Season 6, Episode 26 (#179):

Jim (00:06.987)
and we should be live.

Jim (00:14.285)
We are.

Jim (00:48.13)
I found that other episode, Lionel. I found that episode of Stargate SG-1 that I, yes, no, thank goodness I did, really, honestly. So it was not called Wormhole Extreme, but it features, and it doesn't feature the DeLuise brothers. It features Marty, the alien script writer or Hollywood show runner, and that is...

Lionel (00:52.34)
I'm so relieved.

Jim (01:16.63)
It's called 200 and it's in the 10th season. And it is pretty funny. And it does have kind of a very touching speech at the end by the actor who plays the robot character in the TV show in that's featured inside of Stargate SG-1. It's a wonderful meta meta episode. So I'll send you a link to that.

Lionel (01:36.246)
Right. Cool. Send me the link. Was that your quirky sort of interjection? that was pretty standard. Anyway, tonight on our show, ladies and gentlemen, our guest is Mr. Jonathan Cooper. Jonathan and I are professional associates.

Jim (01:44.292)
That's my thing. That's my intro.

Jim (01:54.004)
Boys and girls.

Lionel (02:04.503)
We both work in information security. We have worked in information security. And Jonathan is on the show tonight. Jonathan hails from Corpus Christi, Texas. No, you're, by the way, nobody needs to know exactly close enough. The Corpus Christi area of Texas, the bustling metropolis of the greater Corpus Christi metropolitan area where I lived for many years. Jonathan.

Johnathan Cooper (02:19.29)
Close enough.

Lionel (02:33.473)
hails from Corpus Christi. And we have worked together and we've worked together in some very amusing incidents. And we also keep track of what's going on in the world of internet scams. We listen to stories and repeat stories so people know what's going on. So Jim suggested that this episode be about scams, but I think more specifically internet-based scams. And so.

Thank you, Jonathan, for joining us.

Johnathan Cooper (03:04.743)
No problem.

Jim (03:06.692)
Jonathan, if you look on your phone right now, there's a pin from your phone company. Can you tell me what it is, please, so I can fix your account? Yeah, thank you.

Lionel (03:16.205)
Right. Yep.

Johnathan Cooper (03:16.474)
Sure, it is 7331.

Jim (03:25.466)
Okay, now stay on the

Johnathan Cooper (03:27.034)
That's late speak. No, there's a...

7 3 3 1

Lionel (03:33.847)
Well, there used to be hell, right?

Jim (03:35.61)
Wait, I'm trying to think what that is.

Johnathan Cooper (03:38.256)
7 is the L, 3 is the E, E, and then T.

Lionel (03:42.666)
E.

Lionel (03:47.022)
Oh, lead. Oh, you're spelling the word leap. I thought you were trying to spell like the big thing when I was showing it when the dinosaurs roam the earth, you take your calculator and you type hell, you know, you turn it upside down, spell it's four, three, three, seven or something like that. And you turn upside down.

Jim (03:47.103)
I see. Tell.

Johnathan Cooper (03:49.071)
Lee.

Jim (03:53.593)
Haha.

Johnathan Cooper (03:57.131)
No

Nah, sometimes you'll see it as 1337. mean, you know, any of your viewers or listeners that watch the movie Hack the Planet might see some references in there to stuff of that nature. Or hackers. Hackers, I'm sorry, hackers.

Jim (04:18.106)
Well, Sarah's in the live and caught the 7331 immediately. So, 7331 speak, she typed.

Lionel (04:18.381)
Speaking of which...

Johnathan Cooper (04:25.552)
Good

Lionel (04:29.781)
Well, the you know, funny, funny you should mention movies because we talk a lot about movies here, Jim and I, and I actually watched a Michael Mann movie. Michael Mann, the guy who made Miami Vice and made Collateral and made The Last of the Mohicans and made a lot of really great films. He also made I forget the name of it, of course, because I'm thinking about it. He made a movie about hackers, which was surprisingly accurate and really interesting.

I think it was something like Black Bag or something like that. forget. I don't want to spend time tapping on my key. What's your favorite hacker? Do you have a favorite hacker film, Jonathan, or favorite favorite hacker show that you think is really

Jim (05:03.342)
Hmm

Johnathan Cooper (05:05.476)
There is one named that.

Johnathan Cooper (05:14.096)
Probably probably the movie hackers is is the first one and then behind that the course because you asked me I just drew a blank but there's another one out there that Sandra Bullock is in and Now it's not it

Jim (05:26.542)
Black hat? it black hat?

Lionel (05:29.047)
I think Black Hat is the, what's the Michael Man, we're going to look it up. Forget it.

Jim (05:32.794)
That's the Michael Mann one, according to Sarah, and Sarah is always right.

Johnathan Cooper (05:33.25)
It, it, yeah. Now the, the, Sandra Bullock one is, is, she's responsible for making people digitally disappear and then she disappears.

Lionel (05:44.757)
Uh-huh.

The Net.

Jim (05:47.847)
the net. I haven't seen any of these.

Johnathan Cooper (05:48.782)
The net, yeah.

Lionel (05:51.99)
Is it good?

Johnathan Cooper (05:52.143)
Yeah, no, that's, I think it's really good. Now, none of these are accurate till real life. None of them are at all.

Jim (05:57.754)
Well, everything's changed. I think a lot of things have changed. As far as I can tell, things have changed. And I definitely would love to hear about, you know, kind of what you're finding, what you're looking out for, what you're hearing about would be great.

Johnathan Cooper (06:02.798)
Yeah, I mean even

Johnathan Cooper (06:10.798)
Yeah. I mean, cause again, even, even your, your fans that are watching NCIS and they see a McGee over there and it's like, well, can you break into the national database and look up and he goes, you're talking about me breaking into the FBI. Give me a minute. Did you, did you, did you, know, and he's got the information in 30 seconds, you know, no, it doesn't happen unless they're letting you in. but, more of what I think we're talking about today is, is there is actually a very severe uptick.

Jim (06:26.586)
Right.

Johnathan Cooper (06:41.444)
In phishing scams and email scams that are, that are happening. And I was doing some research earlier today and I saw something that said that these scams were even dramatically increasing, for people who are over the age of 60. And one of the things they're doing there is a relative based scan, scam. So they will call a person and say, Hey, I have little Johnny.

Jim (06:58.168)
Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (07:10.864)
Uh, or they'll even personate being little Johnny and say, grandma, need, I need you to send me $5,000. You know, and one of the other trends that I'm seeing in a lot of this is used to when the, when the crypto currencies hit and all of the other different ransomwares and schemes, a lot of these people were trying to make big bucks. Fast. One of the things they're doing now is they're dropping and they're, they're asking for $500, a thousand 1500.

Jim (07:15.513)
Mmm.

Johnathan Cooper (07:41.169)
And they're hitting people faster. the nefarious actors are still getting the same money they wanted. Matter of fact, um, in 2024, um, business email compromises. where people had their email accounts compromised contributed to $2.7 billion of loss.

Jim (07:43.555)
Mmm.

Lionel (08:04.941)
BECs, business email, yeah, business email compromise is a BEC. I think it's still big though then, because it was huge. It was huge to begin with. My favorite one was the town of Henderson, Texas, which I think is close to where you grew up, right, Jonathan? Henderson, Texas. So Henderson, Texas was engaged in a federal, they had a contract with like the Department of Transportation.

Johnathan Cooper (08:06.448)
BECs yes

Jim (08:08.077)
And that's just click this link.

Johnathan Cooper (08:15.364)
It's still huge, very huge.

Johnathan Cooper (08:23.396)
Yeah, yeah, it is.

Lionel (08:33.613)
to redo a highway near Henderson, Texas. So they were processing with the government of Henderson, Texas every month, every third Friday of every month would process this $7 million payment, progress payment to the contractor. And what happened was a hacker got into this, hacked into their system, watched it for a while to see exactly how it happened, knew exactly what these emails said, knew exactly the names of all the people involved in it.

Johnathan Cooper (08:46.116)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (09:04.045)
got in there an hour before the next payment and sent an email to Henderson saying, Hey, it's Todd. Something happened. We had to change bank account numbers. Can you send the $7 million payment to this bank account? This is our sec. This is our backup bank account number. And they did because Todd Todd knew exactly what to say. Phrase the emails perfectly had blocked off the real construction company. And they made as I think it was, was it seven? was like 700,000. I think it was 700,000, but

For one email to make 700K off of one email, whoa, that's a BEC. That's a classic BEC.

Johnathan Cooper (09:33.668)
don't remember the exact numbers.

Jim (09:37.134)
Holy moly.

Johnathan Cooper (09:39.921)
That's a BC and in these types of cases, like I was talking about, according to research done by IBM, it is not uncommon for an nefarious actor to be in the system. 270 days. That is the average that the, that the person is in a system, doing a thing that's called footprinting where they're just watching and they're seeing how the system is put together. Now that's talking about business stuff.

Jim (09:55.727)
Wow.

Johnathan Cooper (10:09.432)
But even that same thing happens to individuals. They may get access to your Google account or your Yahoo account and they will sit and watch and they will wait to see what, what business interactions, who are you talking to? And then get enough information to do like I was talking about earlier, where they call in and they impersonate little Johnny.

Jim (10:35.215)
Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (10:35.312)
Because now they've, they've watched and monitored and they've got enough information. And the scarier part today is with AI and the way it's generated. If they have, um, you know, maybe you sent a picture and said, a video said, here's Johnny's, uh, 16th birthday. They that nefarious actor can intercept that. And if John and he's talking, they can drop that into the AI, the AI can learn, and then it can produce Johnny's voice. can produce his.

his mannerisms, it can, uh, there was, there was a, uh, some stuff that was released three or four years ago, uh, that showed president Obama standing at a stage talking and every bit of it was 100 % AI generated, but, you couldn't tell. Yeah. Yeah.

Jim (11:18.372)
Hmm.

Jim (11:22.721)
Right.

Lionel (11:23.01)
Yeah, because there's a lot of Obama. Yeah, there's a lot to feed into the hopper. And there's a lot of there's a lot of elderly. There's a lot of elderly Americans with a lot of money. The baby boomer generation is aging and they've got 401Ks and they got IRAs. And, you know, it's something that I've thought about myself. mean, I wonder if I should just take a large chunk of of my cash.

Johnathan Cooper (11:34.149)
Yes.

Lionel (11:50.703)
and put into a trust to my daughter already in case I lose my marbles and somebody calls me on the phone and gets me to transfer. If I don't have money to give away, then the money's probably pretty safe. But it's spooky.

Jim (12:06.02)
So yeah, mean, recently somebody I know received an email from an email address that she trusted inviting her out to brunch. And it was like, just need you to add yourself to the reservation. Now all of that is stuff that actually happens, right? So I met some people out for reservation and it clicked up with.

Johnathan Cooper (12:26.992)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (12:32.922)
Oh, I forget what the, whatever the app is that does reservations at most restaurants nowadays. Um, of course I was already logged in and, I just added myself to the table. But, um, in this case, this, this person started like going through, well, you're not logged in, you know, and then it asked for their Google, uh, their Google email, their Google password. And right after that, they told, they called me and told me what had happened. And I was like,

Lionel (13:02.702)
change your password right now. Hang up.

Jim (13:03.0)
All right, stop talking and change, change your password and click log out all devices. And hopefully that does something because once they get your email, so then it turns out that that email that had come to her had come from somebody who had, who shortly after that, sent an email saying my email was hacked. So the email hacking can start a chain of events where it's like you and all your friends and all their friends.

Johnathan Cooper (13:08.773)
Yes.

Lionel (13:29.059)
Yes.

Johnathan Cooper (13:29.476)
Yes.

And that's actually a, you know, we talked about the, BEC or the, business email compromise. And that's actually just a personalized version of that same thing that happens is it happens to us. And the there's been some cases a few years ago where some large data clearing houses had lots of data about individuals and they got compromised and millions upon millions of records were.

Jim (13:32.727)
It's pretty scary.

Lionel (13:32.812)
Hehe.

Jim (13:57.945)
Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (14:02.082)
swept off into the dark web and people correlate that data. And when they start correlating it, they start putting things together. they may get one piece of information off of one website, another piece of information off of another website, somebody else scraped your cookies and they start correlating all this data together to put together a profile on you. And then they sell that profile on the dark web. I actually last week got to,

Jim (14:28.334)
Right.

Johnathan Cooper (14:31.952)
Uh, work with someone that does forensics for a living and they were showing me going into the dark web and actually going to some of those sites and how it actually worked. That's the first time I actually saw it live in action and not just pictures. And it was, it was quite scary. Some of the stuff that was seen out there. Um, and, and yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Lionel (14:54.158)
It's like Amazon, right? It's just like, yeah, I got 50,000. I got 50,000 of this for, yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (15:00.718)
Yeah. And, and, know, one of the other things that's, that's a big, that I'm seeing more and more of a, of an uptick in is the phony tech support calls where either you go to a website and something pops up and says your machine has been compromised. Well, I can tell you if you're using the, Microsoft defender, which most windows people are, or if you're using the Apple stuff, it's not going to pop up in the dead center of your screen. comes up over on the side, you know,

Jim (15:10.927)
Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (15:28.324)
But it'll pop up and then you, starts asking all kinds of personal information or tells you to call up, call Microsoft now. Well, Microsoft's not going to help you with your, your antivirus. They're, just not, you know, but again, it's a major industry. I was actually, I guess you say in the right place at the right time. I was working with a, another coworker one day and his phone sitting on the table and we're, working trying to.

Jim (15:32.654)
Right.

Jim (15:39.983)
Right.

Johnathan Cooper (15:58.257)
to resolve an issue on a computer and his, his phone rings and he just swipes the answer. Didn't even pick it up. Just swipe to answer. he's, he said his name and the person says, hi, I'm with Dell and we're seeing a regular activity on your, on your device. We need you to, and they started giving him instructions to walk through. And he just looks at me and I looked at him and I said, play with them.

Jim (16:17.591)
Wow. Yeah.

Jim (16:24.772)
Yeah, right. Well, that's called scam baiting, which is something I am just getting interested in.

Johnathan Cooper (16:27.032)
Hehehehe

Yeah. And so they were trying to say that they were getting into his system. And then, the user said something about, well, your windows device is compromised. And the user looks back and goes, I don't use windows. use a boom to click. Yeah. You know, was like,

Jim (16:46.522)
Yeah, I've had scammers like cursing me for saying you're just letting them go like windows. Okay. Where do I wait? Where do I go? Like run them through the nightmare that is IT assistance over a phone. Like, wait, I don't know. Okay. No, click, click on the window. I'm like, which window are you talking about?

Johnathan Cooper (16:53.698)
yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (17:04.139)
Mm-hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (17:09.744)
Are you throwing for a loop? say, mean, you mean that little apple icon in the upper left corner?

Jim (17:14.668)
That's right. Finally, you are a bastard person is what the person said. Anyway, I was very happy. But that is a whole like kind of it's a there's a whole YouTube there are a series of YouTube channels. There is a guy named Jim Browning who basically only does this on YouTube and, his yeah, it's it's scam baiting, which can be very entertaining. And apparently there are scam baiting bots. Lionel you had said I would love to have one of those and that. Yeah, there are that exists. Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (17:25.688)
Yes,

Mm-hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (17:37.796)
Yes.

Lionel (17:37.966)
That's yeah, I'd love to have an AI have your AI call my AI and have them battle each other out. It's like hiring champions to fight your cause on the field of battle.

Johnathan Cooper (17:43.632)
Yeah.

Jim (17:45.316)
Yeah.

they'll start saying, I'm sorry, my cat is throwing up in the other room. you know, what color again? And just like, just being the most obtuse, like slow, not being able to follow a thought. It's beautiful. They drive them crazy.

Johnathan Cooper (18:02.072)
it does drive them nuts. mean, it's, you know, and like I said, the tech support is something I'm seeing a major thing of. Another one that's making a rise is,

Someone in the first actor again will open a Gmail account and maybe it is got a name very similar to mine. And then in the body, it'll say, I just read about the most horrific thing. I've, I've decided to change my life and I'm joining an organization. and I'm going to quote a few things that were real in this one that I saw. I'm a joining an organization, no hungry child.

Jim (18:26.618)
Mm-hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (18:49.552)
I really would appreciate if you could help me with this adventure. We're looking for three to four people in the area that can, that can help me make this come true. if you really support the, the, the organization, here's the website, check it out. my stuff is not set up yet with the organization. So if you're interested in helping me local, here's my local Gmail address.

Jim (19:01.239)
Hmm

Johnathan Cooper (19:18.136)
And they give the email address. And so, you know, who in the world is not going to want to help a hungry child. And they jump into this and then I say, great. You've responded to me. I'm going to send you a check. This is going to pay for your computer and all the office equipment you need to get started and get set up. look, you know, I've got two other people in the area, so I'm going to send one check to you.

Jim (19:24.44)
Right.

Lionel (19:36.856)
Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (19:46.545)
I need you to coordinate with the other people. I'll send you their information in a separate email. They go through this whole thing and they get you believing that you're fixing to be the point person. You get the check in the mail. You run it down to the bank. You throw it in, you run down to whatever electronic store and you get your stuff and you head back to the house where your phone rings and the bank says, um, your account is overdrawn. How can it be overdrawn? I just dropped $5,000 in the bank. Oh yeah. That bank, that check was no good.

Jim (19:48.878)
Right.

Lionel (20:16.11)
Right. It's Money Mule. It's called a money. It's a very variation on Money Mule, which is a classic scam, which we had. We had plenty of that. We saw that plenty in universities because young people get very, very excited when they're sent in, when they're sent an email that says you can earn $500 a week working only four hours. I'm a traveling businessman. I'm a traveling salesman.

Jim (20:16.75)
Right.

Johnathan Cooper (20:18.798)
Yeah, it's called Money Mule.

Jim (20:29.038)
Hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (20:41.156)
I want the job.

Jim (20:43.022)
Hmm.

Lionel (20:44.43)
And I need somebody to perform light clerical duties for me. I'm sorry, would you say Jonathan? I miss something? Yeah, yeah. I don't know. But it's a very attractive lucrative offer. I forget what it was, 500 for four hours or whatever it was, but very lucrative. And it's just, have to do light. They don't ask for anything at all. They just say, me an email. And somebody, some young person who really needs the money is very excited about this replies.

Johnathan Cooper (20:44.516)
Mm-hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (20:50.298)
I said, I want that job $400 five hours. No, it's.

Johnathan Cooper (21:00.826)
Yeah.

Lionel (21:13.294)
And they say, okay, here's the first thing I need you to do. I'm going to FedEx you a check, take the check down to the bank, cash it. It'll be a thousand dollar check. You keep 200 for yourself. You put the 800 in a FedEx envelope and FedEx it back to me and you keep the 200 as your fee. And so of course it's Money Mule. They're cutting a banker. And it's usually a banker's check from Walmart, some large corporation, Target Walmart.

Johnathan Cooper (21:42.331)
That's what it looked like, but it's, it's all the, every bit of the information is bogus on it. You, can, I was like, you can get the check. can get official check looking stuff. You can order it online, you know, cause a lot of accounting businesses, instead of keeping, you know, a hundred different checkbooks around for their clients. They order like you would order paper for your printer. They ordered the check stop.

Lionel (21:43.853)
Yeah.

Lionel (21:47.278)
Yeah, and so what they do is they, yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Lionel (21:56.206)
Mm-hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (22:09.316)
And then they print everything in their accounting firm. So, I mean, you can do it online if you know the right resources and get the stuff.

Jim (22:09.933)
Right.

Lionel (22:13.742)
Yeah. And we had horrible, we had horrible situation, not horrible, but I mean, you know, really devastating situations, you know, where the student goes down and tries to explain to the bank and banks at first were kind of like one student was lucky because she'd been a customer of the bank for like seven years. The bank said, okay, you're probably not screwing us. But other times banks like, sorry, you owe us, you owe us $800 or you owe us $5,000. But it wasn't me is in there like, we don't believe you. Sorry.

Johnathan Cooper (22:37.573)
Yeah.

Jim (22:38.777)
Yeah.

Lionel (22:43.199)
And I can see where they're coming from.

Johnathan Cooper (22:43.256)
Yeah. A new variation, a new variation I've seen of that is that after a few emails, exchange back and forth, they'll say something like, I really want to get your direct deposit information set up. I need your, your routing information and your, your bank account number. And as soon as you give them that information, they just start draining the account. They'll start with small numbers and then get bigger. And then until they get a rejection.

Lionel (22:56.194)
Right, to pay you. Right.

Jim (23:06.788)
That's something I don't understand. Your routing number and bank account number are on every check you write. Why is it so insecure that somebody with that information can basically drain your account? How is that possible?

Johnathan Cooper (23:21.902)
I'll go one further that the routing number of your bank, all I gotta do is talk to you long enough and I can get, I can get what bank you use. You would probably almost willingly give that to me.

Jim (23:32.719)
Mm-hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (23:34.262)
Every routing number for every bank around the world is in a published book.

Lionel (23:39.062)
is public. Right.

Jim (23:42.628)
But if somebody found a check that I, I know what it So if I, if I write a check to somebody and they, they throw it in the trash and somebody finds that check, they can start printing checks as me.

Johnathan Cooper (23:42.926)
And today you can actually look it up online.

Johnathan Cooper (23:56.462)
Yes, yes.

Jim (24:01.422)
That's not very secure.

Johnathan Cooper (24:03.158)
No. And that's why a lot of the, lot of people are trying to move away from those paper checks and they're moving towards, you know, the credit cards or the debit cards or the electronic currencies and Zelle and, and, yeah, things of that nature.

Jim (24:12.138)
or Zell. Yeah. Yeah.

Lionel (24:17.836)
Although if you go and you try to transfer something by Zelle, whoa, the banks put up like five screens saying, you better know what you're doing because we are not going to move a finger for you. If you get screwed by this transaction, we are going to dance on your grave singing bloody hallelujah. Really the banks are just like, not going to dangle a rope down to rescue you. We're not going to throw you a life preserver.

Jim (24:23.106)
Yeah, it's intense.

Jim (24:31.022)
Yeah, when it's gone, it's gone.

Jim (24:38.702)
Thank

Lionel (24:47.694)
completely on your own if you use this service, which shows you how serious all this stuff is.

Johnathan Cooper (24:53.744)
Yeah.

Jim (24:53.85)
It was funny. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Jonathan.

Johnathan Cooper (24:56.666)
I was going say, you know, just to kind of tell you, everybody is susceptible to these scams. you know, I don't know if everybody can see or not, but what I'm holding here is a large pack of basically eyeglass cleaner cloths. Okay. When I ordered this, it was a one terabyte hard drive.

Jim (25:12.228)
Mm-hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (25:20.068)
That is what I clicked on to order was a one terabyte hard drive and I got clothed. And whenever I said, I got scammed and went back to, to, you know, I paid through PayPal and I went back and I said, well, you know, the, person said, well, we sent, we sent an order. Here's our confirmation of sending. Here's our confirmation of receipt. And then PayPal says, well, it looks like you got your order. said, no, no, no, that's not, it's not by order.

Jim (25:49.21)
Right. Right.

Johnathan Cooper (25:49.784)
You know, so it happens to everybody, even what looks like very, very, very legitimate companies.

Jim (25:59.898)
But I was gonna say that, you the IT scam has actually been going on for a long time and people have gotten a little bit savvy to it. And the newer scams, so I've learned a little bit more since I started watching, what is it? Jim somebody or the Jim B, Jim Browning. And some of these I had never, you know, there's the job scam where you're...

Johnathan Cooper (26:05.572)
BitHack.

Johnathan Cooper (26:23.898)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (26:24.73)
They ask you to just do a five star review and I'll send you five bucks and the more you do then I'm more and they actually send like up to $50 to each person. So you're actually getting actual money, not money in some kind of Bitcoin account that you can't get to in a fake app, actual money that you get. So then you feel confident and they're like, oh, well, here's a bigger job, but it's going to require some monetary outlay on your part. Right. And then.

And then it starts to turn, they turn it the other direction. And apparently the, even with people basically quitting at the $50, you know, they, they rope you into the point where the promise of $800 is like, Whoa, what if I could really get that for just, you know, for just writing a review or something like that, all I had to do was, was type five stars before. now if I write a review, I get $800, but somehow I need to like,

send in $45 to do that, right? People fall for this. There's

Johnathan Cooper (27:28.112)
And there's a, there's another scam that's, that's getting more and more popular. And most of the security industry calls it a, a victimless, um, scam, but the, the true victims are not the one who is being scammed. So you may get an Amazon package on your front door that you didn't order.

Jim (27:39.919)
Hmm.

Lionel (27:50.304)
this is the you're stealing my thunder. Right. The Nespresso, the Nespresso scam.

Jim (27:54.562)
Right. Yes.

Johnathan Cooper (27:55.545)
Yeah. And an express a machine or something of that nature, you know, and sometimes they're a little cheap, nothings, and sometimes they're expensive gifts. But then what that person gets to do is go into Amazon, make a five star review, talk about how wonderful the product is. And next to their name is verified purchaser or verified buyer, something, either one, you know, verified that they purchase this product.

Lionel (28:16.6)
Verified buyer. Yeah, verified. Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (28:23.77)
So now it looks more legitimate. Well, if you look at the world of advertising, they're just advertising. So whether they would go spend money on some advertising platform or whether they get a series of good reviews and good reviews, sell product.

Jim (28:45.784)
I see they're not giving away their location. They're sending it to a random address and then they're.

Johnathan Cooper (28:52.996)
Well, like they'll create an account that looks like me and then they buy it and send it to my address. Now I have no access to the account. they're, they're credit card information or whatever is still secure and hidden and all that good stuff. But I get this box, but that use that, that person who sent it out gets that verified purchaser and they get to write a good, good review.

Jim (28:56.012)
I see.

Jim (29:03.853)
Right.

Jim (29:10.435)
Right.

Johnathan Cooper (29:22.05)
Now you read that review for a crap product and you're thinking, man, Jonathan said, this is great. look, Mary says it's wonderful. Okay. And then you buy it you get it in and you're like, man, this is, this is flimsy. It's not. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and

Jim (29:22.2)
Yeah, that's.

Jim (29:31.395)
Right.

Yeah.

Jim (29:39.8)
Why were they, why do they think this was any good? Yeah. Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (29:45.912)
And the average person doesn't actually return those products.

Jim (29:52.194)
Right, because it's a hassle. It's time out of your day. And it's if it's a small purchase, then they don't. I think they must so they must count on you not returning the product, right? Or does that change the? Yeah, so if you return it, then then it won't work. And they're out the money. So it's definitely worth returning it. In that case.

Lionel (29:58.19)
Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (30:00.942)
Yes, a hundred percent.

Lionel (30:09.102)
There's a different Nespresso scam. And I just looked it up. It's on a show called Planet Money. You guys can look it up later if you want to. It's called Wake Up and Smell the Fraud. And this really fascinated my daughter, because what happened was somebody did this to this lady. And the lady turns out to be the director of cybersecurity for the national. Or she's the executive assistant to the

Jim (30:20.975)
Yeah.

Jim (30:32.258)
No.

Lionel (30:36.268)
the director of somebody in the National Security Agency. And she was fascinated because what she did was she ordered Nespresso pods on Amazon. And when they arrived, there was way too many.

Jim (30:39.736)
Wow.

Jim (30:43.948)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

right.

Lionel (30:49.036)
And she called up Amazon and said, I heard an espresso pods and there's way too many. And basically Nespresso and Amazon said, whatever, just keep them. Right. But, but, and it's, it's called triangulation fraud. There's actually three people involved, you, Amazon and the fraudster. And I forget exactly how it works. It's actually fairly complex. but it's really, really interesting, which is that

Jim (30:57.316)
Like why are you complaining? Yeah. Yeah.

Jim (31:12.206)
Yeah.

Lionel (31:15.17)
Like Jonathan said, you don't get harmed. You end up with a lot of extra Nespresso pods. what it does, it relies upon the fact that companies like Nespresso and Amazon are not going to, they have, they thresholds for prosecution and the scammers know precisely where those thresholds are. And so they,

Jim (31:27.866)
They just stay underneath the.

Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (31:32.068)
Well, and, some of those companies have a threshold for what they're willing to lose on a sale. And so again, like you said, there's three people. What I've seen variation of that is, is some, it's usually an insider threat. So you order the pods, you get way more than what you needed. You call Amazon says keep it. And then on the backend, somebody goes in and they do a refund.

Jim (31:38.435)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (31:59.001)
I think you're, I'm not sure, but.

Jim (31:59.45)
Uh-huh.

Johnathan Cooper (32:00.697)
They do a refund and then they get the money that person who does the refund gets the money back.

Lionel (32:06.338)
Yeah, but it's a great thing. It's a planet money, wake up and smell the frauds from 2022, really well put together show. But yeah, mean, sort of summing up all this stuff together, think one of the, so the big shifts that are happening recently, one, there's a lot more elderly people. And I've been hearing a lot about fraud perpetrated on the elderly. think everybody's really, really hard to deal with it. The second big vector is AI.

Jim (32:26.144)
Absolutely. And it's hard to do anything about that.

Lionel (32:35.522)
which is a force multiplier and three, not really a new thing, but one of the great enabling, great enablers of this entire wave is cryptocurrency, allowing people to move stuff around. But on the good side has been the emergence and the universal acceptance of multifactor authentication, which is a fabulous antidote to a lot of this stuff. Not to...

Jim (32:46.946)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (33:02.19)
not necessarily so much to the social engineering of actually calling people up, but trying to brute force people's passwords is probably not a very profitable thing anymore because so many people have adopted MFA. And one of the things that's happened with MFA and is, know, MFA used to be you would just get like classic MFA used in corporations and universities.

Jim (33:14.873)
Right.

Lionel (33:30.488)
You get ding-dong on your phone. When you go to log into something, you get ding-dong on your phone, you say either accept or decline. And that worked great for a long time until it no longer did because what happens is there's some, what?

Jim (33:41.882)
What? I was going to ask, how does it break? Yeah, I'm curious about that.

Lionel (33:45.878)
It breaks because people will click on anything. There's certain group of people who will just click accept on anything and they don't think about it. Yeah.

Jim (33:48.922)
Johnathan Cooper (33:52.867)
You also have MFA fatigue is another term that's used where I will, once I have your username and password, I will just continue to keep logging in until you get frustrated. Then you just go, yes.

Jim (33:53.06)
Right.

Lionel (34:05.774)
Right. So they've, they've fished your password for via whatever, whatever means they fished your password. They want to log in as you, but they can't cause you got an MFA. So the old joke is what's it, what's the easiest way to get, get somebody's password, ask them for it. Um, and the other way, and what's the easiest way to get people to, to approve the MFA, ask them to do it for you. Um, and so people pound away at, so one of the things that

is being contemplated now is you can't just simply say, okay, what happens is you're going to get a code of four digit number and you have to type that number in. Because what it's relying upon, the scam relies upon. So let's say the guy's in Nebraska, the hacker's in Nebraska, the hacker has your password, hacker keeps logging in and your phone keeps going off. At some point, if you get sick and tired, if you get MFA fatigue, you'll just click on okay, just to make it stop.

Jim (34:55.236)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (35:05.016)
But if you actually, go ahead.

Jim (35:05.112)
Right. It's different. It's funny because the Google authenticator is like that. Google authenticator is like, click the button and then suddenly it authenticates because the code is changing every so often and they're in sync. That's a lot, you're right. That's a lot less secure than sending. Yeah, but I mean, but if somebody's trying to.

Lionel (35:22.523)
Google authenticator is very secure.

Johnathan Cooper (35:27.396)
Your phone, your phone has been registered with Google. They know your phone when you hit. Yes. Yeah.

Lionel (35:27.586)
No, what's in...

Jim (35:33.588)
I know. I mean, you might, if you, if you are tempted to just say yes on your phone, then that whoever's been trying to get in gets in. Whereas you have to be on a screen and enter the digits. You can't just say, go ahead and do it. Right. To somebody else for somebody else.

Johnathan Cooper (35:38.575)
Mm-hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (35:42.286)
Yes, but

Johnathan Cooper (35:46.639)
Yes.

Lionel (35:47.407)
that appear on the screen. Yeah. And that's why, that's why everybody's going to this now. But the problem is users don't like that. mean, users didn't like it. There's users who didn't like passwords. And then once they got used to passwords, we did MFA and they hated that. And now we're saying to users, look, you can only just click the big green button that says, accept. You're going to have to look at the screen. You're going to have to have a four digit number. And so the problem is the guy who's trying to log in, the login screen is in Nebraska and you're in Boston.

Jim (36:00.707)
Well, yeah.

Lionel (36:18.07)
And so the four digits are appearing on a screen in Nebraska, but not in Boston. And then it gets to this really complex stuff where the hackers try to get you to tell them what the codes are that are appearing on their phone. But if you answer yes to that, then you probably deserve to be scammed at that point.

Jim (36:27.214)
Yes.

Jim (36:32.842)
I did once, and let me just, I just want to tell three stories, two stories really, three stories maybe about times I was scammed. And, I was working late. I was, I was exhausted and somebody called in saying they were from T-Mobile and that there had been some suspicious activity on my account. And they said, no, I just need the, I just need the three, the four digit, temporary password that showed up on your phone.

And before I could think, I gave it to him and then immediately realize what was happening. I hung up and called T-Mobile and they're like, yep, we saw it. Six iPhones were just ordered to somebody in who knows where, and they canceled the order. They had me reset my password. And then the guy called back and say, what did you do? Like he had the nerve to say, what did you do? How dare you? How dare you?

Lionel (37:26.052)
yeah.

Jim (37:30.404)
call T-Mobile, which is where I'm calling from. The other things, the other times the scams were more interesting because they figured out I was an author. AI had summarized my book. They sent me like, they said, I love your book, right? This is a pretty interesting. The author's scam is kind of new and you can read about it a little bit and there are two different kinds. I can help you get better reviews.

and help you sell more books on Amazon is what was the first scam. And you just need to pay me X amount of, I don't know. They didn't even talk about money at first. They went in and they put up a bunch of fake reviews. And then they listed me on a bunch of different lists on Amazon. And I think these are all AI generator reviews. And the lists that I was listed on were like strange, like medical travel, you know, books about

traveling, you know, clothing shopping in different places, you know, because my book is, about a traveler, but it's a, it's a science fiction book. None of these lists have anything to do with my book. I, I insisted on a zoom meeting and I did have a zoom meeting with an actual person. I think, but it was, I don't know. It may have, it, I think that AI wasn't quite there to like imitate a zoom call yet, like a video call.

But the person was clearly in a third world country. And then I started to feel, okay, well, if I just automatically assume this person is a scammer because they're in a third world country, doesn't that make me kind of an asshole? And I let it go on for a while to the point where they were like, you know, listen, I put so much work into this. I've, this has been like, I've done so much for you. And there was actually something done. said, yeah, but it's all garbage and it's going to get erased. said, listen, I'll pay pal you 200 bucks and never contact me again.

And, they were like, no, we can't take PayPal. We need to do, it was either Zelle or we need like a bank transfer. Like they were, they wanted my bank information. said, Nope, no, I'll pay pay you. I'm, I'm willing to pay you some money to never contact me again. And they fought me on that. And they finally took the $200 and then they started contacting me again. And I blocked their, I blocked their email address. Final story. And it was like, after that, I should have known.

Lionel (39:35.767)
Hehe.

Jim (39:55.962)
somebody I love your books, I've read your books, I think they're fantastic, I think they'd be perfect for our book club, the Denver Gay Book Club. The guy's name was like Jim Davidson, Jim Davidson, right? I mean, I don't know. No, it's a very original name. mean, that, you know, there's how many people, how many Jim Davidson's are there out there? And, again, but it's like, that was actually fairly clever. I'm like, well, it's a gay book club. How can I get critical? I'm a straight white man.

Lionel (40:08.524)
I can expect somebody called Jim Davidson.

Johnathan Cooper (40:13.604)
Yeah.

Jim (40:24.874)
Should I get critical of a gay book club in Denver? Should I think they're a scam? So that was clever. But the first thing I said was, listen, I need to do a, you're Jim Davidson, I need a Zoom call with you. And they set up a Zoom call with me and then they blew it off, right? And then the second time I got a woman who was clearly in a call center and I was like, or it sounded like she was in a crowded place. And I said, no, I'm not gonna do this.

Lionel (40:54.574)
I'm out.

Jim (40:55.546)
Jim Davidson keeps writing me, keeps writing me. like, and I look at the problem is I can't find any scams on the web associated with the Denver Gay Book Club. So this must be a one-off with me, right? I didn't Google the right thing. I didn't Google author, like Zoom author book club scam. That would have shown me that it doesn't matter what the name of the book club is. These are happening to a lot of authors.

And so I gave it another try and we got as far as me sending like my press shots, know, my head, my head shots for the press so they could make posters and all that. And they're like, and we're ready to go as soon as we receive your fee. And then I was like, fuck you. No, this is a scam. And he's like, no, no, no, genuinely you don't have to pay any fee. It's all right. That's okay. And I said, well, I'm not doing anything now. And as a matter of fact, we're to talk about my fee. you need to pay me and I need to talk to you on a zoom call.

set up another zoom call. The other person on the call was named Dell and it was clearly a call center this time and a woman. And, and I was like, where's Jim Davidson? I want to talk to Jim Davidson. was like, Jim Davidson can't make it. I'm like, you're a, fuck you. You're a scam. And then finally I blocked them. But it was like, that took a long time. You know, I mean, I should have been able to stop it right at the beginning and I couldn't, I really, I really, it is their right.

Lionel (42:11.926)
Yep. Nice talk. Let's keep it. Yep.

Jim (42:23.798)
Once you flatter somebody at the beginning and say, I read your book. Of course, every author is like they're waiting for those words.

Johnathan Cooper (42:31.962)
Well, again, the, the, the basis underlying piece of all of these scams is psychology. They, they take advantage of the fact that the average person wants to do good. want to help.

Jim (42:38.81)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (42:45.176)
Mm-hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (42:46.998)
And because they know that they will prey on everybody until they get somebody to respond. So think about the email that you responded to. They might've sent, you know, a thousand emails out. They got one back, you know, it, especially as we've talked about with the technology today, it doesn't take a lot for them. last fall, the FBI credited, I believe it was Claude.

Jim (43:01.017)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (43:16.592)
an AI tool with the first 100 % AI cyber attack.

Jim (43:25.626)
Hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (43:26.252)
A person sat down, didn't have a lot of experience with, doing cyber attacks. they said, review the top 100 companies in the United States. Review this, this, and this, they gave the criteria and all this stuff. And so Claude came back and it pulled up all the information. Then the user said something to the effect of now personalize an email to each of these companies.

And gave more criteria. then it all sent out. And then by the time they were done, they got, I won't say they got access to 40 or 50 corporations.

Johnathan Cooper (44:10.832)
You know, they got in and started doing their footprinting and then the FBI, I guess they tripped the wrong switch and the FBI caught onto the scent and tracked them down, shut it down. And another one that was presented last fall that's happening. Um, I don't know how much of scam it is or just something scary, uh, was, was recorded up in, in, uh, New York. And I think I've talked to Lionel about this one.

Jim (44:23.0)
Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (44:39.68)
Where there was found three or four apartments around New York with enough, cell phone, SIM cards installed in electronic devices to stop all cellular communication in New York.

Lionel (44:49.083)
yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Lionel (45:02.22)
Yeah, you're basically doing a DOS on the entire cell network.

Jim (45:03.0)
Wow.

denial of service attack. Just translating for the people who don't know.

Johnathan Cooper (45:08.034)
Yes. Actually, yeah.

Lionel (45:08.878)
No, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. But it looked it looked like a nuclear reactor. These buildings, thousands racks like these industrial racks of cell phones, all power, you know, ready to go. I mean, it looked like something out of a doomsday scenario, which in fact it was. Because you basically just turn on 40,000 phones simultaneously and make a call simultaneously. It's like that old, who was it? Lenny Bruce, Flesh for Freedom.

Jim (45:14.074)
Ugh.

Johnathan Cooper (45:15.17)
yes.

Lionel (45:36.054)
If everybody in flushed the toilet at the same time, could collapse the collapse, New York water system.

Johnathan Cooper (45:41.142)
you're about the Super Bowl flush.

Lionel (45:45.484)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim (45:46.257)
yeah, I guess that happens, right? Of course.

Johnathan Cooper (45:47.714)
It does. It's called the Superbowl flash.

Lionel (45:51.551)
It probably affects the rotation of the earth. The fields reverse, the poles reverse.

Jim (45:51.63)
That's funny. That's hilarious. That's why the magnetic poles are going to reverse. Yeah. That's why we figured it out guys. So I just want to actually, I want to get back to like the scamming of people because hacking of big systems is one thing, but scamming people, what this has made me realize is that it's important to figure out what it is that presses your buttons. Like what is the scenario that you're wishing for? That you're wishing would happen.

Johnathan Cooper (45:57.905)
Huh?

Johnathan Cooper (46:06.191)
Yeah.

Jim (46:21.742)
that will just like make you so happy that you would kind of forget a lot of a lot of careful steps that you really shouldn't forget, you know, and

Johnathan Cooper (46:30.106)
Well, number one thing that they do is they push you and pressure you in time so that you don't have time to think.

Lionel (46:34.157)
Yeah.

rush people, very gentle aggression, but it's aggression. It's like, got to, we got to, this has to happen, you know, honestly, it happens everywhere in society. The one I, the one that causes me to hang up on salesmen immediately go, well, we have a special deal. If we do this before the end of the month, you get a special rate. I'm just like, that's it. I'm not buying anything for you ever again. But there's always that.

Jim (46:38.007)
Right.

Jim (46:54.958)
Yeah. Goodbye. Goodbye. For me, it was at the Jewish deli, the Jewish deli in New York. They were like, what's your order? What? What do you want? What do you want? What do you want? And you're like, I want to, I don't know if I want tomato with a, can you hurry up? I got a line.

Lionel (47:04.46)
Yeah, it's hustling people along. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, the hustle. They try to hustle you along. Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (47:13.22)
Yeah. And another, another classification in what you're talking about there, it's been called investment scams where they call you up or they send you an email and it's like, we got this, really hot IPO that's fixing to hit. we're going to let you in early. You've been pre-selected. Just send us your, your bank account number and we're going to automatically deduct the funds and you'll be guaranteed to get in on the sub prime rate.

Jim (47:21.369)
Yes.

Jim (47:32.877)
Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (47:42.416)
or whatever, you know, and, and, you know, 2024, $6 billion was recorded in being lost that way.

Lionel (47:42.786)
Mm.

Jim (47:52.539)
and a lot of this, like, people who are really smart with a lot of money, fall victim to that kind of thing. Like,

Johnathan Cooper (48:01.54)
Well, again, your, your top level business people are used to doing things in a hustle.

Jim (48:06.616)
really fast. Yeah. And they're expecting things, good things to happen, right? They feel very deserving. Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (48:08.346)
You know, exactly, exactly. Again, they're trusting.

Lionel (48:14.796)
Well, it, you know, I have a slightly more dim view of mankind. you, you, sort of think that everybody's like yourself and that's usually a good thing to do most of the time, but we are different. People are different and some people are really clueless when it comes to computers. I mean, I've had to work with them and

Johnathan Cooper (48:19.984)
Ha

Lionel (48:41.176)
They're really clueless. They really have no idea of up or down and they're really lost and their whole life they've taught to defer to authority. So when somebody, you know, I had to deal with something where somebody, was just a simple, a simple mail scam. Somebody said, you know, you see these, you get these letters all the time and say, final notice, you need to do this to avoid blah, blah, blah.

Jim (49:02.2)
Yes.

Lionel (49:05.006)
I mean, the simplest game of all was the time one of my friends came home and his girlfriend had set out a huge table with champagne and lit candles and it was filet mignon. He goes, what's going on? She says, we're going to be rich. And she holds up the publishers clearing house sweepstakes letter and she says, I won $7 million. And he's like, sweetheart, I don't know to break it to you. You know?

It goes on on every level of our society, but people really are, and I'm probably gullible in ways that other people and I probably, other people laugh at me for different things. But when it comes to business and communications and people, I basically really am a sociopath. I don't trust anybody at all. I think everybody's out to scam me and I'm usually right.

Jim (49:36.975)
Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (49:37.25)
It does.

Lionel (50:00.747)
And even if I'm wrong, I convinced myself I'm right, but people really do fall for this stuff. It's the hustle. The Bernie Madoff trick was, know, so Bernie Madoff was the guy who collapsed the Western society for a couple of years there. And his line, people come to him say, can I invest your thing? goes, no, can't. I'm sorry. It's all closed. We can't take anymore more. And then he'd sort of walk away and go,

Jim (50:15.928)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jim (50:22.018)
No, we can't take anymore.

Lionel (50:27.916)
You know, there's one guy who's, there's a couple, I think I might be able to fit you in. And that was his lick. Maybe I can squeeze you in. And that's how he got most of the people into the thing.

Johnathan Cooper (50:38.864)
I actually worked for a company that was, scammed in part of that, that process. They, they, bought and sold a certain product and they bought it and then sold it. And my employer had to wind up giving the money back to the person who bought it from him. Cause he got sued, come to find out it in the chain of custody.

One of the people in there was the Bernie Madoff, say the name. Yeah. So when it Cheney Custy was that, it, the courts went back and reverted the ownership back to the person prior to.

Jim (51:13.594)
Bernie Madoff, yeah.

Lionel (51:13.912)
Bernie Madoff, M-A-D-O-F-F.

Lionel (51:26.146)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jim (51:27.491)
wow.

Johnathan Cooper (51:27.876)
Bernie buying it. And so it took all of these three or four other people. They just lost all their money. They no longer had a product and lost their money.

Lionel (51:34.265)
Yep. Well, that's, that's if you resell, if you resell a stolen item, you're screwed. I mean, if, if a stole something and gave it and sold it to B and B sold it to C and you're C and, and all of a sudden the original owner finds that you have it, you've got to hand it over and your only recourse is go soothe B and B's only recourse is to sue the original thief A and who's going to do that.

Jim (51:42.574)
Yeah.

Lionel (52:02.466)
But there's Bernie made up the other famous one, is millions of years ago. But again, you know, it's about, it's about like Jonathan said, like you all said, it's all psychological. and one of the, well, the interesting, the, one of the big ones, and I forget the exact name of it, but it, it was a massive hit to the Philadelphia area about 20 years ago. And it was an investment fund.

Johnathan Cooper (52:12.464)
This is psychology.

Jim (52:12.748)
Right. It's what you want. It's what you deeply want.

Lionel (52:27.822)
that went around to all the major nonprofits in the Philadelphia area. They went to the Scott Foundation. They went to a bunch of Bible colleges in and around Philadelphia. They went to all these charitable organizations, all these funds. And the key thing was that it was a father and son team and they very much promote themselves as devout Christians.

Jim (52:55.064)
Hmm.

Lionel (52:55.624)
and proceeded to fleece everybody. And one of the guys who ran one of the organizations said, you know, said he led such wonderful prayer meetings. So that's the thing is that you find something, you know, like Jim, they say to you, you know, we love your book. You know, it's that personal connection, that personal connection. But it's amazing how fast that veneer gets stripped away once you're onto them.

Jim (53:05.785)
Hmm.

Jim (53:14.178)
Right. What do want to hear? Yeah. And I mean.

Jim (53:23.872)
God, yeah, then it did just like, I mean, I continue to get email. The other one big clue, if you're getting, if you're in one of these kind of like they've gotten to know you scams is the rate at which the emails come is incredibly rapid and they come at all times of day at night, right? So it just check, check how many emails they're like, we're just waiting on whatever it is, like a blurb, you know, or we're waiting on

Lionel (53:41.432)
Yeah, we go.

Jim (53:50.798)
You know, can you suggest some questions for our readers, whatever it is they're asking for. If you don't send it right away, you'll get five emails before the next day. That's a big, that's a big red light. And you know, it fits in with the more complicated one, like the pig butchering scam. I don't know you guys have heard of, heard of this.

Lionel (53:58.542)
yeah.

Lionel (54:12.096)
No, you may mentioned it.

Jim (54:14.456)
I don't, it's so complicated and it's run, I forget, I think it's run out of China and a lot of times the people who are doing it are being held prisoner. It's, I think there was something on NPR about this. Usually it is a literal honeypot, like not a literal honeypot, but it is like a very attractive woman is trying to get in touch with you. It's just, you know, asking you how you are.

And they'll start out just kind of being really casual. And then they'll kind of ramp it up and ramp it up. And then they'll show you pictures of their luxury lifestyle.

yes. I listen, I don't I don't tell everybody this, but I have an investment opportunity for you. And so it's a long con. It builds up slowly and you kind of want to get the attention of this very attractive and wealthy person. And then you throw your life savings away.

Lionel (54:58.476)
Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (55:04.314)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (55:16.184)
I forgot where I started, it's just amazing how it plays on your desire. But then that other element of urgency is a, yeah.

Lionel (55:22.659)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (55:26.424)
Yeah. Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (55:28.804)
Yeah, that's, that's the big thing is they, they, they, they try to appeal, like you said, to the good nature that's in most people and they try to make you move quickly. So you don't have time to connect the dots. You don't have time to think about all the words that they had said and how they don't line up.

Jim (55:36.823)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (55:51.086)
Yeah. Yeah. The multiple emails do that too, because you can't read them all, right? There's just, you're scanning them because there's like five and you know, in your inbox in the morning, like, wow, this must be important. Gee, I'd better do something.

Lionel (56:07.938)
Well, I think did I mention I mentioned on did I mention already, Jim, about the book, the AI generated book? I mentioned that, right?

Jim (56:15.545)
no, you didn't mention it here. You mentioned it to me, but not on this episode.

Lionel (56:17.954)
I didn't mention. So here's another scam that people should be aware of, which is Amazon created this thing called print on demand. And what that is, is that if you're an author, you no longer have to find a publisher to publish your book, because all you have to do is submit something to Amazon and nothing happens until somebody orders your book. And when somebody orders your book, Amazon will print one up right then and there in real time and ship it to the person.

So what this has led to is a huge amount of nonsense books being created by AI and flooding the market. The most heavily hit segment is travel guides. If you look for a travel guide, the 2025, 2026 travel guide to London, there'll be thousands of books out there that are very cheap and they have complete, not complete nonsense, but they'll have very generic stuff that means nothing.

I fell for it. I didn't fall for it. It was like a $35 book for, it's a study guide for a test. So this is a lot more important than a travel, well, a tourist book, because I was relying upon this to prepare for this test. And I realized about 12 hours before the test that this book was nonsense.

I did about a hundred test questions and got a bunch of them wrong. And when I went to research, the right answers found out I had the right answer. The book had the wrong answers. And then I actually went and looked at the rest of the book and it just sort of devolves into like, eventually the questions just become a single word. It's just like, it just, gets, it gets more and more. It's like how it gets more and more deranged as it goes on. Yeah. So we're.

Jim (57:55.797)
my god!

Jim (58:01.092)
That's so funny, right? Daisy, Daisy.

Johnathan Cooper (58:04.312)
AI hallucination. Yeah. No, I've seen like you're talking about there. I've seen now on Amazon, a lot of times you can preview a book. And so like the first 10 pages or whatever that they'll let you preview is beautiful. Looks absolutely wonderful. And then it just goes downhill real fast.

Lionel (58:17.773)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (58:22.392)
Yep. So a word to the wise. this is, but it's interesting because it's all enabled by certain technologies, print on demand, AI, cyber currency, telecommunications, being able to talk to people in real time. And, you know, when the AI has got really heavy, you know, well, it's already happening. I mean, it's already poisoning the internet. mean, every, every video I see on YouTube,

that it has any significant emotional content or is that speaking to anything except the most niche interests in the world, I just presume is fake. I just presume it's being made up to convince somebody. I mean, we've already seen the deep fakes of the missile attacks on Tel Aviv. mean, that's fairly well documented. There's all kinds of fake videos.

Jim (58:58.51)
Hmm.

Johnathan Cooper (59:01.476)
and

Definitely.

Jim (59:10.146)
Yeah. Mistrust, but verify. Yeah.

Lionel (59:14.414)
Yeah, just withdraw from society altogether. I'm thinking about just

Johnathan Cooper (59:18.224)
And one of the things I see all the time, or I have people ask me all the time is, is, is if all this stuff can be caught and figured out and traced back and on and on, why is, why do we not see more prosecutions? And the answer is really simple. Most countries out there have no laws.

Jim (59:18.51)
What? Yep.

Lionel (59:33.746)
yeah.

Yeah, we love jurisdiction.

Johnathan Cooper (59:42.649)
against it.

Jim (59:42.692)
Yeah. Yep.

Lionel (59:44.121)
they're making money off of it. Even if they had laws against it, it's an income. It's an income. My favorite, I'm sorry, just one last, can I tell one last story or is that, do we need to go Jim? Do you need to like?

Johnathan Cooper (59:46.031)
Yeah.

Jim (59:46.478)
Yeah, it's bringing in income. Yeah.

Johnathan Cooper (59:50.349)
Exactly.

Jim (59:59.596)
No, no, no, yeah, tell one more story.

Lionel (01:00:01.678)
It's not really a scam, it's kind of like a scam, but it's fascinating because days of yore back in the 1980s, lot of countries run their own telephone systems, right? The telephone system is owned by the government and the telephone system is a revenue earner for the government. And in many countries, especially countries where a large number of the people go overseas to work,

Jim (01:00:21.06)
Hmm.

Lionel (01:00:31.274)
say for example, the Philippines, the Philippines actually, you know, a fairly well, but let's take a smaller country called country X. They own the phone system. So what they do is they charge very little money for people to make phone calls out of the country. Like you live in the country and you want to call somebody. They charge very little money for that, but they charge an extraordinary amount of money for people trying to call into the country. Cause what happens is,

Jim (01:00:33.348)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (01:00:54.988)
Your son goes to New York City to work there and he wants to call mom back. So the company's, the country wants to make a huge amount of money. Well, what happened is that some enterprising people found out how to do callback services. And what that is, is you take a phone switch and you set it up. And what happens is you call into their special switch, but you immediately hang up. As soon as you call in, that switch grabs your phone number, hangs up.

Jim (01:01:03.512)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (01:01:24.046)
calls the number you're trying to call, calls mom, and then calls you back out. So now it's using the 10 cents per minute fee instead of the $5 per minute fee. And some governments send people with machine guns to go in and shoot up these callback services. Yeah.

Jim (01:01:43.748)
those call switches. It's so funny because it's not really a scam. It's just an exploitation of the way they set up the, it's a hack, right? Exactly. And it's not even a malicious hack. It's like, wait, you set it up this way. Why didn't you think we're going to do this? I mean, of course we're not going to make calls into the country. We're only going to be having calls out of the country. We're just going to set it easier. Set up a time of day.

Lionel (01:01:50.38)
Right. It's a hack.

Lionel (01:01:59.331)
Right, it's money.

Lionel (01:02:07.83)
And what's interesting is that the advent of universal telecommunications of fiber optic cables and the advent of the internet blew that all away. It's all gone. And countries have had to adjust because there's a huge money earner for some countries. was like remittances is a huge amount of income for some countries in this world. The money that people send back to their families from abroad. Anyway.

Jim (01:02:35.523)
Right, of course.

Lionel (01:02:36.588)
So Jonathan, how you like being a guest in the show? You said about what? You probably said about 17 % of the words and the entire thing come again. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We should have made more time for you.

Jim (01:02:40.995)
I do.

Johnathan Cooper (01:02:44.014)
Well, everybody knows I'm a talker that knows me at all, so...

Jim (01:02:49.124)
hope we didn't talk over here, but this was an exciting topic. I was excited to talk and I had my own stories and I did go on for about 15 minutes with my three examples. So I apologize, but.

Johnathan Cooper (01:02:50.831)
No.

Johnathan Cooper (01:02:58.736)
No, you're fine.

Lionel (01:03:02.977)
No, it's good.

Johnathan Cooper (01:03:03.15)
No, it's, it's, it's, it's a, in, the role that I play today in the enterprise world, one of the tasks that I have is to spread the word and train and teach how to protect yourself. And I think Lionel will agree with me that there's not enough places I can be. There's not enough words I can say, and there's not enough stories that we can tell to teach everybody and to convince and get the word around. So.

Lionel (01:03:23.918)
Mm.

Johnathan Cooper (01:03:33.282)
I appreciate the opportunity to talk about some of the things that are going on out there. We didn't really talk much about how to prevent them because a lot of these that you can't, the only thing you can do is common sense and stop it at the beginning.

Jim (01:03:45.186)
I was actually just going to ask you if you had any advice to leave us with for like the last word of like, do this, don't do this, but I'll give you the last word anyway.

Johnathan Cooper (01:03:54.572)
If it sounds too good to be true, it is. If they're willing to give you a lot of money for no return, it's, it's not good. And if they need your information yesterday, it's probably a scam.

Lionel (01:03:56.77)
It is.

Jim (01:04:07.874)
Hang up. Thank you so much for joining us, Jonathan. Really, really enjoyed it.

Johnathan Cooper (01:04:10.82)
I appreciate the time.

Jim (01:04:14.394)
And there we go.