Beau: In a world where scams are draining more money than the entire budget of the Department of Justice every single year, you’d think you might be hearing a little more about it.

Ken: Criminals in Southeast Asia—and it’s spreading around the world now—have organized themselves to steal money from U.S. citizens at scale.

Beau: And these aren’t small-time crimes.

Ken: They’re successfully extracting hundreds of billions of dollars out of our economy, and it’s going to fuel more and more organized crime overseas.

Beau: Some of it happens in call centers. Other times we’re talking about compounds where people are trafficked. Human trafficking, people forced to work around the clock.

Ken: A Chinese crime boss walks to the front of the room and he leads the room in the following chant: ‘Cripple the economies of the U.S. and Europe. This is World War III.’

Beau: This week, we’re talking to Ken Westbrook who has joined the fight against these scams, to find out how they work, who’s behind them, and why the United States has become the world’s softest target. 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?

[00:00:00] Beau: Ken Westbrook, thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:00:04] Ken: Well, it’s a pleasure to be with you.

[00:00:05] Beau: Oh, the pleasure’s all mine. Now, Ken Westbrook is the CEO and founder of Stop Scams Alliance, an organization that is laser-focused on mitigating the scam and threat scape in the United States of America, which is getting worse by the day. You’ve seen this problem from the national level, but it’s also hit a lot closer to home for you. What turned you into an activist?

[00:00:38] Ken: Lemme take you back to the scene of the crime. It was Valentine’s Day 2023. My mom, who was 83 years old at the time, was trying to look up the obituary of her sister who had recently died, and she did a Google search for an obituary website. And the next thing she knew without clicking on anything else besides the search link, she got a pop-up on her computer that took over her computer screen. She couldn’t close it. It had a loud voice that was saying, “Do not turn off your computer.” It had a handy 1-800 number to call Microsoft Support, and she was frightened. This stuff is actually called Scareware for a reason. She was frightened by the loud voice and she said, “I have to do something about this.” So she called the 800 number, and on the other end of the line was a fellow who was very helpful. “Oh, ma’am, we see that your computer’s been hacked. In fact, we see 39 hackers on your computer right now, and we’re here to help you clean it up. But you know, very often when your computer gets hacked, your bank accounts get hacked too.” And then they asked her for her phone number and with the phone number, they were able to look up where she banked. I found out later that much of this information is out on the dark web. For the price of less than a dollar, a criminal can do a search and find out where you bank armed with a phone number. So now they know where she banked and they said, “Well, let’s put you in touch with the Chase Bank fraud department.” And she was, she told me later, “How in the world did they know that I banked at Chase Bank?” It was because they were able to look it up. So now she’s on the phone with a fellow who represents Chase Bank, she thinks, and they’re really criminals of course. By the way, this is all enabled through phone spoofing. When she was on the phone to Microsoft, her phone said Washington State, and when she was on the phone with what she thought was Chase Bank, her phone said Connecticut.

[00:02:39] Beau: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:39] Ken: So she now believes that she’s talking to Chase Bank fraud department because of the phone and because they were able to look up where she banked. And who else can do that but the real professionals, right?

[00:02:52] Beau: Sure.

[00:02:53] Ken: So what that leads to then is, “Oh, ma’am, we see your money is being stolen out of your bank account right now. We see people taking money out and the only way that we can prevent this is for us to move your money into a safe place that we will protect for you.” And she was then instructed to go buy gift cards to start the transfer of money. So she was driving all over town to various stores, Home Depot and others, to buy gift cards. And then she was instructed to take a picture of the back of it, send it to the supposedly Chase Bank people. But in fact, they were criminals of course. And that was the way that she started to move money out from her bank account into the hands of the criminals.

[00:03:38] Beau: Now, how much money are we talking about? I mean, how much can you put on a gift card? I think there’s, like, it’s usually like 500 bucks, but some of them, like on store-specific brands, you can put up to $5,000.

[00:03:48] Ken: Uh, I think it was like $500 or so. So at first it was a few thousand dollars.

[00:03:54] Beau: So she went around town. She went to the various places that this person had suggested and got gift cards amounting to a couple thousand dollars.

[00:04:03] Ken: Right. At a certain point, the criminals instructed her, “We need to move more money out of your account. This is an urgent matter now.” And she was instructed how to send cashier’s checks and she was given the addresses of various businesses, or supposed businesses, first in New York state, later on in Colorado and California. And in each case she was to make the check out to a person and she was instructed who that was going to be. The check was written out to… She then went to the bank to withdraw the money and to prepare the cashier’s check, and the bank started asking her questions. Here’s an elderly woman walking to a bank, making large transfers. Well, the criminals know that. So they instruct folks, including my mom, to lie to the bank. They say that the bank is in on this and the bank has been hacked, and they’re participating in the theft of your money. So you can’t reveal to them that we’re starting to take this money out to protect yourself. So what you need to do is to explain to the bank teller when they ask you a question, that you are taking the money out for a home renovation. And then later on the ruse was, she was instructed to say that she was buying a pickup truck. So this was all to get around the bank’s questions about large transfers suddenly being made by an elderly woman.

[00:05:23] Beau: Hmm. And you know, if I were at the bank and I saw an elderly woman getting ready to buy an F-250 pickup truck, I actually would sit her down.

[00:05:35] Ken: They did. And they tried.

[00:05:37] Beau: They did? Okay. So what happened?

[00:05:40] Ken: Early on, one of the bank tellers filed a report that this sounded unusual to her. And then after many more transfers, ultimately a bank official was able to take her aside and say, “Ma’am, you’re trying to send money to a business that doesn’t exist. I just looked this up and I think that you’re not sending this to people you know, are you?” And at that point, the bank and the official instructed her that you need to talk to your family about this situation. And when she did, we were able to unravel it, but it lasted for a long time. It was over the course of three weeks. She ended up sending enough money to lose most of her life savings.

[00:06:23] Beau: Wow. Okay. Now when the smoke cleared and it was clear that she had been scammed, did your mom have a sense that that is what happened? Or was she, what happened then?

[00:06:38] Ken: She knew pretty early on that she had been the victim of a scam. Once my brother talked to her and I talked to her, she was very ashamed about what had happened, despite the fact that we supported her a lot. And I, you know, I told her I didn’t know that much about scams at the time. I just had some general reading. But I was able to tell her early on that this was an attack on her by foreign organized crime gangs. And they, this happens all the time and there’s lots of elderly people who are being targeted in this fashion. So you’re not alone. It wasn’t your fault. Nevertheless, she really internalized it and just really couldn’t let it go.

[00:07:26] Beau: Did you just say that she had been attacked by transnational crime syndicates?

[00:07:35] Ken: Yeah. Do a Google search and find out where the tech support scam comes from, and you’ll find out that the FBI says that most of these criminals are in South Asia, principally India and Pakistan.

[00:07:48] Beau: Did your mother ever manage to recapture and claw back that money or was it gone?

[00:07:54] Ken: So we talked to the bank officials and at first they were optimistic because we had reported it so quickly. They said if you report it quickly, there’s a chance that we can claw back some of the money before it’s actually transferred out of the country. But as it turned out that was not true. They tried, I believe, but it didn’t work at the end of the day, and she got none of the money back at all.

[00:08:17] Beau: Ken, your mom’s experience is not an isolated incident, right? It’s part of a massive crime wave that’s as common as a lot of other crimes that sometimes end in arrests. And sadly, these don’t a lot of the times because they’re coming from overseas. And the truth is, these scams may be way more widespread than we know because people are embarrassed to talk about it. They don’t wanna report them, or they just actually don’t check their bank accounts, their investment accounts, whatever accounts they have, and they don’t catch it. So what are we talking about in the case of your mom?

[00:09:01] Ken: About eight months after my mom was scammed, I was able to convince Gallup to add a question in their crime survey that took place in September, October of 2023. And when Gallup asked Americans, “Are you the victim of the scam in the last year?” it turned out that 8% of Americans said yes to that question. Now, 8% of Americans is 21 million people. Now to put that in perspective, the state of New York has about 20 million residents, so this is bigger each year than the whole state of New York. It’s 57,000 people a day. It’s really astonishing when you hear numbers like that. So my mom was not alone by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a crime that affects millions and millions of people.

[00:09:53] Beau: So your mother becomes one of those 57,000 or more people a day who get hit by a scam. But in this story, they pick the wrong family because her son isn’t just any concerned citizen. He’s a former CIA analyst, which doesn’t mean you’re gonna go full James Bond on them ’cause that wasn’t the job that you did, but you’ve got game. So let’s rewind. You spent decades in the intelligence world. Paint the picture for us. What did that look like, and how does that background shape the way you’re fighting this battle now?

[00:10:28] Ken: So, I was an analyst for the CIA for 33 years, and we did analysis, this is top-level analysis for the President of the United States on whatever the issue of the day is. So I started off analyzing Soviet strategic forces. I wrote the estimates about our ability to monitor arms control treaties. When I was a manager, I became the chief of the nuclear weapons security task force that we created after the fall of the Soviet Union. When the question of the day was, “Who has their finger on the button and where are the loose nukes?” And then later on, I became the chief of Ukraine branch when Ukraine became an independent country. And I was also the deputy chief for the Balkan Task Force when we were at war in Bosnia, Kosovo. So this was the kind of broad analysis that we did of military, political, economic affairs for the government.

[00:11:22] Beau: This is starting in like the early eighties. And so you got to see some really interesting and probably top-secret information over many, many years. Did that also involve surveilling criminals or people who were criminal-adjacent in governments? I mean, how did that work? Were you essentially doing spycraft or what were you doing?

[00:11:46] Ken: Well, so one of the things that US government officials want to know is, when they’re dealing with a foreign country, is “Who can I trust and who should I avoid?” So yes, we do provide information about who we think the trustworthy people are. And if someone is not trustworthy, we say why we think that’s true.

[00:12:04] Beau: Okay. “Who can I trust and who should I avoid?” That to me is the big question these days when it comes to scams. We’re living in a fairly dystopian world right now where there are scams that are rampant and they’re being perpetrated by really serious people. You mentioned earlier that there were transnational criminal syndicates involved in these scams. They are actually funding some pretty dark stuff, aren’t they? Around the world?

[00:12:37] Ken: Yes, according to Interpol, the FBI and others, the proceeds from crime that are stolen from Americans via scam are going into human trafficking, human slavery, drugs. There’s a report from the US Treasury Department last year that says that the criminal gangs in Mexico that used to be exclusively drug cartels have branched out now and they’re doing scams to diversify, and the money being stolen from scam victims in the United States are going to Mexican cartels to engage in more fentanyl production and distribution.

[00:13:17] Beau: Okay, so we’re looking at a scam-scape or crime pattern here that is sort of the same old story, but a new trick. It’s a new trick in the tool bag of a criminal, right? And it’s scams. So these scams are just part of a larger network, I’m hearing, that may be focused on bolstering a drug business or a human trafficking business or… and these are businesses now. As I understand it, not all of this money is just buying Lamborghinis and diamond watches. Some of this money is finding its way back to governments that we don’t consider particularly friendly. What do you know about that?

[00:14:09] Ken: Well, one of the best reports I saw about that is a White House official last year said that the government believes that about half of North Korea’s missile program is being funded by the proceeds from cryptocurrency scams. So that’s a pretty serious situation. And that was before North Korea was fingered as perpetrating the largest cryptocurrency theft that we’ve ever found. That was just a few months ago.

[00:14:35] Beau: So the same criminal pipeline that drained your mother’s savings could be fueling drug cartels, human trafficking, and even weapons programs in hostile nations, which we just talked about in a recent episode involving IT workers from North Korea. You’re gonna hear exactly what it sounds like when that pipeline opens up in your living room, actual audio from one of these scams after the break.

[00:15:26] Beau: Before Ken Westbrook started Stop Scams Alliance, before Gallup polls and policy meetings, there was this moment his mom alone at her computer thinking she’s talking to tech support. And what you’re about to hear is almost exactly what popped up on her screen. It’s called Scareware, and it’s designed to do one thing: make you call the number on your screen.

[00:15:27] Clips: Please call support immediately. Please do not attempt to shut down or restart your computer. Doing that may lead to data loss and identity theft. The computer lock is aimed to stop illegal activity. Please call our support immediately.

[00:15:43] Beau: All right, so we’re watching this video of a real tech support scam in action. The moment it loads, a giant popup takes over the entire screen. There’s no way to click around it. There’s bold red text warning you not to shut down, and a phone number flashing like it’s the only lifeline you got, I guess, if that’s what you think you’re looking at. The whole thing has this strange, slow pulse to it, almost like the screen is breathing. It sucks. But it also, it looks fake to me, right? If you’re not familiar with the system or you’re feeling that surge of panic, you might pick up the phone too. Which makes me wonder, can that particular scam what we just saw, be the point of entry for state-sponsored hackers? I mean, if they know who the mother of a CIA analyst is, doesn’t it make more sense to hack the analyst’s mom than the analyst?

[00:16:52] Ken: I wouldn’t say state-sponsored. That particular scam is the specialty of the criminal gangs in India and Pakistan.

[00:17:01] Beau: Okay.

[00:17:02] Ken: And what is interesting about that scam? That’s the one that got my mom.

[00:17:07] Beau: Okay.

[00:17:07] Ken: I’m kind of paying a little bit of attention to it. When you look at the FBI data, that is the number one scam that attacks American seniors each year, by far, measured by the number of victims. That scam gets twice the number of victims that any other scam out there. Now there’s other scams that get more money out of the victims, but this is the number one in terms of the number of victims that are attacked by it.

[00:17:31] Beau: I want to bring up a different example of a scam that a lot of people are receiving on their phones these days in the form of a text, which is known as a smishing scam. And because it comes via SMS, I’ve received it. I’m guessing you’ve received it, Ken. In fact, I know you’ve received it ’cause we talked about it. The fake toll scam. So this fake toll scam is actually, we know, attached to criminal gangs. Can you talk about that?

[00:18:04] Ken: Yeah, so this is one of my favorite ways to begin a speech these days. I give a lot of public speeches and I very often start off with an audience participation question. Okay? I ask, “Who in the room here has received a toll road scam?” And a hundred, a hundred percent of the hands always go up every time I ask this question, ’cause everybody in America has gotten it, right? So then I ask, “Do you know where it’s coming from?” And then I get kind of a silence.

[00:18:30] Beau: Well, my phone, no.

[00:18:32] Ken: Korea or some… they don’t, they’re guessing at it.

[00:18:34] Beau: Sure, sure. Okay.

[00:18:36] Ken: And then I tell them that, well, according to many, many researchers, they’ve documented that this is actually coming from ethnic Chinese cyber criminals. They’re using SMS phishing kits from China. They’re using Chinese keyboards. They speak Chinese. The volume of the attacks goes down around Chinese New Year. It’s an ethnic Chinese attack. Now where the criminals are is hard to pin down. Most researchers think it’s Southeast Asia, perhaps Thailand, perhaps Cambodia.

[00:19:05] Beau: So, Ken, they’re using software as a service. They’re using SaaS that, you know, in everyday corporate America and everywhere else around the world, there’s software that people use to streamline work. Criminals have their own software as a service. They have crime-as-a-service. And that’s what these folks are using. They’re using a suite of things that allow them to do campaigns.

[00:19:31] Ken: They do actually. So it starts with buying a sophisticated SMS phishing kit. Then what they do, okay, what do they, they say you owe a toll. Are they really looking for your five bucks?

[00:19:44] Beau: No.

[00:19:45] Ken: What they really want you to do is to log in to what you think is your credit card company. So they’re presenting a fake website where you enter your credentials. Now they can take money out of your credit card account, right?

[00:20:00] Beau: Are they buying gift cards or what are they buying?

[00:20:04] Ken: Um, well, as far as I know, what they’re really after is to try to get into your credit card account or your payment system in order to steal a lot more than just the $5 toll.

[00:20:13] Beau: Got you. So it’s like an account takeover.

[00:20:15] Ken: Mm-hmm. They’re hitting everybody in the United States. You might not know that they took over 60,000 web domains to send these text messages. So just think about that, taking over that number of web domains to send the text messages. That’s amazing. I think as far as I know, that’s one of the first times we’ve ever seen such a large takeover of web domains.

[00:20:36] Beau: Can you tell me exactly how that works?

[00:20:40] Ken: Well, they buy a web domain. So criminals are buying web domains and they use that to send the text messages. You can send it either over the web or via the telephone system. And they’re doing both, by the way.

[00:20:53] Beau: So we’ve got popups tricking people into calling fake tech support, text messages about phantom tolls, and a gazillion other scams. Many of them are run by organized crime and they’re hitting Americans by the millions. But it’s not just a consumer problem. They’re hitting governments, they’re hitting law enforcement, they’re hitting lawmakers. So lawmakers are starting to talk about it like it’s a bigger problem, because it is. One of the most striking moments came last year in this regard when Senator Chuck Grassley opened a Senate hearing on the growing threat. Grassley’s been in Congress forever. He’s seen his fair share of crime trends. But what he says here, it’s almost as if someone from our space in cybercrime prevention wrote it. He says something that is totally not just another political sound bite. It’s a rare moment of a senior lawmaker calling scams what they are: a national security crisis.

[00:21:43] Clips: We’re here today because the scam threat is real. We’re all potential victims. The perpetrators are getting more bold, more ruthless, and more global by the day. Transnational organized crime groups are targeting all of us with industrial scale fraud. These aren’t small time lone wolf crooks. They’re sophisticated criminal networks operating with precision across the borders. They exploit technology, including artificial technology and are draining billions of dollars from Americans’ households.

[00:22:58] Beau: So, to me this is a watershed moment in Congress. Maybe you can tell our listeners why.

[00:23:09] Ken: Well, what he went on to say, he said, “Let me be absolutely clear. This is a national security crisis hiding in plain sight and we’re inadvertently funding it.” And then he concluded his remarks by saying, “This isn’t just a call to protect the elderly. It’s a call to defend our country’s integrity, its financial security, and its moral obligation to protect the innocent.”

[00:23:34] Beau: Now you’re a former CIA agent. I think that he’s talking about it from that point of view, isn’t he? The integrity of the United States from an outside threat.

[00:23:46] Ken: Yeah. So you asked to put this in perspective. That’s the first time I’ve heard a senior person in the Congress say that our nation is under attack. This is a national security threat, and we need to defend ourselves. I’ve never heard that before, so I was very pleased with Senator Grassley’s framing of it, which I think is the proper framing. We have to understand, you get those toll road scams and the scammy text messages and the scammy emails all the time. People in America have to understand that these are attacks by foreign organized crime gangs, and we need to defend ourselves against that threat.

[00:24:22] Beau: Now that’s why organizations like Stop Scams Alliance matter. Tell me about Stop Scams Alliance and why you started it and what you’re doing.

[00:24:36] Ken: Right. Well, so of course my mom got me interested in the subject to begin with, and then I did a deep dive into this phenomenon, about how pervasive it is. And then I started to look around, especially overseas, whether there’s any best practices that are going on around the world, and I found some in both the UK and in Australia. I actually flew to London last summer and met with various government officials, various telephone regulators, bank regulators, and I would ask all of them, “What’s working for you? Why is it that you seem to be bending the curve on this? Whereas in the US, the statistics are going the opposite.”

[00:25:14] Beau: Now is that right? In other countries, they are actually starting to mitigate the flow of these scams.

[00:25:20] Ken: Yes. In the UK, according to the statistics reported by the government, they flattened the curve there, and Australia actually is reporting a pretty significant downturn of about 35% reductions in fraud losses over the last two years. Whereas in the US, it’s the opposite direction. It’s a 65% increase in our case.

[00:25:40] Beau: So in Australia, what are they doing differently in Australia than the UK that we’re not doing here?

[00:25:45] Ken: Yeah, I think it’s three things. When you look at the UK situation and Australia, in both cases, they’ve done three main things. The first is to recognize that this is a national security issue and it’s a priority. They put somebody in charge of putting together a strategy. They have a strategy and an implementation plan. So that’s bucket one. Bucket two is in both cases, they’re centralizing data more so they get better collection from scam victims, from banks, from telcos, from social media organizations so they can get a better picture of the threat environment, which enables ’em to move faster to shut things down. That’s bucket two. Bucket three is a little more complicated. It has to do with analyzing the ways that scammers communicate with us and how they get the money out the door. So this is sort of a kill-chain scenario. And what Australia, if you hear the fraud czar talk, he says, “What we’ve done is we’ve looked at what, how are we being attacked? We’re being attacked through email, text messaging, phone, malicious ads, and malicious websites. Those are the main ways we’re being attacked.” And in each case, they’re putting either blocking or authentication measures in place so that you can more easily determine who the bad guys are and who the good guys are.

[00:27:07] Beau: You said a key word there. Fraud czar. Now, so there’s a fraud czar in Australia. Is there a fraud czar in the United States?

[00:27:18] Ken: Unfortunately there’s not one, but we need to have one in the worst way, and that’s something that Stop Scams Alliance does is to advocate for the creation of a fraud czar. I hesitate to use the word fraud czar because that kind of has some negative connotations sometimes. But basically if you view this as a national security threat, if you accept the fact that criminals are at war with us trying to steal our money at scale, then you need to have a general in charge of figuring out how to fight back, and that’s what we need is somebody in charge of a strategy.

[00:27:51] Beau: Why is the United States being attacked more than say the UK and Australia right now?

[00:27:58] Ken: Yeah, that’s something that I’ve tried to look into, and the answers are not crystal clear, but you know, first of all you have to think that all three of the countries speak English. And that turns out to be handy for scammers who also speak English. But that doesn’t differentiate us very much. We’re a wealthy country, but you know, so is the UK and Australia, so that doesn’t differentiate us that much either. One thing that does differentiate us and the Secret Service has talked about this, they say that criminals are finding the defenses are starting to go up around the world and they cite Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and the EU. And because the defenses are going up, particularly in the banking sector, the criminals are telling the Secret Service that they’re now targeting the United States more than they used to. So we’ve become a target. We’ve become the softest target, which leads then to criminals starting to target us more than other countries.

[00:28:52] Beau: Criminals around the world are closing in. You don’t need to be rich, you just need to be easy to find or trusting, or you’re just not a digital native. The easy-to-find part’s easy to take care of. You just, you know, use a service like DeleteMe. Have your personal information removed from online. Easy peasy. But with so much money changing hands, I wanna know like what else we’re doing to stop it. That’s after the break.

[00:29:09] Beau: If scams are draining more money than the entire DOJ budget, why isn’t it being treated with the same urgency as other national security threats?

[00:29:20] Ken: Well, it’s way bigger than the DOJ budget, by the way. I mean the FTC thinks that accounting for underreporting… so remember we talked about this is rarely reported. So FTC does estimates of how much the underreporting is and when they do the math, they come up with numbers like $158 billion a year. So now you’re talking about the annual revenues of a company like Bank of America or Home Depot. It’s that kind of size of dollars that are leaving our country and going into the coffers of foreign organized crime gangs. So it’s huge.

[00:29:54] Beau: The other number I heard recently was $600 million going directly to North Korea.

[00:30:00] Ken: Well, I can believe that.

[00:30:02] Beau: And so we’re talking about a huge amount of money. I think both of us have experience doing this. I’m not gonna say how, and I would never name names because I really like doing it, but I’ve written white papers before for senators and other Congress people and I bet you have too. And what that means, if you’re listening, you don’t know, it’s like we have expertise in an area and lawmakers cannot have expertise in all areas. It’s impossible. But they do need to understand these things. Do you think lawmakers understand the threat?

[00:30:41] Ken: I don’t think they understand it well enough. I think they are hearing from their constituents, they’re being flooded with phone calls from people who are asking for government support. But scams, as I said, is a hard thing to measure. So the question was, why is it that we’re not responding to this national emergency? And I think it’s because of the under-measurement problem. So look at the US is responding… the US responds very well when we really come to understand that we have a significant problem. Let’s take deaths from fentanyl. It’s measured. It’s publicized. There’s 80 or 90,000 people a year being killed from fentanyl overdoses. So that now elevates it to the national attention, and we’re creating a… there was an executive order in January that ordered the military and the government to really go after fentanyl interdiction. So that’s really good. We’ve done it recently with healthcare fraud because we came to learn the hundreds of millions of dollars that are being stolen by foreign criminals mostly from our healthcare system, so that too became visible. And the DOJ just a couple of weeks ago announced the creation of a task force to fight that. When it comes to scams, it’s underreported and it’s not easily known, so it’s hard for lawmakers to put it into the proper perspective.

[00:32:06] Beau: Do you believe policymakers fully understand the scale and global reach of these crimes?

[00:32:15] Ken: I don’t think they do. I mean, when I talk to congressional staff, they’re often surprised to hear that the toll road scam is coming from Chinese cyber criminals because they haven’t ever heard that. You know, before you mentioned that Chuck Grassley said that this is a national security threat, but that has never appeared in writing in any publication that the US government has ever done. Never. I mean, I’ve looked and I cannot find a single instance. So in other words, the government is not telling Congress in vivid enough detail what the size of this problem is and where it’s coming from, and more importantly, what we need to do to stop it.

[00:32:53] Beau: Ken, if you had to convey the full scale and urgency of this problem, not in statistics, but in a way that someone could see and feel, how would you describe what’s really happening inside of these global scam operations?

[00:33:09] Ken: Okay, so The Economist recently did a study on scams. They called scams a “trillion-dollar enterprise,” and they interviewed a fellow who escaped from Myanmar. He was a prisoner there who was forced to scam 12 hours a day, all day long. And he was asked how the day began. When the day begins for a scam camp victim in Myanmar, a Chinese crime boss walks to the front of the room and he leads the room in the following chant: “Cripple the economies of the US and Europe. This is World War III.” So these trillion-dollar now criminals in Southeast Asia, and it’s spreading around the world now, by the way, have organized themselves to steal money from US citizens at scale, and they’re now being successfully extracting hundreds of billions of dollars out of our economy, and it’s going to fuel more and more organized crime overseas.

[00:34:09] Beau: Okay so what do we do?

[00:34:24] Ken: Huh. Well, so our main mission right now is to paint the proper picture about the actual size of this problem, which then leads to policy solutions about how to combat it. It’s important to know where it’s coming from. It’s important to know how many victims there are. It’s important to know the main methods of attack so that we can raise the defenses properly. So that’s our main task right now, is just to get the data in place to paint the picture properly for policymakers, and then to arm them with best practices that we’re collecting around the world, especially UK, Australia, but also Singapore and other countries are doing a pretty good job of bending the curve and we can learn from them to put the proper defenses in place.

[00:35:10] Beau: Ken Westbrook, thank you so much for joining us today. If people want to go and learn more about Stop Scams Alliance, where do they go?

[00:35:19] Ken: www.stopscamsalliance.org.

[00:35:23] Beau: Great. Um, we’re gonna have you back and get an update soon. I really appreciate having you here.

[00:35:29] Ken: Well, it was a pleasure.

Beau: And now it’s time for the Tinfoil Swan. Our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. So how can you build a better defense against this threat? The first step is to recognize that your personal data is often the currency that scammers use to get your money. The other thing is your personal sense of survival. I mean, they operate on fear. This information that’s out there is easily gettable. It’s how criminals can find you. The other way they can find you and guess who you are is by putting something, for instance, on an obituary site. So who’s looking to see who died recently? Well, older adults do that. And they’re gonna be easier to target because they’re not digital natives.

You can fight back by doing several things. Take control of your data. And the easiest way to do that is with a service like DeleteMe. DeleteMe makes this podcast possible, and we specialize in removing your personal information from data broker websites, period. When your data isn’t as easy to find, it’s harder for a scammer to create a dossier to get at you, and they’re gonna go to the easier person to find, right?

The other things you can do is recognize red flags. Be wary of any unexpected call, text, or popup that creates a sense of panic in you. This is a classic scam tactic. If you’re scared, take a breath, because you might be fine if you don’t do anything after that sense of fear hits you. Verify, don’t click. That’s another thing, right? If you get a message about a problem with something in your world, don’t deal with the person that’s reached out to you. Go directly to a website or, you know, reach out to the organization in question. Talk to a human, right? Google the number where they say they’re working, and ask to speak to someone in that department. Call yourself. You control the interaction.

By proactively protecting your information and being on guard against these deceptive tactics, you’re not just staying safe, you’re fighting back against a global threat. You are actually joining Ken Westbrook’s army. And if you wanna learn more about getting a discount on a DeleteMe subscription, check out the information in the credits. It’s all there. Stay safe. Thanks for listening.