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Online Scam Awareness That Sticks: How to Get Marketing on Board, With Gabriel Friedlander, CEO of Wizer - Free Security Awareness Training
361 Plays1 year ago
In this episode we talk to Gabi Friedlander at Wizer about how financial institutions can create effective awareness to educate their customers on online scams, and how educating kids in school about basic concepts of online safety can help prevent scams later in life, such as romance scams, investment scams, sextortion and phishing, to name a few. At the end of the episode Gaby provides concrete advice on how you, as fraud fighters, can collaborate with your marketing teams to drive differentiated scam awareness for your customers.
You can find Gaby here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrielfriedlander/
Wizer: https://www.wizer-training.com/
This podcast is hosted by 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. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayelet-biger-levin/
ScamRanger: https://scamranger.ai/
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Transcript
Introduction and Survey Insights
00:00:00
Speaker
Last year, Aytenu Verica, now DATOS Insights, conducted a survey of 18 large financial institutions in North America about the recent activity and publicity around P2P scams and how they affected the financial institution's focus in this area.
00:00:19
Speaker
They uncovered that 94% of financial institutions are stepping up customer education and awareness campaigns in order to combat online scams. And the big question is how? How do we create effective awareness in order to really truly impact the success of online scams on our customer base?
Combating Scams with Gabby Friedlander
00:00:42
Speaker
We're going to discuss that and much more in today's episode of Scam Rangers. This episode is brought to you by Scam Ranger. Scam Ranger enables you to empower your customers to protect themselves against online scams. Go to scamranger.ai to learn more. Scam Rangers.
00:01:05
Speaker
a podcast about the human side of fraud and the people who are on a mission to protect us. I am your host, Ayaad E. Lavin, and I'm passionate about driving awareness and solving this problem. Today's scam ranger is Gabby Friedlander. He's the CEO and founder of Wiser Security Awareness Training. Hi, Gabby. Welcome to the podcast. We're so excited to have you here.
00:01:34
Speaker
Thank you. I'm really excited. Finally, we're getting to do this online, not just in person, usually to the other way around. And full disclosure, Gabi and I, and we'll share a little more about this, but we actually have partnered in education and in driving awareness for cybersecurity and other areas. So we'll talk a little bit about that later.
Founding of Wiser Security
00:01:56
Speaker
So Gabi, tell us a little bit about yourself. You're a veteran in the cybersecurity industry, you're a serial entrepreneur.
00:02:02
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about your journey before your last venture, Wiser. Sure. So like you said, I've been an entrepreneur most of my career. My background is actually coding. So I'm a product guy that built products that eventually became startups. The last one was before this one was Observe It. It was an insider threat solution.
00:02:25
Speaker
that helped a lot of banks, insurance companies. And we were the pioneers of providing a solution for insider threat. I remember the days where we had to convince people that, you know, insider threat is a real thing. So that took some education, you know, 12, 14 years of doing that. We sold it to a proof point. And yeah, I moved on to my next thing, which is wiser. We're going to probably touch that as well.
00:02:54
Speaker
And, uh, that's what I do. You do that and you do many other things too, for the community, uh, you know, as well as mentoring children, uh, and leadership programs and also driving cybersecurity awareness on a community level, which we'll talk about as well. So tell us a little bit about Wiser. Wiser is a cybersecurity awareness training company. Tell us a little bit about how you started, how you came to start Wiser.
00:03:22
Speaker
Was it kind of an experiment? I know you're kind of a very creative...
00:03:26
Speaker
guy who tries a bunch of things and then you just go with the flow. Tell us about that journey. So yeah, so I think this is exactly what happened. So after I sold observe it, I had some, I basically became a stay at home dad and I had time to sell security to my kids and to my family. And I pitched them all day about the importance of security and all of that. And I realized,
00:03:52
Speaker
that for almost 12 years, I had three insider threats at home. So I sort of overlooked that part. And what I wanted to do is sort of like you said, experiment. So I reached out to content creators online and I collaborated with them and I created some cool videos, short form videos about the importance of security. Again, I had time, so I used that time to do this.
00:04:18
Speaker
My kids loved it. I started posting it on social media. It really blew up. And the next step was, you know, once I figured out, okay, we have here something, people like it. Actually, people do care about security. It's really a matter of how it's delivered. Once I figured that out,
00:04:35
Speaker
I built a product around it, which is Wiser. Basically, it's a learning management solution that hosts the video that we produce. It includes also phishing simulation and some other features. We started with a free version because the mission was to raise awareness in general to the public. It wasn't even a business model yet. We launched Wiser,
00:05:04
Speaker
people started companies started to subscribe they started to train their employees and then we figured out okay we need to make money somehow right like otherwise it's not going to be scalable so then we offered the boost version which is that fishing simulation and uh
00:05:19
Speaker
more content around compliance and regulations and basically blew up. We have over 20,000 organizations using Wiser in total and we're able to both serve the community, serve both the business community by giving a free solution, serve the average day person. We do a lot of online safety videos for the family and also make money.
00:05:47
Speaker
I'm really happy when we are excited where we're heading.
Challenges in Scam Awareness Content
00:05:50
Speaker
That's awesome. Great. So let's talk a little bit about the effectiveness of awareness training, because one of the things when we talk about the scam lifecycle, we talk about, you know, from the moment someone gets a call or an email or sees a pop-up message and then goes down that path of emotional manipulation and then tries to transfer money. We also talk about solutions across the scam lifecycle. So if it starts with the end,
00:06:16
Speaker
Trying to recover the funds is really hard. It's possible in some cases. And then catching the transaction and saying, you know, this looks like a scam transaction, although it's a legitimate person, but they were under the influence. It's also pretty hard because you have to detect intent. And we've also learned that it's not effective to stop it then because of the emotional manipulation.
00:06:39
Speaker
And one of the things we've been advocating here on the podcast is catch it before the emotional manipulation. Right. And awareness is a great way to drive that. However, I've seen financial institutions being hesitant about driving awareness. And in the past, it was via email, maybe sending, you know, sending customers information.
00:07:03
Speaker
about the scams, but emails, lengthy emails are less effective. We know people don't read T's and C's, they don't look at these emails so much. Whereas in the UK, we saw these huge scam related campaigns on media, et cetera. I think there's been a huge change recently.
00:07:22
Speaker
in the U.S. and financial institutions, actually in a research conducted by formerly ITIG group, now DATOS, they talk about specifically P2P scams, so like Zelle and others,
00:07:38
Speaker
And they state that 94% of financial institutions in the survey that they've done are going to invest in step up their education and awareness campaigns. So that's great news. My question to you is from your experience about driving awareness and being kind of getting in front of the problem, what are the most effective ways in your mind and what makes one
00:08:03
Speaker
awareness program more effective than another one with the approach and really getting things to stick in people's minds.
Banking Safety and Marketing Opportunities
00:08:11
Speaker
So a few things. First of all, people see banks as a place that they can safely put their money. That's the basic, right? You don't put it under your mattress, right? At least most people. So the idea is that banks sell safety. We put the money with us, you know, we'll give you some kind of insurance if something happens.
00:08:35
Speaker
That's the essence. So it's in their DNA to basically make sure people are safe. And it's not just technology. You know, we are at a point today where people are getting scammed.
00:08:50
Speaker
Banks can say, look, it's not my problem. You know, you got scammed. Right. But at the end of the day, the perception is a reality. You know, like victims say, well, you should have known better that I'm sending it to a fraudulent account. How don't you have technology that does that? So the expectation is.
00:09:07
Speaker
that the banks will provide a safety net for us, especially when the transaction is happening in their marketplace, right? It's happening where basically on the platforms of the bank. So I think there is first of all a huge opportunity to go back to the basics, right? To go back to why we put money in the bank.
00:09:28
Speaker
And I think banks that go with that mission and that vision, remember the roots and basically sell safety as the reason they exist, I think they will win the trust of their customers. So this is a great
00:09:46
Speaker
a marketing vehicle, especially, you know, whenever there is an issue like in the market and there's a lot of scams, there's also opportunities, right? Like problems produce opportunities. You know, I'm looking at that as an entrepreneur as well. So if we see a lot of scams, like who's going to step up and help? The first ones that will do that are those that will benefit the customer's trust. And there are many, there are many ways to do that, right?
00:10:16
Speaker
Right now, I wouldn't say they're not doing it at all, but sometimes it's full compliance, like in the footer of the email. It's not like center and front, front and center on their homepage. They need to sell that. They need to sell
00:10:34
Speaker
to their customers come to us because we give you that blanket of safety all in all. And I think it's a missed opportunity, unfortunately. I don't understand why even compliance needs to force them to do that. This is an amazing marketing vehicle for banks.
00:10:53
Speaker
Well, I think that's really, really interesting and really that mind shift of we're not doing this because we need to. We're doing this because it's an opportunity to retain customers, to get more customers, to be that financial institution that cares. So I think that's a great point. And from your experience, what approaches to awareness in a community level? You talked about why they're also doing a lot of kind of community awareness.
00:11:20
Speaker
training, what do you think helps and what was your approach and how does it stick with your target audience?
00:11:30
Speaker
I'll give you an example from a different line of business and how I think it can be shifted towards the Financial Institute and what we're doing about it. So if you look at Nike, for example, shoes, right? They don't sell the features, right? They don't sell like, we've got the most cushioned shoe or we got the most, I don't know,
00:11:55
Speaker
whatever attributes you, they say, just do it, right? Like, they remind people why they are wearing those shoes, you know? It's not for the feature, it's for, you know, going fast. And that's why they sponsor all these athletes, and they don't really talk so much about, you know, the features of the shoes. And I think, you know, what we do, for example, and then I'll tie it back to the banks,
00:12:23
Speaker
What we've done with Wiser is that I never forget the mission of why we started it, which is to educate the masses about online safety and making it a basic life skill. So instead of saying, okay, we're a for-profit business and let's just talk about all the features and how we are
00:12:46
Speaker
competitive versus our competitors you know how we're differentiating ourselves we are providing a lot of content for families we're going to schools for example what we're doing together we are providing free content like we're pushing and we're spending actually a lot of money
00:13:05
Speaker
in creating content that we will see zero dollars from because our buyer is not the kid or the grandma or the average person it's for businesses but people buy from companies that they believe in their mission so going back to those banks you know like
00:13:26
Speaker
How do you raise awareness? I'm just tying everything together to what we started with. You know, you buy from banks because they keep you safe, right? And you have to tie it back to that. So sort of like just do it was, you know, one of the best campaigns. Banks need to come up with their own campaign. And basically,
00:13:49
Speaker
get people to use their solution because it's the safest place to transact. And again, going back to that opportunity. So many ways to do that.
Leveraging Social Media for Awareness
00:14:01
Speaker
I actually posted earlier today a video on LinkedIn about wire fraud. It's a minute video and it's really funny and it's already going viral. So this is the type of stuff that banks can do.
00:14:15
Speaker
So one thing I think we touched upon is really financial institutions taking that approach of seeing this as an opportunity and advocating for it, for driving awareness for their customers. But when we talk about the content itself, how do we create content that will stick? If our listeners are mostly fraud fighters at financial institutions and other organizations, and they come to their marketing counterparts and they tell them
00:14:41
Speaker
I think we need to drive awareness for all the reasons that you stated earlier. This is a business opportunity. It drives customer retention. We need to, we want to be the most trusted, et cetera, et cetera. What kind of approach should they take in creating the videos from a effectiveness perspective so that their campaigns will actually stop scams, will actually help customers not get scammed?
00:15:08
Speaker
Yeah, so see what's working, right? Social media is full of content, right? Every day there are new trends, whether it's, you know, songs, dances, memes, all type of like. There is no shortage of creativity online.
00:15:29
Speaker
Tie to a specific trend that is going right now. Collaborate with content creators. Make them push that message. Show to the world that you care. For example, go to schools. Donate to specific causes and show that you're doing. Make out of it a cause that you are putting your money behind it. It's not hard.
00:15:56
Speaker
Right. It's like and if you're a bank and if you're a financial institution, you probably have money to support some of the people in the community to help deliver that message. And at the end of the day, awareness versus training. Awareness doesn't require to learn a topic in depth. You know, all it requires is to remind people, you know, like when you cross the road, look left and right. You don't have to learn, you know, the history of roads.
00:16:23
Speaker
and all the type of roads and all the cross-sections, you know, there are some basic things. And like you said, at the end of the day, if people would have, you know, that's when you talk to victims, if I only thought even this could have been a scam, I would have not, you know, went through with it, you know, but I didn't have a clue. So all you need is to create that
00:16:47
Speaker
Maybe this is not true. That's all you need. That's the purpose of awareness, not to teach a topic.
Shifting Internal Training Approaches
00:16:55
Speaker
Exactly. And it's really to insert skepticism in the process. It's just that. It all comes down to that. I really like what you said about looking at trends online, because I think there's this notion that cybersecurity is so serious. It's a serious topic, and we need to be serious about delivering this. But actually, and we've seen this in campaigns and
00:17:17
Speaker
Santander and HSBC, they've created this fun, these fun campaigns with mentalists and, and tricking people on the street. And I think looking at trends online and, and also depending on the population you're talking to, if you're reaching out to older population or, or, you know, people who lost a loved one and you might be susceptible to romance scams and things like that.
00:17:43
Speaker
It's really creating content from a marketing standpoint and not the security risk standpoint, which is considered heavy and maybe outdated. It's really being a marketer for this awareness, which is I'm hearing from you.
00:18:00
Speaker
It's a great point you're making, and I think if we shift for a second for awareness internally, how companies do awareness because of compliance, and I think this is what's driving the problem. When it comes to compliance, companies require 100% participation. Everybody has to finish this. This leads to poor level of content. The shift is from
00:18:24
Speaker
let's see if people like this to what can we do to force people to watch it. So then instead of investing in content, in the quality of the content, you invest in reminders and stick and carrot and reports and all of those things to force people to do it because you have to get to that 100%. So I think this is the type of stuff that if people
00:18:51
Speaker
had to do awareness internally and The success would be progress and not 100% Let's see how we did let's see how many people want to consume our content and then try to improve and improve and improve and improve That would be amazing and make every and by the way you like every company right not just banks they have an amazing opportunity because
00:19:16
Speaker
They can not only teach employees how to keep safe online on their personal life, they can give tools to every employee to take home and to teach their kids and their family how to be safe.
00:19:28
Speaker
Like that's a benefit. That's not a chore. Yeah. Everybody should want that. So the problem is that I think it's driven a lot about, you know, from people that are security experts, not communication experts or marketing experts. And they don't, uh, they don't know how to deliver the, they know a lot about it, but they don't have to deliver the message. So the next podcast episode is going to be how to make friends with marketing and turn them into your best ally.
00:19:56
Speaker
But I think it's really important. That's the way to effectively get out there and preach security. And I love the idea of having your online safety ambassadors that go beyond your frame of the organization, but actually it's a community opportunity. And I think
Early Online Safety Education for Children
00:20:15
Speaker
if financial institutions engage in community-wide, and I know financial institutions do amazing things in driving equity and social care,
00:20:26
Speaker
One of the things that to me is kind of the most alarming in terms of online scams is the victims are getting younger and younger. We're talking about meal account victims. We're talking about extortion that is mostly young male teens and it keeps getting lower. And the age of device users is also getting lower and lower and that
00:20:54
Speaker
really scares me. And one of the things that really scares me the most is extortion is when young teenagers are reached out to by a stranger that lures them and convinces them to send nude pictures of themselves and then turn around and start extorting them and threatening them. And people are taking their lives and we're talking about
00:21:17
Speaker
hundreds of people every year. And this really terrifies me to that. And I think we really need to think about acting on a social level as financial institutions, as government institutions, and really targeting that problem. It's going to impact our society, not just extortion, all these types of threats to our children.
00:21:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's impacting more and more. And I think with the introduction of AI, you know, deep fake voice cloning, all of those things. People people need to remember that a physical person is not the same as a digital person, you know, it's two different things. And you never know who's behind that.
00:22:00
Speaker
digital person and it's a concept that is hard to sort of uh think about you know it's logical but it's hard to accept you know you just see a message from your mom from your kid like it's them right
00:22:17
Speaker
You don't think, oh, they were hacked and now somebody is using their account. You know, you just don't think like that. And there is a reason you don't think like that, you know, because you haven't been nothing like the it's not a problem, but the fact that usually nothing happens. Right.
00:22:36
Speaker
builds sort of like a false sense of security, right? Because we talk every day, so like this message is of course it's from you, right? I don't think that it's someone else, but the fact that it never happened up until now doesn't mean that it won't happen. So you have to build those guardrails for yourself. It's not hard, you know, you don't get run down, you know, you don't have to get run down by a car to look left and right, you know, you just
00:23:01
Speaker
It's something that you just built in, you know, you learn how to do it, you look left and right, and that's it. There's no need for, you know, an accident or a history of an accident to actually become aware of the problem. Right. However, in safety, in physical safety training, when we teach our kids how to cross the street, we tell them about the risks. We tell them the why, right? So you have to also start with the why. Yeah.
00:23:31
Speaker
One of the things that I mentioned earlier is that you and I started to talk to kids at schools about online safety. And one of the things that I've been advocating for a while is let's get those messages in early. We talked about extortion and romance scams. And what we set ourselves up to do is really teach some concepts early on.
00:23:57
Speaker
So we visited fifth graders. We thought it was too early, but we realized it's, it's spot on. And maybe middle school is even too late because those fifth graders, many of them have phones, all of them have some device that they connect to in their spare time.
00:24:14
Speaker
They go online, they play games, they share passwords. I wanted to talk a little bit about what you and I had talked about with the schools and why those messages are so important and also draw the lines to online scams that happen later in life. Definitely, I like that idea of a community advocate because I think these principles could really drive that level of awareness from a very, very young age, just like crossing the street.
00:24:41
Speaker
and riding a bike and those things that you need to think about. We had kind of three major topics. The first one was password safety. So do you want to share kind of the why behind that and we can talk a little bit about what we actually talked about with the kids.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah, so in essence, one of the issues with at least schools in America, I don't know about the rest of the world, but schools sort of own the user and password of the kid. That's the mindset, meaning they give the kid the username and password and they ask the kid to use it everywhere, the same user and password to use it across all applications. It's just easier to manage than if the kid forgets their password,
00:25:25
Speaker
then you just need to give it once and not for every app in school. I just want to say this is progress because it used to be one password for all the kids. So now they at least have a password per kid and also an image kind of site to user.
00:25:44
Speaker
authentication, but they don't necessarily have single sign on. So as you said, it's one password too. So basically they share the same username and password across all apps. And what happens is that we're teaching them some behavior habits that are bad, right? Because when they go home, they only remember one password.
00:26:05
Speaker
And it's easy, the password they use at school. So now they use the same password for social media, for their computer, for apps. And it's just, you know, a bad practice. And I'm even putting aside the fact that they don't know how to create a password, you know, that it's very easy to crack and there are short passwords and, you know, includes their name and dog name and stuff like that. That's sort of how the school teaches them to create a password. So, you know, we'll leave that alone.
00:26:32
Speaker
But, you know, one of the things we speak about is that websites get hacked, you know, and then their password gets leaked even if they are very, very secure. So these are the type of topics we touch. And just add to that the risks of phishing. I know we talked about it later when we talked to the kids, but when it comes to password and one is the fact that if there is a data breach, but also if someone does
00:27:02
Speaker
get fished and does share personal information, then reuse of passwords is just a greater risk. So definitely part of that as well.
00:27:12
Speaker
So the second topic we talked about is the whole concept of strangers online, which is so relevant to online scams, right? And we asked the question that actually you brought up, and I think a brilliant question is what is the risk of talking to a stranger online if you're never going to see them, never going to meet them in person? And that was a really, really interesting conversation we had with the kids. We asked the question and we just let them answer.
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah, so I think it's a very, yeah, it is an interesting question because we were, when we were kids, we were taught stranger danger because somebody, you know, in a van may kidnap us or, you know, something like that was sort of the risk.
00:27:57
Speaker
Kids today see a stranger, I would say very differently and parents don't understand that. They see a stranger because they're not gonna meet them and they don't feel the physical risk. They feel anonymity and they feel freedom. So they're actually seeing a stranger as someone they can tell that stranger anything because they can just swipe that stranger away. So they don't understand the concept of risk
00:28:27
Speaker
when talking to strangers. So we have to teach them, you know, those concepts. We talk about applications like Omegle and others where, you know, random webcams and yeah, a lot of topics that we touch. But it's very interesting when you talk to kids to see how their perspective on a stranger is when it's online versus physical. And one of the things that we talked to them about and something that you kept raising is
00:28:53
Speaker
If you are feeling lonely, if you're feeling like you have a problem, it's not the stranger you need to talk to for a few reasons. One, they're going to give you bad advice. They don't care about you. They're strangers. But two,
00:29:08
Speaker
That's where grooming starts later on for scams, right? When someone is vulnerable and they come and talk to strangers that they don't know, they don't really know who this person is on the other side. If they're really who they are claiming to be or someone else, they might be that legitimate person. But regardless, talk to your friends, talk to your family. Trust in people you know care about you and not people
00:29:33
Speaker
who are grooming you and of course we didn't use the terms grooming and we didn't talk to that extent but it was more about they might give you bad advice because they really don't know you and we also talked about the risks of oversharing with strangers and the fact that
00:29:50
Speaker
If you tell them too much about yourself, we did talk about the risk a little bit, but it's the same with online dating and with getting to romance scams eventually, and even cryptocurrency investment scams. If you share too much about yourself, that's exactly the tactic cyber criminals are using to lure their victims. So that's another concept that we wanted to get.
00:30:19
Speaker
into kids thoughts at a very young age. I remember there was, if you remember, I guess you remember as well, there was one kid that raised her hand and she said, but what if I tell my parents and they take my phone away? So I think, you know, this is a conversation that that's why we usually do after we do the session with the kids, we usually do in the evening a session with the parents because
00:30:46
Speaker
both need to learn, you know, it's not like just talk to the kids because parents need to provide this safe space for kids to come to them without feeling they'll be punished if they tell them something bad they experienced. So it has to have that, you have to set up that environment that will allow the kid to approach you and not a stranger.
00:31:10
Speaker
So another thing that we talked about with the kids was what I called the grandma test. And I was corrected to be, to be the grandparent test. Cause it can also be grandma, but essentially the goal, and this also ties to this extortion is. Think about what you're sharing online, everything that you store on your phone, even, but everything definitely that you share on Snapchat, on Instagram, on TikTok.
00:31:34
Speaker
is there for the rest of time, right? Because the internet remembers everything. So we talked about it in context of, think about you're in fifth grade now, but think about your 25 year old self applying for a job. Think about that age person looking to date someone. And that concept of think about what you're posting online,
00:32:01
Speaker
is really important for many, many reasons, but one of them is also the safety. And then we talked about sending even messages, even instant messaging, DMs. Don't share with your friends things that you don't want your grandparents to see.
00:32:16
Speaker
Right? So no nudes, no silly things, nothing that will, because, and what we said to them, we don't think your friends are malicious, but someone can grab their phone away from them. Maybe their sibling, maybe a friend of a friend that took their phone away and is, no, we've seen that in movies. We've seen that on 13 Reasons. I don't know if anyone has seen that, but
00:32:39
Speaker
Those things are really can can lower ages it could be just socially embarrassing but at later ages it could be used for extortion and I think you had a video that shared a case with an Instagram or Snapchat account that got hacked.
00:32:56
Speaker
Yeah, which is, you know, this goes back to this also ties nicely to privacy that even if we don't feel, you know, when we started to ask them to tie it back to the password, because it's sort of like it's a very similar topic, like, what do you need to protect, you know, and it was funny because
00:33:15
Speaker
They said, bank accounts and stuff like that, you know, they raise their hands and we're like, you know, like, do you have a bank account? No. Credit card? No. So, like, why are you saying all those documents, you know, because they think like their parents, you know, they're trying to say the right answer. But then when we ask them, like, what happens if, you know, would you feel comfortable to give your camera roll to your, you know, random friend in class?
00:33:38
Speaker
And they were like, no, you know, or read your messages. And so they forget what is privacy and what they're entitled to and that the fact that they need to protect it. And it ties to that Snapchat thing where understanding where the data is stored because there is a difference if it's stored on your phone or it is stored in private memories on your Snapchat because
00:34:03
Speaker
If your Snapchat gets hacked, that's it, you know, like all those images that you kept private now can get leaked. So the Internet is not only, you know, the public world. It's also the things that are private, but not on your phone.
00:34:18
Speaker
So they need to understand where things are stored in order and how to protect them in order to be to basically keep their privacy, which is very important.
Community Ambassadors for Online Safety
00:34:30
Speaker
Right. And then the third concept was if something is too good to be true, it probably is.
00:34:35
Speaker
Yeah. And that's a definitely a concept that ties to, you know, the Nigerian print scam, the inheritance scams, the crypto investment scams, everything around the gaining something scams, not the fear scams, but actually the opportunity scams and planting that seed of skepticism very early on. So what, again, the content that was created by you guys, by Weiser, we showed them, you know, maybe you want to share about the, the two game cheats and the Roblox.
00:35:06
Speaker
yeah so one of the things that you know in the gaming world that kids love to do is to you know use game cheats and stuff like that to progress in the game and unfortunately there's a lot of scams around that too many scams kids are basically lured to either download a game cheat or sign in to a fake website in order to collect
00:35:35
Speaker
for example, free vbox, which is the digital currency for Fortnite. So the idea is that once they log in to that fake account, it's basically a phishing
00:35:49
Speaker
where their account gets stolen. However, during that process, there is usually another scam that happens where they need to verify they're a human. How do you verify that you're human? It looks legit. You know, you're being asked, how old are you? Where do you live? Stuff like that. And they don't think about it. They just think it's part of the process. But basically, they're sharing private information. So not only their account was taken,
00:36:15
Speaker
they're also private information was shared and that can be used later for further scams. So, and the surprising thing is, is that those things are advertised on YouTube because what happens is
00:36:32
Speaker
that first of all YouTube can't just like you know validate all videos that are uploaded it's almost impossible so there's a lot of scams that go through but there's also a lot of advertisers that get hacked and their accounts are used to push advertisements of scams because they didn't because the advertiser didn't protect their account so they took over their advertiser's account and now they're using that to push advert scam ads
00:36:59
Speaker
What's really interesting in addition in that video is the process of verifying you're a human. Also has another dopamine inducer, which is win a prize, like a free Samsung Galaxy or Chipotle. It was so interesting to see how the kids reacted to some of these things. Like who likes free game cheats? Everybody's like, yeah, all the boys, to be honest, mostly. And then who, everyone saw the options for a gift on the way and everyone's like, Chipotle, $100 free gift card.
00:37:28
Speaker
So it was so interesting. Like every time there was a opportunity for dopamine, they jumped for it. And it was really hard. I think those are one of the hardest things to stop, be skeptical, and nothing is free ever. Like just, you know, so that that conversation to me was, was pretty hard because
00:37:51
Speaker
they got excited at all the wrong hooks and, and, and trying to create a shift there is hard. So I definitely think that starting young and creating the right habits and creating the right skepticism. I loved your analogy of crossing the street. You don't have to get hit by a car, start working properly. So we don't have to be scammed or, you know, have these social embarrassments, even not talking about a crash, like being scammed, but social embarrassments to act
00:38:20
Speaker
in a way that will safeguard us and just create those habits.
Collaboration Between Fraud Fighters and Marketing
00:38:24
Speaker
I really, really enjoyed our conversation. I love what you are doing on a social level. I love that your mission is really creating ambassadors and creating a community and creating a mindset of security. That was a place that it comes from is amazing. So if I'm a fraud fighter at a financial institution and I want to partner with marketing,
00:38:48
Speaker
What do you suggest I do tomorrow morning to make a change, to drive change in the mindset of my own financial institution? Army with some ammunition there. Yeah, so I think, you know, you need to sell it, right? Because fried fighters usually deal with frauds that I think happened, right? So now they need to deal with it. This is before it happened, right? This is something that they need to sell to their marketers.
00:39:18
Speaker
So to the marketing team. So what I would suggest is, first of all, you can contact us, right? Both of us online and we would be more than happy to help. But there are, and maybe you can share like links to videos that they can give examples because people love examples. Look at this bank. Look at what they did. Look at how they marketed it.
00:39:39
Speaker
because that will just make it easier to open the imagination of the marketers of what they can do by using these tools because
00:39:51
Speaker
you want to differentiate yourself and I think you can differentiate yourself with the mission. I think it's very blurry today, the difference between one bank and another. I don't understand what's the difference between one and another bank, they all look the same. Maybe the app, I love their app versus their app, but that's sort of it. I think here, there is an emotional connection that can be made
00:40:16
Speaker
And we could just share some videos and they need to sell it. They need to sell it and they need to also believe in it in a deeper level because it won't necessarily impact their job. It won't make
00:40:36
Speaker
detecting fraud that already happened because this is the awareness piece. So I think collaborating will give them also the fraud fighters a bigger view of the entire landscape of the fraud, the life cycle like you say.
00:40:55
Speaker
It gives them the ability to collaborate with different teams. I think it's more interesting to have that different arms in different places to eventually feel the entire life cycle. And at the end of the day, you should feel it by seeing less fraud. And people will thank you. I think people will thank you. Absolutely.
00:41:18
Speaker
Gabi, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us, for being a guest on the podcast and looking forward to chatting soon. Thank you very much for inviting me.
00:41:37
Speaker
This episode is brought to you by ScamRanger. ScamRanger enables you to empower your customers to protect themselves against online scams. Go to scamranger.ai to learn more.