905 – Be careful when communicating: Tom talks Phishing

Episode 905 - Phishing
[00:00:08] 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 905 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, is part of our Keep You Safe series, and this is about phishing emails and what to do about it, what to watch for and all that. And, uh, also, um, let's see, 904 was catfishing. That's a different kind of phishing. That's a romance kind of scams. And 903 was QR code scams. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. 903 is QR code scams, 904 is catfishing and today's 905 phishing. Hope you didn't miss grabbing a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and then check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.

[00:01:19] All right, phishing is fraudulent communications, and they usually appear to be from some reputable source. It's kind of a form of social engineering, they call it, and they deceive you or your people in your organization, your employees, your contractors. So you need to spread the word about this with, uh, you know, in in an effort to install viruses, worms, adware, ransomware, do identity theft, grab credit card and log in information you know for your bank statement. They can wipe you out with this. So it's something to really be uh, cognizant of. Example might be you might get an email that says, hey, your password for so and so is expiring.

[00:02:15] Uh, click here to renew your password. And maybe there's a little tiny misspelling or a subdomain or something that makes it look legitimate, like something you're really dealing with. And they, you jump over, you know, renew your password. Boom. Now they have your login information. So you got to be extremely careful. So at the end I'll tell you the things to watch for and what to do to keep yourself out of this mess. So there's basically four types of phishing I would say maybe five. One would be a mass phishing where they're just hitting, you know, millions of people in hopes to find the people that don't know what they're doing, grab all this information and then screw them over. But the four other types that are more targeted one is called spear phishing. This is where they're targeting a specific person. For many who knows what reasons. They may have some information already. In the catfishing episode, the the supposed girl was trying to get my phone number and my address, which would be enough to get started on going deeper and deeper to social engineer me, to give up enough personal information where they could rob me or do something really bad to me. So spearfishing is targeting a specific person. It's possible I was being whaled or whaling. That's where they fished towards a big shot. Somebody, a celebrity or a high net worth person. I'm not a celebrity, really. But I mean, I guess in some circles I am, but but mostly not a household name for sure.

[00:04:00] And so wailing is going after big shots, celebrities, high net individuals. Then another one that I reported on, you know, I was doing the tour for Scam Brigade. I was out in, I think, Phoenix talking I introduced long time ago. I told him about Smishing. That's phishing to SMS or text, basically text messages and see text messages. People open them faster and more often than they do email. So it could it could play on that urgency thing. Oh your passwords going to expire. You need to change it right now for your bank or something like that. And you know, they make it really look legit. So you. Yeah. And I'll tell you in a minute how to get out of these things. Then there's another one called Vishing. That's where the v, vishing, this is where it's over the phone with either a pre-recorded message or a script for some fraudulent person. And you don't think, um, this works? Well, ask Twitter when they got hacked because a bunch of these people pretended to be IT staff for Twitter, and they got the Twitter employees to give them up all kinds of information that allowed them to hack Twitter, say so. They're, uh, you know, when you think one of the things in the Scam Brigade quote that I uncovered, I forget who said it. They said, if you think you can't be conned, I want to meet you, all right? Because and with the stuff I know about conning people, I mean, I really could set up a situation where you would beg me to take your banking information, and you think that's crazy, right? But there's videos out there actually showing, uh, people getting scammed like this.

[00:06:04] So, yeah, when you think you're too smart to get scammed, uh, the scammers want to meet you, and then they pass your. Once they know they can scam you, they they sell your information to other scammers because you're an easy target. So. All right. So how do you get out of this. Well, first of all, never ever respond to something unsolicited that's asking for any kind of personal information your birth date, anything. And if you think it could be legitimate, you don't respond. Don't click on anything. Don't call anybody. Don't text, you know, text back to anybody. Do nothing but go through, uh, a legitimate method to contact the business or agency. If it's a pretending to be government to contact them directly, do not click or respond to the message, uh, never give your password out to anybody for any reason. Make sure you review your credit card statements. I was at Starlee Murray's house one time doing some work, and she was looking through her credit card statements and didn't recognize some of this stuff, and she called her husband and said, hey, did you order so-and-so from. He said, no. And I said, let me see that. And it was.

[00:07:27] And then I looked through her statement. There was a bunch of tiny, very tiny charges, which is a typical thing where they want to test to see if, first of all, if the credit card is good. Second, it's so small that you might not even notice it on your bill. Or if you never look at your bill and then they hit you for the big stuff. See? So so make sure you review your credit card bills every month. Don't click on anything. You know, overall, be very skeptical of anything you get that you didn't ask for. Even if you ask for it. Be careful that someone didn't intercept that communication and then send you a phishing email thinking you're expecting something. See, that's these people are diabolical. Look for misspellings and things. Look for, you know, domain names that kind of look right, but have extra stuff on the beginning or the end of them. Uh, so. So they just be skeptical of everything is what I'm trying to say. And don't react quickly when they're looking for urgency on something. If you're going to react quickly, skip clicking on anything and go directly to the company. Call the company, call the agency and look on their legitimate website. Make sure if you go to their legitimate website, make sure it's all spelled properly. And sometimes they have warnings. Hey people. The Federal Trade Commission has them all the time, you know, hey, this is going on where people are pretending to be this, that and the other and look up scam sites and and so forth.

[00:09:11] I'm just there's just so many ways they can get you. I'll probably do another episode on this, but, uh, but anyway, watch out for phishing stuff. And this is episode 905 904 was catfishing. That's romance, romance type scams and 900. And if you don't think those are big, oh my God, just. There was 57,000 episodes reported, which means probably 4 or 5 times that were not reported because people were embarrassed when they get, you know, screwed over on romance scams. Uh, and then episode 903 was QR code scams. You know, be careful. We love QR codes for your business, but not you clicking willy nilly on stuff or I'm sorry, you don't click on them. You scan them with your your phone. But there's so many ways they can get you there. So make sure you listen to this whole series. And even if catfishing doesn't apply to you, you might have friends, kids, uh, kids especially, you know, they they con you in to send in some kind of, uh, I mean, suicides happen over this. They they con some young person into sending some revealing photo and then extort them or threaten to reveal them, and some young people just kill themselves. I mean, so this is serious stuff. All right. Check out my mentor program. GreatinternetmarketingTraining.com and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.