 and think tech community matters until the arrest of Cylanda and Roseanne Freight as the executive of the BBB, Better Business Bureau of Hawaii. Thank you very much for joining us, you guys. Thanks for having us, Jay. Thank you, Jay. Let's talk about creative scams, because as the world passes by in the time of COVID, people take secondary jobs. There was a piece in the Times this morning about all these kids and all these college campuses. They used to be able to get part-time jobs. Now they make their own very creative stuff. Now I'm not saying they're doing scams, I'm just saying they're creative in the time of COVID. And scammers or would-be scammers are creative too. So Attila, you follow this stuff and you talk to Roseanne, what is the nature of the connection between Cylanda and BBB? What is it? Can you tell me about that? Well, the Better Business Bureau is a great organization, and not just here, but all across the country. And they do a lot to educate the public. And so Roseanne and her team do a great job in being the source for a lot of these kinds of scams for learning the public. So some of the stuff we do, we follow them, we follow other BBB chapters, and we try to kind of pick and choose something that maybe is actionable content, and then we'll do small videos that are entertaining so that someone can actually do something about protecting themselves. We try not to focus too much on the big overarching, scary type of stories, because those are out there like election rigging and giant data breaches for really big companies. I agree, those are important too. But in terms of what the community can do on a day-to-day basis, those are the kind of things we try to do. So Roseanne is kind of one of many resources. And I think she's a great value to the community and the kind of information that she and her team puts out should really be followed. Yeah, Roseanne, how much of that do you agree with? I agree a lot with what Attila said. And he's right, we have similar roles. Ours is most definitely on the education side and his is on helping consumers get through and navigate through that system because the technology is there and most of us don't always understand it and unfortunately scammers do. So they use that to target us and without the help of legitimate businesses out there, more of us would be taken advantage of. Let me ask you a question that seems appropriate in the time of not only COVID but the election. I get hundreds of emails from political organizations with email return addresses that I do not recognize at all at all and they do not even pretend to be legitimate. But I don't know one way or the other and they want money from me. And buried in there probably are some legitimate ones. Who knows, maybe they're all legitimate, maybe none of them are legitimate, but I suspect that there's people out there that are trying to confuse me, trying to make me feel that none of them are legitimate, therefore I shouldn't give money to anyone. How right do you think I am Attila? Well, one thing that's always been a good practice when it comes to where you put your money is to know where it goes. Yes, lots of folks are gonna reach out to you. That could be because you're on a list because maybe you gave it some point in the past. That's great. And sometimes if you unsubscribe from those lists, you'll even get more spam email like that. So, look for the kind of causes that you really wanna support. I mean, I support the Children's Fund. So, I sponsor a child in Egypt. I think that's a valid thing. And so that kind of saved the children kind of interaction is what I trust because I know that the money's going there directly, but if you wanna support a particular political campaign then go there directly. And this is good advice for any type of interaction that's gonna ask for any sort of communication, not just political parties that are asking you for money. We're talking about your credit cards, your banks, right? If you get an email from your bank asking to reset your pin, don't just click on it and enter in your information. Make sure you contact your bank or your credit card directly for those kinds of things. So, I guess the general with them is to answer your question, try not to trust anything that comes in through your email, reach out to the organization directly and communicate with them about money. Good advice. Rosanne, have you gotten complaints about this sort of thing where people were phony people come and ask for money in the name of some larger, you know, altruistic organization? We see it all the time. So we get a lot of notifications of, especially during disasters, people wanna help. That's just our natural instinct. And so they see all of these different organizations wanting donations. And so they go ahead and click. But what we recommend is very much what Attila said, you've gotta do your homework. If it comes down to a charity, you can go to give.org, which is a part of the Better Business Bureau. And it will tell you about the charities and if they're legitimate. When it comes to political organizations, that one you're gonna have to do a little more homework because there really isn't an organization that's gonna tell you which one's legitimate or not. However, it really does going back to finding out the resource and maybe making a phone call and not clicking on links that come into your email. We're gonna see it because they want you to click on the link because one, they might download malware onto your system. They also wanna get information from you because they want your money. At the end of the day, they want money. And they don't care how they get it. They're ruthless. And they will take advantage of confusion. And that's what drives all scams that we know about is all emotion-based. And whether it's happiness or sadness or fear. And right now we got a lot of fear going on. And then now we're adding an election into all of that. So people are really going to need to do their homework. And if you suspect something's not right, you probably go with that instinct and then do your homework. You know what, we had a little thing in the newspaper a couple of days ago about Steve Bannon and how he was raising money for the wall. Now, we know Steve Bannon. We know that he's associated, he was associated with Trump. Trump wanted the wall. If you're a Republican or an anti-immigrant person, you like the wall. So a lot of people gave money to him. And then ultimately it was determined that he was just taking the money for to line his own pockets. And now he's going to go to jail. So the question I put to you is, how do you think that got revealed? How do you think he got turned in? Was it the government obviously was investigating? It went to a prosecutor somewhere. I think it was the Southern District of New York. But the question is, how did it get to the prosecutor? And I'm asking really, if Steve Bannon contacts me and he wants money for the wall, or some such like that, what do I do if I suspect it's not only a scam, but it's huge fraud for millions. What do I do? I think that's the top. Do you want to take it to Tilla? No, no, I'll let you say, but before you get deep into Steve Bannon, I just like to point out that for every one Steve Bannon, there's probably a hundred others. So he's just got caught. Let's just be honest. He's just got caught. Tilla's right. And there are so many out there. So the key as a consumer, if you feel you've been duped, you need to report that. And there are various organizations you can report it to. You can report that to us at bbb.org scam tracker if it's business related. But you can also report that to the FTC. So there's a lot of government agencies that you can reach out to and say, hey, I think I have been ripped off. And that is how these people get caught. And if it weren't for the consumer, telling us what's going on out there, none of us would know. So that's why it's so important for people to report that information. What about you? In other words, if I see a Steve Bannon thing going on and I get suspicious, should I call you Roseanne? I wouldn't call me directly, but I would reach out to the bbb.org or go to give.org. But because that was a political question, we don't deal in the politics. So we don't get involved in those type of issues. I still would then reach out to the FTC. Okay. So my question, go ahead, Tilla. So this is a good topic. So thanks for bringing it up, Jay. You know, from an individual consumer side, just think about how much money they're asking you for. Maybe it's $35, $45. The kind of case that we have to deal with with the FBI involves hundreds of thousands of dollars where they'll accidentally fish a company and someone will click on a link, they'll put in some data and then that leads to $150,000 transferred. Now, when that occurs, you have a very narrow window of time to actually get that money back. So on a small individual level, maybe $50, you'll be out. But at a business, $150,000 or $250,000 transfer can sink it, especially in today's economy. So you do want to reach out to the FBI if it is something a little bit more substantial. You have to file an internet claims using Apple's IC3 database. So file that first, reach out to the FBI and then you do have a window of time that can be up to 72 hours to get that money back. Just depends. These guys like to do it on a Friday, so that kind of gives them the weekend to allow that money to get through. And there have been a lot of cases where they've been able to stop that money within a 24-hour window if it's reporting in a timely manner. So it is critical to report that if you are a business. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is Bitcoin. I think I saw an article about how there was a task force already in Hawaii state government, which was going to look into whether Bitcoin should be legitimized here. Maybe it's federal, I'm not sure. But the question is, is Bitcoin legit or is Bitcoin something I should worry about until? Well, anything that's untraceable should make you a little bit nervous, don't you think? Yeah, I think that, I think that. But a lot of people think they can make oodles of money with playing with Bitcoin. Well, that's always going to be the case. I mean, you know, thousands of years ago, they used to do horse trading, right? So they make money that way. That human drive, I don't think has gone away. The one thing that is good about Bitcoin is it still does have a unique identifier. So the FBI sometimes can. So even if that money's gone from your business, sometimes that email string can be submitted to the FBI and online security, they can work together with them to sometimes find those threat actors and at least shut them down. Now, obviously this isn't a one night deal, right? It doesn't take weeks or months even to shut these guys down. It could take years, but that cumulative evidence is what they need. So be sure to hang on to that information and we can submit that to law enforcement and hopefully at least stop some of these threat actors from doing their bad deeds. Yeah, Rosanne, have you received any complaints about Bitcoin? Yeah, we did. So in 2018, it didn't even make our top 10 scambles. In 2019, it was number two. So most definitely in that one year, we've seen a big increase and it's big dollars. There's no doubt in a lot of times, people are transferring money. The thing is a lot of people like I can make great money. The return on my investment is high, but what everybody needs to remember, if you get a high rate of return, you also have high risk and that risk and your return go hand in hand. So there's no guarantee with it. If you're not comfortable with it, it's still relatively new. It's not federally funded. And once the money's gone, you probably won't get that money back. Yeah, isn't it like when the ransomware scam goes down, they want to be paid in Bitcoin? Can you trace that? Because if you could trace that, I'd sure like to see those guys go to jail for life. I think it would be great. And Tilla mentioned that sometimes they can trace, but it can be so long and there's so many going on. They do go after the bad actors, but there's so many of them. It's hard to catch them all. Yeah. You have experience on this, the ransomware, Tilla? Yeah, unfortunately, yes. And it has been going up. But I think when we last talked, we were talking about this is the golden age for hackers and cyber. It's gone up. The latest study was something like 300% just in the past two months. So the amount of trash that you're getting in your inbox, 300%, the amount that everyone's getting the attacks, the brute force attacks, the vulnerability scans and the infiltrations are going up. And they're not going after the individuals, they're going after the bigger companies, but they get millions of dollars in Bitcoin from a ransomware. Luckily, they've been kind of backing off of the healthcare because they understand the stress in the healthcare systems, but it hasn't stopped them. Ransomware attacks have gone on healthcare, they've gone on state, federal, local. It just does not stop. Yeah, I mean, there was one city somewhere in the South got a ransomware claim. I mean, a ransomware scam and they paid them off for millions just to go on with business. It's pretty scary. And you know, there's any city or state jurisdiction in the country is under pressure right now. So that's terribly unfair. I wanted to ask you about Cambridge Analytica, you know, back when Facebook gave Cambridge Analytica a lot of personal data and Cambridge Analytica, you know, was completely irresponsible in distributing that. And I think a lot of people were compromised. And that's not necessarily big business. That's little guys like you and me. And so the question is, is that still happening? Am I still subject to being compromised? Oh, little guy now, not a business. Am I still subject to being compromised and all my personal data, my passwords, bank accounts, social security numbers, is that still happening? Because Cambridge Analytica is out of business, yeah. Tell that. Well, I mean, it's practically every week there's some giant data breach. And it's not necessarily Cambridge, it's all these other data aggregators that combine profile information. It was just a breach, I think, Saturday it was announced on TikTok. So you're gonna see a lot more of these breaches popping up. That's fine. So really what it comes down to is you don't have control over that. So every week, we see it in the news. We got a new breach. All this data is out there. If you don't have a good structure approach to protecting yourself, you're not gonna be able to do anything about it. And so this is why we have like a four tier approach to getting this stuff together, right? To protecting yourself. Number one is to have good password management. Most people don't use password managers. Actually, look at my last video, we did some kooky stuff with time travel because we're trying to encourage people to make. I was very kooky and I made it very interesting. We're trying to get attention somehow to encourage people to use password managers. We're not telling you to go buy one. There's free ones out there. Last pass has a free tier. Go on, use it. Generate unique random passwords for every single website that you use. You may not think that that's important, but it is because if one of those sites gets breached, the password can be reused and then everyone gets hacked, right? No one feels safe using anything online if you have the same password over and over again. That brings us to number two, which is our layer approach. You've got to have multiple layers. So not just password, you've got to have good antivirus. You've got to have some good security awareness training. Can't be running Windows 7, which is End of Life as of January of this year. There's a lot of businesses out there that just have old equipment that is known vulnerable. And to replace it is just a few hundred dollars, but they don't want to do it because everyone's afraid. But if they get in there, it's a problem. So number three on our list is bad cyber hygiene, right? They have just bad habits. Clicking on those emails that you have in your inbox, right? Clicking on phishing stuff. And these are the kind of things going to the big one, I'm sure Rosanne will back me up on this, is those online shopping sites, right? Typically in my opinion, if it's not on Amazon, it's not worth buying, right? So there's a lot of sites out there. There's non-delivery. That's the number two major scam that's out there according to IC3, which is the FBI's database. So we want to make sure that you go to good websites, you have good data out there, and don't just be throwing your credit card in for a round. Anyways, number four on our list is no consistent employee security awareness training. So maybe there's a training platform that was put into place a year ago, and no one's looked at it since then. You got to have ongoing training, otherwise it just doesn't work. It's like going to the gym, right? We'd all love to do it right now, but if you only do it once every so offering, if you haven't gone in six months, you start to put on those COVID-19 pounds, right? Oh, that. Rosanne, I want to unpack one thing that Tilly said with you, and that is we see in the newspaper that some company or other, in this case, TikTok last weekend, has been breached. Why do they do that? My recollection is that they have to do that. They have to reveal that. I get a federal statute maybe that says if they don't reveal it within X days or hours, they're in violation of law, they're going to get punished for that. So how does that affect things when these large breaches of data happen with big companies? Well, it impacts everybody. And we can look at what happened with the unemployment fraud up in Washington, because that's where it started. And they felt that data actually had come from some of those data breaches in the past. So what was happening is they had people's names, they had people's social security numbers. They filed these unemployment fraud claims in their name. And I mean, those were big bucks. And then they ended up funneling that money through money meals, which were other victims of other scams. So it became this really in-depth international crime ring, but it all started with the information that they got from data breaches or information that sometimes people willingly give up online. And that's the other thing. We have to be careful with what information we're willing to share about ourselves, and especially on the social media platforms. Sometimes we give away so much information, they can figure out the answers to our security questions. And so it, again, is protecting yourself. I think Attila hit it there with it, therefore, steps. It's really, training is probably the big one, and that's probably the biggest problem for anybody, is your IT department can set everything up in place, but if your employees are not following the proper processes, they're gonna let something in, and it's gonna impact your whole system. So it really is protecting information and understanding. Our personal information is as good as gold. It's data, and it's, people wanna buy it. Yeah, right, and it could happen to you tomorrow or in six months or a year. So the chances are pretty high that something somewhere along the line. Can you find out if you're on the dark web? Can you find out that you've been compromised, that they've been selling your data? Is that something you can find out, or is that a big secret that you could never know? Yeah, there's plenty of resources out there that probably the most popular one is Have I Been Pawned.com, P-W-N-E-D. That was put together probably about 10 years ago, and they just kinda gather all these latest breaches and they put it all together for you. So you just put in your email address and it'll tell you what breaches you've been a part of. Well, very, very interesting, yeah. Yeah. And what do you do about that? Well, start changing your passwords and start monitoring your credit. Start checking to see if anything unusual has occurred on your bank accounts. I mean, that's a good place to start. And then really work on your layered security approach. It's like going out onto the beach, right? You're not gonna go out and if you're like me without sunscreen and maybe a hat, you gotta put on a couple of things in order to protect yourself. Yeah, maybe a mask too. Yeah, and a mask. Shouldn't be on the beach, guys. So, Rosanna, 10 years ago, there was all this publicity about identity theft and the terrible things that could happen and somebody would focus on you and just rip off your identity, and become you somehow, an online version of you. And then you had to go and spend a lot of time and money. In fact, there were contractors out there that would help you recover your identity because it had been so compromised. And I'm wondering, you know, from what you guys are saying, whether that's mainstream these days anymore. It sounds to me like maybe what's happening is it's moved on and they deal with large breaches, they grab a few bucks from a lot of people, a lot of people, and then they go to the next scam rather than focus on one individual and blow them up and take his identity. Is there a dynamic there? So what you see is they're taking everybody's, as much information as many people as they can con in identities they can steal, they're going to because they have that information. Technology has made it so easy to submit and that's where all those unemployment fraud claims came from, from all the states. While it started with Washington, it happened in all of the states. This is continuing, it's going to continue. Right now, because of what's happening with COVID, you can get your, you can get a credit report free once a year usually. Right now, during this time, they're giving it to you every week at annualcreditreport.com and you'll get that until July. They're allowing you to do that because you really need to go check, you need to go through that, see if any accounts have been opening your name that you are not aware of. Look for anything suspicious on all of your accounts from your checking accounts to your credit cards and also the mail that's coming in your inbox. Are you getting things that don't look right or mail that you used to get, are you not getting it now? Did it get redirected somewhere else? So we have to be a lot more suspicious now of everything that's coming into us because identity theft has gone up. I believe for the second quarter, it was actually the number one coming out of the FTC because of all of these unemployment fraud claims. And now we're also seeing those same claims with the PPP loans. And so that's even bigger bucks. And then they are funneling the money through another victim. So it becomes very complicated to find them. So what they were finding is a lot of the Washington money was being funneled to Hawaii through victims of romance scams here. And then they were sending the money onto the criminal, but they didn't know they were part of the scam. And so they're getting very layered, very sophisticated and they're taking long time to plan it out so that people in the middle feel some sort of trust towards the scammer. And it's going to get worse, especially right now. Everything is done online. We're not shopping anywhere pretty much, but online. So we know a lot of those websites are fake. You are going to have to do your background check. Go check at bbb.org or Google the company, Google scams, a lot of time that information comes up. It's going to be up to us consumers to make sure we're shopping smartly. You know, Rosanne Attila said that, you know, you felt I would feel, I do feel safe with Amazon because I know Amazon and I know their moves, you don't have an account, blah, blah, blah. But there's a public policy issue there. If we all feel safe with Amazon and we all shop for everything we need because they do have everything we need, everything we need, then we're making Amazon bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And they're becoming a huge monopoly that makes the standard oil trust look small and trillions. And so the question is, is that good for the public? Shouldn't somebody say, wait, we need competition in this area? We do. And I think that's also let's go back to look at shopping locally. And that's another big one. And granted, lucky enough, most stores are still open right now and hopefully they stay that way. But shopping local with the companies that you know you can trust, that's really gonna help out the small business and it's gonna help out our economy here in Hawaii. And we need to be focused on that because we're gonna be part of that solution to help Hawaii come out of it. And we as people here in Hawaii need to be shopping local. So I would also say, you can't just buy from one company. You need to look at everybody. Everybody has a different need but you also have to be smart and you have to shop wisely. And I suppose Attila that you could emulate Amazon. You could come along and make like Amazon and take some of their style and we'll look and feel what have you and then make people feel they're gonna get that same, they should have that same kind of confidence. I think we're gonna see that. But one thing that we've been talking about that I wanted to ask you about, Attila, is who is they? Who is they? What's the demographic on a day? Are they from Vladivostok? Are they from Moscow? Are they associated with national, you know, state players? Because the fact is that some creative person in the time of COVID who learns the language, watches the way the web works, who knows a little about psychology and human nature and how to fish on people, they can do a hell of a job on us. But who is they? Well, you know, one thing that's interesting and Roseanne brought this up about how there's multiple chains, right? There's a large network of handoff of money mules for all kinds of scams. And so when I say organized crime, I say that with respect because they are probably more organized than most even businesses are. They really have their supply chain figured out and organized crime. If you look at any of these Netflix documentaries, they all talk about how, you know, the banana organized crime rings were around. And then it all moved to like, you know, coffee and these other kinds of things. Those have all moved on now. Now it is all online, the world is online and organized crime is online. There's no such thing as a lone sitting in a basement, you know, as a teenager doing, you know, hacking governments or that kind of, that's kind of a myth. It is a state actors, it's private, it's organized crime. It's everyone is out for themselves and they recruit the best talent. And there's some really good scenarios where that works very well. Take Israel, for example, they have a very talented cyber crime division and they're able to save lives by fighting an electronic war rather than throwing bombs and killing people. I think that's a smart way to use this kind of talent. America also does the same thing to protect itself so that we don't come into harm's way. So there are some really valid points to doing that. Well, you know, they say, there was a very interesting article the other day at the Krasnoy desk about AI. And you know, the US invented AI and it kind of got handed off to China who decided it wanted to become the world leader in AI. And my question to you, Attila, is does AI play a role in scams, in fishing? If I know AI, does that help me do better on you to scam you? Well, AI, the bigger threat with AI is not the way that, you know, you see it in the movies of some robot coming to life and killing people. It's a threat to the economy. It's automation. So now more than ever, right, folks are thinking about automation. AI is not the robot. It's the automated teller at McDonald's who takes your order at a touchscreen rather than you having to interact with a human. AI strikes me that if I have AI and I want to do scams, I want to select people out of a demographic. I get, for example, voter lists or mailing lists or dark web information on people. If I have AI, I can find a profile of a sucker a lot easier. The AI can compare all those fields and it can identify the sucker for me and give me a much better likelihood of scamming him. What you're talking about is package and leverage. So on the dark web, what's emerged over the past year, I would say, is not necessarily a talent set, but they're actually selling packages that... Yeah, packages that help the scammer. Right, exactly. And so the AI that you're talking about that's really about leveraging any available tools that they have to be able to go out and access millions of people, which before they wouldn't have been able to do. You know, the problem is this is all without sanctions. It's all completely criminal, irresponsible behavior, socially irresponsible, economically irresponsible. There is no excuse for it. It's white collar crime, I suppose, and that's charitable. It's really organized white collar crime and terrible. And the question I put to you, Rosanne, is what are we doing about prosecuting? You know, I remember in the Attorney General's office here in Hawaii, there was a unit. There was two people, as I recall, it was dedicated to finding scams and investigating them and prosecuting them. I'm not sure they've been all that active these days, but who's doing it? Are they successful? I wanna see all these guys prosecuted. I wanna, I'm gonna say this slowly, I wanna be on the jury. Well, I think the challenge with that, Jay, is most of these are happening internationally. So we're not necessarily gonna be able to try them here in the United States. The federal government and the FBI and all of this Homeland Security, they most definitely are tracking those guys. And that's where we get some of our information from for the warnings to let people know is through those entities and they do try to track them. But it's hard with so many, and then you have to get the country to cooperate. So I think we're gonna be better off in many ways to also protect ourselves. Yeah, to me, the bottom line on that issue is we need an international convention. We need global collaboration, like Interpol kind of thing, where there's an organization that looks across borders and finds these guys. You know, I've always felt that the problem with the web, and we're almost out of time until, but I still wanna ask, the problem with the web is it's anonymous. Wouldn't it be better if we said, look, you wanna get on the web, you have to identify yourself. You can't be on the web without identifying yourself. And that way we cut a lot of this out, wouldn't we? Well, you know, there is a George Orwell approach where we just monitor and surveillance everyone. Or there's a political approach where you look at these bad actors and you acknowledge that perhaps, even you and me, given similar circumstances of poverty or oppression, would perform in the same way and make these same choices. They're doing this to eradicate the Amazon rainforest. They're able to change political structures so they can save the rainforest and make ecological changes in the same way. We can do the same thing online. We don't necessarily need a giant police, electronic police state. We can make better choices to improve the quality of life for others so that there's no need for cyber crime. Oh yeah, oh yeah, but right now, right now I would have to say, even from the four corners of this discussion, that there is something we gotta do. So, but we're out of time though, and I wanna ask you one last question. And that is, what message would you leave with our audience about the new creative scamming that's going on? And you cannot repeat what you said before, Attila. You have to say something new and fresh to leave this message. I'll be asking you the same question in a minute, Rosanne. Sure, sometimes you may need professional help. And that would be in the form of what? Well, it's some of what we do, but really you should reach out to a professional sometimes when it gets too complicated. Get that professional help, it'll save you an enormous amount of time, effort, energy and money. You mean in the preparation and planning, before you get scammed or after you get scammed, or both? Oh, absolutely, sometimes you just need professional help. Okay, Rosanne, so this has to be something that neither you nor Attila have said before on the show, it's the message you wanna leave with people. So the message is education. The more we know, the better equipped we are. And sometimes, and yes, I will follow a little on what Attila said, you need to find the right professional. And again, you need to find someone who's trustworthy. So you need to know where to go look. So I always recommend go to bbb.org. Okay, there you go. And Attila, you're probably gonna say, we should take a look at www.cylanda.com, am I right? It's a great resource for the... Thank you, Attila. Thank you, Rosanne, you guys are great. Rosanne, friend of the Better Business Bureau and Attila's the rest of Cylanda. Thank you so much to two of you, Aloha. Thank you. Hey!