 My name is Jessica Awong and I will be your host for today. Today we are talking about fraud prevention and scam prevention. I have here with me Paul Hiligas from the district attorney's office. He is a investigator and I also have Kevin Clark here with me today, a enforcement officer with the Yellow County district attorney's office. Welcome. Thank you, thank you. So I wanted to start off with what types of crimes or fraud schemes are around the holiday seasons are most pertinent? Yes, it's a good question because right now and during this time, we go through all year trying to be aware of scams and frauds that are out in the community. And it seems during the holiday season, those tend to increase and with everybody buying things over to internet, having packages delivered, that it's very important to be aware of those scams. Yeah, and specifically, you always want to shop at a site that is secure. You can look for the green or gold lock on the website that it's secure or HTTPS when you're logging in. Also when you're purchasing things online, especially holiday gifts, you always want to be careful to not purchase from like a third party vendor or somebody that you don't know. You can go to the official websites and make sure it's sent to your house. When it's sent to your house, you could also request that a package is, when it's delivered, a signature is required or that you can pick it up from your local, the post office or UPS because there's a lot of package stuff during the holidays. Right, you see it on the news that there's a lot of packages being stolen from your front porch. So that's something that you don't want to leave out. The same thing with your mail. You don't want to leave your mail out in your mailbox because this is time of year when a lot of people will be maybe checking to see if you've left a credit card statement in the mail which gives them your information. Also, one thing I was thinking about when Kevin was mentioning shopping on the internet, it's always very good to make sure there's a difference between a debit card and a Visa card because if you use a debit card and something happens on the internet, somebody gets that information and they're able to make a fraudulent purchase. Well, then that money's coming, that's your cash coming out of your account as opposed to a credit card that you can file a claim on and you're not out that money. Yeah, and just to be specific, a Visa card meaning a prepaid Visa card that somebody make it as a gift? No, not exactly. It's like when you have a debit visa where you can punch in a pin number that when you use that card, that's your cash coming directly out of your checking account or your account as opposed to a Visa that you get a statement on, which is actually the banks or the credit card's money that you're paying that bill at the end of the month. You have a better protection using a credit card on the internet than you do your debit card. Oh yeah, and specifically, it could be a card other than a Visa. I mean, it could be MasterCard, American Express Discover. It is, it's a standalone credit card that's not associated with your bank account. Anytime that debit feature is used, it's drawing money directly out and so somebody can see what is that checking account and routing number. However, with the credit card, it offers a standalone credit card, offers the highest level of fraud protection and it's on the credit card to disprove that. So when you file that fraud claim, they're going to be able to re-inverse that whereas with a bank account when it's your checking account money and it's cash sometimes that cannot be re-inversed. Okay, okay. So aside from, I know Kevin mentioned some tips that people can use to prevent this from happening to them. Are there any other tips that you guys can think of? On tips on credit card, there's the multiple different types of fraud. If we get into like email scams, there are specific ones that they convert specifically for holidays. Email scams about grandparents receiving an email about a needing bail for grandchildren or the IRS scams about being late on your taxes. Those, even though some of those are on the phone, they can be done by email and all the scammers do are tweak them to fit the holiday message. And being very aware, nobody's ever going to ask you, that's a legitimate, it's going to ask you your personal identifying information, your date of birth, social security number, your home address. You never want to give those out when somebody's calling you. And calls and emails do pick up during this time, whether it's a scam, such as the grandparent one, like he said, or giving to charities, which is huge during this time, whether it's people wanting to get it in before the end of the year or because it's that holiday time where they're trying to give back. One of the most important things during this time is that you don't, you're very careful of those phone calls that come in. There's so many of them coming in. We tell people to screen their phone calls, know who they're calling. If it's an unsolicited phone call, be very careful with it. Don't give out your personal identifying information. If they're asking for account information or social security and they don't know you, then you shouldn't be giving that. And we tell them to give local in places where they do know that, where they can see face to face these people they're giving. Because especially when you're sending money, abroad or to other places in the US and you don't know if it's a real charity, we see so many news reports or reports from law enforcement that certain charities end up being fake. And so it's really important that they're careful with that too. And so we're touching specifically on the holiday time, but I know that there are different types of fraud that are identified. Can you guys give us a little bit of an explanation about that? The different types of fraud. Fraud is basically a theft by a deceit mechanism, whatever it is. So anytime there's any type of theft and they're committing fraud, whether it's through the mail, our regular mail that where you have a mailbox, where they're gonna be taking that information and using it fraudulently, or email trying to trick you into giving private information, or some of the other things like we mentioned, nobody's, a public entity's never gonna demand money. Just wanted to make sure I had my list here. And they're gonna require you to ask you to wire money, either some type of money grammar, something of that sort. And that should be a very big red flag to try to get a callback number and to make sure it's legitimate. Some of the other things besides wiring money now, prepaid cards are becoming very popular, where there's ones that they call green dot or just loading cards. And what they'll say is go down to the convenience store and load $500, a thousand, $1,500. Read the numbers off the back to me on the phone and we'll take care of this payment today. For seniors and people that are unaware that that's a payment method, they might think, oh, it could take care of it really quickly. However, the problem is that that money disappears and it cannot be recovered. A lot of times they're hiding behind the internet, they're hiding behind the phone, oftentimes in another country and they'll be calling and acting as if they're from here. And many times the caller ID says 530. They can trick the phone number to say 530, spoof it is what they'll say. And so they'll say, oh, I'm getting a local call from a local person. So I know I'm sending it to them and then they're close by. Yeah, yeah. So be careful of those prepaid cards, be careful of those 530 area code numbers even as well. Okay, well thank you for that explanation. So I know that you guys have been working in this field for a while. So how do you, what's the impact that you see on people that are encountered with these scams and fraud? The impact has multiple different layers because to the immediate victim, victim of identity theft of fraud, number one, they're immediately out the money. And if somebody's depending on what type of fraud they're doing using their social security card, they're opening up accounts in somebody else's name and it's hurting the person's credit. And those can take a long time to get taken care of. And on top of that, the theft, a lot of the businesses will have to kind of eat the loss per se and that ends up all being passed down to the consumer. So that gets passed down to the economy. So it's kind of a snowball effect and for the immediate person that's affected at the Yolo County DA's office, we have a killer victim witness program that will assist a victim of identity theft and fraud through the process. Okay. Yeah, and especially when these people, if they call the victim services, they get help with these things. We have victim advocates that help them in those areas. But what's most important is that we, sometimes it's hard for us to get restitution payments for them. How do they recover those funds? If it's somebody that we can never track down where they took the money to, right? Who that suspect is, it's very difficult to track that. And so what we do is we say, be careful, be aware, be on alert and prevent victimization. And so with all that being said, what we try to say is if it's harder in money, whether you lose 500 bucks or some people lose thousands and thousands of dollars, whether you have a little bit of money in your account or a lot, any type of loss, it hurts that victim. It's difficult. And especially during the holiday times, especially when they're wanting to give to loved ones and things like that. So that's why we're there for victims of crime. We have a fraud hotline where they can report it at. And so it's very important. You want to give them the fraud hotline? The hotline number is 855-496-5632. And for that fraud hotline, that's not a, if you don't even know what specific type of fraud, it doesn't matter because just to quickly mention at our office, we deal with consumer fraud, human trafficking, auto insurance fraud, check prosecution unit, real estate fraud, welfare fraud, and workers compensation insurance fraud. So we try to do things on the prevention and then the investigative side and then the follow through with assisting victims. Okay, so anybody could just call and get information about all that types of fraud. Is there an email that you want to put out there or? Yes, the fraud email is fraud at yoloda.org. And that comes in, Paul and I take a look at those and we respond and reply. A lot of times people don't know, they just say, this is suspicious or I think I've been victimized. And what we can do is most of the times we're able to help them out directly or we can refer them to local law enforcement. If the investigation has to start there, we can refer them to our Victim Services Department. If they need help in their victim. What's most important is that we want them to feel comfortable contacting us so that we can help them out and look into it, investigate it and point them in the right direction. Yeah, so it sounds like to me that you work with not only District Attorney's Office, but also the whole community to assist those that are victimized or have questions. So is there any other resources besides the ones that you've listed that people can go to? Yes, because what we are, we can act as a conduit to other state agencies depending on fraud because even with myself, with workers comp fraud, I deal with contractors licensing board. So I can help refer people there or see if we need to handle it in-house. Okay. Correct, we also work with the California Department of Insurance. So especially during this time of the year, there might be people that are trying to sell fraudulent insurance, whether it's annuities, life insurance, things like that at the end of the year. And so those type of fraud come in, we work directly with them and get referrals and things like that. And a lot of times if it's something where it's not a crime and it's civil, we can refer to like legal services of Northern California or some of the other nonprofits that could help people in the community as well. Okay, so you can act as a referral, a resource referral. That's right. Okay, well thank you for being here today. Thank you for joining us in this episode of In the Studio. If you want more information, you can visit them at www.yellowda.org or you can follow them on all of their social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at YOLODA. Thank you.