Transcript
Speaker: If you invested an entire year or a half a year and prospectively your return could be three hundred thousand dollars, is it worth it to you? The big answer is a big yes to that. And these fraudsters, they know that. So they engage in social engineering. They engage in really doing their homework about who you are to again mirror who you are and try to gain that level of familiarity. So your guard is let down and then all of a sudden you look over your shoulder and you're like,
Speaker: Oh, I'm talking to this person for the last 30 days, and now they're saying, I love you all of a sudden. When a victim is absolutely sure that the scammer is in love with them, or that they're going to get a new job and be famous, what does it take to stop the scam?
Speaker: a podcast about the human side of fraud and the people who are on a mission to protect us. I'm your host, Ayere Figur Levine, and I'm passionate about driving awareness and solving this problem.
Speaker: Welcome to Episode 7 of Scam Rangers. Today's Scam Ranger has a very unique perspective of the scam lifecycle. He's a private investigator who helps victims of online scams. He's actually called Superman at home by his family and I learned that he only sleeps
Speaker: four hours a night. So I'm really excited about today's episode and looking forward to hearing from Chris. So Chris Salgado is a highly accomplished security and investigations leader with more than 20 years in cyber and physical investigations and general security.
Speaker: He's assisted several fortune -based companies, and between 2016 and 2019, he assisted in building and managing Facebook's Global Investigations Division and intelligence support operation. While at Facebook, he was able to assist on sensitive matters, including Cambridge Analytica,
Speaker: and the investigation on the election tempering of the 2019 US presidential election. He's an expert in social engineering and is a frequent speaker about topics that are extremely relevant to our podcast, such as romance scams, elderly fraud, child online safety, online investment fraud, cyber and physical investigations, counterfeits, cults, assessing and reducing online footprint and other topics.
Speaker: Chris was also a keynote speaker at CrimeCon 2022, where he spoke on romance scams. Chris, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Ayelet. Great. I'm really, really looking forward to our conversation today. So tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you become a private investigator and what is a day in the life for you with regards to scams? I left Facebook over to
Speaker: My own company here in Florida, All Points Investigations, and we're doing a lot of cyber investigations. We do physical investigations across the globe too, but cyber heavy because of my stint at Facebook. So we're doing really hot and heavy cyber investigations and we just start to inherit online kind of scams at large to include, as you indicated, romance scams, elderly scams, online fraud in general and investment scams.
Speaker: and started talking about the topic to, you know, at various venues. We're really enjoying what we're doing to help as many people as possible with, as possible with our skillset. So what does a day in the life look like for you? You get a phone call in. Sure. So we, we do various types of investigations for individuals and fortune based companies, like you mentioned. So the spectrum of types of investigations that we engage upon really runs the gamut.
Speaker: The only thing we really don't do is domestics, cheating spouses, stuff like that. But pretty much everything else under the sun we can do and engage upon. So we can get a call from a fortune -based company saying, hey, our C -suite team member is missing. We need to figure out where that person is. They were last seen, you know, 24, 48, 72 hours ago, whatever it is.
Speaker: Um, or we can go into kind of same origin of the customer is their C -suite member has been threatened online, maybe like through Instagram or Twitter, whatever platform it is, uh, from somebody that they know, don't know about saying, Hey, I hate you. I hate your company. I want to kill you at the end of the day. If you don't believe me, here's your home address. Right. And they blast their home address online, basically doxing them. So we'll.
Speaker: engage upon the bad actor, the author of that post, and try to identify who they are and assess the threat level. Is it a real threat, prospectively, such as a 30 -year -old adult male licensed with five different rifles or something like that, and they're in the state of the C -suite person? Or is it some 12 -year -old kid in the Netherlands that we kind of really don't put a higher level of threat on, right?
Speaker: our client, for instance, is located in New York. So we'll do that. And then we'll also circle back and do what you touched upon trying to do like an assessment of how we got there, how the victim or C -suite person got there. You know, how did this person find out your home address? How did they identify you? And we'll act as their kind of cyber stalker and put together a dossier on how exposed they are online to say,
Speaker: Your home address is here. You've got pictures of your kids. You've got pictures of your kids standing in front of their elementary school on day one of school, right? Everyone's excited about that. We see a lot of those photos. It's a big no -no. You should not be doing that. I mean, it's super great. You're thrilled. Your kids are thrilled, but don't take a photo of them in front of school. It tells everybody exactly where they go to school. So we'll do that and try to mitigate the
Speaker: online exposure level of our clients and help them out to negate hopefully is another episode from occurring. And then certainly we get the calls for romance scams like we're talking about here. My mother is elderly, she's in her 60s or 70s and I'm convinced that she's being scammed but she won't listen. Chris, can you unroll
Speaker: an unbiased third -party investigation to assemble who we're dealing with, prospectively, and then more importantly, or just as importantly, who we're not dealing with. Showcase that the person isn't who they say they are because that's really what you need in a romance scam. You need to invalidate who that person is because
Speaker: The moment that you invalidate, this is not John Smith from Idaho talking to your mom or you in Texas, the moment you invalidate that, there's a kind of rude awakening that you're giving money to somebody that is not who they say they are. So it almost doesn't matter who they are. It matters more importantly who they're not, because that relationship is built upon the information given from one person to the next, that money
Speaker: is sent out to that person based upon who they say they are, right? So if they're not who they say they are, then you have that rude awakening of like, oh my gosh, who am I giving money to? Who did I invest my emotions into and my heart into for the last, whatever, six months, 30 days, or whatever it may be. So we engage upon that pretty heavily across the globe for various people to identify who they're really involved with.
Speaker: You talked about romance scams. You talk about actually physical threat scams. When it comes to romance scams or investment scams, I know there are a lot of crypto scams now. You mentioned maybe someone reaches out to you on behalf of their mother. Who else would reach out to you to investigate such online financial scams that are trying to get money? It really could be anybody with some kind of vested interest, right? And the easy one is family, like my mother.
Speaker: I think is being duped online. My father, I think, is being duped online, my sister, whoever it may be. But there's also entities out there. For instance, we are tasked by abortion -based companies for us to engage upon an investment scam, where a group of bad actors in illicit operation will get together and say, hey, I'm Joe Blow from company ABC.
Speaker: And it's a legitimate company. It's a company that you and I and everybody else know, or a lot of people know about. And they're saying, Hey, I'm recruiting on behalf of this company. Are you interested in a job? Yeah, I'm interested in a job. You know, go ahead and fill out this application. And then, you know, they're asking you for money. Or they're saying, Hey, you're, you're interested in the modeling industry, right? Find your pictures on Instagram. We'd love to have you represent our brand in
Speaker: swimwear competition or a fashion industry competition, right? And these people typically eat that up because they're the younger, you know, in their 20s and they're looking to break into the industry, right? Oh my gosh, this large company, well -known brand reached out to me and they want to pay me, I don't know, 500
Speaker: $1 ,000 to do a gig, right? And they'll say, hey, we'll go ahead and do that. But we're going to send you a check for something like $5 ,000 or $7 ,000, something like that, that exceeds the amount and do the person, right, the victim. And they say, just keep that amount because you're going to pay the photographer for us when we set this up and so forth like that. We all know where this goes. The check ends up being fraudulent.
Speaker: and take out the money, they give back some money to the company saying, okay, here's the overage or whatever that setup looks like because it varies. And nonetheless, they're left with the loss of money and more so they're left with the negative connotation on that brand now.
Speaker: because that brand supposedly came into their life through this bad actor to say, hey, we want you, right? And the person, the victim knows that they've been defrauded, but now they think that the company defrauded them, or at least a true employee of the company, even if the employee supposedly went rogue, they're still carrying on the name of the brand. And that's a brand impact right there.
Speaker: Even if it's not really associated with a brand directly, I think the impact is the association that in their mind with a brand. And, you know, if that happens a lot, then it does create significant impact for the brand itself. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's a, it's a variance of individuals that come to us, you know, with some kind of vested interest in the situation.
Speaker: So why don't they go to law enforcement to check out things or to take care of their mother, to make sure that this is a legitimate job offer? Why do they need to hire a private investigator? So they do. They go to law enforcement a lot of times before they come to us. Not all of them do, but a lot of times before they come to us. Those that don't go to law enforcement before they come to us,
Speaker: We say, hey, we can listen to your story and assess how we can assist as much as possible. But first, you need to report this to law enforcement. And we engage with law enforcement fairly routinely. We have contacts with local law enforcement, regional, national, FBI, HSI. And we try to keep those partnerships strong to engage on whatever agency is relevant at the time.
Speaker: when it's needed, right? It's not always needed, but when it's needed. So the individuals, for the most part, they do engage the appropriate law enforcement, and sometimes they don't engage the appropriate law enforcement. So we educate them, okay, well, you filed it locally, which is fantastic, but you also might want to file it with this agency or that agency. So we help with
Speaker: kind of navigating those waters for them to report appropriately. But then they come to us because maybe law enforcement says, hey, we have no leads. Maybe law enforcement says we don't have the resources to dig into something
Speaker: very heavily on the cyber front, right? Maybe law enforcement has ingested their case and they're, as far as the victim or our client is concerned, they're engaging upon it, but they're not really sharing information, which I totally understand law enforcement traditionally can't share information because they got to keep their own investigation close to their chest. And I completely understand that. But sometimes we can act as another resource to extract information, right?
Speaker: and try to build a dossier on the whole situation kind of at large. And then who knows, maybe we can help unfurl information that law enforcement doesn't have. Now I'm not gonna be so bold as to say we can get more information than law enforcement. I'm not gonna say that, but it's the whole, you know, two pairs of eyes are better than one, right? So we try to help in that regard as much as possible. So I assume that people coming to us
Speaker: acknowledge that and try to uncover as much information on this episode as possible. And then certainly in one case that I showcased at CrimeCon last year in Vegas, there was a lady that came to us, an adult lady that came to us. Her mother was a victim of a romance scam and
Speaker: The mother had dumped out over $300 ,000 of her own money, of her own inheritance from her husband who just died earlier that year. And they were together for 40 something years. And he gave her a nice nest egg to make sure that she was comfortable for the rest of her life. And
Speaker: you know she's just given over three hundred thousand dollars away to the scammer that she was hell -bent on loving and he loves her and they're going to get married and it's it's not her fault i'm not blaming her unfortunately this this well -oiled machine of romance scams is incredibly successful and i hate saying that every time but it really is uh... and she was just another victim of it so that the daughter had hired us to
Speaker: build a case on is this person legit or not, there was a huge assumption that he wasn't and they just wanted an unbiased third party to look at the matter and then have a conversation with the mother, right? But if we follow the facts, right, it's great to have the insight from the client, but we follow the facts and sometimes that proves the client right and sometimes it proves the client wrong. So nonetheless, we follow the facts in that case and sure enough, he was being duped and we
Speaker: helped to engage that matter a little bit more personally and then with a relay over to our folks at the FBI. So it's a pretty interesting setup and we try to, like I said, just act as a second or third or whatever number resource to try to shed light on the matter as much as possible.
Speaker: So how do you find the emotional state of someone who, you know, goes through this process and then uncovers the fact that it was a scam. It's ongoing for, how do you find her emotional state, her daughter's emotional state, the surroundings of families? So it can be a variance of emotions, right? And I'm, I'm not a psychologist. Um, I do what I do, but I don't, you know, delve into an area that I'm an expert in. So,
Speaker: But through our experience, we certainly come across a variance of emotions. And what are those emotions? They can be from dismissive, from the client in this regard, you know, a family member calling us because, hey, my mom, I think is being duped. Dismissive of that whole relationship, dismissive of the mothers and that example of the mothers kind of
Speaker: love, admiration, infatuation, feelings towards that other person, versus, hey, let's talk about this, this fantastic mom, I'd love to meet the person, it's more dismissive, and whatever you say kind of doesn't matter. And that really inflames the person, the victim, because they're like, you don't care about me, you don't care about this person. So any subsequent conversations that you have with that victim are dismissed as well, kind of in turn to your dismissiveness, right?
Speaker: Once you identify that, in fact, this is not the person they claim to be the scammer, how do these emotions come to play? Yeah, I mean, it's anger, right? It's anger from the victim. It's definitely anger from our clients. It's sadness. It's great sadness. It's deceit that they feel. It's a variety of emotions. And unfortunately, none of them are positive. And we try to console as much as possible
Speaker: And we have resources if it leads to prospectively, hey, this is somebody that you can talk to. And we don't offer a certain person's resource or phone number, anything like that. We'll offer a collection of resources for people that try to assist others in romance scams and online scams psychologically. So yeah, we try to navigate that as best as possible, but still really fixate on our
Speaker: our focus, our scope, which is the investigators trying to figure out the nooks and crannies of the whole situation and deliver a comprehensive understanding of the information based on what we unfurl with our investigation. And you shared a story with me about a situation where you were able to confirm that the person is not, in fact, who they claim to be in a romance scam. And then there was confrontation with the scammer. Can you share that story with us?
Speaker: Yeah, so that was another one. We've done so many different romance scam investigations and one of them was this lady had met a guy online.
Speaker: The conversations usually start off lightheartedly on whatever social media platform you want to pick. Hey, I want to be your friend. I want to be your connection. Hope you're having a good day. Something like that. Super lighthearted. You assess. They're not a threat. You ingest them as your social circle online, right? And then they'll start talking to you. Hey, notice you like, I don't know, dogs or noticed you lost your husband or your wife recently. I'm sorry to hear.
Speaker: And it's always mirrored. It's always mirrored. You know, I lost my significant other six months ago or, yeah, my dog died recently. It's mirrored to gain a level of familiarity with you and gain a sense of trust on a surface level because it's a very new conversation, right? But it grows quickly from there. And we've all heard the stories, you know, I think you're great. I love your picture. I think you're very beautiful and so forth like that.
Speaker: They don't have a lot of time to invest before they start asking you money for money, but they do invest a decent amount of time because they know that the return can be significant and taken into consideration the case that I brought up where our client's mother had dumped over $300 ,000. If you invested an entire year or a half a year and prospectively your return could be $300 ,000, is it worth it to you?
Speaker: The big answer is a big yes to that. And these fraudsters, they know that. So they engage in social engineering. They engage in really doing their homework about who you are to again, mirror who you are and try to gain that level of familiarity. So your guard is let down and then all of a sudden you look over your shoulder and you're like, Oh, I'm talking to this person for the last 30 days. And now they're saying, I love you all of a sudden.
Speaker: So you got to be really careful with that. So back to the example, this lady had met a guy and he followed in the same footsteps, like how her conversation growing to, hey, I'm enamored with you in some regard. And yeah, she was able to convince herself that he loved her. She loved him and he was overseas. He was going to come into the States and they were going to find each other at the airport and just go off and get married.
Speaker: And so we were hired to explore that situation and confirm or deny this person. And we uncovered numerous, numerous online accounts of this person. And we stopped counting at 60, six zero different social media accounts. Yes, 60. And when we threw our hands up, we said, OK, we've we've blown this thing open. He was
Speaker: on various platforms. He never repeated his name. And he was an individual that had this like treasure trove of photographs of a real person. And that's really valuable to a bad actor.
Speaker: Because if somebody has so many pictures of themselves scattered across their lives, scattered across times of the day and locations behind them in the background, the bad actor can always put up new pictures. Hey, I'm just walking to the grocery store. I just wanted to say hi to you. Here's a photo of me. Hey, my work sent me out to
Speaker: india when they're supposed to be in scotland you know here's a photo of me i mean it's just super valuable if these bad actors can get their hands on a person a real person that might even be narcissistic to have so many pictures of themselves and they can pick whatever image they want for the day so yeah we stopped counting it
Speaker: at 60 different profiles, and like I said, this person that they kept pushing photos on kind of struck a medium balance as far as ethnicity goes. The person was olive skinned, so the bad actor called themselves Caucasian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and it really fit the bill of what they were pushing out there.
Speaker: It was an incredible find that we uncovered with that particular investigation. And when we related to the client and the victim, there were definitely moments of anger, sadness, and even tear a shit on that. It's a very, very powerful scam. It hits the emotion. And then you mentioned to me that she confronted the scammer, right? Yeah, yeah, she did. And so immediately she
Speaker: got really angry and said, okay, I denounced this relationship. I'm killing all my accounts. I'm deleting the emails. I'm deleting the phone numbers and so forth. And she really kind of internalized it. And from what I was told, you know, she was very sad for about a couple of weeks. And then after that, she became very inquisitive and curiosity really just won her over, right? She felt defrauded.
Speaker: And she felt like this person had really just taken advantage of her and just dragged her through the ground on her emotions. And she confronted him because she wanted answers. So she contacted him and said, hey, we had somebody scope you out. This is who you are. How can you lie to me? I thought you were faithful. I thought we had something. And what he said to her was in a perfect kind of
Speaker: exemplification of us, of these bad actors always being a step ahead of us. And it's very frustrating for me to say that, but that's unfortunately what it is. So she said, Hey, I know who you are. I know who you're not. And you've been lying to me all this time. How could you possibly do this? You said you'd fly over, we get married and so forth. And this guy said, Oh, I'm sorry about that. That was actually my twin brother.
Speaker: When you hear that, you think there's no winning. There's no winning in the context of the situation, right? You can unfurl the information and identify through your investigation that's been successful. You've either identified the person or you've confirmed that they're not who they are, right? Which I told you is very, very important.
Speaker: But if they're going to continue to feed the context of the situation that much more, it's very difficult to really sit somebody down. So she stayed in touch with him? Yeah, yeah, she did. She bought it and she remained in touch with him. And last I checked, she was still giving him money.
Speaker: Not to the same tune of $300 ,000, but, um, yeah, the relationship and I'll use air quotes without using my fingers. Um, but, uh, yeah, the relationship continued and so did the donations to him. So tell me more about how you partner with other parties that have touch points across the scam life cycle, such as banks, maybe law enforcement and others. Where does your role end and their responsibility begin?
Speaker: So you can think of it as kind of a puzzle, right? And we're pieces or operators of within that puzzle. You have us, you have law enforcement as another puzzle piece. You have internal investigators elsewhere, in this case, financial institutions, banks, union, you know, credit unions, anything like that, credit card companies. So, you know, we're happy to share our information with whatever
Speaker: other entity wants to help in this kind of larger puzzle. But we have to have the client's permission to do so. So when we flag information or a case or a report to the FBI, first I have to check with my client and make sure that they're okay with me doing so. Because one of the resources is the IC3, but we're able to, with our relationships, we're able to assess it and see if we can flag it over to a local law
Speaker: local law enforcement office, whichever agency is kind of fitting to oversee that or at least analyze it. So we're happy to partner with anyone. If it's an internal corporate investigator at a bank or anything like that, we'll be happy to share it again with the permission of the client and try to come together as one as much as possible to be as strong as possible on the investigative front of this episode.
Speaker: A lot of times they're not, we're kind of siloed from one another. And I understand, you know, I'm willing to share. Other companies are not because they have their corporate standards and their policies and laws that they have to abide to, especially if you're talking about a bank, hugely restricted with sharing information inside the financial institution. And I honor that. And I want to respect that.
Speaker: So we go ahead and we try to partner with anyone that's willing to listen or be on the receiving end of our report to try to bolster or solidify or confirm their findings. We don't know everything. So maybe, you know, we can kind of give them information to the larger pool of information that they've unfurled on it.
Speaker: So it's a larger puzzle and we're one of the pieces within that puzzle. Collaboration is definitely invited and welcomed as much as possible, but every one of us as an individual kind of puzzle piece to continue that example, we have our confines that we have to work within. I have my own laws and ethics and policies that I have to adhere to, one of them namely, like I said, I have to make sure that I have the approval of our client.
Speaker: But we're more than happy to partner up with anyone as much as possible. So if I take the puzzle analogy, who's responsible for putting the puzzle together? Well, it depends on what the puzzle is. And I don't want to get too granular with you, but I don't want to split hairs. But if the puzzle is being assembled by the client,
Speaker: in essentially really the true category is the victim, right? The client in our case, but the victim. If that person's assembling the puzzle, then they would want to incorporate law enforcement. They might want to incorporate us. They'd want to contact their financial institution. They'd want to contact the social media platform that this originated on, because we all know that it starts with social media platforms a lot of times, right? Yes. So and then you've got
Speaker: So that's the episode right there immediately. But then you've got the larger picture of the puzzle, which then that one case becomes a piece of that puzzle, right? And then another case becomes a piece of that puzzle. And then whoever is looking at, prospectively legislatures, they're looking at to assemble some comprehensive legislature that is
Speaker: is going to be impactful and helpful to all of us. And I say all of us as a community of people, right? Because I'm, you know, I could be duped by a romance again, I can't because I'm married, but, you know, you know, I could be duped, right?
Speaker: But a different scam, an investment scam. There you go. Cyber investigative specialists, lawyers, doctors, all have been duped. Not all of them, but all within that category. Everyone can get scammed. It's not someone who has a disability. Yeah, 100%. It doesn't matter how smart you are. It's being charged emotionally in the situation. And when that happens, your intellect goes out the window.
Speaker: So yeah, it depends on who's assembling that puzzle, you know, as far as who's really charged with amalgamating the pieces or collecting the pieces together to understand the kind of larger landscape of the impact of these romance scams.
Speaker: And so in your opinion, what needs to be done to drive real change here? We talked about a few issues, right? We talked about the fact that people reach out to you because they don't get enough help or they don't know what to do. I think that's another problem. They just don't know how to navigate law enforcement, getting recovery, getting the emotional help. What needs to happen to drive real change in this scam landscape?
Speaker: So that's a hard one to answer because you have people on one side that say, are quick to point a finger to social media and pick your platform, right? And then you have social media saying, hey, we're just a platform.
Speaker: If we do what you say, excuse me, if we do what you want us to do, what you're saying you want us to do, we might be confining speech, right? And that's a big no -no. So at least here in the States. So I see both sides legislature, you know, is, is, it's, it's difficult to put something together with teeth that really have a full impact on this
Speaker: this really, really significantly growing scam. So I think all players have a piece in identifying the most impactful outcome for this. I don't think romance scams are ever going to go away. Fraud in general is never going to go away. And that's rough, but it is what it is. And I think the best thing that we can do is position ourselves to have open conversations with social media platforms, have open conversations with law enforcement, have open conversations with
Speaker: legislators to say, OK, this is our kind of brainstorming session. Let us know what you think and assemble the pieces together as much as possible, because a lot of times we're all working in silos and we all have these grandiose ideas to say, hey, it's social media. Hey, it's not social media. It's legislature. Hey, it's law enforcement. They don't have the resources, you know, and it's easy to do that. But you have to consider the other the other side of the coin.
Speaker: And when you do consider that you have to really kind of position yourself as successfully as possible. And in my opinion, it's by bringing all the heads to the table and saying, okay, how can we do this? Now that's the easy part, right?
Speaker: The hard part is convincing all the head players to come to that table in the first place. Legislation, legislation can be very, very powerful, but only if it has teeth, only if it says, hey, if you don't do this, this is going to happen to you. And it has to be significant. I mean, if you're talking about engaging the social media platforms and you're installing a $100 ,000 fine, good luck.
Speaker: It has to be impactful, it has to have teeth, and it has to show movement in the cause that we're trying to get some movement on. Because these numbers are significantly rising in not only the frequency of occurrences across the globe, but the dollar amounts on a per occurrence basis.
Speaker: In the past, we've seen like hundreds of dollars. And now with investment scams, we see hundreds and thousands of dollars, up to millions of dollars being lost by victims. So that's an example of growth in the monetary losses. It's becoming astronomical. It is astronomical in my personal opinion. And it's a global impact. I mean, we've unfurled literal
Speaker: kind of networking resources from one bad actor to the next saying, hey, this is a script that you can literally copy and paste into your communication with your victim. They call them clients to get them to send you money within 30 days.
Speaker: And we've unfurled a large repository of these hyperlinks saying literally they're titled something like how to get a Caucasian male to send you, a Caucasian male in the US to send you $3 ,000 in 60 days, something like that. And you click on it and you've got basically a step -by -step guide on how to do that. So these fraudsters, these bad actors, they're really well resourced. They've identified that, hey,
Speaker: I can benefit myself so much more if I'm part of this net underground network. And unfortunately, it's, it's very successful. And it's, it's, it's terribly damaging. Right. And today with Chad GPT,
Speaker: You really don't even need those manuals. You can really tailor the conversation according to whatever the person on the other side is saying, which makes it all more frightening and we'll see how things go with that. Technology is fantastic when it works. It's detrimental when the bad people have it and use it against us.
Speaker: One last question and I wanted to end this conversation on a positive note. What are you hopeful about with what you're seeing in recent days with regards to scams and what are you hopeful about in this ecosystem?
Speaker: So I'm hopeful because of the new year and like everyone else when you change the calendar you're like hey a fresh page let's see what we can do right and collectively I'm hopeful at the partnerships that we forge with law enforcement with advocates like yourself and other organizations and entities out there to try to come together and
Speaker: build as great a resource for education for everybody as much as possible because you know and I know that once somebody falls victim to romance scams and even on the front end, it might be very much too late. You have to really award yourself with the education on how to spot a romance scam, how to spot red flags for it. And then hopefully if you find yourself involved in a situation like that, you'll have kind of a
Speaker: a voice in your head saying, Hey, I remember hearing that from Chris or from IELTS podcast, right? Or reading about this from the FBI's website or something like that. Because unfortunately, when they're really, like I said, entrenched in the situation, it's too, it's too late. Because it doesn't matter how many degrees you have on your wall. It doesn't matter how street smart you are.
Speaker: You are emotionally invested in it. And when that happens, all that intellect, all that wisdom goes out the window. We've come across cases where the clients, the victims say to us, Chris, I knew something didn't jive. I knew something didn't make sense when I was in this. I just kept going because I wanted to believe. I lost my husband. I lost my wife. I wanted to believe, right? And that's emotions.
Speaker: and you can't do much to check that after they're really deployed into the situation. So the best thing that we can do is to stand up this really strong
Speaker: repository, this really strong kind of movement on education on these types of romance scams and how to mitigate, how to prevent as much as possible. Great. So Chris, thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Be sure to subscribe to the podcast, and if you want to keep current with the latest news on online scams, follow me on LinkedIn, be it at BiggerLevy. Have a wonderful week.
