This episode features Marc Evans, a financial crimes detective and co-founder of Fraud Hero. Marc discusses job scams, social engineering, and identity theft and elaborates on his role as a detective and Fraud Hero's mission to help prevent fraud.
Highlights:
He emphasizes that job scams are a form of cybercrime with complexities involving multiple levels of victimization.
He shares that scammers often use social engineering to exploit victims, obtaining personal information via data breaches and using it to execute scams.
Marc mentions that once scammers have partial information, they can quickly gather more details about their victims through third-party data brokers.
“And you use the term right there, human hacking. That's exactly what social engineering is. It's just manipulating a person into giving over some confidential information or getting them to carry out an act that they shouldn't carry out. And sometimes that act can have criminal repercussions when it comes to it.”
He highlights that protecting personal information is crucial and suggests freezing credit reports as a preventive measure.
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Marc also discusses various scam tactics such as phishing, vishing (voice phishing), and smishing (SMS phishing), explaining how each method aims to manipulate individuals into providing sensitive information.
Marc stresses the importance of pausing, thinking, and verifying before reacting to suspicious messages or calls.
Listen to: How To Spot a Fake LinkedIn Profile And Its Dangers
Marc gives examples of business email compromise and in-person scams where scammers coerce individuals into handing over money. He provides an example of an employee giving fake employees (whom he thought were actual employees) using a Deepfake AI video. The employee gave the imposters access to 25 million dollars. I shared this in an article back in June.
“You have some people gathering money within their business, walking out the door, delivering it to another person who they believe works for the business. And then, come to find out, 30 minutes later, they were tricked. And now the business sometimes out of maybe a couple thousand dollars, I've seen to well over a million dollars.”
The significance of using protective services like LifeLock and credit monitoring is discussed, although Marc notes they could be more foolproof. I only use some of these services as assurances and extra alert touchpoints.
He explains certain services can be beneficial in alerting individuals to potential identity theft, allowing them to act swiftly to mitigate further damage.
Fraud Detective's Hack: How to "Think.Pause.Verify" Job Scams