598 – Don’t be a victim: Tom talks Online Scams

Episode 598 – Online Scams
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with Episode 598 of Screw the Commute podcast? Today, I'm going to talk about online scams, including several brand new scams that haven't really been seen before that much. Now, if you think I'm too smart to be scammed, I don't need to listen to this episode. Well, there was a famous scammer that once said, If you think you're too smart to be scammed, I want to meet you. And I got to tell you, you know, I have that scam brigade TV show in development and Hollywood, and I actually scammed people professionally for six years in my practical joke company. I could manipulate their minds like crazy right now. It was all for fun and good natured and birthdays and anniversaries and stuff. But the same psychological techniques can be used against you. And if you think you're too smart, they want to meet you. All right. Oh, and another thing. This one lady got scammed so bad, she got the death sentence. And I am not kidding. I'll tell you her story. Anyway, I hope you didn't miss Episode 597 That was online customer service, which is really important. It'll make you a lot of money. And of course, any time you want to get to a back episode, go to screwthecommute.com, slash and then the episode number. That was 597. This is 598. And you know, 598 is only two episodes away from 600 where we're going to have a big 60% off sale. I keep saying, no, it's not going to be 600% off. All right. So that will be coming up very shortly now.

[00:02:10] All right. Let's get to the scams. And these are going to be a potpourri of different ones. Here's one of the new ones called an online backlink scam. And what it is, is you get a letter. From an attorney. That say and look, you there's an image on your site that is copyrighted and we're going to sue you. But the owner doesn't really want to sue you if you're willing to give a back link to his or her site so that they get credit for the image. And so a lot of people just get scared because it's a legal thing. It looks like a real legal law firm. There's a picture there's pictures on the the law firm website of attorneys and all their bios and everything. Guess what? It's all bullshit. And the and I want to give you a couple websites and they'll all be in the show notes. One is called Thispersondoesnotexist.com. And there's hyphens between all of them. And then slash n, there's just pictures, lots of pictures of people that were artificially generated. But it's not real. They're not real people. I want to give you several websites here callingbullshit.org is one whichfaceisreal.com.

[00:03:35] This is where you can practice to look for the little clues to see if a picture is real or not. Also, I'll tell you about that one later. All right. But what happens is, is people give backlinks and these are SEO scammers basically trying to get a whole bunch of backlinks to a site to make it look important to Google and then probably put some spam, you know, affiliate programs or whatever on there that they're trying to push. So so if you get a letter from a appears to be from a attorney about backlinks, it's probably bullshit. But certainly you can go to the sites and check out all the things you see from these pictures that they have on there. And if you call the numbers, they may even have an answering service, answering the numbers. But if you do a little bit of sleuth work, you can tell it's all BS. All right. So that's one of the new ones that's going around. Now, I told you about the site callingbullshit.org, right? This is a site that reviews social media and and network news and all kinds of things that people claim and. It really looks in deeply to what's BS and what's not. It kind of reminds me of this scumbag I saw that I think he's retiring soon from the CDC or it could have been some other agency, but.

[00:05:03] But he claimed that COVID deaths were three times as high. I think, you know, if you're not wearing a mask as opposed to wearing a mask, something like that, he was just claiming that the deaths are just scaring people to death, that the deaths are three times as high. Maybe it was the hospital admissions or ventilator. I don't know. But he said this three times as high. Yeah, and that was true. But here's the thing. The thing that he was claiming was 0.003%, which is way less than 1%. Not even a 10th of a percent. And. The other thing that he said was so bad was 0.09%. In other words, three times as big, but still not even less than a point of a percent. So there was no risk at all. But this scumbag piece of crap pencil pushing government slug is on TV, you know, pushing an agenda. That's bullshit. All right. That's what you'll find callingbullshit.org. Because these people are scum and they're getting your your tax dollars, paying them big money to lie through their butts to you. Scumbag. He's going to be in my new book coming out highly educated idiots and you know I'll throw in scammer as point I can't believe these pieces of garbage that we pay to just sit there and lie and make up crap in the so against these government people. I remember the guy a guy way, way, way, way back when I was just starting speaking and he he knew for sure he was a NASA, you know, pencil pusher.

[00:06:51] And he knew for sure about this thing of what they said when they landed on the moon. And he just acted like, no, that's not true. No, it's not true. And he's just, you know, they just have a stick up there, but little puppets do what they're told. I wish I knew who was the puppet master. All right. So that's a little rant there. But you can see I'm darn passionate about people that are lying scumbags and hurting other people with it. So that's what this scam thing is all about. That's what scam brigade was all about. That's what one of the most read articles it has to be. The most read articles I ever wrote was the top 20 seminar scams, and we'll have a link to it in the show. Notes that it's over at Antion. It's been seen hundreds of thousands of times, and I know it's cost these scammers millions of dollars and I'm giving them the middle finger right now. I triple dare them to come after me. I'll crush them. So but they're too scared because they know the truth. You know, one of them tried to get me for defamation. I triple dared them. I triple dog dare to come after me, please. I'm begging you. They got the one of the biggest scumbag attorneys in Los Angeles to send me a cease and desist order.

[00:08:04] And I said, Come on, scumbag, I triple dare you to sue me because that's going to make it public. Record all this evidence I have against your piece of crap client, and he still hides from me today because he's a little pussy. So there you go. All right. Now, a lot of these supposed fact checking places. Our scumbags too. A good example is snopes.com. I don't believe it can be trusted. I mean, I'm going to get it. Put a bunch of links in the show notes. One about BuzzFeed. The co founder is not allowed to even write on Snopes anymore because he plagiarized like 60 articles and he's a scumbag. So yeah, I got a New York Times article. I've got a Forbes article, I got Daily Mail article, I got BuzzFeed is, I think, the one that, you know, did the first exposé on it. And another another one is, oh, I forget what the name where you can buy your way out of bad reviews. It's pretty well known site. I forget the name of it right now. I was on there once because the scammer that I'm going after had people write a fake review and then all my the people that know that it's there was a lie came to my rescue. But, you know, they wanted me to pay to get rid of the review which is scum is in itself. All right. So let's get into some more scams.

[00:09:42] So there's government programs that are real that scammers use to scam you. So it has an element of reality to it. Rebates on solar panels and child tax credits and things like that are real programs that exist. But these people call up and say, Hey, if you want to get this child tax credit, all you have to do is give us your information and you've got to put up some type of fee and boom, boom, boom. But it's all fake, you know, so no government agency is going to ask you for a fee. Then the IRS will ask you for a lot of money. But it's not a fee. Technically, it's a tax. So if you get any kind of I mean, first of all, start ignoring this stuff because they want to scare you. It's worth a look if it's from a legal thing, because it could be real. And that's that's what they play on. It could be real. So don't let them scare you into making rash decisions to do what they want, because most of it is scams. Government agencies don't text you to to send them money to apply for a program that just doesn't exist. So don't let that happen to you. All right. Now, here's another new one. Now there's a. Some type of payment processor. I guess it's similar to PayPal called Zelle Zilli and you may even be signed up for it and don't even know some of the banks use this.

[00:11:18] So you might get a text apparently supposedly from your bank. A lot of the a lot of these scams are based around text also. And it says, well, if you made this charge, if you didn't make this charge, please reply. And no matter what you respond, you get a call from supposedly the bank, which is the scammer, and they say, well, we're investigating this fraud against your account and we need you to do a password reset. We'll we'll stay on the phone with you to do it. And and then once you get this verification code, read it back to us and we'll make sure that you, you know, you get a refund for any bad charges. And so there they're social engineering. You basically they're scaring you and they're staying right there to make sure you do what they want. Well, that that code, it says right on it, don't give it to anybody. Right. And so you give it to them, they put it in and now they have access to your bank account. And then they're going to probably keep you on the line and say, hey, any charges that you see come in in the next 24 to 48 hours or know don't worry about it, we'll refund you because now we've got it straightened out. Well, that's all the charges that they're going to make here and steal your money. See, so so that's the Zelle payment scam. So I'll be giving you general rules, like never, ever respond to an unsolicited text.

[00:12:51] So I'll give you a list later of that stuff. Oh, and another one, the XL thing, the banks that are using it usually have in their terms of service that if you get fraud through Zelle, they're not going to reimburse you. So it's it's up to you to to pay attention to this stuff. All right. Let's go to another one. Cloud access, job scam. So basically it's a fake job listing. And they may even do a fake chat interview with you or a text interview, something like that. Of course, they're not going to be seen on camera and they offer you the job, but you have to sign a tax form. Well, guess what? You got to put your Social Security number on that. And so you're you're giving them the information for identity theft. And they also want you to sign sometimes they call it an NDA, which sounds like a non disclosure, but it's it's really a a cloud access account like Amazon S3 or something. And they may they may not be grabbing money directly from you. If they if you don't give me your Social Security number and do the identity theft thing, they're getting access to a cloud account. That's. Connected to you because you signed up for it. And then they're using that all those computer resources to run their scam bots against other people and rob them. All right. So and they usually want your username and password now.

[00:14:22] Now, one other variation of this is it's a job and they have you sign up for a credit check where they get paid an affiliate commission, every person that signs up and there is really no job. All right. So again, you've got to be really, really careful with this stuff. All right, another switch gears, disaster type scams. And by the way, you know, I know lots and lots of scams. I don't have time to do them all here today. But I want to open your eyes to these things anyway. Disaster scams and fake charities, and one of them looks like you're eligible. Like if you were in an area that got hit with tornadoes or something, you'll get a scam. Says you're eligible for FEMA funds. You know that disaster relief agency. But you've got to do this. You got to pay this fee and it'll get reimbursed to you. Just, you know, they'll just have some kind of story. Well, that doesn't that's not real. You know, FEMA doesn't ask for fees from people that just got their houses whacked with a tornado. You get debris removal, people that want you to pay upfront and then they either do a crappy job or no job at all. They get the money and leave and then you have no idea how to contact them or get the money back. And some of them, especially these ones where you think it's a government agency, you know, they'll steal your identity because you'll fill out these important forms because you think it's real.

[00:15:48] And the government and then they got all your details. So only sign up for anything by going directly to the official website of those people. Don't respond to a link in a text or an email. Don't ever click on one because it's either going to give you a virus and steal the information off your computer, or ruin your computer or lock your computer where they extort you to get it unlocked. You know, there's just so many bad things that happen, so don't click on any links that are unsolicited. Go to the official government website and search for the deal or call them up. And they do it also with COVID tests and things like that. Oh. Another one related to bad weather is the high wind scams. This is where they show up at your house and they have a piece of shingle or something and they take it to your front door and say, hey, you know, these winds really damaged your roof and we can fix it for you or before your roof starts leaking and causing more damage. So basically they're scaring you and creating urgency to get you to make a decision quickly. And then they might really go up on the roof and cause more damage on purpose, take pictures of it and then tell you, oh, it's really it's worse than we we could tell from the ground.

[00:17:11] And they might damage your chimney and charge you a fortune to fix all this stuff. So, no, you you don't respond to somebody showing up at your door with one of your shingles. Don't do it. All right. Now, here's a bold thing they're doing. There people are that sell stuff online or, you know, just not that they're in the business, but maybe the Facebook marketplace or offer up or something. People are showing up and paying with fake money. I mean, I don't even want to say counterfeit. It's fake money. I mean, some of it says for motion picture use only it's props money and they're getting away with it. The way, you know, is slick as they are. And if you're not careful watching the bills, even if they're $20 bills, but if they're hundreds, you've got to be triple sure that they're real. All right. Now, some of the old ones are lottery scams. Where? Guess what? If somebody calls you, says you won a lottery that you didn't enter. It's it's fake. I mean, this is this is one of the biggest, I think, in Jamaica. This is one of their biggest sources of income, the Jamaican lottery scam. They want you to send the tax money in advance. And there was no lottery. You didn't win, and you just lost all the money. And and guess what? These people are intimidating, too. If they know that you're gullible and can be intimidated, they'll use Google Earth and look at your house and say, Oh, you're the house with the red door.

[00:18:45] If you don't pay up, there's somebody going to be beating on your door very shortly and scares people. You know, they target older people a lot of times. But but but anybody that gets scammed, guess what happens to you? If you get scammed? You get put on what's called a suckers list and that is sold to the highest bidder, to other people that are going to scam you because you're obviously gullible and susceptible to it. And and I say that and trying not to be in a mean way. But I got to tell you people, I mean, I watching this documentary I'll put a about scammers and the lady that got scammed for $40,000 which she borrowed all of it on a romance scam. She was talking to the picture. She was zooming with a guy that they used his picture, a military guy to scam her, to make her think that he loved her and was going to marry her. And she says, you know what? I don't hold anything against you. Of course not. That's the guy. They stole his picture. But she said, you know, I don't really hold anything against the guy that did this. He's 29 years old. And he was he had the sweetest writing style. I mean, she's saying how great he is and he stole $40,000 and could care less about her, you know? Couldn't care less about her.

[00:20:07] So those kind of people, once they get identified, they just keep over and over and over getting scammed. So I don't want that to happen to you. There's one going around now, the free roof scam and there are average. See, the thing is, they're advertising these scams on main social media. You'll see it all over the place. You'll even see it on television and free roof. You know, we want to advertise our new roof. And so we want to see if you qualify for a free roof. Well, first of all, all it is is is a disguised lead generation program of people who are interested in new roofs, and then they come out with a substandard roof that's way overpriced and try to pressure you into buying it. So that's all it is. Nobody gets the free ones. Maybe one person got a free one so that they can claim that they have been given out free ones. And that was it. You know, the rest of the people get overcharged with substandard stuff. Same thing with solar. And that's another one of those ones based on real programs. You know, there's real rebate programs and so forth from the government and state governments and feds, feds. But the other thing is, is that you see an advertisement for free solar stuff, you know, make your house solar. No problem. Well, guess what? It's a lease. So you're paying a monthly payment.

[00:21:33] You know, they come in and install the whole shebang. It's beautiful. You know, it probably saves you some electricity, maybe. But the thing is, is you're leasing that equipment and. If you go to sell your house, the next person you know, you're really hurting yourself because the next person is not going to want to take over your monthly payments in addition to their mortgage payments for your lease stuff. And then the ownership of it is questionable and could create a lot of legal trouble for you. So there's way more about that that you need to know about because they'll, they'll say, oh, yeah, you can make so much electricity, you'll sell it back to the electric company and no, you money. Yeah, yeah, it sounds great. And again, that is possible. But is it going to happen to you? Well, I don't know. So anyway, be careful of that. Yeah, there's other real programs on child tax credits and government rebates and broadband rebates and even computer money rebates for certain groups of people. But all of these scammers are going to charge you to to tell you about that stuff. And then they're probably just going to take your money and leave. And you can you know, you could have signed up for your own for any of those and researched them online. So now let me tell you about how bad this can be a death sentence. All right. And if you don't if you think I'm kidding, wait, are you here? And you can read about this lady.

[00:23:02] Her name is Maria Exposito. Exposito. And she got scammed. She's a pretty sure she's Australian. And she got scammed in a romance scam. And once they tapped out all the money that they could squeeze out of her, they still kept it going. And they they got her to meet them. And I think Malaysia or somewhere. And one of the supposed Army buddies of the guy who had to go on deployment. So she's in Malaysia and they say, oh, you got it. Yeah, he told me to send you back. Here's a plane ticket or whatever. And they gave her, here, take this bag back with you. Because when he comes to see you, he won't have to carry it. And it was laced with a. Drugs. And she volunteered to have the bag checked that she didn't need to have a check. And and they arrested her and sentenced her to death for being a drug mule. It took years. She was in in jail, 18 months. She's a little grandmother. She's in jail 18 months with the death on death row for 18 months. And finally, enough pressure came probably from around the world that Malaysia didn't want to look bad. They released her after 18 months of being on death row. All right. So these scammers will do anything and say anything, and they will they could care less about you. They're all sociopaths, and it's terrible.

[00:24:40] Let's see. Oh, the name of the documentary I was watching about scammers in West Africa, Ghana, I think. And these scammers are proud of what they're doing and they tell you and they were showing the ABC representative, here's how I do it. Here's what I say. And you owe it to us because you white people stole our people and made slaves out of them. So we're just getting it's payback time. They're all proud of it. So the name of the documentary I was watching, I think it's about half hour long is Meet the Scammers Breaking Hearts and stealing billions online. Meet the scammers breaking hearts and stealing billions online. There's another there's more stuff, I got to tell you. I told you about the suckers list. But there's another site called HaveIBeenPwned.com? Now, I got to explain this to you because you probably don't know how to spell that. It's pronounced pwned. And it's from the gaming world. When someone beats somebody online. The the account of how it got spelled that way is that it was supposedly a misspelling when somebody really trounced somebody online and they say, I just owned you and they put a P instead of an O. And so now it caught on and it's pwned. So if you've been pwned, that means somebody is owned, you beat you really bad, something like that.

[00:26:17] So this guy started this. I think he's an ex tech executive or something. He started this site, haveIbeenpwned.com. And what he did is he made a site of all the data breaches from these big companies. You know, he's really in tune with all this and lists them all there. So if you. Have anything to do with any of these companies. Then it's likely your information has been postponed and put out on the Internet somewhere and it gives you a chance to check it out. So it is a legit site. So you can check that out to see where your information has been. Now, you really should put a different. Password on every site you have. Because if you've been pwned and you use the same password. It's so easy for these people to go in and compromise every site they can find with you and they're going to concentrate on banking sites. So specially your banking stuff should have unique passwords, hard to crack passwords, and I know this can be a hassle for you, so you need to get something like robo form or one password. These password managers that encrypt everything and save your passwords for you so they can't get hacked into. You have to remember one password and don't mess that up. All right. But but it keeps I've probably got 500 different passwords and user IDs and stuff in mind. So give it a shot. If you want to try to hack me.

[00:27:48] It would be a pretty tough. All right. Now, here are some other things. This two factor authentication you might have heard of, which is where you log into something, but they have to text you or call you or something to prove that it's you. All right. It's supposed to be higher security. Well, it is to a certain extent. But the problem is, is with social engineering and technology, these scammers are smart. So they might have, you know, send you a thing that says, hey, if you didn't make this charge, click here and then you click there. And they even have a bot that contacts you and says that we just sent you a code and then you type in that code, which again, you're not supposed to type in the code and it goes back to them and then they can log in because they got your your secondary authentication details of all this. You can find if any one of these that grabs you, you can go online and read all the details of how these things work. But and some of them have a fake website they tell you to go log into, but it looks like the real site. And of course, you're putting in your all your information right in the site that they own. Right. So and you think you're logging into a real site, but it's their fake scammer site. Now there's a new thing out called a security thumb drive.

[00:29:11] Now, I've had the iron keys in the past which which were thumb drives that are super hard to hack. They were bought out by another company, but now there's one that instead of you typing a code in or getting a text, you have to physically have this thumb drive and you push a button on it and it logs you. It ends up logging you in as a secondary like authentication. But the thing is, is if you use that, only use that, don't do a secondary where they want you to phone, call or text because that's the ones that are easier to to hack. So this was just a smattering of the the ones that I know about and the ones that I've taught and the ones that we try to feature on our show. You've got to be careful out there. Just slow down any time you see anything weird. And also just another one I've taught for years is don't if you get a spam email, don't click on unsubscribe. All that does is tell the scammer or the spammer. Scammer spammer, both of them about the same. That you're a real address and then they just sell that address to. For higher prices, the other spammers. And you say, well, Tom Ho, what am I going to do with all this spam? Well, yeah, it bothers you. There's there's things like. I think it's called Spam Assassin, maybe, but every email that comes in a real person has to identify it the first time.

[00:30:45] And then that knocks out 95% of your spam like overnight. I can't remember if that's spam assassin. I know Spam Assassin checks in our Kickstarter card. It checks to see if your email is a scam. I mean, your email looks like spam before you send it out so you can adjust some of the words. But I can't remember if that's also the one that that stops any incoming spam and then they have to verify. What it does is an email comes in and then the spam thing catches it and sends them back an email and says, Hey, if you're a real person, click here. And that means the regular spammer that's just sending out millions of emails will never do that and only good ones will come through. And there you go. It knocks out 95% of your spam, like instantly overnight. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. That's just one of the phases of the things you learn when you hang around me and my mentor program at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. And we have lots of people making lots of money because of the program, and we hope to see you in it one of these days. So check it out. Get in touch with me and don't get scammed, please. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.