What the Hack Ep. 255: “How Kindness Works in The Scammer’s Playbook”

“What the Hack?” is DeleteMe’s true cybercrime podcast hosted by Beau Friedlander

Beau: There’s a CVS in Bethel, Connecticut, right next to a Chase Bank. And one afternoon last winter, an eighty-five-year-old man walked in, went to the CVS, and bought about three thousand dollars worth of gift cards. Sephora, Apple, a few others. He walked back to his car, he sat down in the driver’s seat, and scratched off the numbers on the back of each one, and then read them one by one over the phone. Then he drove home. His son was waiting outside his apartment in a planned community with his wife, his brother, and a police officer.

Brian: He got a call from Chase Bank, and Chase Bank said, “There are some strange transactions going on in your account.”

Beau: We’ve all heard that older adults are more likely to get scammed, but here’s the thing: when we actually look at the data, it’s not that simple. In fact, researchers have found that the thing that makes you vulnerable has a lot less to do with age than any of us might assume. Truth is, it’s a lot more complicated. It’s as complicated as human beings.

Brian: I said, “Dad, you’ve 100% been scammed.” And he still didn’t believe it at this point.

Beau: Today we’re talking with Brian Ward, whose father got scammed. Three times. And why none of us are immune from sitting in that CVS parking lot and scratching off numbers and reading them to somebody who told us to do that. I’m Beau Friedlander, and this is What The Hack, the podcast that asks, in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? Brian Ward, thank you so much for joining us today on What the Hack.

Brian: Thanks, Beau. Happy to be here.

Beau: All right. Well, so listen, I hear that I– Well, I hear tell that you have a story, and it’s a story that we’ve heard a few times, and it never ceases to amaze me how stubborn people can be about their scammers. Now, but before we go there, Brian, I wanna just give our listeners a chance to get to know you. Where are you coming to us from right now?

Brian: I am in Redding, Connecticut.

Beau: Oh my goodness. You sound like you’re from the South. Am I right?

Brian: That’s right.

Beau: No, you don’t sound like you’re from that far south. You sound, you sound Mid-Atlantic to me.

Brian: Yeah, I actually lived up here until I was four, and then a divorce occurred, and I went down with my mother and my brother to Virginia. So I spent the majority of my life in Virginia. But my dad, he’s a Yank. And then… So he was born up here, lived in Upstate New York. His father actually, not to go too far off, we were just talking about it with him the other day, was an animal trader who would import animals, and they had zebras, chimpanzees, baboons, a baby elephant on their property that would often get loose, and go into town. So, you know, he had quite a colorful childhood in that way. Then he went to Yale, and then he went to UVA Law, so there is a Virginia connection there. And because that’s where he met my mother, who grew up in Virginia, so that’s kind of the connection of how we, I ended up in the South.

Beau: Having a really fun time imagining growing up in a place with zebras and baboons that got loose.

Brian: Yes, they got loose and especially the baboons, they would go and throw things at people in the town. And so it was, it was quite, it was quite a scene. I wish I was there.

Beau: Me too. And so, is that a big part of his personality? I mean, does that, a story that comes up a lot when he’s talking to people?

Brian: He likes to talk about it. I think it makes him happy, especially as he’s getting older and remembering these things from his childhood. I think those are some of his best memories, and they’re quite honestly some of the coolest memories. Like my grandfather, he lost part of his ear, sadly, to melanoma, but he told us the longest time that it was bitten off by a chimpanzee, so he had this prosthetic ear. And when I found out as an adult that it wasn’t a chimpanzee, it was one of the more devastating things that’s ever happened to me. So it was very colorful. My dad wasn’t, but my grandparents and my dad’s brothers were the colorful, loud, obnoxious people. My dad was the super quiet, reserved one of the group, so. But yeah, those are some of his best memories, and he has a little baby elephant tooth in Lucite sitting on his desk from that elephant you know, 70 years ago.

Beau: Now, what do you do in Redding?

Brian: So I work for a wine company. My job, I’m remote, which is nice. So my job is basically to find clients that have wine collections and help them auction them or sell them

Beau: So is that, I don’t really understand what that means. I mean, we have a few bottles of wine in our house. Would you come and get them and sell them?

Brian: Sure, depending on what they are.

Beau: They were like 20, maybe 15 bucks, something like that.

Brian: It might fall right below. Might fall right below. But basically what it means is, a client… And this is very common. So say you go on a trip to Napa Valley or Italy or whatever, and you have the most amazing wine of your life, and you go, “Oh my God, I gotta have some more of this .” And you get on that list, and then you get on another list, and after 15 years you find yourself with 1,200 bottles because you keep every year getting a case from a wine club.

Beau: Wait, so you go to these places… you’re already way ahead of me. So wait a second. First of all, common… People go to Italy to just visit winemakers?

Brian: Yeah, Italy is one of the greatest wine-making regions in the world. It has the most wine varietals in the world, matter of fact.

Beau: I know of one. Wait, and I know of one. One is, gross. It’s, do you know which one I’m talking about? There’s one where they do something and it just sits around and rots for a while, and that’s supposed to be very good. What’s that called?

Brian: Yeah, yeah. So that’s the Amarone. So that’s the… So basically the idea is that it’s, the grapes are just left in the sun, and it desiccates them, so it really concentrates the flavor of that grape. So Amarone Valpolicella is the wine, and it’s amazing. Like, you drink that sucker and it’ll get your nose hairs going ’cause it’s super powerful wine, but it’s really great wine

Beau: And when you say super powerful, do you mean it gets you drunk or it just gets your… If you’re a wine person, it makes you go giddy?

Brian: Kind of a little bit both. So it can, it can load you up pretty good. It’s got high alcohol content. So, like a typical bottle of wine is gonna have 12 to 14%. Some of these Amarones have 17, 18% just ’cause they’re so concentrated. And when I also say it’s gonna get you going is just ’cause it’s so concentrated, there’s so much flavor that it’s just, like a nice little kick in the head, but in a good way.

Beau: So, okay. I don’t drink, so for me I’m like, “Okay, this is all very foreign to me.” Literally it’s in Ital- Italy and then desiccated grapes and then…

Brian: Yes. It sounds delicious, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Beau: It sounds fine. So, now folks go and they buy these, they go to these places and they just sign up and then… And I’m just curious, I wanna understand the money part. Is there like a case of wine from one of these places with desiccated grapes that become powerful, what does that case cost generally speaking?

Brian: I mean, it depends, right? So that, that, that’s a wide range. So, like a nice bottle of Amarone will be 100 bucks, you know, a case.

Beau: What?

Brian: It can be. But yeah, so you’re looking at 1,200 bucks a case, but then you go… And then what, this is what happens, right? So some people just do that, and they enjoy drinking, and they don’t get that many bottles, but a lot of my clients get obsessed, and then they start looking to the next level, and that’s when they start getting into Bordeaux, with the first growths. Those are kinda like the top wines. Those are 5, 6, $700 per bottle. And then they go to the next level to Burgundy, where there’s a wine called Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, which even new vintages, ’cause it’s so rare and so well-esteemed, that new bottles can sell for $20,000 per bottle, not per… Yeah, so it’s insane. So that’s… I don’t see a lot of that, but that’s when the clients go off the rails. And then, they get divorced, and they have to pay for that divorce or, you know, they get in some debt, and that’s where I find a lot of clients that need to sell their wine, or they just have too much, and they’re 65 years old, and they do the math, and they realize that they’re not gonna drink through it all.

Beau: So there’s bottles of wine out there that are worth as much as Knicks tickets at the Garden during the playoffs, during the finals.

Brian: Yeah, I don’t, I’m not sure. Yeah, you d- yeah, you could probably train, trade a bottle of DRC for maybe the nosebleeds for this series.

Beau: So all right, I have the picture. Wine, Italy, desiccated grapes, $20,000 bottles, divorces, people should be nicer to each other even when they’re man. Brian Ward, Redding, Connecticut, there you are, you’re helping people sort it all out. Now, you told me before we started recording that you had a story, and I have a feeling it has nothing to do with wine.

Brian: My dad, he’s 85. He was a corporate attorney for a large multinational firm where he was general counsel. Went to Yale, really proud, kind of super smart guy. But, he’s getting, older and-

Beau: So he’s retired now, your dad?

Brian: Retired. He’s retired. He’s been retired for, God, I wanna say 25, 30 years almost. He retired pretty young, during a merger of companies that he was able to get the old-fashioned golden parachute on the way out. And so he became… He started becoming very trusting and technology was really not his thing. So when someone would tell him that there’s a problem with his account, or, you know, you over… You bought something by accident, and they showed him the proof of it, he would tend to believe it and do whatever he thought was required to fix it. He’s 85 now, and technology is a pretty new concept to him. And so he used to be the big-time corporate lawyer going through contracts. Speaking of the Knicks, he actually did a lot of the contracts for, like, Patrick Ewing. He was the head lawyer for Madison Square Garden back-

Beau: Any chance he could get Pat on the phone right now?

Brian: No, he’s no longer involved. I tried. I tried with the Rangers, I’ve tried with everything, but no, he’s-

Beau: So he’s no stranger to that sort of thing, but he is a stranger to the digital world. Is… Did he have, did he have a secretary helping him for most of his, or an assistant helping him?

Brian: Yep, absolutely.

Beau: So he didn’t type his own stuff. He did, he had…

Brian: No.

Beau: Okay, so he’s not used to digital assistance, he’s used to human assistance.

Brian: Human assistance, right. So it made him uncomfortable, so when he got someone on the phone that was calling him, telling him there was a problem, he would tend to believe that and ask them to help him

Beau: No, I understand. So, so, your dad is 85 years old, he’s retired. Is he… Does he live alone?

Brian: Yeah, so he actually… So here in Redding, there’s a great retirement community that we recently moved him into, back in, I guess, November of last year. So he’s there. It’s not an assisted facility yet. You know, he’s kind of living alone, but he’s always watched, he’s always protected. I could actually walk to him through the woods, like, a five-minute walk.

Beau: Really?

Brian: Yeah, he does live alone, but he’s not alone in any way, shape, or form

Beau: So he’s, he lives alone in an apartment in a community.

Brian: Yes.

Beau: I gotcha. Yeah. And you said that he’s, he’s trusting. Did– Is that what you said? Did I hear you say that he’s very trusting?

Brian: He is trusting of people that tell him they can help him with things that he’s not familiar with, if that makes sense.

Beau: It does make sense, especially a person who’s not used to doing things for himself, especially if they’re tedious.

Brian: Right. Exactly. Exactly. And if it’s something he doesn’t understand and they say, “Hey, you have a problem here, but I can help you solve that problem, but I need you to do this,” he- that’s where he becomes overly trusting.

Beau: Now, let me ask you this. Is your father identifiable as a resident of the community where he now lives? If someone were to go online and Google him, would they… would that pop up?

Brian: God, that’s a good question, ’cause he hasn’t been involved in… I mean, like, he’s been on boards and, but maybe, probably so.

Beau: Let’s try it. Now, what’s your dad’s name?

Brian: BEEP.

Beau: All right. And let’s see. Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well.

Brian: Well, well, well.

Beau: That’s a lot of wells because….

Brian: Ba dun -dun-dun.

Beau: Anyone googling him is gonna see that he’s got ducats. He can afford the wine that you sell or that you appraise.

Brian: That is true

Beau: And that is probably enough. And what’s troubling about it is that it was that easy for me to find his name, find out how old he is, which means that he’s probably going to be pretty susceptible to any number of ruses, and I found his address, and then I looked it up on Zillow, and he did okay for himself. You know, not bad. Pretty big house for one guy. And so a scammer is going to reach out with any number of approaches. Let me guess at the one ’cause I don’t know.

Brian: There were two. There were two separate ones over-

Beau: I wanna guess, though. I wanna guess. So let’s just play the game. Was it… Does he have a computer?

Brian: Yes

Beau: And was one of them related to his computer?

Brian: Not like from a service standpoint.

Beau: Okay, I lose. That’s, that’s a…What was the first one, Brian?

Brian: So the first one was someone found out where he purchases things, and he got an email that said, “Your purchase of X from,” like, I don’t know, some bath store, “has gone through. It’s getting ready to ship. If this is an incorrect error, please, order, please give us a call.”

Beau: And it was a place where he has bought things.

Brian: Yes. Yes.

Beau: Okay.

Brian: And so he said, “Oh, well, I didn’t buy that.” So he called the number.

Beau: Uh-huh.

Brian: And this person said, “Oh, okay, no problem. We can help you with that. We’ll refund you, but I need you to log in to this website to do so.” And so now they saw the same thing on the screen, and they asked my dad to put in, “Okay, I need you, I need you to type in the exact amount.” So say it was $420. So my dad typed that in and hit submit, and the person on the other end said, “Oh. Oh my gosh, you put two extra zeros in there. You just typed in $42,000. Oh, no. So what I need you to do, I need you to wire me the difference, of that $41,000 and $790,” or whatever it is. And that’s the only way they can resolve this.

Beau: How much was the overage in this case?

Brian: It was $41,000, roughly.

Beau: Okay.

Brian: So he typed in two extra zeros.

Beau: A mere pittance, okay?

Brian: A mere pittance, a drop in the bucket.

Beau: Yeah.

Brian: So he actually… you know what? There were three times. This was the first time. I’m sorry. So he actually attempted to make that wire, but luckily his financial advisor saw that and flagged it and canceled it.

Beau: Perfect. Perfect. So that’s… And that is the way it should go. Do you remember where he was shopping?

Brian: No, but it was a bath-type product like that. It was a small kind of little place like Johnny’s Bath Shop or something like that for some bath products for my brother. Yeah.

Beau: Well, that actually makes perfect sense. Now, you know, the way that scammers will typically find this kind of information out, and it’s really useful as you just found out, are data breaches. And data breaches for small companies, not big ones, way more common than the big ones, and they don’t report them. They should, they kinda have to in a lot of states, but they don’t. And now when that gets hacked, the retailer’s database gets hacked, maybe purchase history, loyalty account details if there’s anything like that, but just who bought what. And so that is most likely what happened there, and it is why, it’s typical for me, and so it’s super typical for older adults. Well, I am an older adult, but an older, older adult who…

Brian: We’re older adults, yeah.

Beau: No, but this is, you know, the older, older or older, older, older, adult is really not going to say, “I don’t wanna give you that data,” or, “How are you storing this ?” Or any, “How do you protect my data?” None of that. So it’s really a typical way of people getting got. It’s sadly not that avoidable if you’re a person who doesn’t remember that you haven’t bought anything there in a while or, you know, you are trusting enough to believe that you actually did type in an extra two zeros when you didn’t.

Brian: Yes. Yes. And that one, you’re right. When that one happened, we said, the family said, “Okay, hey, I get that one .” The next two were the ones that really made us start scratching our heads, my dad, what he was thinking . This is where it gets really confusing

Beau: Okay, so there was this thing with probably a hacked store where your dad bought stuff and his information got stolen and somebody added some zeroes and scammed him and whatever, and then the financial advisor caught it. Then the wire never went through so it didn’t matter. And for a while that felt like the end of the story. But it wasn’t.

Brian: So this, the second time, this is more recent. Similar setup. Oh, this is PayPal, so this one was a little bit more, you know, large, type company, and you’ve made a purchase, and no, I didn’t make that purchase. Very similar setup, but the payoff, as it were, was quite different. So similar where he typed in again. He, I think he’d forgotten the first time. This one was a smaller number. Instead of forty thousand dollars, it was maybe three thousand dollars. Like, oh, a thirty dollar purchase. He… Oh, you typed in– I think you meant to type in, thirty dot zero zero, but you typed in three thousand. Oh, no. Or maybe it was… Actually, you know what? I’m sorry. Let me take that back one second. It was the person on the other end that accidentally typed in three thousand. So they said, “Oh my gosh, I just refunded you three thousand dollars by mistake. I’m gonna lose my job. Is there any way that you can help me out ?”

Beau: Classic.

Brian: “Okay, sure. I’m happy to help you. What, what can I do?” “Well, I need to refund that money, but I can’t do it with cash. So what I need are gift cards. If you can get me gift cards, then– and give me those numbers, then I’m able to make this go away on my end, and you got your thirty dollar refund, and we’re all square.”

Beau: So, I mean, obviously it’s this common scam, but the… Just so I understand what happened, he was told by the person who said they were from PayPal that they entered the number in wrong. Instead of $30, they entered $3,000, and because of the way that they did it, they could not fix the problem with cash. They had to fix it with gift cards, which I guess would make no sense to anyone, but if you’re a person for whom many things make no sense because it’s a new, brave new digital world, that might work. Oh, boy. So now, is this when your father is living in this community?

Brian: Not yet. Not yet.

Beau: Okay, so he’s still in, he’s still in the other town and, he is living alone in that house, which is identifiable as, like, a pretty decent house. And this person… Does he drive or does he not drive?

Brian: He drives. He drives. So that’s when he hopped in his car, and he drove to… And the person instructed him, “Don’t buy them all at one location,” you know, because it might, they might ask questions, and we just wanna make this nice and clean. Because apparently, which I’m sure you know, CVS and places like that have been taught if an elderly person comes and buy gift cards, it’s probably a scam. So he went to three or four different locations and bought Sephora, Apple, what have you, different gift cards, and then went and scratched them off and gave the codes to this individual, and then they were gone. So there was no tracing. They were gone.

Beau: And they literally said, “Do not go to the same store. Go to different stores and buy different kinds. It doesn’t matter what kind of gift card you buy”?

Brian: Does it… I think they instructed them. I think there’s a pattern because in scam three, the pattern’s similar of the type. For some reason, Sephora is a very popular one. I don’t know if it was just coincidence. Apple-

Beau: Well, it’s product, and it’s products that people buy. That are easy to turn, I bet. Now, this happened. He’s living alone, and he went ahead and did that. How do you– Did you know that he did this, or did he tell you?

Brian: I didn’t initially. No. So this actually happened over a two-day period.

Beau: Okay

Brian: Or possibly three. So they made this call initially. They told him what he needed to do. The next day, he went out and bought these cards. And my… I have three other brothers, and one of them happened to be there, who’s a little bit mentally challenged. But to his credit, he heard my dad talking to this individual on the phone who was telling him that that wasn’t enough. He needed to go get more cards. And my brother heard him talking and thought something’s not right here, ’cause it was a very heated discussion. So he called one of my other brothers, and that’s when we were alerted to what was going on. And this is the part that’s hard for us because my father didn’t believe us that this was a scam, that this idea of giving gift cards to a complete stranger was not a normal thing to do.

Beau: So your dad didn’t believe you. So who broke the news to him that it, you thought it… Who said, “Dad”? Who was that? Was that you?

Brian: Tthat was not me ’cause I wasn’t aware of it at…my other younger brother was the one that said, “Dad.” And he got on the phone with this individual, and this individual is so brazen that he was trying to convince my brother that, yes, this in fact is normal. Please put me back on the phone with BEEP, I can only talk to him about this. And then he heard this individual telling my dad, “Who are you gonna believe, me or your son?” And that’s luckily when my dad snapped out of it and hung up on the guy, and realized that, wait a minute, this is a scam.

Beau: Because he, well, also probably because he respects his son and he was like, “How dare you talk about my child that way?”

Brian: Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Beau: And also you don’t say that to a former general counsel, attorney who went to Yale without actually incurring the wrath of God. I mean, there’s a certain point where that person just has enough pride to be like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Excuse me, who do you think you’re talking to?

Brian: Yeah, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah. And thankfully, because this individual, which we saw patterned in the next one, was gonna just keep going.

Beau: Okay. Last story. Your dad has been scammed out of three grand. That’s gone. He is still mobile. He is still scammable.

Brian: Scammable.

Beau: That surprises me, because he saw it. He saw he was being scammed

Brian: He saw he was being scammed, but he still wasn’t convinced, and that’s what kind of got reflected in this third time. And, and also he’s definitely… His memory is going. You know, he’s starting to have some cognitive issues clearly, which we’re dealing with.

Beau: Sure. That’s actually a very complicating factor for sure.

Brian: That’s what happened on this third go-around. And this was the scariest of all three. You know, he… So he’s in the facility at this point. We have him comfortably moved in. He has the same number he’s always had, so he didn’t change that. He got a call from Chase Bank, and Chase Bank said, “There are some strange transactions going on in your account.” This is how I got alerted. I got a call from the Chase Bank up the road and they said, “Your father is in here. He’s very confused.” And it was a call from my dad’s phone, and when I answered and said, “Oh, hey, Dad. What, what’s up ?” He goes, “Just go along with the contractor story.” I’m like, “What?” And then the bank teller gets on and says, “Your father’s in here. He’s telling me he needs $30,000 for remodeling in cash. He needs cash. It can only be cash, but he can’t tell me, you know, who it’s for, what it actually is for, and he seems very confused.”

Brian: So I got back on the phone with my dad, trying to find out what’s going on, calm him down, ’cause he’s getting quite irritated at this point. And the teller says, “I’m sorry, I can’t.” And I said, “Okay, Dad, I’m gonna meet you back at your place. Let’s get together and we can talk about this and figure this out.” He says, “Okay.” Hangs u- He goes, “Okay, fine. Fine. I’ll meet you back.” I couldn’t get in touch with him. I’m calling, calling, calling. He accidentally answers. I think he meant to hit, you know, hang up, and I hear him talking to someone about Sephora gift cards. “Did that one go through?” “Yes, that one went through.” “Okay, great.” So I figure out right away there’s a CVS right next to the Chase Bank, so I call the CVS and they say, “Oh, yes. He was in here, but he just left .” And he bought about… I, and this is where the CVS idea broke down a little bit. He bought about $3,000 worth of gift cards. So we call the police at that point.

Beau: And CVS did not stop him from doing that.

Brian: They did not stop him. No, they did not stop him in this case.

Beau: Interesting.

Brian: So we call the- yeah, we call the Police, and they meet us at the facility. And I’m calling him, calling him, calling him, and I can’t get in touch with him, so we’re outside his apartment door. Finally, he answers and he says, “Oh yeah, I’m, I’m almost home.” And, you know, I’m telling him what’s, trying to tell him what’s going on. The line goes dead. Oh, boy. And so he finally pulls in, but he had been apparently sitting in his car scratching off the numbers to give to this person. So that’s another th- three or $4,000. We’re not 100% sure how much, ’cause he was able to get cash from the ATM apparently. And when I see him, he knows something’s wrong. He knows because I said, “Dad, we’re all here, myself, my wife, my brother, and a police officer.” He says, “Oh, boy.” I said, “Dad, you’ve been scammed.” He goes, “I don’t think so.” I said, “Dad, you’ve 100% been scammed.” And he still didn’t believe it at this point. So what did sink in was that the police officer explained to him exactly what happened. My dad showed him the phone number that called. He said, “Look, this is a…like some random number that has no association with Chase.” The woman called back.

Beau: It was a woman this time.

Brian: A woman this time, Clara Harper, I think was her name.

Beau: Okay.

Brian: She called back. The police officer answers the phone. She is so brazen that she is arguing with the police officer that this is Chase Bank, she can only talk with BEEP, and that she would like his name and badge number. And so the police officer, you can imagine, got rather upset and said they were gonna do a warrant on her number and that, but they clearly know that they’re not gonna get caught. So that’s what happened and hung up and, you know, we put some things in place on my dad’s phone and, you know, some other financial things, but he did not believe that this was a scam until the police officer showed him. So, and one final thing that really blew our mind is he was in Chase Bank talking to what he thought was Chase Bank, who was telling him to lie to the teller that it was for a remodeling. So he was lying to Chase Bank while trying to deal with a Chase Bank matter.

Beau: And that was Clara Harper on the phone or whoever.

Brian: That was Clara Harper, who was, it was clearly a call center overseas.

Beau: Yeah. It was a call center almost certainly in Southeast Asia.

Brian: Oh, could have been. Could have been.

Beau: and, the level of aggression is matched, and this is this, the part that people don’t understand is there’s two victims in this kind of crime because if this was a call from a Southeast scam compound, Claire Harper, which is a kind of name you might find in a colonial African country in imagination about a good English name, is almost certainly being tortured and is almost certainly there against their will and is almost-

Brian: We did wonder that and felt somewhat bad about that, but-

Beau: But, you know, as the saying goes, hurt people hurt people. And in that moment where the crime is being committed, yes, it’s fine if you have the capacity to have compassion for the person committing the crime, great. More power to you. But you must stop the crime and you must, you must say, you must say no. And one can politely hang up and say no. But, you know, may I ask, what did you put in place on your father’s phone? ‘Cause I was gonna get into like what some measures our people can take who have similar problems. Because what happens in this situation is often that the scammed identify more with the scammer than they do their own family.

Brian: Yeah, yeah. And she was so convincing to him that he was convinced that gift cards were gonna solve this problem, and that it was a purely perfectly acceptable thing. So what we put in place, and we’ll see how successful this is, ’cause this has only been a couple of weeks. On his phone we have where it only rings through contacts that he has in his phone. So if it’s a non-known number that he’s never talked to or received a call from or made a contact, it goes silent. And they can leave a voicemail, and then we can kind of work with him to see if there’s anything he missed. So for his phone, that’s what we put in place. You know, we’ve also… Luckily he has a financial manager and those sorts of things where we can move his bank account to them and we have power of attorney as myself and my brothers to be able to help him kind of manage his affairs so he doesn’t have to deal with things like this. And I have kind of overriding power of attorney, where if there’s anything like that, any strange activity in his bank account, I can stop it. So those are a few of the things that we’ve put in place so far, but I tell you what, Beau, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Eddie Murphy Raw. There was a great line that I feel my dad really felt. It flashes back to when he’s a little kid, and he’s telling a story to his family. And one of the funniest things, I don’t know why I find it so funny, but then he says, “And then he kicked him in the ding-ding,” and that’s what happened to my poor dad.

Beau: Your dad got kicked in the ding-ding.

Brian: He got kicked in the ding-ding.

Beau: Now, you know, there’s another tool that you might wanna consider using, which is something that a scam baiter… There’s people out there who bait scammers. They go after them. They, you know, they go, “Okay, here’s a scammer,” and they go. It’s called Seraph Secure, and it’s an anti-scam software developed by, by Kitboga, who’s one of them. And it’s a browser extension that just allows you to… You can control whether if your dad gets one of those calls and they say, “You have a virus. We can get it off your computer. Click this link.”

Brian: Right.

Beau: It’s really a valuable tool if you have somebody who is vulnerable to scams and online. ‘Cause what is gonna happen eventually, he’s going to click a link that sets off five alarms, and then someone is– And there’s gonna be a phone number, and he’s gonna call that number, and they’re going to offer him a remote access tool.

Brian: Yes. Yes.

Beau: Then once they’re in his computer, most likely he doesn’t have the best cybersecurity protocols in place. His passwords are gonna be somewhere easy to find. Then you have a real problem. Now, are they gonna be able to wire themselves a large amount of money? Absolutely not, because, you know, banks are hip to that particular trick. But they’ll be able to do some damage. And so I definitely wanna recommend discussing adding, that Seraph Secure extension on his computer.

Brian: Okay. He would do that ’cause he’s, yeah, he sits there especially on his iPad. In his chair, he’s on his iPad, a ton.

Beau: Well, I would just make sure that, you know, whatever tools you can put in place to kind of get him safe from the obvious ones where people are trying to get into his device or trying to get into his head. They’re both a problem. You know, that’s something you can do. And, you know, but there’s not, there’s, there’s not– The only other thing that you can do, I think, is really keep communication open because a lot of the time older adults, especially ones who live alone, will have all the support in the world from their family, but it’s a separate and different kind of loneliness that makes them susceptible to these scammers.

Brian: Yeah. Yeah. No, you’re absolutely right, and I feel that ’cause his, my stepmother passed away about a year ago. And so ever since then, he’s been very lonely, and, you know, we talked to him about making friends at this facility, and he’s like, “Ah, I’m fine.” You know, he just says hi. He doesn’t wanna get involved yet. So I think you’re, you’re absolutely right. That could be a big part of it

Beau: Yeah. I mean, just that, it’s okay to talk about what’s going on. Like, “Oh, you wouldn’t believe it. I typed in a number wrong and now I gotta go get a bunch of gift cards.” Like…

Brian: Yeah

Beau: Or, you know, “Clara Harper needs 30…”

Brian: She needs cash. I don’t know how we’re gonna get it to her, but-

Beau: ‘m so… “Let me tell you. How dumb are you, Dad? I am so dumb,” you know. And, and, and… But it’s a problem when people aren’t, don’t have a sense of humor about it, and don’t have a sense of like, you know, no wrong, the no wrong answers version of going through life.

Brian: Yeah. Yeah

Beau: We’re all one phone call away from a scam. We tell ourselves that we’ve learned something. We know all the signs. We wouldn’t fall for this!. Our vulnerability is safe, like an elephant tooth, sitting there sealed tight in Lucite. But that’s not what the research shows. There’s a specific moment in a scam, the moment when someone says, “I can help you fix this,” where the brain’s threat detector just turns into a sponge for attention. It doesn’t like the cortisol; it wants to swap for oxytocin, and that’s not because you’re old or naive or because you have some sort of neurological problem. It really is just a question of the way humans work. We would prefer to be more open, more cooperative, more trusting. It just feels better, and that’s reciprocity, right? So it’s not a big, weird thing that’s happening. It’s a feature of our operating system. I hate to say that because we don’t have operating systems, but you know what I mean. It’s what makes us awesome, and it’s what makes scams suck, because scammers don’t hack your weaknesses. They hack your humanity. So at the end, the baboons, or whatever, the zebras or whatever you want to say; I hate to say animals, actually, because animals are actually a lot cooler than humans. The threat actors are out there, and they’re always out there, and they know how to talk to you. They know how to soothe you better than you do. That’s their job, but now your job is to know they’re doing that and be more careful. Thank you so much, Brian Ward, for joining us this week. Thanks for your story

Brian: Thanks, Beau.

Beau: And now it’s time for our Tinfoil Swan. If you want to protect an older adult in your life, I do think that you want to put controls on your phone, and that is one way. So make sure that their phone won’t ring if the number that’s calling them isn’t already in their contacts. That’s one thing you can do, and another thing you can do is look into Kitboga’s extension, Seraph Secure, and consider putting it into the rotation on the browser that your older adult uses so that they are not susceptible to a scammer getting into their computer in real time and mucking about. Okay, that’s that for this week, and I want you to stay safe and I want you to come back. Rate and review as always. It does help people find the show. Thanks for listening. This episode of What the Hack was produced by me and Andrew Steven who also did the editing. What the Hack is a production of DeleteMe, which was picked by the New York Times’ Wirecutter as the #1 personal information removal service. You should be using it already. If you’re not and you want to, well, you can. Here’s what to do. Go to joindeleteme.com/wth. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth and get 20% off. I kid you not, 20%. 20% off. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth. Now stay safe out there. See you around.

Learn More:

• Learn more about gift card scams and how to stay safe.
• Learn more about data brokers and how they contribute to online exploitation and risk.
• Read more about common online threats in 2026 and how to avoid them.