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Fighting Scams on a Global Scale - Collaborating to Win, With Jorij Abraham, Global Anti Scam Alliance
531 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of Scam Rangers, Jorij Abram, the CEO of Scamadviser and General Manager of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), talks about his journey into fighting scams and shares some valuable insights about the scams landscape. Jorij discusses the common types of scams, including online shopping and investment scams, and stresses the importance of knowledge sharing and collaboration in the fight against scammers. He also highlights the role of GASA in creating a network of organizations and individuals to share intel and find better solutions to fight online scams.
The podcast also delves into the highlights of the Global Anti-Scam Summit, which saw over 1300 participants from 70 countries, and the press release with 10 recommendations to combat scams. https://www.gasa.org/turning-the-tide-on-scams
Jorij emphasizes the importance of international cooperation in fighting scams and exposing the criminals behind them. Tune in to learn more about the challenges of combating scams and the initiatives being taken to reduce their impact on individuals and society.
This podcast is hosted by Ayelet Biger-Levin https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayelet-biger-levin/ who spent the last 15 years building technology to help financial institutions authenticate their customers and identify fraud. She believes that when it comes to scams, the story starts well before the transaction. She has created this podcast to talk about the human side of scams, and to learn from people who have decided to dedicate their lives to speaking up on behalf of scam victims and who take action to solve this problem. Be sure to follow her on LinkedIn and reach out to learn about her additional activities in this space. Also check out https://scamranger.ai if you had received a message that you suspect is a scam
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:04
Speaker
Scam Rangers, a podcast about the human side of fraud and the people who are on a mission to protect us. I'm your host, Ayelet Bigger Levine, and I'm passionate about driving awareness and solving this problem.
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 15 of Scam Rangers. Today's Scam Ranger is working hard to drive change in the Scams landscape. I can't wait for him to share his story, mission, and action.
Guest Introduction: Yuri Abram
00:00:34
Speaker
Yuri Abram is the CEO of Scam Advisor and also the General Manager of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance.
00:00:42
Speaker
which has a very bold mission, to create a world where people worldwide are safe from financial and emotional trauma caused by online scams. For full disclosure, as this is my mission as well, I recently joined the Global Anti-Scam Alliance as an advisory board member. Sayori, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you here. I'm very glad to be here. Thank you.
00:01:08
Speaker
I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.
Yuri's Journey into Anti-Scam
00:01:11
Speaker
So before we dive into the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, I wanted to ask you to share a little bit about your background and your journey into fighting scams. What brought you to Scam Advisor and to start the Global Anti-Scam Alliance?
00:01:24
Speaker
I ended up in the scam industry or anti-scam industry, I should say, by accident. I've always been active in the e-commerce industry, working for mainly large corporates like 2E Travel, a department store chain, as responsible for online sales. My last job before what I'm now is I work for the European E-commerce Association.
00:01:47
Speaker
as director for research and advice and we saw that in several european countries we have a trust seal and that really fostered digital trade and my idea was to launch a global trust seal to allow especially for developing countries people to directly sell to western consumers.
Founding Global Anti-Scam Alliance
00:02:10
Speaker
So I launched Save.shop. And in that process, I came across ScamAdvisor, which was an initiative by a developer from the UK, which was really cool because it allowed you to real-time check what's the chance of a website being legit or a scam. So in the end, I took over ScamAdvisor, but the trust still never came to be. I mean, the Dutch love it. The Germans love it. The rest of the world either doesn't understand it or doesn't care.
00:02:39
Speaker
So in 2020, we decided to fully focus on ScamAdvisor and fighting scams worldwide and helping consumers not get scammed. And then how did you start CASA, the Global Anti Scam Alliance?
00:02:51
Speaker
ScamAdvisor is now helping about 5 million consumers every month checking if a website is legit or a scam. But ScamAdvisor is not solving the problem behind scams. It's warning consumers, it's good, but we're not fighting scammers. As soon as you take down one website, 10 new ones pop up.
00:03:10
Speaker
And that's the reason why I founded the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, to really create a network of governments, policymakers, law enforcement, consumer protection organizations, scam fighters such as yourself, and of course also the commercial sector, to really share knowledge and intel on scams, what's happening in the market.
00:03:34
Speaker
but also really share best practices and even define better solutions on how we can find online scammers. Great. So we'll definitely get to all of that very
Scam Trends and Tactics
00:03:45
Speaker
soon. But before that, I wanted to ask a little bit about what you see actually on the ScamAdvisor platform because you see a lot of trends and you and I talked in the past a little bit about some trends.
00:03:57
Speaker
What are the main trends that you see from Scam Advisor in terms of the types of scams or the patterns? What can you share with us?
00:04:06
Speaker
The most obvious scam is still online shopping. You go to an online store and you order and you either never get a product or you get a fake or you get something which even doesn't resemble the product at all. But then the scammer can say to the credit card companies, no, no, we ship the product. That scam is still the most common. But we see a very sharp increase in investment scams.
00:04:35
Speaker
So where people think they're investing or they're in crypto or forex or just in a very normal investment fund. And they say they even see their investments growing. But as soon as they really want to pull out a lot of money, then the website disappears. And then, of course, the latest trends are that investment scams and romantic dating scams are combined, also called pig puttering, which is a terrible name.
00:05:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think we're trying to use financial grooming. Financial grooming is a major name because that's what's happening. I mean, a relationship is built up. It can be romantic or it can just be friendship. And then at one time or another, the scammer says, hey, I made a great investment. Why don't you join me? And then the victim slowly gets scammed out of often all his or her money.
00:05:32
Speaker
What we now see happening at the moment, and that's, I mean, scammers, I mean, you have to give them one thing. They're unfortunately very good marketeers. So the latest trend we see is that they're no longer offering investment opportunities, but they're offering training into forex trading or crypto trading. So it looks like a very legit looking training site where for a few hundred dollars, you can do an online training,
00:05:59
Speaker
But behind it is that as soon as you go for the training, you're slowly lured into investing with websites they know or they actually own and are just scam traps. And that's the, we see an incredible number of training sites currently appearing.
00:06:19
Speaker
That's really, really interesting because you look at the website perspective. I personally received, both on Skype and Telegram, many groups that I was just asked to join, they popped up and they're talking. I didn't even join, but I see the conversation.
00:06:37
Speaker
They were typically setting up this guru, so there's a coordinator introducing themselves and saying, I'm the assistant of so-and-so, Mr. Rogers. And then Mr. Rogers suddenly, and this Mr. Roger person has all these very, it's like cult-like,
00:06:54
Speaker
very profound insights about all of everything, the world, the markets, and et cetera. And then you have people popping up and saying, oh, I made so much money in sending screenshots, which are obviously part of this scam scheme. And it's just like mushrooms after the rain is everywhere. Yeah.
00:07:16
Speaker
And I'm familiar with those kind of telegram and WhatsApp groups. You're suddenly in a group you never ask for. And people are very enthusiastic and telling how great this or that person is and how incredible money they made. But it's completely automated. And you are the only real person in that group. All the others are bots talking to each other.
00:07:42
Speaker
following a script but it's incredible convincing if it happens to you for the first time because you really feel whoa yeah you're suddenly in a in a pub and with friends and being enthusiastic so i really can imagine that people fall for it because yeah i mean everybody's saying that this is great yeah
00:08:05
Speaker
Well, thanks for sharing some of the trends. And I wanted to shift and talk about the global anti-scam alliance.
CASA's Mission and Collaboration
00:08:13
Speaker
So as stated earlier, the mission is very, very bold. And I wanted to ask you to tell us a little bit about the global anti-scam alliance. What is this organization? How is it structured? And what actions are you taking to execute the mission?
00:08:29
Speaker
Gaza is really what you could call a network organization. We bring together all the stakeholders because that's necessary. Fighting scams is not only the responsibility of one organization.
00:08:44
Speaker
the entire internet is used by scammers and that starts with social media, hosting companies, registrars, registries, banks. Everybody is basically misused at one moment in the process. So we bring together all the stakeholders and we do three things. One is research. So we do a lot of research on how scammers operate but our biggest piece is our annual global state of scam report where we look at more than 48 countries
00:09:13
Speaker
And we try to determine how much money is being lost, how many people are being scammed and what are the best practices in that country to protect consumers better. And then the second thing are we have six working groups, law enforcement, consumer protection or awareness building, I should say.
00:09:31
Speaker
research, fraud investigators, where we on a monthly basis via a virtual meeting share insights. Usually we have one or two speakers sharing a best practice and then we have a discussion. And that works really well because we can learn so much from each other on how we can better fight scammers or what we often, we had, for example,
00:09:56
Speaker
Jade Richmond from Scanwatch presenting. She's from the Australian government. And Australia was hit first by Flubot, a kind of malware. And because she already presented Flubot a few months actually before it hit US and Europe.
00:10:15
Speaker
So we were able to take some precautions in Europe and the U.S. because what we see is that scammers often test the market in one country before they either sell the scam to other countries or they roll it out worldwide. So it's really very useful. And the third part is our Global Anti-Scam Summit where we really meet physically, again, share intelligence, share best practices, but this year we're also going to really work together on
00:10:43
Speaker
See if we can define real solutions to combat scammers better together That's really interesting and I completely agree that the way to fight scams has to be on a global scale with collaboration because as you said they start in one country and proliferate to others, but also Globally, I think there are ways from law enforcement agencies to learn from each other. I actually have a
00:11:10
Speaker
someone who was a victim who reached out to me via LinkedIn. He's from the Netherlands and he was a victim and he didn't know what to do. He went to local law enforcement, but they didn't really know what to do and told them to hold and that he needs to wait. And we know that when fighting scams, speed is essence. You don't wait six weeks. You act immediately or you're not going to get anything back.
00:11:34
Speaker
I know that the UK just yesterday announced that they launched a huge program to fight scams, both text and call based scams with 400 scam fighters. And I know that in the US, there's a lot of activity with law enforcement with Erin West and Alana Katz from New York.
00:11:54
Speaker
driving the awareness of the ability to do blockchain investigation for investments camps. But I really didn't know what to tell this guy from the Netherlands and having that type of research that really is able to say, you know, here's how you do it in this country and how to connect the dots. That's so critical for everyone in the industry to help others as well. Yeah, I agree. And as you said, I mean, speed is always of the essence and
00:12:22
Speaker
That's also interesting. I mean, in the Netherlands, very weird. Online shopping scams, we have a law enforcement team here in the Netherlands, which is very good at doing great work. But investment scams are not part of their charter, unfortunately. So if you get scammed by an investment scam, you're lost. So we see every country is doing something right and a lot of things not yet. And that's why we need to share a lot more knowledge.
00:12:52
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So tell me about, you know, we talked about the summit and I know the summit last year was early fall.
Breaking Victim Stereotypes
00:13:00
Speaker
Tell me a little bit about the summit and maybe if you have a specific moment that you remember of sharing or something that kind of influenced and impacted the audience.
00:13:13
Speaker
I think we had a lot of great speakers. We had too many. That's too little time, too many speakers. In total, we had more than 1,300 participants from 70 countries. So that was very well. There were two presentations which really we got the most positive feedback on. One was by Eileen Charlotte. Eileen was a Tinder swindler victim.
00:13:44
Speaker
I know you've seen the Netflix movie about the Tinder swindler. She was one of the victims.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, just maybe to recap, for those who haven't, this is a movie about a guy who's basically creating this chain of romance scams, and he's using a lot of money to convince the victims that he's very rich, and he's actually taking the money from his previous victim. So it's kind of this chain reaction. And actually, there was a documentary on Netflix, and I think Aileen was the one who realized that she's being scammed and managed to get some revenge back, right?
00:14:20
Speaker
Yeah, she scammed the scammer by convincing him to send her all his
00:14:27
Speaker
Chanel, Louis Vuitton closing, promising him to get money for him because she said, I don't have any more money, but he needed money. And of course she kept the money. But the reason I found her presentation very impressive is often there's a prejudice that scam victims are stupid. That's really, really not the case. We see everybody being scammed. It's just
00:14:50
Speaker
The scammer has to find you at the right moment with the right message. And that happened to Eileen Charlotte. I mean, she's very intelligent, very smart. But she got scams because the scammer knew how to press the right buttons. And it can happen to everybody. So I found her presentation very, very good. And it also highlighted that scams is really a huge problem which can hit everybody.
00:15:19
Speaker
And the second presentation I really loved was of Jim
Exposing Scammers
00:15:23
Speaker
Browning. Maybe for those who are not familiar with Jim Browning, it's a hacker, but a good one. And there are a lot of call centers in India which are scamming people with tax support scams.
00:15:37
Speaker
They promise to fix your computer or get your printer to work again and they either install malware or they charge you ridiculous fees for antivirus and other software. And what Jim does is he hacks into the CCTV of those help desk centers.
00:15:57
Speaker
and actually records using their cameras, records, well, they think they're scamming him. And the reason why it's such a good thing is that Jim, I mean, we see a lot of people on YouTube making jokes about people who are trying to scam you, but those are the future soldiers.
00:16:18
Speaker
And they're often poor and there's no excuse to scam people, but those are not the real criminals. The criminals are the kingpins behind it. And what Jim does very well, he exposes the kingpins, he exposes the owners of these call centers. And so he gave a great presentation and
00:16:37
Speaker
We were able to surprise him at the end because the Austrian police, I should say, gave him a token of appreciation for all his work because he had helped them roll up a scam network.
00:16:54
Speaker
What I learned from Jim is that, of course, hacking is illegal. But we have to use a lot of tools available for us to fight this kind of menace. And it emphasizes international cooperation. And it really emphasizes that we can find the kingpins behind scams.
00:17:16
Speaker
Wow, it's kind of being a presence of two celebrities that are really taking action and trying to make a difference. Eileen, she became a scam victim and now she's very action-oriented and very on a mission to help others and make sure it doesn't happen to others. So that's really great.
00:17:38
Speaker
So that's a great segue, actually, talking about the international collaboration. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance in yourself recently published a press release with 10 recommendations to turn the tide on scams. I will share a link in the show notes to the 10 recommendations. In a nutshell, the recommendations talk about driving awareness, unified reporting, industry knowledge sharing, and other initiatives.
00:18:06
Speaker
First, I wanted to ask you why. What drove this effort? Why did you publish it? What outcomes do you want to see? The Global Anti Scam Alliance doesn't only want to be a
00:18:18
Speaker
network where we bring people together to share information. We really have to define concrete actions together. We have to do things. And at the last summit, we invited people, both those attending virtually as well as those attending physically, to share as many ideas as possible. What can we do? How can we protect consumers better? How can we raise awareness better? How can we fight scammers better, et cetera?
00:18:45
Speaker
And we got hundreds of ideas. And in the end, we boiled those hundreds of ideas down to 10 recommendations. And those 10 recommendations, we now are presenting to governments so that they get a better feeling of what needs to be done. But at the next summit, we're also going to further define those recommendations and see what can we already do together now on the short term, the midterm, and the long term.
00:19:12
Speaker
Wow. Okay. So share maybe there are 10 recommendations. I won't go through them all, but if you can maybe describe three of them that you think that are most foundational to start with and will drive a lot of impact.
Awareness and Prevention Strategies
00:19:27
Speaker
I think on the short term what countries can improve pretty quickly are awareness. We see that awareness campaigns are fragmented. It's a campaign by a bank. It's a campaign by a telecom operator. Then a social media platform says, oh, we should do something.
00:19:47
Speaker
We need to, we want to push governments to create uniform continuous awareness around scams. And it starts in the kindergarten and it ends in the elderly home. We need to warn consumers continuously and we need to help them know the latest scam tricks and make them aware of it. So that's something which actually, I mean, you can do that in a year. You can join forces with all the stakeholders in the country
00:20:16
Speaker
and start to work together instead of spending a million dollars on a TV campaign, which is forgotten within days. So that's a short-term benefit. And then on the midterm, it's about sharing data, sharing data on a national level, because now we see that people report scams to their banks, their credit card companies, to PayPal, to consumer protection organizations, to law enforcement. It's fragmented.
00:20:43
Speaker
And that the only one who benefits from that fragmented reporting are the criminals because they remain invisible because we're not sharing data. So the second thing we're pushing for is that there is one place where you can report scams and preferably all crime. So the consumer knows where to go.
00:21:04
Speaker
And the data is centralized within a country, which makes scams much faster, visible, and also on a national level, action can be taken much more quicker. Going back to the awareness, I just shared yesterday on LinkedIn something that I saw, which is a campaign in New Zealand. It's for online safety, but that's also scammers, you know, not financially motivated, but child predators that are
00:21:32
Speaker
looking to impersonate youngsters and befriend others. And the campaign is very, I think, very creative and very attention-grabbing and almost shocking to parents. And the fact that it was done in New Zealand and someone from New Zealand published it and then I shared it and then people from my network saw it. I got so many responses because it really resonates. And the ability to share between countries
00:22:02
Speaker
The creativity at the end of the day, what we need to do in awareness is attention grabbing, right? So, making something that or creating something that will make an impact, that will shake them out of their routine and get people to think. And as you said, awareness is very important. I described the scam lifecycle many times on the podcast already.
00:22:24
Speaker
really going down the scam life cycle. So you start with awareness and then you talk about data sharing reporting. What are some other initiatives within the recommendations that maybe align on that? Maybe the most ambitious one and also the one who's going to take a long time, but we really need it.
Challenges in Prosecution
00:22:45
Speaker
We really push countries to set up a, I mean, most countries now have a national cybersecurity center.
00:22:51
Speaker
and that national cybersecurity center is focusing on protecting the national infrastructure and the big companies from cyber crime, which is good. But there's very little attention for consumers and there is definitely a need for every country should also within that national cybersecurity center have teams to protect consumers. And in the end, what my dream is, is that every country has its own
00:23:18
Speaker
national cybersecurity center to protect consumers. And all these different cybersecurity centers work together to, because I mean, if a scammer from a country A scams people in country B, you can be pretty sure that he's also using the same trick to scam people in 10 other countries. So as soon as those scam centers are starting to share information and start to block scammers, start to take down servers,
00:23:47
Speaker
then it becomes we really, we really, really can beat or win this war. But that's going to take a lot of legislation changes, because yeah, I mean, very honestly, I'm from the Netherlands, we're part of the EU. But my the GDPR legislation to protect privacy, sometimes I think it's the worst export product we ever created. Yeah.
00:24:12
Speaker
It's definitely with good intent, but yeah, it does impede information sharing in many levels. So I'm wondering as you're talking what your thoughts are, so we didn't talk about this, but when it comes to scams, I think there's a notion out there in the fraud fighting community that maybe we can try, we need to prevent, we need to put into technology to
00:24:40
Speaker
you know, prevent and detect scams while they happen. But once they happen, it's almost game over. There are ways to seize and maybe recover some of the funds. But when it comes to catching the scammers and actually finding the criminals, that's almost except for, you know, one offs like Jim Browning, trying to catch them and some current law enforcement successes. But because they're in a different country, typically,
00:25:11
Speaker
That's very, very hard. I'm wondering if there's an initiative with regards to that as well.
00:25:16
Speaker
No, I mean, considering the current political climate, it's going to be a very tough one because, I mean, a nice example is Singapore. They estimated about 90 to 95% of all scams are done by people not living in Singapore. Singapore is a very small country. They know exactly where the scammers are. I mean, but those countries
00:25:41
Speaker
either don't have the resources or they don't have the priority, or very bluntly, local law enforcement has been bribed to not do anything.
00:25:51
Speaker
That will be the case for a very, very long term, but we can still fight those kind of criminals. We can block them. We can take away their payment infrastructure, because in the end, the money has to go from Singapore to that country. And we are technically able to block that, but it does need a lot of work. When you say we are able to block that, I'm thinking
00:26:16
Speaker
crypto, which is a means to bypass kind of the mule type activity, which does require that international transfer mechanism. But again, the collaboration with the crypto providers and the ability to work with them, which is what law enforcement is doing today. In some cases, I think that becomes even more critical in that sense.
Collaborative Efforts and Optimism
00:26:39
Speaker
I mean, you're absolutely right, crypto.
00:26:42
Speaker
We do see some changes there. The crypto exchanges especially are getting more pressure to clean up their act. And they are. Actually, a lot of banks and crypto exchanges are contacting ScamAdvisor to say, hey, how can we use your data on scammy websites so that we can make sure that there are no transactions done via websites which are already known to be scams.
00:27:10
Speaker
So we're getting there, but we will be slightly older before the problem is fixed. So many listeners of the podcast are fraud fighters at financial institutions or merchants or
00:27:27
Speaker
you know, other parts of the industry. And I wanted to ask you, how can they kind of join this initiative? What can they do to take part? I know that many of them are part of the Noble or have joined the Noble in its mission. And we had Ian Mitchell talk about the Noble in a previous episode here.
00:27:47
Speaker
And it would be interesting to also see if there is any collaboration with them. But as individual fraud fighters, how do you think there's potential collaboration between the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and this community? Everybody is very welcome to join the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. As an individual, they're always welcome. We also provide free access to our data on scam advisor to law enforcement and governments and other nonprofit organizations. And I also want to invite
00:28:17
Speaker
commercial organizations, please share your scammy sites with us because we send it to more than 150 organizations worldwide so that they know that the website you report to us are scams. So we are very open to not only sharing information, letting people become part of the network, but really also share our data to warn in the end both companies and consumers as much as possible about scams.
00:28:47
Speaker
And with regards to the Global Anti-Scammerlands organization. Everybody is very welcome to join. It's an open network where we really, people are very welcome to join our network meetings, are able to present and of course also on the summit and get access to our research. Okay, great.
00:29:08
Speaker
There are a lot of issues here with regards to scams and that's why you launched the 10 recommendations. And you've been working with a team of people for a while now. And I wanted to ask you, what are you most hopeful about in this ecosystem? There's a lot of negative stuff happening and you're trying to change it. What are you most hopeful about?
00:29:32
Speaker
I think we are, scammers are currently winning. According to the World Economic Forum, 0.05% of all cybercriminals are being caught. It's the Wild West out there. And as an American, I can say to you, I mean, in the end, the Wild West was tamed. And I think we will also solve this problem. It will take a long time. It will take a lot of effort.
00:29:58
Speaker
But like with the wild west in the U.S., like with viruses and malware in the 90s, it took us a while to adjust, to build more security into the network. But we will solve this problem. We just have to work together. Well, thank you very much for joining the podcast today and looking forward to the next global anti-scammerline summit.
00:30:26
Speaker
I look forward to seeing you there and everybody else who is interested, and I also look forward to your next podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Scam Detection Tools and Resources
00:30:33
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you got a message and you're not sure if it's a scam or not, you can validate it on a new website called scamranger.ai and also get advice on how to check the validity of the message. If you want to hear more about the recent evolution in online scams, follow me on LinkedIn, Ayeret Biger-Levine,
00:30:54
Speaker
or follow Scam Rangers, Scam Dash Rangers. Until the next time.