Personal And Professional Challenges Of Cybercrime

That Solo Life, Episode 291: Personal And Professional Challenges Of Cybercrime

Michelle Kane (00:12):
Thank you for joining us for this episode of That Solo Life, the podcast for PR pros and marketers who work for themselves, people like me, Michelle Kane, with Voice Matters, and my wonderful co-host, Karen Swim of Solo PR Pro. Hey, Karen, how are you today?

Karen Swim, APR (00:28):
I'm doing great, Michelle. How are you?

Michelle Kane (00:31):
Hey, rolling along. We are just rolling along, riding all the waves, right? It's all we can do.

Karen Swim, APR (00:39):
Yes, we are. And today we have kind of an important topic to talk about. Well, it's not kind of important. It is important. It's not necessarily the happiest of topics, but it is a necessary topic.

Michelle Kane (00:54):
It is. It's not super exciting, but we're talking about online fraud, cyber fraud, scams, phishing, all those wonderful things that we come across mostly in emails, sometimes in texts, sometimes in phone numbers, phone calls, rather. I know, a couple of months ago, I got a call from my bank, and I'm always super paranoid, and I said, okay, that's the bank's name. That's their number. It was after hours. I answered it, and the person was claiming to be their fraud department asked me, did you purchase X amount at this place? And I said, no, so far, so normal. And then they started asking for things about my debit card, and I thought, you know what? I said, you know what? Put a hold on my card and I will call the bank in the morning. And then my light bulb went off. I was like, you know what?

(01:46):
I can actually do that myself from the app. So as I'm talking to this person, I open up the app, I put a pause on my debit card, and they're getting a little antsy, and I thought, yeah, I'm done with you. I hung up, called the actual 800 number on the back to speak to my bank, and they said, yeah, no, wasn't us. As I was on the phone with the actual bank, I was pummeled. You know how they say your computer server gets slammed with all these attempts to get through from cyber attacks? He was doing that with my phone. I got, I think, no less than six calls all from different branch numbers from the bank. So every phone number was legit, but none of the calls were, so I reported it to my bank, of course, but yeah, so ended up getting new debit cards and all that fun stuff. So the point of that is they're getting really good at it.

Karen Swim, APR (02:42):
They are for many years. My stance on the bank calls is I never answer them. I let them go to voicemail, and then if they say it's the fraud department calling me, then I call my actual bank with the number that I know is the bank, and then I call and I verify. Sometimes it has been the fraud department, but you can call them back and then they say, yes, that was us. Then I know I'm speaking to my actual bank, but I never, ever, ever even answer those calls because, and I think we should all probably take that posture. A lot of us use the, we don't answer unknown numbers. We silence those and just let them go. Any legitimate business, even when it's an emergency, even if there has been, they will leave you a voicemail.

(03:32):
You're not like us. We'll make a phone call and if somebody doesn't answer, we'll just hang up and we'll either send a text or something. But banks, financial institutions, legitimate businesses, the government, they are not going to do that. They're going to leave a voicemail, so then you can always call back. And so I don't ever feel bad about not answering the phone. And the reason I started doing that is because long before AI was a part of our daily lexicon, I had read these horrifying stories about them cloning your voice and being able to use that and to do criminal activity with that. And so I didn't want anybody to have my voice saying yes or no. That was actually a scammer.

Michelle Kane (04:22):
True. That's so true. And that goes even years back in my many jobs in different offices where the toner scam was the thing where if you got that call about your copier, I'm like, hang up on you. And what you say is a hundred percent correct. At a recent Rotary Club meeting, we had someone from a local bank talk exactly about the different types of scams, and she said she rarely, if ever, will pick up the phone, and she recommends just what you said, you can always call back and no big whoop. Yeah. And they are, they're getting so good at it, and hey, since we stopped policing the Russians, so hey, yay.

Karen Swim, APR (05:10):
Yeah,

Michelle Kane (05:10):
I'm sure we'll see a lovely uptick in this. So

Karen Swim, APR (05:13):
It's gotten fabulous. So crazy. If you have a website, you have undoubtedly been spammed. If you have an email address, the email attacks are on the rise, and there's, we'll drop some links in the show notes of some resources that you can read up on what's happening with Gmail and Outlook. And if you have the ability, and there are some services out there if you don't use an iPhone where you can mask your email address. So that's the other thing, I've stopped giving out my real phone number. I have a burner app on my phone, and when I sign up for things, I use the burner number because it's not connected to my personal information. I can burn the number. It literally just goes away. And with email, there are services where you can mask the address, so it's a fake address, but then the service will actually deliver it to your real email address. And so that's a layer of protection. It is not fun to read about all of these things, but there are, again, we'll drop some links. There are publications that cover these kind of things. None of us can afford to not be smart about what scammers are doing. And as you said, the attacks are coming from text messages, phone calls, emails, links. I've stopped clicking links on my cell phone because your cell phone treats links differently, so you could end up getting spoofed that way. So

(06:46):
It sounds super paranoid, but we're in this era where automation so smart, used for evil, and they keep developing things to hit you, and it doesn't mean that something won't happen. I think probably everybody has a story of fraud having to replace a card, somebody opening up an account in their name. All of these things can happen, but the more vigilant we are, the better we are to not only protect ourselves, but to act quickly if something happen.

Michelle Kane (07:16):
I mean, the good news is we have many ways at our disposal of fending this off like you just shared. I don't know if it's just with the Google Pixel phone or if it's a Google based Android thing where you can just screen your calls. So anytime I get a call, I don't know who it is, or maybe I don't want to talk to them, I hit the screen and the automated AI will answer for me, or thankfully, there's just all these different ways that we can offend this off. I know recently with EZPass, I don't know if it hit Michigan, but in New York and in the northeast, you get a text of, oh, you owe this toll click here. I'm like, you know what? It's a nuisance. But the good thing is we always have these other steps we can take. So rather than click that link, I would just go to my little EZPass account and say, Hmm, for real. And usually, no, no, not for real.

Karen Swim, APR (08:13):
Yeah, I've gotten all the toll emails. I've had family members get them. One of my family members actually did click the link, and so I had to do this thing in a family group chat to remind everyone, and you're right, Michelle, it's just even with social media where, remember the days where we used to do this thing called open networking? I don't do that anymore. I'm really careful about pictures. It's become a very dark place and we just have to be really careful. But there's another side to this discussion, and it involves our direct work as communicators, because sometimes we have to send links, sometimes we have to point people to websites. We of course want people to go to our client's websites. We want people to download things. And so in this environment, we have to be really careful as well.

Michelle Kane (09:11):
Yes, absolutely. And that does really speak to when you say downloading things, it really speaks to what we say all the time. Build your business on land that you own. If you want someone to download something rather than just dangle a link out there, how's the link on your website? I mean, that could be a landing page that's still part of your online ecosystem. Just so people know that they can trust that. And not only will that build that trust in that micro moment that will serve to build overall trust in you. And really the way you present yourself to the outside world that way can only help you rather than harm you.

Karen Swim, APR (09:56):
This is so true, and trust is a big word for us as communicators, and it keeps coming up in every single detail of our jobs because I agree, it's building trust with your audience, being consistent in the types of communications that you send. Because if you send something that's wildly out of character, your audience may not trust that. I've seen companies that email me all the time suddenly end up in spam because of a subject line or because of something, and you don't want that to happen. We can't 100% prevent that problem because sometimes it's a word that triggers the automation, but I think we have to really dig even deeper to make sure that we are not only establishing trust, but we're taking actions to continue to make us trustworthy, that we're updating our privacy policies, that we're looking at the way that we share links, even when it comes to the media. The media does not like tracking links. Please don't send them to them. Don't do that. People still do that. People use open trackers, and those open trackers will also add a tracker to the link. Please don't do that because it could result in your pitches not getting read further. You could actually get banned by the entire domain of a publication. So

Michelle Kane (11:24):
Good times

Karen Swim, APR (11:25):
We live in different times do not do crazy promotions that look like a scam. Don't give people money unsolicited and don't ask for money without having a relationship because people are really protecting their space and their space online these days.

Michelle Kane (11:47):
Yeah, I think that's really, really important and important point because what sounds like a great promotion, while you're talking about it, anything that even remotely approaches something that could be flagged as fraud, you certainly don't want to use it to promote your company. Yeah, I just, there's not much more to say about that. Just don't do it. I mean, people are still mad at you too for putting an album in their IPO accounts.

Karen Swim, APR (12:20):
Yes, I remember that. I mean, it still comes up all these years later. Two, just they're still living that down. Yeah, don't give people things that they really didn't ask for, especially in this day and age because, and sometimes I say to myself, my God, I've become so paranoid, but I am that person that when I'm coming back to my car that I check it for trackers and I'm looking, and I don't get into my car without looking into the backseat because the world has taught me that I can walk on the sunny side of the street and I can be like, follow la, la, la. But with follow la, la, la, I also have to be very, very vigilant about safety, and I'm looking forward to a time when I can disconnect from the internet entirely and live a life free of all of these problems because it's exhausting.

Michelle Kane (13:22):
It is time consuming, but certainly worthwhile. I always say a little bit of paranoia goes a long way. You can have a little healthy dose of paranoia,

Karen Swim, APR (13:32):
And I want to say this on this podcast. I recently shared this on my LinkedIn as well, that there are, and again, we'll drop links to the publications, but there are people that work in this space that do roundups and will give you digestible bites of the latest and greatest in steps that you can take so that you don't have to, if you're not one of those people that really doesn't want to digest all of what's happening with the dark web and cyber crime. And so one of those people, Shelley Kramer, and she works in the technology and research space, she's very smart. She talks about other things as well, but she is fantastic about sharing this information quickly and making it very relatable and helping us to understand the danger attached to it. So I believe that a lot of our audience know Shelley, and they follow her, but if you don't, I would encourage you to do so and to find other trusted voices like that that can help us navigate, because none of us can really be an expert on all of the things. But as communicators, it is important for us to understand this, to keep our own finances and emails and information safe, but also to make sure that as we communicate that we're protecting our clients and making sure that something that we're doing does not hit a sore point or look like something that's

Michelle Kane (15:02):
Nefarious. Yes, yes. Always, always good to conduct our business and live that way. And hats off to Shelley. Usually when she points something like that out, you have those people that you automatically know. Okay, that's trusted information. Freaking me too. But thank you. But no, we hope you've found some value in this and we're pretty sure, unfortunately, that most all of you have endured something that we've talked about, but that's okay. It just keeps us on our toes. Life is always keeping us on our toes. So we hope if you got some value out of this, share it around because people do need to be reminded to practice safe internet. And until next time, thanks for listening to “That Solo Life.”