their bank. | ||
| Oh, yeah, you have a deposit of $50,000 in your checking account. | ||
| That was an accident. | ||
| You have to send it back to us. | ||
| So you have to go and wire it or you have to go pull the money out. | ||
| And, you know, and so it's not really an overpayment. | ||
| They just moved it from one account to the other, right? | ||
| That kind of stuff. | ||
| So they will see how much you have and work from there. | ||
| And I think another one, a couple of those, it's definitely the, they will increase massive blast of emails. | ||
| Anything that best buy Amazon, Target, anything that you shop for a family, every single person doing things online, you booking your hotels, tickets, Airbnb, whatever you do, you do it online. | ||
| So they will overblast those emails that you overshopped. | ||
| There is, you bought something, right? | ||
| You bought the couch, you bought this. | ||
| Call the number on the bottom. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Another one, have you heard about parking where there is a QR code? | ||
| And instead of real one, it's a fake one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Same stuff. | ||
| They will print local scammers. | ||
| They will print exactly identical of the same format. | ||
| And we all struggling parking at Macy's, right? | ||
| So you park somewhere, but you need to pay for your parking. | ||
| And there's going to be fake one. | ||
| So you do the QR code and it's going to lead you to a link that you clicked, pull the information, and they'll read inside of your bank account. | ||
| So it's a lot of things that you have to be like, we always say, if I did not request, if I didn't call IRS, if I didn't call my Bank of America, if I didn't call Amazon, do not take these robot calls. | ||
| Do not reply those emails because it's fake. | ||
| Do not trust anybody. | ||
| So everyone knows that, you know, anyone that gets your email address can send you emails, right? | ||
| And I think if you're a savvy person, and this isn't to disparage anyone, but if you're a savvy person, you know, you don't really click links in random emails. | ||
| You can check the email address and just because it says best buy, if you look at the, if you hover over it, it'll have some big long those text messages. | ||
| So, but do you think or is it that if you're actually working inside of apps, is that safer for people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| If you have an app on your phone, like a Hilton app, for you, you mentioned booking hotels or whatever. | ||
| If you're working inside of an app, is that safer for people? | ||
| Or do you think that the apps are compromised as well? | ||
| I mean, I think there's risk anywhere. | ||
| It just seems to me that most of the time when we talk to somebody who fell for something like this, they were caught at a bad moment in life, you know, or even just a bad moment in the day. | ||
| Like I was just distracted at this one moment. | ||
| I got this text. | ||
| I thought I didn't think about it and I clicked on it and then all hell broke loose. | ||
| It seems that apps are more trustworthy. | ||
| I think as long as apps are, I think in general, apps and banks and companies like Amazon, they just need to be better at making their customers understand how they will and how they will not reach out to you. | ||
| Everyone does it differently, you know, whatever. | ||
| But like, you know, you get an invoice from Amazon saying that you purchased, you know, whatever, an iPhone that you didn't buy, and then you want to call the number on the bottom to dispute it. | ||
| Well, Amazon needs to make it clear that you're never going to get a PDF invoice from them. | ||
| And to some, it's obvious. | ||
| To some, it's not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| You know, to an old person that's just scrolling through their email with, you know, big text and they see Amazon order they didn't buy and it's going to drain their account. | ||
| They freaked out and then they freak out, you panic, you call the number and then they hijack your entire life. | ||
| I just, I think, you know, like if Amazon made it clear that we will only contact you or you can only get support through our app, go to the app and click on this button. | ||
| If more people knew that, then it would obviously be way safer. | ||
| I mean, I'm not immune to this at all, but like I generally will err on the side of let them be mad at me because I didn't reply and didn't click. | ||
| You should never be pressured. | ||
| If anyone's ever pressuring you, no matter what it is, you don't need to act now. | ||
| It's okay to take a breath, ask questions, talk to a loved one. | ||
| If the IRS is really after you, they're going to send you a certified letter to your house and someone's going to hand deliver it so that way they can say, we definitely let you know. | ||
| Repeatedly, you're not going to get one phone call one day that says you have an arrest warrant. | ||
| Like it's just not going to happen that way. | ||
| But to someone that doesn't know that, it can, you know, it can hijack your sensibility to make rational decisions. | ||
| Especially if you're the kind of person that's like, I have to take care of this now. | ||
| And there are people that, people that have good credit, a lot of people have good credit because they see any kind of bill or whatever and they're like, I have to take care of this right now. | ||
| But again, it's a timing thing too, that they're counting on happening when they send a billion of these things out. | ||
| They send out a billion Amazon invoices. | ||
| We'll often see that the victim will say something like, and it's just, the timing was bad because I had just looked at an iPhone on Amazon the other day to buy from my grandson. | ||
| And then they sent me this invoice that it was purchased and I thought it was related, even though it was a total coincidence. | ||
| Speaking of awareness, do you know how many times when we live in Los Angeles, California, we physically, in person, we went to Best Buy, Walgreens, Walmart, speak to the manager, and like, guys, for the love of God, put a freaking big sign in your gift card section. | ||
| Do not pay your taxes with Apple gift cards, play cards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I talked to Kashir and they said, Art, I see zombies every single day on a phone with a scammer who's saying, who are you sending money to? | ||
| My family. | ||
| Getting instructed. | ||
| They go to gift cards and buying, buying, buying, buying. | ||
| I think we're slowly moving away from gift cards. | ||
| I say slowly, emphasis on that word. | ||
| It's now going into crypto ATMs, which need to be, in my opinion, obliterated entirely. | ||
| It's a disaster of an invention. | ||
| But they're sending grandmas to crypto ATMs because there's no Linux. | ||
| You just pile your whole freaking savings into it in cash over the course of however many weeks. | ||
| And it's completely not untraceable, but it seems to be. | ||
| It's harder. | ||
| I'm familiar with crypto in that I know that it's not like people used to say that Bitcoin was anonymous. | ||
| It's not anonymous. | ||
| It's not anonymous. | ||
| But you need someone that knows how to follow it. | ||
| And then you need a law enforcement connection to run a KYC request, which may or may not yield you the information you're looking for. | ||
| And it never just goes to one wallet and stays there. | ||
| It branches out to a million other wallets. | ||
| And people will say, oh, well, you know, you can download the blockchain and look. | ||
| And it's like, no. | ||
| It doesn't help. | ||
| People can't do that. | ||
| It's not like, oh, let me just look in there. | ||
| It's like it's specialized knowledge. | ||
| You have to understand how, you know, you have to understand a lot about blockchain and technology and the blockchain that you're dealing with in particular. | ||
| You can't just be like, oh, let me look it up like it's a file, like Googling it. | ||
| One of the episodes on our show, Scam Getting Even, there is a case in Canada. | ||
| We went to Canada and the guy is 65, 67, and he had concrete business, right? | ||
| He was like, it's time to retire. | ||
| And he goes on Facebook and scammers can buy Google ads officially on Facebook and blast the crypto investment account. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| Don't ever Google support numbers for companies. | ||
| Like, don't say Amazon support customer number. | ||
| Don't Google that anymore because your first three, four results are all paid ads and they're oftentimes not real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And a lot of times when they're paid ads, you know, if you're not, again, if you're not constantly looking at Google, you don't know that. | ||
| Or even if you know it's an ad, you just, it looks like Amazon. | ||
| So it's like, oh, Amazon ad advertises. | ||
| Like, it's the number. | ||
| And they just call it, like, you don't, you know, sometimes, anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| We're not going to go this deep because this hasn't happened yet, but we got approached by, we took a couple congressmen, you know, and they said, guys, what can we change? | ||
| What kind of laws do we need? | ||
| And me and Nashland was like, these Bitcoin ATMs that is in every single gas station, 7-Eleven, when your people, my people, anybody goes and deposits the whole houses, right? | ||
| So much money, it should be regulated. | ||
| Okay, let's not shut down Bitcoin ATM, but let's put it in a bank. | ||
| It has to be regulated. | ||
| Have you ever seen anyone that legitimately trades crypto use an ATM to do it? | ||
| Like, I only hear about scam victims going to them. | ||
| I've never seen a person actually use it for legitimate. | ||
| That kind of trade. | ||
| Back in the day, in the early days of Bitcoin, it was fairly normal. | ||
| When you heard that there was a Bitcoin ATM, people would go and be like, oh, I can just go ahead and put my cash in and it'll keep me, you know, it'll keep it away from the feds. | ||
| They won't. | ||
| Now we have anymore. | ||
| You go online and you go like, I buy cryptocurrency. | ||
| I love cryptocurrency. | ||
| But you go on official, you know, federal approved websites, blah, blah, blah, and you buy it. | ||
| I talked to a gas station close to my house, and he's the owner. | ||
| And I just noticed that he just put Bitcoin ATM. | ||
| So I was like, yo, do you know what I do for a living? | ||
| So I give my brochure to a Luigi brochure, explain to him, and he said, Art, the person who just put this Bitcoin ATM, the amount of money that I'm getting paid, I'm covering the whole rent of my gas station. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I kind of don't give a shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I look at him and like that humanity level. | ||
| And we went in Canada. | ||
| We went to so many countries where victims were like, where did you deposit money? | ||
| This gas station will go to gas station. | ||
| We talk to the caloric manager and everybody is like, nobody cares. | ||
| Just pay rent. | ||
| You know, it's frustrating because you'd think that if they're giving you enough money to pay your mortgage just to have an ATM in there, maybe something's up. | ||
| It can't be above board. | ||
| It can't be above board. | ||
| You know, you go, they're incentivized to turn a blind eye. | ||
| You're an active participant in scamming people and taking advantage. | ||
| Again, for me, it's frustrating to hear that because it's like you have to understand that the reason you're getting that kind of money is because they're taking advantage of it. | ||
| Or they're just being complicit because they want the rent for the machine. | ||
| And they just don't care if a bunch of old people die. | ||
| Literally, after all these conversations that happen, and I used to go to gas station a lot, I'm not going anymore just because he's a greedy bastard. | ||
| I was like, dude, if you, and I give my number, I was like, call me. | ||
| If you see any person at this Bitcoin ATM putting money, please call me. | ||
| I'm going to come. | ||
| I'm going to stop. | ||
| And we stop so many scam victims in the process because we have an amazing team. | ||
| We have people working behind the shape, like in the shadows. | ||
|
Frustration Behind Board Lines
00:02:42
|
||
| And he just kind of like, I don't have time for this. | ||
| I was like, well, I'm not bringing my business to your gas station. | ||
| I was like, yeah. | ||
| That's shameful. | ||
| It's frustrating to hear because I personally am fairly positive about cryptocurrencies and fintech in general. | ||
| And to hear that there's a guy that, you know, or not just a guy. | ||
| I'm sure that there are, you know, thousands and thousands of people that have said, you know what? | ||
| I'm not worried about it because this guy is giving me whatever, 10 grand a month just to have it here. | ||
| But it's like that amount of money, you should be like, this is clearly not above board. | ||
| There's a line between it's none of my business to like, where's your humanity? | ||
| Like it's obvious in your face. | ||
| Yeah, like I said, you're facilitating in your property until your whole life. | ||
| Until something happened to your family. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And all of a sudden, like, hey, Art, hey, Ashton, yeah, can you help? | ||
| And I was like, but did you just, how many, how many people just you put your blind eye? | ||
| We, a lot of things in the process that we're not allowed to talk yet. | ||
| And again, talking to congressmen and we're trying to figure out new laws. | ||
| All laws is from 1969. | ||
| We're already the generation. | ||
| It's the AI right now talking to you. | ||
| And we're still applying laws from different centuries on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. | ||
| I was like, guys, come on, government, come on. | ||
| We have to do something about it. | ||
| And, you know, movement started. | ||
| Movement has been started. | ||
| That's good to hear. | ||
| So one of the things that was listed in the stuff we're going to talk about was the Louvre robbery. | ||
| And the NBA scandal and how AI scams have been involved in that. | ||
| Why don't you go ahead and kind of flesh out for the viewer what the Louvre robbery was and how that affect how the scam was done, I guess. | ||
| I mean, the Louvre was interesting because it was kind of symbolic for a lot of the things that we've been doing. | ||
| And you could say the same thing for the daycare shit that's happening in Minnesota. | ||
| It's meaning it's in plain sight. | ||
| Like it's right. | ||
| It's not done at nighttime. | ||
| It's not done behind a curtain. | ||
| It's like literally done right in broad daylight in your face. | ||
| Literally and figuratively. | ||
| And so just to jump in here, they just found the crown that was taken, right? | ||
| I think they took a bunch of jewels, right? | ||
| And they took it intact or they had to have dismantled it. | ||
| It wasn't intact or dismantled. | ||
| It was actually like really beat to crap. | ||
| It was damaged. | ||
| And I could be thinking of a different. | ||
| What was that? | ||
|
Crown Jewels Stolen
00:10:37
|
||
| Was it the same thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so it was. | ||
| I would have been shocked when I first heard if they would even find it. | ||
| The pictures we can show you. | ||
| We went live with Pierce Morgan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pierce Morgan and all the heist, all the people. | ||
| He brought everybody together. | ||
| And we had our point. | ||
| There is a dark web. | ||
| You can buy anything, anyone. | ||
| You can hire people to kill and stuff like that. | ||
| There is no way in the world you go in doing these heists and you're taking these jewels without buyer already being existing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Or someone on the inside helping you. | ||
| Is that the I haven't seen this? | ||
| Anyways, broad daylight. | ||
| That was there was an insider at the Louvre, right? | ||
| I think so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Yeah, I don't know if that was that confirmed. | ||
| I don't know if that was confirmed, but it feels like there would have been unless the embarrassing for the security. | ||
| What we heard that security during the day and security during the night is two different levels. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because you have a lot of, you know, nobody going to see who's brazen. | ||
| And they also discover that the password for something was like stupid like Louv 123 or something. | ||
| I could be misquoting that, but I thought I read something where one of the passwords to something in a security something was really stupidly unsophisticated. | ||
| You know, look, you can download an app that will give you random passwords. | ||
| I strongly recommend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Don't use your pet's name in your personal account. | ||
| Those days are behind us. | ||
| Download an app. | ||
| And usually in the app, it has like you can put the password as well as the login. | ||
| And it's usually encrypted, needs some kind of face ID or something to get into the password manager. | ||
| Get a password manager. | ||
| You will thank yourself later. | ||
| We did a social experiment a couple years ago in Santa Monica by the peer. | ||
| We asked people and asked them about their passwords. | ||
| And 99.9% password was, you know, whatever. | ||
| Your first name and 12345. | ||
| Or your dog name or your cat name, 12345. | ||
| And it's just, they're like, yeah, you know my password. | ||
| I was like, unbelievable. | ||
| It's really bad. | ||
| The people that are just like, oh, you know, what's the password? | ||
| Password. | ||
| No one will ever think of that. | ||
| That one or that one. | ||
| I don't remember exactly what government official it was, but there was a leak of information and it was some high up in the government that had the password and the password was literally passed. | ||
| It's just like, you know, the government official. | ||
| Yeah, government official. | ||
| And you just can't do that. | ||
| I mean, you cannot make these shit up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No, no, you can't. | ||
| You know, you'd think that, you know, if the more sensitive the information, the stronger your password's going to be. | ||
| But apparently people just are like, oh, no one will ever try. | ||
| And I do think that there's a lot of, you know, it won't happen to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, people assume, well, you know, it happens to a lot of people, but it just won't happen. | ||
| It's not going to happen to me. | ||
| I don't click links. | ||
| I'm immune. | ||
| You know, not true. | ||
| So, but yeah, the Louvre heist, like, what do you know about it? | ||
| Not a lot, to be quite honest. | ||
| I know that it was done in broad daylight. | ||
| I know they used the, what was it, that, like, not a scaffolding, but like a lift, like a construction lift. | ||
| They wore a construction vest. | ||
| They just blended in. | ||
| That was my takeaway is this. | ||
| They're blending in with day-to-day life, which was really symbolic to the kind of shit that we're uncovering, where on paper, it looks like that these scams, oh, it's just a call center in India. | ||
| And oh, I'll never fall for this because if he has an accent, I hang up the phone, you know, stupid shit like that that people say. | ||
| But like, they don't realize that there are mules, there are plants, there are people here, your neighbors. | ||
| We can go to some random tiny town in Arkansas and get them to show up and take money from us, you know, broad daylight. | ||
| Surveillance videos. | ||
| Just go to just go to the news and just pull up, because I'm sure I just want to get a picture of the crown. | ||
| Because where did they find it? | ||
| I heard they found it outside. | ||
| Just like in the days. | ||
| And it was just, you know, the crown itself is beat up. | ||
| And someone had said, they were like, you know, just leave it beat the way that it is and put it back. | ||
| Don't try and restore it. | ||
| Just put it back in as a reminder. | ||
| As a reminder to change your passwords in a Louvre. | ||
| Security people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is. | ||
| Did they catch one guy too? | ||
| They heard that they caught somebody, right? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Hold on one second. | ||
| Let me try this. | ||
| I just don't get it when you have like number one museum in the world, right? | ||
| With the most historical, expensive jewels, and it's just so easy to do things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There was that one that difference camera on broken hair on the top left. | |
| What was that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You see, like, top left right there? | |
| I mean, it just shows do we need to? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Broken. | ||
| The broke, the broken, the, the. | ||
| I mean, they had to have. | ||
| Yeah, I want, I just want to bring it up so people could see like the crown. | ||
| I mean, they had to have taken jewels off of it and sold and stuff, right? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Of robbery crown. | ||
| I mean, it still looks good. | ||
| No, that's not the one. | ||
| It was, it's like, it's all caved in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Well, yeah, I can try and find that, I guess. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But so, yeah, like the, the, the heist was during the day. | ||
| And so was there scammers that were involved in getting in, or was it just. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think that was the, that was the theory, at least. | ||
| At least, you know, and when we were on the, we did the Piers Morgan thing and they had a bunch of like ex-mafia guys like on a panel and they were all kind of concurring that this isn't you. | ||
| Don't just wake up one day and decide on Sunday, you know what. | ||
| I'm gonna rob some. | ||
| I'm gonna rob a museum. | ||
| Let's start with the Louvre. | ||
| You know, like you don't. | ||
| That's not your, that's not your first go-to crime. | ||
| Buddy, do you have a social vest? | ||
| Do you have one extra? | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| That's the thing you like. | ||
| You know people assume that security is really high and you know no one could and or maybe no one's this brazen. | ||
| But it had to be either just crazily planned or, you know experienced, or someone on the inside like again that that's not like a, that's not a whim crime. | ||
| When there is a buyer, when there is a private collector there you go this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, is that it? | |
| Oh My. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So they didn't sell it. | ||
| They put it into a hydraulic press. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that, I mean, that, like, that's a disaster. | ||
| That is a disaster. | ||
| But I do think that it actually makes sense to put it back in as it is. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Not only as a reminder to put it on the head of security's desk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not only for that, but to, you know, do they make any money on it or do they just decide to take a hammer to it and call it good? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it looks like it just fell out of the bag and the guy stepped on it as he was running away. | ||
| 1626. | ||
| Yeah, look at this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Before and after. | ||
| Lord. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| That's what we've been talking with Pierce Morgan. | ||
| He was like, guys, do you think it's just somebody needs money right now? | ||
| Like, how are you going to go and you're going to sell those jewels, right? | ||
| You must have a buyer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Private collector, some oligarch, Russian oligarch, who has every single collection in the world. | ||
| Who are you going to sell this crown to otherwise? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Go to Puncher. | ||
| With every single person looking for these items. | ||
| I'm there trying to yank out. | ||
| Unless you're just a real serious novelty or you just want to display it in your own house, I guess. | ||
| But again, it has to be someone that isn't in circles in the West or doesn't, you know, wouldn't expose, show this. | ||
| Because you know just having that isn't enough. | ||
| He's going to, whoever has it is going to want to show his buddies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because the ego is really the motivational factor because it's not the money. | ||
| It's not the actual cash. | ||
| Because if you can actually facilitate that crime, you know, you probably have billions of dollars and whatever. | ||
| So it's really. | ||
| So you don't live anywhere near the Louvre. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's probably someone that wants to be able to show his buddies. | ||
| And you're not going to, you know, if you told Bill Clinton, you know, hanging out or Bill Gates or whatever, they'd be like, oh, well, I'm going to tell the authorities. | ||
| And so you'd have to have insulation from the government of whatever state you're living in. | ||
| Like a call center boss, maybe. | ||
| It's just a funny comment from Josh Clooney and Ocean 11 and stuff. | ||
| And they're like, hey, shout out to them. | ||
| If they did this, like, we make a movie about this in Hollywood. | ||
| And somebody did this exactly like this, but in real day and succeed, he was like, but I mean, even in Ocean 11, even in Ocean 11, they just stole cash. | ||
| Cash spends. | ||
| That's fungible. | ||
| It's such an old, you know, like when you see stuff like robbery in person nowadays becoming less and less everything online, all your money online, all your crypto online, all your savings online. | ||
| You don't need and put a gun and get something. | ||
| It's just like, just be a cybersecurity wizard, you know? | ||
| Yeah, like if you're knocking over gas stations for 200 bucks, you're not like most likely that guy's just looking to get a fix. | ||
| You got a gut point, gun point. | ||
| Yeah, back in the DJ customer service days. | ||
| Yeah, long before we worked YouTube. | ||
| In customer service and someone. | ||
| Blockbuster. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know why you'd rob a blockbuster of all stores. | ||
| He was not the brightest bulb. | ||
| How much did he get from you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| I probably had maybe $150 in the register. | ||
| Like nothing consequential, but it was enough to pull a gun on me. | ||
| And, you know, he went to the, I was actually managing at that point. | ||
| What a shit show. | ||
| If you can believe it. | ||
| I was the worst. | ||
| Whoever promoted me should be fired. | ||
| I was a terrible man. | ||
| Let me speak to the manager I wanted. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| No, he grabbed a soda out of the fridge, brought it up. | ||
| It was like $1.80. | ||
| And then he gave me two singles. | ||
| And as soon as I went to get, as soon as it popped open to get change, he didn't make a big scene. | ||
| He just had it right here. | ||
| And he just leaned forward so only I would see it. | ||
| And he's like, give me the money. | ||
| So I just removed the tray and handed it to him and backed up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I'm like, I don't give a shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Smart. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't want to die in the sound. | ||
| I got to honest there. | ||
| I was like, do it sooner so I can go home. | ||
| Well, I guess I can close. | ||
| Shout out to them. | ||
| They gave me the weekend off unpaid. | ||
| So it's all good. | ||
| Good for them. | ||
| Good for them. | ||
| But yeah, so one of the things that you guys were talking about or mentioned is like how to fight back. | ||
|
Hacking the Human Factor
00:15:41
|
||
| What can the average person do if they think that they've been scammed or they think there's someone trying to scam them? | ||
| How do you like, how do you kind of retaliate against this stuff? | ||
| Or at the very least, how do you make sure that you don't get scammed? | ||
| Obviously, don't click links. | ||
| That's obvious. | ||
| But when it comes to the romance one or the people that really know how to manipulate people and get you to trust them, what can people do to be aware of that, first of all? | ||
| Like, look, what are the signs? | ||
| And second of all, like, what can you do if you're actually the victim? | ||
| Maybe I will put my two cents and you can cover the rest if you want. | ||
| You're welcome. | ||
| I think if we're talking about Roman scam, if you're talking to somebody online, and this is, we can talk about another type of scam, blackmailing, sextortion with teenagers that happening in other pandemic. | ||
| We should talk about this. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| If you're talking online to somebody and you never FaceTime, all you did is text message or phone call, don't go deeper in the relationship until you see person in person. | ||
| Don't even FaceTimes right now will not get you anywhere. | ||
| It could be deep fake, it could be AI. | ||
| Meet person, let's meet tomorrow at Starbucks at five o'clock and let's go further down, right? | ||
| So if somebody talking to you without showing identity, you haven't met that person, move on. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, nowadays, I, you know, a lot of people talk about, you know, there's a funny meme online, right? | ||
| So there's the, if you're talking to an AI girl or if you're talking to a girl, it's actually some dude in India. | ||
| And the AI nowadays, like the motion capture that they can do. | ||
| You don't have to be wearing a special suit or whatever. | ||
| Just the video camera will capture your emotion. | ||
| Live deep faking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's incredibly realistic now. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| So the idea that you can trust video or just be like, oh, well, show me your ID. | ||
| Those days are gone. | ||
| And I don't think that the average person understands how compelling and convincing this stuff is because all that a scammer has to do is get a couple pictures of someone that you trust and then, you know, or a video, a couple videos, which most people have some kind of video on their Instagram page. | ||
| Maybe it's not all usable, but you could probably get enough information from the average person's Instagram page to do a deep fake up. | ||
| And then Deborah, another episode from our TV show, it was exactly like this. | ||
| Person was, she was 80, and there is actually a Brazilian guy. | ||
| He always shortlists, sexy dancing. | ||
| So scammer in Nigeria got all these videos, all these sexy pictures, and was talking to person to Anne. | ||
| She's where? | ||
| Tennessee. | ||
| Tennessee. | ||
| Talking to a person in Tennessee, and she absolutely like, this is it. | ||
| I said goodnight. | ||
| I sent pictures of me. | ||
| He sent pictures of him. | ||
| But scammer in Nigeria using pictures from somebody else. | ||
| Exactly what you said. | ||
| You cannot trust anymore. | ||
| But again, we're going back to the core awareness. | ||
| What is awareness? | ||
| Why nobody's talking about it? | ||
| Why media is not talking about it? | ||
| Why government not applying more and more rules and laws to prevent elderly people from filing for those scams? | ||
| You know, we as a society, you as a grandson, you must educate your parents. | ||
| I cannot do anything outside of this circle. | ||
| If I have my knowledge, I will share with you. | ||
| You share with others. | ||
| That's all we can do. | ||
| We talk about the older people a lot. | ||
| Scams can affect anybody, but we talk about the older people because they are the most vulnerable. | ||
| And, you know, they're coming from a time where, you know, getting your doorbell rang randomly during the day was not a terrifying thing. | ||
| It was an exciting moment. | ||
| You know, you believe. | ||
| Handshake promise. | ||
| If my phone rings, I'm like, just a sour face. | ||
| I'm like, why is my phone? | ||
| Nobody wrote from me. | ||
| Like, I've got, like, because I've had my number for so long. | ||
| I literally do not pick up any calls if I don't have the number in my contacts. | ||
| Unless it's obviously if it's a scam call and I'm using it for a video or something. | ||
| But, you know, you have to train now, especially older people, to you can't just assume anything anymore. | ||
| I saw back and forth on X between some people. | ||
| It's like, I remember a time, and I'm old enough to remember this time, where like when you're young, you would run. | ||
| If the phone rings, you'd run to answer the phone. | ||
| Who is it? | ||
| This is exciting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Younger people can't believe that there was a time where you'd pick up the phone and not know who was calling. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Young people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're young. | |
| That's what? | ||
| No, you don't feel it. | ||
| But yeah, like the idea that you're excited about a phone call, that is long gone. | ||
| You used to be excited about getting mail. | ||
| Now you don't want mail. | ||
| I'm not even excited about email. | ||
| Yeah, unless it's sponsorship. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, right? | |
| There you go. | ||
| But yeah, the complexity and just the realism that AI can offer to people, it makes this a whole new dimension of scamming. | ||
| Again, you can't trust even people that you think you know. | ||
| And it's not the people. | ||
| It's just if it's unless it's in person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's why we said the password thing is a good trick that will last through a lot of layers of this. | ||
| Having a verbal password that only your family knows, that you never write down. | ||
| You never text it. | ||
| You just, it's spoken. | ||
| It's only texted if you're verifying it or whatever. | ||
| But that way, if you're, because, I mean, they did the same thing with my grandma. | ||
| They called my grandma as me saying I was arrested for DUI in Mexico and I needed bail money now. | ||
| And it freaked her out. | ||
| She had the wherewithal, at least in the moment, to like call an aunt who verified and reached out to me. | ||
| I was like, no, I'm fine. | ||
| I'm in LA. | ||
| But it's that quick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| No, we have somebody. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| We have somebody close and he wants to sell his name. | ||
| But he was doing taxes. | ||
| He received from his accountant official email, email and saying, hey, so-and-so, just want to let you know, crypto has a new law. | ||
| If you have any money on cryptocurrency websites, please send it to us so we can apply taxes. | ||
| Send all of it to us. | ||
| I don't know if it was that cut and dry. | ||
| It was something that he was like, yeah, it's come from my accountant that I've been doing doing my taxes for 20 years. | ||
| So he sent the name of the apps and passwords, username, passwords. | ||
| And he was like, okay, so let me know. | ||
| One week passed by, two weeks passed by, and he said, this is strange. | ||
| So he shoots email back and he's like, so what happened with my taxes? | ||
| Like, are we like, how much are we like with all these new laws and blah, blah, blah? | ||
| And they said, what are you talking about? | ||
| We don't need, we would never ask for passwords. | ||
| And he was like, he immediately went online and he was like, everything was gone. | ||
| Was it a lot of money? | ||
| Everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Poor guy. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And he said when he talked to his accountant company, they hijacked that email and they blasted to every single client. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| So it was really from like, and he's not, he's a very smart tech guy. | ||
| Like, he's not an idiot. | ||
| Like, not that scam victims are idiots. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| Working with us. | ||
| He's not somebody you would think would fall for something like that. | ||
| Maybe there's a real use for the current use for the real mail. | ||
| Send an actual letter. | ||
| People are going to have to learn how to write again. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Do it in cursive and then you know it's real. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| AI just doesn't get that. | ||
| So the idea that you use a password with people, that's a great thing. | ||
| Is there any other stuff that you guys can recommend to help people to avoid this kind of stuff or at the very least to prevent them from ending? | ||
| Changing every six months, your password basic housekeeping is kind of cliche, but I mean, it does go a long way, making sure that you're not using the same password on multiple accounts, even derivatives of it. | ||
| Don't use a similar password with your bank that you use for Netflix, that you use for Coinbase, that you use for whatever. | ||
| Because if they get one, they're going to have it all, you know. | ||
| Use different passwords. | ||
| A password manager, you know, it's a good tool. | ||
| It's a good place to start. | ||
| At least it's something. | ||
| Wait, I want to drill down on that. | ||
| You don't seem convinced. | ||
| Well, I only, what came to my mind in that moment was the, was it LastPass that got hacked a couple years ago? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There was one of those password managers that got hacked. | ||
| And I personally am not thrilled about the idea of having all of my passwords in one place. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| That's also scary. | ||
| So you got to do what's going to work best for you. | ||
| Certainly it's a better decision than not having anything. | ||
| It's better than not, it's better than you trying to remember it and having it be a derivative of the same password for every account. | ||
| It's also, I think anything comes with its own risks, but something is better than nothing. | ||
| But changing them often is a great way to bypass that, especially because your data is getting leaked and shared all over everything. | ||
| So a password that I used to use is now very easy to find if you just had any kind of public data search on me. | ||
| So any old account that still has that password would probably be pretty easy to get into. | ||
| I think I've changed them all. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| But stuff like that, just changing them frequently, not using derivatives, making sure you have two-factor authentication on everything nowadays. | ||
| A password literally isn't even enough now. | ||
| Fingerprints? | ||
| Or at least a text or just something. | ||
| Authenticator apps. | ||
| And I know those are slow to catch on, but it's better than just having a password that you're pulling from your memory. | ||
| At the end of the day, it really just is about adjusting your behavior and training older people in your family or just anyone that would be susceptible to this to understand that you never need to be pressured by anybody for anything to do it urgently. | ||
| The biggest, one of the most, one of the biggest inhibitions, I guess, for people dealing with passwords and stuff like that is like everything needs a password now. | ||
| And it gets to the point where like, look, all I'm doing is logging onto Netflix. | ||
| And people are just like, who's going to go after my Netflix account? | ||
| What do I care if they're watching movies? | ||
| And the point isn't the Netflix account. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| The point is the email address attached to this. | ||
| It's the data with the Netflix account. | ||
| It's the Wi-Fi network that's connected to the network, the Netflix account that you're using. | ||
| I am by no means a technical sleuth. | ||
| We consult people like Ryan Montgomery or Jim Browning for that kind of stuff. | ||
| But even Jim Browning said the same thing. | ||
| He's like a password manager. | ||
| It's way better than having nothing. | ||
| Another great example. | ||
| Jim Browning, the godfather of Skimbaiding Community, even he got scammed himself and lost, almost lost his channel. | ||
| He did lose his channel. | ||
| It was restored. | ||
| It was deleted. | ||
| He got scammed into deleting his entire YouTube channel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And he's one of the best hackers in the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was social engineering. | ||
| It wasn't even hacking. | ||
| They just social engineered him. | ||
| That's the deleted channel. | ||
| Customer support. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Reaching out to you. | ||
| That's one thing that people don't really understand. | ||
| Like hacking is social engineering. | ||
| Like when you talk about hacking, like people think that it's like getting into the back end of something and changing what it does. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, exactly. | |
| That's what the 90s kind of taught everybody. | ||
| And any teacher in a movie show will show you. | ||
| And it's like, you know, it's like, no, it's not. | ||
| It's really more about social engineering. | ||
| That's why you, Jim, like we asked you, like, what does it feel? | ||
| I forget how we asked him. | ||
| How does it feel to be a hacker or whatever? | ||
| But he's like, I'm not sure. | ||
| He said, I'm not a hacker. | ||
| For me to get access to a scammer call center, at the end of the day, they have to let me in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I have to social engineer them to do a couple of things that allow me in. | ||
| I can't just type keys on a keyboard and suddenly I'm in. | ||
| It doesn't work like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really more about getting people, convincing people to do something for you. | ||
| I mean, it makes me think that probably one of the earliest hacker texts is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, which was a book that came out in, you know, probably in the 20s or something like that. | ||
| And he was basically talking about sales, you know, how to convince people to buy something for you. | ||
| And if you've done sales, or at least if you did sales in the aughts, that was the book to go to. | ||
| And again, this is an old book, but really, and when you read it, I've recommended it to a ton of people. | ||
| When you read it, you don't realize that it's the most simple things like, you know, make eye contact, make sure that you're being friendly, make sure that you're being amicable. | ||
| Just because you disagree doesn't mean you have to tell them that you disagree. | ||
| And it's like all of these simple things that I guess personable people do automatically. | ||
| But people that have, if you have an abrasive personality or if you're kind of an introvert or whatever, they actually are a bit foreign to you. | ||
| But that's the way to get people to do the things that you want, which is just be nice. | ||
| That's exactly what you're describing is what scammers do on the phone. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| They're social engineering an older person to allow them remote access to their computer. | ||
| You could call that hacking, even though it's not, but it's the same thing. | ||
| You're convincing that old person to allow them access to everything. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and that's, that's, I think that that's the, the, that's why I said like the real core of hacking isn't about, you know, typing away on a computer. | ||
| It's about figuring out ways to get either someone or something in a piece of hardware to do what you want it to do, whether that be, you know, whether that actually be going into inside of it and changing the code or getting someone that knows, that wrote programs or writes programs to write a program for you and be like, oh, thanks. | ||
| You know, the one of the largest vulnerabilities that I hope that people realize, but they probably don't, is, you know, if you want to get something onto a computer or get something off of a computer, just leave a thumb drive around. | ||
| Someone is eventually going to pick that thumb drive up and be like, oh, what's this? | ||
| Just to see what's on there. | ||
| Well, if you plug it in, you know, you throw enough of those out. | ||
| I hear, this is just rumor, but that was, if I understand correctly, that was how they got the Stuxnet virus onto the computers in Iran. | ||
| They just had people drop enough thumb drives around the right place. | ||
| And eventually someone put it in and wasn't savvy enough, plugged it in. | ||
| And as soon as you plug it in, it's over. | ||
| Well, a QR code is just another version of that now. | ||
| You don't need to plug it in. | ||
| You just need to scam. | ||
| You just have to wait until somebody. | ||
| Well, and that's the thing is when people saying scam, scam, scam, it's only for elderly people. | ||
| And that's something that we want to talk about. | ||
| Sextortion scam, right? | ||
| We're talking about elderly people. | ||
| Why are we not talking about teenagers? | ||
| Teenagers kill themselves after they will send nudes to scammers and get blackmailed that if you're not going to pay me this money, I'm going to send these pictures to your school, to your friends, to your father, to your mother, everybody on your phone contacts. | ||
| And it's a huge problem in America, in the world, that nobody talk about. | ||
| And when you're talking about sextortion scams, like the, I feel like, and this is just from an ignorant person's perspective, that that doesn't seem like maybe that doesn't seem like much of a problem to people because what do teenagers have, right? | ||
| Obviously, old people, you go after old people, they've got their savings, they're 401k, they've had a whole lifetime to save up money. | ||
|
Parents' Role in Sextortion Scams
00:07:24
|
||
| And to go after teenagers, it's like, well, they're going to have to go out and find the money because, you know, teenagers, especially young people today, like young people are struggling to find jobs, never mind, be able to have any kind of nest egg or any kind of savings and stuff. | ||
| So do when they, when people are doing, you know, when they're victims of sextortion stuff like that, like what kind of, what kind of payoff are they looking for? | ||
| Are they basically saying, hey, look, you got to get your parents to give you this money, get me the access to your parents' accounts? | ||
| Or, you know, what is the frequent honeypot that they're looking for? | ||
| I don't think it's any massive financial reward necessarily. | ||
| I guess maybe you could even call it low-hanging fruit. | ||
| But from what we've seen, they'll ask a first payment that is small, quote unquote, 500 bucks. | ||
| You can find 500 bucks, but it's going to be what comes after that. | ||
| You pay at the one time and they're like, oh, well, now you got to, now they know you'll pay. | ||
| Now they know that you're probably able to be convinced. | ||
| And now you're way more valuable to them. | ||
| So it's really the psychology behind the long game in a lot of these. | ||
| Even with romance scams, they always start with, I just need a $100 Apple gift card to pay for my internet, whatever bullshit they're going to say. | ||
| But it's over time. | ||
| And the romance scams, I think, are the longest ones, years and years and years, which will start with a menial gift card, but end up being hundreds of thousands of dollars. | ||
| Selling higher cents, cashing off. | ||
| They don't ask for that up front. | ||
| I haven't seen a sextortion scam necessarily go that far. | ||
| But also the sex tortion scams are extremely difficult to bait and they're extremely difficult to expose because the topic in and of itself is not something you can really make content on. | ||
| And also they're always targeted. | ||
| They're not like Amazon invoices with phone numbers on them. | ||
| You can just call. | ||
| They always come personally. | ||
| On dating apps, on Instagram, on Facebooks, I'll come to you as a pretty girl, but I'm a dude in Nigeria. | ||
| And I'm going to show you my nudes, right? | ||
| You think it's my part of my body, but it's not, it's been stolen from somebody else. | ||
| Or AI generated, but you sending me your part of body. | ||
| So to that point, like if you're a parent that's got, you know, teenage kids, what kind of things should you be looking for? | ||
| Obviously, I mean, in a perfect world, it's like, all right, well, kids don't get the internet until they're 25, right? | ||
| I mean, that doesn't like I have a very young kid and I am, I am fully committed to not letting him have screens right now because, you know, he's three months old and you know, so it's super easy to say, I'm not going to do this. | ||
| But like, obviously kids are going to be, you know, if they're around other, their peers, they're going to want this. | ||
| They're going to want access to Facebook. | ||
| They're going to want access to social media. | ||
| Maybe not Facebook, but I think now Snapchat's the hot one, which is terrible because everything disappears. | ||
| That's why scammers love that app so much. | ||
| Telegram, send them Telegram. | ||
| I think, again, I'm not a parent, so I can't give parenting advice at all. | ||
| But for me, it seems like anytime I see someone falling for this, it should be some kind of more involvement from the parents. | ||
| And like, obviously, you're not going to be involved into every single message they're sending to people that they know. | ||
| But in general, knowing like what apps they are actually using, because there are always some telltale signs, like when we do a lot of predator stings and the apps that our decoys will use, they'll tell me, hey, I got a predator on this app that I've never heard of. | ||
| I'm like, what the hell is this? | ||
| What is this app? | ||
| Meet me, meet me, meet 23. | ||
| All these apps I never heard of. | ||
| There are tons of these apps that are in these younger communities that they're using, whether it's for not necessarily social media, but more for talking, more for DMing, chat rooms, maybe an older term for it, but that kind of thing. | ||
| It's like you should be aware of what apps your kids are using because the scammers, even if it's initiated on Facebook, they'll want to get you off of that and onto something that they have more control over. | ||
| So, if your teenagers using an app like that to talk to strangers, or they're talking to, I don't even know how Roblox works, but it sounds like it's a disaster because there's so much shit going on with that. | ||
| That's another one. | ||
| So, it's like understanding the platforms that the kids are on and what they're using it for is a big part of it. | ||
| And I will, I will bring you another example. | ||
| We have another friend, and that friend said, Hey, I got knock on my bedroom at midnight, and I opened the door, and I see my son, teenager, pasty, white face, fear in the eyes, being on a phone. | ||
| And he said, As a dad, I already knew exactly what happened. | ||
| I grabbed the phone and I said, Listen to me, you want to release those pictures? | ||
| Release it. | ||
| Here's a ming, ming, and I'm okay with it. | ||
| And hung up, and he said, Do not ever send newts to anybody. | ||
| If you're in a relationship and you met that person and do whatever you want, but do not send your newts to your to to random people. | ||
| And that goes back to elderly people, and young people, and teenagers. | ||
| We as a society, we as a community, we as a freaking family, should we should have this ability to trust. | ||
| I should have ability to come to you as a grandparent, to your mother, and said, Hey, I have a problem. | ||
| Hey, mom, yeah, we, it's a parenting thing, you know. | ||
| It's okay, your kids should trust you to come to, hey, dad, something is off. | ||
| Hey, dad, what should I do? | ||
| Like, there is a like you, teenager, you exploring your body. | ||
| You need to talk to somebody. | ||
| You should be comfortable talk to your parents about sex life. | ||
| Yeah, why it's such a taboo. | ||
| Why we like growing up, like you, you, you learn from watching, you know, not from the internet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Yeah, well, that's why it has to be education. | ||
| Why public education? | ||
| Why schools? | ||
| Why we don't have these conversations in school about scams, about sextortion, about dating? | ||
| Everybody dates online nowadays. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's it is something where you know, there's so many things that there's so many ills in society, so many dangers in society that if parents are really active in their kids' lives, and they have, if you have good, you know, you have you good, you have good parents, they really are not a significant threat if you're active and stuff. | ||
| And not that, not that anyone's totally insulating, that's not what I'm trying to say. | ||
| But, you know, if a kid's, if a kid trusts his parents or their parents, you know, they're going to go to their parents for anything, you know. | ||
| And I think that, you know, look, this isn't this isn't about single motherhood or single parenting and stuff, but those kind of things make people vulnerable. | ||
| Having a good family well, there's a lot of parallels there with older victims. | ||
| Like, you know, and I know, you know, you're talking to a grandmother that doesn't have any parents around, but how many times have we seen an older grandmother who didn't tell her own family that she got scammed because they were afraid that they were going to take off the will or something or they were going to remove her ability to make her own decisions. | ||
| She's more comfortable to tell us as a couple clowns on YouTube versus telling her own children that something bad happened. | ||
| So there's a lot of parallels there with kids trusting their parents, parents trusting their own and how many times you have grandmother and she has nobody. | ||
| She's a widow. | ||
|
Walking Around, Gripping, Talking Family
00:02:42
|
||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's a target for those scammers. | ||
| All those leeches immediately. | ||
| That's exactly what you want to hear. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| Did you eat? | ||
| Did you this? | ||
| Good evening. | ||
| And blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And it goes and goes. | ||
| And personally, it's like, I'm lonely. | ||
| I've been in a relationship for 30, 40, 50 years. | ||
| Now I'm alone. | ||
| I don't have grandkids. | ||
| I don't have kids. | ||
| I'm alone. | ||
| And now there is this charmer, African Nigerian guy who was like, oh, mama, give me your house, give me this, and person giving it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's, it's, it's, you know, it is, it is, it's very dangerous. | ||
| And I do think that the, you know, family is one of the best interdictors in this, you know. | ||
| And that doesn't mean blood necessarily. | ||
| No, it's just people you trust, the community. | ||
| And this speaks to the problem, what's likely going to be one of the biggest problems in our society in the coming decades is people being isolated from other people. | ||
| You know, going and meeting people. | ||
| You hear stories about, you know, people love to go ahead and make jokes about the old guys that sit at McDonald's every morning. | ||
| Well, the reason they get up and they go and sit at McDonald's and have a coffee is because it's them. | ||
| It's that guy and three other people that are every single morning. | ||
| And they go and they hang out for, you know, a couple hours, whatever. | ||
| They have their coffee and they gripe about the weather. | ||
| They gripe about their, you know, whatever it is. | ||
| It is nothing good for that. | ||
| No. | ||
| Dynamic. | ||
| No, absolutely not. | ||
| And, you know, that's something that human beings need. | ||
| You know, it goes beyond just, you know, I want to go hang out. | ||
| Like, we're social creatures. | ||
| We've evolved in small societies where we knew basically mostly everybody we saw. | ||
| You know, your tribe or whatever is 100 people or whatever. | ||
| And this is your extended family. | ||
| And I'm not one of those guys that doesn't, you know, that's black pilled on technology. | ||
| Like I think AI is going to be an amazing tool. | ||
| I think that I do think that in the future we're going to be walking around with a billion humanoid robots walking around on Earth. | ||
| And I think that's honestly, I think that's coming in the next handful of years. | ||
| You're going to see a lot more robots walking around doing a lot of the menial tasks. | ||
| I think by 2030, to be honest with you, it's going to be, they're going to be very. | ||
| I mean, they already have them, right? | ||
| In some cities. | ||
| They're already doing. | ||
| They exist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But like people think that automaton delivery, freaking drones coming straight to your door and dropping food for you in a backyard. | ||
| And because they don't see them all the time, or because people don't realize that they see them all the time, they don't think it is. | ||
| But every time you see a Tesla driving around, that thing, the full self-driving, that's a robot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, now it's not uncommon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I love them. | |
|
Robots On The Rise
00:04:45
|
||
| You get in the car. | ||
| You don't have to talk to anybody. | ||
| You control your own. | ||
| You want to go talk to anybody. | ||
| You did it right there. | ||
| Yeah, I saw you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And that's actually, I was about to make a point, but now I kind of like shooting my own. | ||
| Shooting yourself in the foot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you see the thing is, especially what we do for a living, we have live streams. | ||
| We talk to people like, I am social butterfly. | ||
| Give me a couple shots of vodka and put me in the stadium. | ||
| I'm going to talk to everybody. | ||
| I don't know everybody, right? | ||
| But when your battery is over and you need to recharge, you want to get in a taxi cab. | ||
| You want to get in Uber. | ||
| And then there is Uber driver who gonna tell you all he's, that he's an actor, that he has so many businesses idea. | ||
| And all you want is just decompress. | ||
| So that's the only reason why I love those Waymo. | ||
| You get inside, I play more in the music, I stream from my phone, I put my ACA, I put on 61, and I'm just chill, chilling. | ||
| But what I was trying to tell you, that our society, at least here in America, we stop caring for others. | ||
| This selfishness is killing me. | ||
| Where I came from, your godfather, that's why you watch movies of Godfather, your godfather, you can be the biggest Yakuza Mafia in the world or Russian mafia in the world. | ||
| If your grandpa Setsa said something, you cannot even look at his eyes. | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
| It's what happens. | ||
| How we are bending our grandparents and putting them in the daycares and stuff. | ||
| If you, somebody's crossing the street and you see that person is struggling or somebody is cannot have a back, you cannot load in the back of the car. | ||
| Why we stop caring for other people? | ||
| That what kind of like it pisses me off. | ||
| If you see like somebody, cars break down on freeway, get your ass out. | ||
| See if somebody needed help. | ||
| Because you can't trust anymore. | ||
| It's sad. | ||
| That person's not doing it to try to kill you or something. | ||
| I've been in America for 15 years and I'm going to freaking kill and die. | ||
| Same reason you don't pick up hitchhikers. | ||
| And the funny thing is, you mentioned like hitchhikers and stuff. | ||
| Obviously, that was something that was far more common in the like 60s, 70s, even into the 80s. | ||
| And in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s, it was a far more dangerous society. | ||
| The 80s were kind of the pinnacle of when serial killers were around. | ||
| Nowadays, they're... | ||
| Well, that stuff isn't blown out of proportion on social media like it is now, you know? | ||
| So now maybe it feels more dangerous because it's everywhere in your face. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I think that it feels more dangerous nowadays, but it's actually like the U.S. is, you know, it's a very, very safe country, especially when you compare it to other places in the world. | ||
| Western societies are very safe. | ||
| And it's funny because, you know, nowadays, compared to, you know, New York City in the 70s was a war zone. | ||
| If you look at a lot of pictures from the 70s, there were buildings that were literally burnt out in the city. | ||
| And now they don't stay very long. | ||
| If there's a fire or something, that building gets knocked down and something is put in its place. | ||
| The society we live in is very safe, but to your point, we're far more insulated. | ||
| We're far less likely to stop to help someone. | ||
| Maybe because now we see so much of the bad in people online in viral videos and news. | ||
| So you just assume more people are becoming more used to assuming people are bad. | ||
| And so there's less trust, less, and then because of that, less desire to help a stranger out of the fear that something's going to happen to you. | ||
| But also it's get like when I go to Europe and I visit other countries, I travel a lot. | ||
| I used to be poor athlete. | ||
| So I was all over the world. | ||
| I'm shocked. | ||
| I'm shocked. | ||
| Even such a simple thing that makes my soul fulfill. | ||
| You can go anywhere, you know, in Europe and you drive this direction and see a cop is sitting in the bushes, right? | ||
| Watching for that speed ticket, right? | ||
| To give you a speed ticket with his radar. | ||
| So when you drive and you see upcoming car, you know what you do? | ||
| You blink. | ||
| You give him a sign like, yo, slow down. | ||
| There is a cop. | ||
| Those little things doesn't cost you a lot of time. | ||
| It's just an effort. | ||
| If I see somebody crossing the street, if you see like things that somebody needed to help, we start caring for each other's society. | ||
| And that's how scammers are going to get you. | ||
| That's how bad guys are going to get you because now I'm going to likely take a cell phone and put it in your face instead of stop the fight and help you to stop the fight. | ||
| They're just like, no, I'm going to escalate that. | ||
|
Irony in Podcasting
00:02:51
|
||
| How many likes is this video going to get? | ||
| If I get this fight and this guy actually blood is the LVI, which is real rich coming from two people that thrive on confronting guys. | ||
| Yeah, but we love confronting criminals. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm not challenging you. | ||
| I'm recognizing the irony and what we're saying. | ||
| The irony is, yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So we're going to wrap it up. | ||
| So why don't you guys tell people where they can find your individual X accounts if you have them and tell people where they can find the show? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Trilogy Media is the home base of all of our content. | ||
| So trilogymedia.com. | ||
| TrilogyMedia.com is our website. | ||
| We have our own streaming platform called Trilogy Plus. | ||
| Are you not wearing a shirt in the market today? | ||
| I'm not talking about it. | ||
| Because YouTube loves to pretend like crimes aren't crime. | ||
| So a lot of times we can't really put full things on YouTube in the way that we'd like. | ||
| But yeah, Trilogy Media Inc. on X as well as all the other socials. | ||
| But yeah, Trilogy Media on YouTube. | ||
| Watch our show, Fox Nation. | ||
| Yes, Scam Getting Even six episodes. | ||
| It just got dropped in October, November, right? | ||
| Now we... | ||
| They're all there. | ||
| Go stream it. | ||
| We're in talks. | ||
| We're doing something, something for this year. | ||
| More stuff coming. | ||
| Brand new video dropping tomorrow with our latest Arkansas Sheriff collaboration. | ||
| So another scammer takedown. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We definitely, as a society, as a scam baiters, we change the game. | ||
| We upgrading the game, scammers upgrading the game. | ||
| It's always that cat and mouse game, you know? | ||
| And you just have to stay in the game. | ||
| And technology is getting better. | ||
| We getting better. | ||
| But the most important stuff that justice finally start like the light in the end of the tunnel, you know, and that's the biggest thing. | ||
| And that's the point of a lot of stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I'm Philip Remains on X. You can check out the Culture War clips all throughout the weekend. | ||
| And tonight we'll be on IRL. | ||
| We're actually going to be filming it live. | ||
| So if you're in the Discord, make sure you're there watching and you can jump in at the end to ask questions from the Discord. | ||
| And we will see you guys later. | ||
| Marketing is hard. | ||
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| It doesn't have to be. | ||
| Let me point something out. | ||
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| You love the host. | ||
| You seek it out and download it. | ||
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| Podcasts are a pretty close companion. | ||
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