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I got weekly complaints and then it became to daily complaints. And at some point, it was like I'd get several per day.

And so over the time, it was like literally thousands that I basically had to sort out with. And it became a huge burden on my time, on my mental health.

Welcome to the knife. I'm Hannah Smith.
I'm Patia Eaton. This week we speak with Alec Kouros.

Alec has been the victim of online scammers for almost 20 years and we talked to him about how that happened and continues to happen and all of the different ways that this has affected his life.

Alec is a professor at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. We actually mentioned him in a previous off-record episode 122 and then he reached out to us.

Turns out one of his students is a listener of the knife and we are really excited to talk with Alec today.

As a quick note, Alec had just finished speaking at a conference when we interviewed him and so his voice is just a little bit scratchy. Let's get into the interview.

Alec, thank you so much for joining us on the knife.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, we're so excited to speak with you.

I mean, when Hannah told me that you had emailed her after our off-record episode featuring your story came out, I was like, wow, that's incredible. It was cool.

I actually had a student who was a big fan of your podcast, and she was excited. She sent me a message, and she's saying, like, this is really cool.

I love this podcast. And your story was featured.
And so she was very happy. And so I listened to it.
And I thought it was awesome. So

it's a delight to be here. So she actually thought I could reach out and

be able to tell you a bit more about my story. Well, yeah, we're so excited about that.
As you mentioned, we did touch on your story a little bit in a previous off record.

It started because I happened upon a Reddit post that you made from 2015 that is titled, For the Past Eight Years, My Photos Have Been Used by Romance Scammers, aka Catfishers.

I really need Reddit's help to have this get the attention of Facebook.

So we talked about what we're able to find online and through interviews, but now here you are, able to tell us more about your experience.

And we're going to dig into that identity, you know, fraud situation that happened to you personally.

But as well, we're going to talk like more broadly about identity fraud on the internet and how AI has really come to change that and progress that. But first, let's go back to the beginning.

Can you tell us, you know, how did this all start for you personally? Like, what was going on in your life

that first time that you were scammed? You know, how did you first become aware that this was happening? Sure, I'm happy to go back.

You know, if we kind of think collectively going back to around 2007, like Facebook was pretty new, like 2006-ish. YouTube, I think, was 2005.

The social web was very, very new. I was presenting a lot.
I was spending, you know, I was a professor, probably eight or nine years at that point. So fairly still relatively early in my career.

I was in Barcelona for a conference. I was married at that point.

I was three or four years into being married. Back then,

I didn't really care about who posted on my Facebook. So it was the settings were quite open, and people posted things, and strangers could read your posts and so on, and people could interact.

And you just weren't thinking about that sort of thing. And so a lot of my photos and my profile was certainly open to the world.
Very different today.

And this was like it's Barcelona, but I live in Canada. So, you know, it was early then, but late at night here in Canada.
And I got these frantic messages from my wife at the time, who was

quite upset about these.

It was from someone named, I think it was Lori, I won't share the last name, but it was someone who shared a number of posts.

They were really mad at me because I apparently was in a relationship with this person, that this person thought I was in a relationship with them.

Like I did really know what was going on at that time. But they were mad because this person had found out, apparently, that I was married, that I had a child, that

my wife at the time was pregnant with a second.

And so I received this very frantic email because I hadn't read these posts yet, but I just heard from again my partner that she was quite upset at me and like, what's going on?

And then even my brother called and he's like, what's going on here? And, you know, just kind of in disbelief, like, what's been going on?

And it was

really

confusing at that point. And I looked at the posts.
I had no idea who this person was or why they were thinking this. And at the time, I really just dismissed it as some sort of prank.

Like, I didn't think that this person really truly believed that they were in a relationship with me. I thought they were just, you know, someone playing a joke on me or something.
Yeah.

And so the posts are they're coming through as posts on your page or messages. Is that? Yeah, like there were posts on my public page.
So it's a tool

that my partner and my brother could see this. Everyone could see this.
So, you know, and it's my reputation.

Like, yeah, I'm basically there's a scandal on my Facebook page that, you know, is, you know, goes against my reputation and so on.

And do you recall, like, not verbatim, but do you recall what they said? Oh, it was, it was very similar to what I said before. It was just like, how, you know, how dare you?

We've been together for, I forget the number of months.

You know, you've been together and you lied to me. And how could you have had this wife and a pregnant wife, you know, at that time as well?

well like how could you have done that sort of thing and so it was really this sort of sense of betrayal but again i thought this was like a prank and i never actually spoke to this person beyond this like i i basically said a couple of things stopped posting my wall and then blocked them and then i thought it wasn't like a big deal like it was just it must have been a prank i think finding yourself in that situation where suddenly someone's posting on your public facebook wall that you have been cheating on your wife essentially right and then your wife at the time calls you.

What was that conversation like? Was she

worried? Yeah, like what, was she like, hey, what are you doing? Well, yeah, she was certainly worried.

And the bad thing about it is this person was from, I mean, there's lots of bad things about it, but one of the bad things about it was it was a person in North Carolina.

I had been there once in my life, and I just happened to have been in North Carolina. for like about 10 hours,

probably a few months before that for a speech she I gave. So it was just, just, I just happened to have been in North Carolina.

And so it was like, this is really strange, but this person thought we were in a long-term relationship. And so, yeah, it wasn't a very pleasant conversation because, you know, this is the first

that this ever happened. And, you know, I'm away at a conference, so I can't be there to like talk about it.
So we're on the phone, we're at different time zones.

So it was very uncomfortable and really left. It wasn't comfortable.
And,

you know, after we kind of looked at the facts and so on, like, it was pretty easy to see that this was not something I had done.

And I do believe, I think from what I remember, and again, this is 2007, so I don't remember everything, but I do believe that this person ended up also messaging my wife at the time as well and trying to like work this up, which made sense.

Like this is what you'd probably do if you were actually in this situation, like, you know, to compare notes and that sort of thing.

And the notes didn't match up from what I understand or what I remember. I wasn't privy to those particular conversations, but you know, it was just sort of a settled thing.

We just, you know, a day, day or two beyond that, it wasn't, it wasn't a thing. Like, it was just sort of like the strange thing.

It was more like, who's this person pranking and why, why are they doing this on my wall? Yeah, because it seemed so unbelievable. Right.
Yeah.

And so it was more likely that it was someone who didn't like me for whatever reason and, you know, who knows.

Was like doing this mean thing to publicly shame you and try to, you know,

cause trouble in your life. But

did you have any questions for her? Does your wife have any questions for as far as like,

when was the last time you saw him in person?

So this person did, I do remember that this person did say that they never saw me face to face. And so even had I been in North Carolina, like they wouldn't have seen me anyways.

But at that time, it just wasn't plausible enough to ask more questions, which saw those great things. So there was, so it just just kind of left very

like in subsequent matters, when this happened, there were way more questions because it started happening happening.

There were more patterns here, more questions to ask because it became, you know, this is not just happening once, it's happening a bunch of times.

But in this first time that it happens, is your primary sort of takeaway, this is a prank, this is a one-off, and not that someone's been duped? Absolutely.

There was, there was no suspicion until years later, like that this was actually something that was starting. Like this was just the beginning of something.

And this may have not have been the first one. You know, who knows how many times it happened before that, but the person never contacted me.

So this could have happened, been happening for years before that. But for some reason, the scammer in this case not only used my photos, but they also used my name.

That wasn't very typical at the time.

Gotcha. So that's how she was able to track you down because the scammer used your real name.
Right. Can you talk us through when you start to realize that this is not an isolated incident?

Like when does that occur? I think it was like, it wasn't until like this just sort of stopped happening. And like it was, it was the one time.
And then I got infrequent messages once in a while.

But it wasn't until two or three years that it really started to accelerate. And so I got.
you know, weekly complaints and then it became to daily complaints.

And at some point, it was like I'd get several per day. And so over the time, it was like literally thousands that I basically had to

sort out with. And it became a huge burden on my time, on my mental health, because

I'm doing multiple things there. First of all, you know, I think it was all sorted with my family.
Like we understood this. But in many cases, their photos were being used, right?

So in some cases, It's not just my identity. It's because some of the photos they had were me of me with with my children and with my partner and with my parents, for instance.

What you're saying is, is people, I'm guessing mostly women reaching out to you saying very similar perhaps to that first person

who, you know, put it on your Facebook wall is that, hey, I think we're in a relationship or. they're reaching out assuming that they've been in some kind of

online relationship with you and that this is supported by these Facebook pages that are not yours, but that when they're sent to you, you recognize that this is you.

This is not just you, but there's another Facebook page that might be like your brother or parents. Is that correct? Well, yeah, so there's very different complexities of this.

So, the people that reached out to me were either people who were very mad at me, that they think they found the real me, that I was the one behind these profiles.

And so that I set up fake profiles with my face for whatever reason, or sometimes with my own name, like sometimes they'd use my name. You know, it really depended on how they use this.

So people would be very, very mad at me because they think that they found me and they found my real contact information and they found out who I really was, or they have discovered at some point that my photos were being used.

And this was all largely due to the number of sort of scammer reveal sites that came up on the web. Like a lot of people who got scammed in this way would create sites that like Scam Watch and

similar varieties to that, which would list scammers. And so a lot of victims would come together and see sites like that.

So they would see my name and my face listed on these sites to, you know, for people to avoid and/or avoid. It'd often say, this person, if you've seen these photos, these belong to Dr.

Alec Kouros, and he's a professor. And like, they'd give the backstory of who I am.
So some people would see these stories and then they'd contact me, not mad at me.

They'd sort of share their story with me. Sometimes it would be, you know, really sad.
They'd sent a lot of money. They might have left their relationship that they might have been in.

Like these, you know, in one case, someone said that they mortgaged their house or they, you know, they liquidated their assets because they'd often give all their money to the scammer version of me.

And so they were really, really in deep

with these particular relationships. And yeah, so I was either mad or sad.
And here I'm going to share this story with you so that you can share with others and for you to know or be aware.

And in some cases, there's a few, and I wouldn't say they're rare, but probably, you know, five or 10%,

if not more, of those cases, they were not only sharing this for me, but they also had a glimmer of hope, like maybe I would be single and available and perhaps interested in them still.

And so even though they fell in love with the wrong persona, like not my personality, not my words, but just the images themselves, somehow they pieced together someone and they felt that it was still possible or feasible to be with me because, again, they fell in love with someone who's not me, who's not my voice in those cases, but my pictures and something that they sort of pieced together from these scammer calls and so on.

And that was kind of the sad part, like there's still some hope, right? Like

they were heartbroken and really drawn in and they didn't know what to do at that point.

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And as you're becoming more, I mean, it sounds like you're getting, you know, dozens and then hundreds and thousands of people writing to you over time.

What measures do you take earlier on in this whole ordeal to

make your public persona online more private?

So that was the difficult part, right? So there was a choice there because, you know, everyone, you know, people, it's easy for people to say, like, you should just lock up all your pictures.

And I did, I locked up a lot of pictures, but there was a point that if you lock up more pictures, then the people who are looking for you who need to find you that are in these scams, because the pictures are already out, like they're gone.

They're already in these databases. They're shared by scammers.

I mean, this is, well, we often think like we, if you watch the documentary, like the catfishing documentaries and that sort of thing, like where the term comes from and so on, they often project these people as, you know, people in the U.S., for instance, who are doing this as some and they might know the person or so on.

But the reality is most of these scams are perpetrated by people outside of the U.S., outside of the Canadian or U.S. jurisdiction.
And these are criminal activities.

I mean, these are dark terrorist type activities that provide a lot of profit for these groups.

It's organized crime.

And so, you know, there are people people who share photos of scammers that they've collected they've sort of gathered these and they share databases so the photos are out there already so part of me is like if i make everything private they'll never find who i actually am so the people who need to find me who are being scammed can't find me and and on the other hand um and then i won't know like it might even get worse for me in some ways and then if i open it up of course then i'm you know more of my photos will will be gone so probably the biggest choice on that front that I made was just not including children, not, you know, being careful in terms of what I share.

Before then, I didn't really think that

using photos of my children would be as big of a deal as it was. And even thinking, like, you know, I have a photo that was used in one of these scams.

It was like when my dad passed away in 2013, my mother is like... on his grave basically crying, right? It's like, it's this incredibly powerful photo.

And I think like, I'm sharing this because I think it's important for me to share with the people that I trust and that I love.

But that seemed like that endearing, that love, that photograph is powerful for someone else to see and to use it in a way that you would portray someone's trust to lie to them.

And so the power of photos, I was very cautious in terms of what I shared beyond that point. Wow.
Yeah, because at that point, it's like your stuff is already out there. Yeah.

So so i can imagine that you would rather know if your photos of you your family these very personal photos are being used to cause harm and scam people and take their money and abuse them emotionally i mean what does that feel like to know that like your personal photos things that you i think we all think of as ours like this is my family this is my life and these are my photos are being used in that way like what does that feel like

well it's gross. It's like, I don't know how other words would describe it, but it's gross thinking of, you know, my children's photos and images being used in these scams.

Like, it wasn't just the photos, but at some point, all right, so it's the sophisticated scam would be.

So, again, it's not just email communication. This is, they were using Skype back then.
It was an off and video. The scammers typically would say when, when they tried to turn on video, and

back then, the video was harder to do.

Like, it was more of an excuse that was plausible like your skype's not working my camera's not working whatever else makes more sense back then today it's less you know you would be have more of an expectation for those things to work or to really prove who that is and of course there's complications with that as well but again this is this is organized crime so it's not a single perpetrator behind this so there would be sophisticated photos take a Facebook profile so there'd be a fake me with whatever name I think I remember one was Alex Gallert

and then they'd take my mother's pictures and then they would connect that to Alex Gallert's Facebook profile and they'd take my daughter's photos and create another profile, so on.

So there would be this, it looks more plausible that this is a real person. And then they'd connect a bunch of fake profiles.

So it looks like this person is a real person with a real daughter and so on. Then they'd have someone talk to the victims, not only from the person that's purported to be me, but from my mother.

So they'd have a mother scammer, you know, or someone with a female voice talking to them like it's my mother, and they'd have people talking to them like it's my daughter.

And so this really, really puts the nails in the coffin in terms of like someone's belief or disbelief around this once you start talking to the entire family. So it's growth on that level.

Like it's not only incredibly powerful for these scammers to do that because it really did the job to make it like I'm not only talking to you. I'm developing a relationship with your mother.

Your daughter is saying that she wants to see me and so on.

But to think that my kids, my family's identities were perpetrated and, you know, and sort of brought into this, like that made me carry a lot of guilt around this.

And it's just like, this is the thing. Like, it's fine.
You're using mine. It's bad enough that you're taking these people for all their money, but those aren't the only victims.
It's also.

my family, right? Like, I didn't see myself as a victim. Like, I see the people that are sending money and so on as a victim.
I'm not sure. I'm more of a medium, I guess, in some ways than a victim.

But because of the choices I made in terms of what I put online, it did affect my family and my family dynamics, and you know, and my children's futures.

I mean, their digital identities are compromised because of things like that as well.

So, something we have to think about is, you know, of parents or guardians of children in terms of the choices we make and what we share.

Yeah.

I mean, to be fair to you, though, in 2007,

everyone was putting everything on Facebook. We didn't know.
Right. Yeah.

I was in college at that time, and I remember we would, I would just be hanging out with my friends. We would just take random pictures of us hanging out.
I'd be like, upload 50 pictures to Facebook.

Oh, full albums of a single outing.

Yeah. For whatever reason, you know, you were also doing that, like many people, but your photos were seized upon.
And I'm sure this has happened to other people as well.

But I mean, what a nightmare that is. So I assume you, you know, you did do things to try to stop this.
Yes. Can you walk us through what you did to try to stop the scammers?

Most of it started on Facebook. And so there's a lot of profiles.
Like you put in my name and you see a bunch of them.

But of course, all of these people also gave me the fake profiles because it was really hard to find. Like if I'm looking for my face, it was hard to do that for quite a while until.

Google brought in a tool called reverse image search where you could basically put in a photo of yourself and then it would basically reverse search those images so you could find but you couldn't find really facebook profiles at the time but you could find you know other websites and we can talk more about those as well but i would report the sites to facebook and say this is not me

sometimes they would take down the ones that were my name and my photos. So if there was a profile that was like a fake profile, that would violate their terms of service.

And so they would take it down. If they were my photographs, but not my name.

So if it was this Alex Gallert out there with my names, it didn't fit within their terms of service to actually take that down because this person is not impersonating me.

Even though they're using my photos, they're not impersonating me using their name, my name. And so this sort of fell in this weird loophole.

So I had all of these profiles that I couldn't take down that were clearly photos that I've used before that.

And if you put the dates on them, you could trace them back to me as being the first one to put them on.

If you look at Facebook's own dating mechanisms, but they still wouldn't take these things down. So I was fairly connected in the sort of the social tech world.

And most of the websites at the time, social websites, I could contact, but Facebook, I couldn't. Like there was no way to get through that wall.
And still today, I think it's really difficult.

But every once in a while, I'd go and I'd speak at tech conferences and so on. And I'd find someone there who worked for Facebook.
And I'd talk to them and tell them what's going on.

And, you know, they'd have a Facebook email address and so on. And I'd tell them and they'd be very like, oh, this can't be happening.
We've got to do something about this.

And they say, email me and we'll fix this. This happened three or four times.
And we might have a couple of communications at the most.

And then it just went like silence, like they ghosted me after that. Like nothing ever came of that thing.

And I feel, and I'm not going to, you know, libel myself or libel anyone else, but I always have the suspicion like this is happening way than it should be.

And I can't see that there wouldn't be a way to stop this. Like even back then, AI would have been able to duplicate or detect where are these profiles being built from? Are they being mass produced?

Are they taking images from elsewhere? I know that there was a technology there to deal with it. But when you're a publicly traded company and

you have my profile and a thousand duplicates of it, that's going to do good for your shareholders.

That's going to look kind of nice that you are having a lot of of growth, even though, you know, a huge number of those profiles are fake.

I mean, so there's lots of reasons why Facebook, in my opinion, would not want to necessarily bring light to this issue.

And at the same time, you know, admit that all of these profiles are, or a lot of the growth that they're seeing are from fake profiles that they're building on a daily basis.

And so since you didn't get a lot of help from Facebook or at least in the way that you had hoped for whatever reasons, you end up creating a website that you would send to people who reached out to you.

How did you decide what to put on the website? By that point, when I put out a story, people would see this. I'd get interviewed by either our Canadian CBC or a few American outlets.

There's Australian outlets and so on. And so a lot of this got into the news.
Most of that was either my reflections. So I created blog posts about my experiences.

There were other other people who wrote things about it at the same time. But most of it was probably media articles from reputable news sources about this.
And so that was kind of the main thing.

Just to provide, you know, first of all, I think on the website, and it wasn't much of a website, it was just simply like, if you're reading this, there's a good chance that you may have been fallen victim to someone.

And I explained who I was. And then I wanted to give them credible evidence in terms of like, these are reputable news sources that you can read and try to figure it out yourself.

If you need to contact me, contact me. So it was just sort of like, before you contact me angry or if you are upset or whatever it might be, read these things over and hopefully this can support you.

Because, you know, otherwise I was just trying to explain this over and over again to someone.

And in many cases, again, if they were mad or if they didn't believe me, spending way too much time on a daily basis trying to convince someone that I wasn't the person scamming them.

For me, it was a time saver. At the same time, I think it was good for others to be able to read and sort these things out for themselves to get some answers.

Yeah, and I'm curious, did anyone reach out to you like via call, text message, try to see you in person? Oh, yeah, for sure. Sometimes threats.
Like, I think I saw, I was just reading one.

I was trying to go through a bunch of them. You know, someone who's in total disbelief, and I live in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

And someone said something at the end of the message like, I know this is you. I'll see you soon in Regina.

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And this was one of the few male ones that were related to this because it didn't have to do with a romance scam, but it was someone who believed I got into some sort of trade partnership with them.

It was someone from Russia. So I'm constantly Google translating.
this from Russia and this person, I think their name was also Alex.

And they were sending me like legal documents and so on in terms of what I had done to them. And then they would actually send emails to my like my boss, the president and provost of my university.

And so there's me like, you know, and at then, yeah, at some point I was in a tenured, then a non-tenured, like a non-tenured position, then tenured position, but early in my career.

And so, you know, I'm having to explain to my president and provost ultimately or to my dean, like, what's this all about? And then have to go through that.

And that, that continued up until like, up until two years ago, we got a new president, you know, so I'm having to talk to the new president about this as well.

It's embarrassing and also, you know, potentially damaging if this person's saying that one of your professors is this sort of evil, you know,

money launderer or whatever it might be. It gets old really quickly.
Yeah, I can imagine. And, you know, the first time you became aware of this, this is in like 2007.
Yeah.

So this is years and years of you dealing with this, your time, energy, also it affecting your life, your relationships, your work.

The last time you spoke about it that I could find, at least like in an article, was 2020 around then. And you said at that time that it was still impacting your daily life.

How do things stand now? Is this still happening regularly? Surprisingly, not as much.

I don't think it's stopped. I think AI has done a big change to what's happening here.

I don't think anyone scamming these days needs my photos anymore. They don't need anyone's photos anymore.

The fact that we're able to generate photos that are incredibly realistic, that are of the same person, that you have a continuous or a

profile that looks the same in multiple photos, that you can create video, that you can create deep fake calls.

All of the technology has shifted in the last few years and not just since chat gpt previous to that even previous years before that they were using virtual cams so right now i know that we're looking on a virtual cam right now looking at each other but truth be told you don't for 100 know this is me like you you may not know this is me like i can use technology today

that would be incredibly convincing that this is, I'm using someone else's face as a face. You see this in bank fraud.
You see this in romance scams.

It's incredibly convincing and really difficult to tell the difference anymore. Like there was a time where I would get emails from fake victims.
Someone would say,

I'm being victimized by this. And what I need from you is a picture of you holding a newspaper.
And I was like, why would you need that from me? Wow.

And so I think this is a victim like wanting me to do this for someone they're trying to convince, right?

And I'm like, no.

So it was a scammer trying to get, trying to make you think that they were a victim so that they could get a picture to convince another victim. Exactly, right? Oh, my gosh.
Yeah. So stuff like that.

So tricky. Because some of the Photoshops that I saw were terrible.
The videos that I saw were terrible.

That they were so like not convincing at that point. When you're truly in love, like basically,

i saw communications from some you know of these victims who for the longest time they'd talk text but then they'd start demanding video like phone was easy but we i've never seen you on video you always say your webcam is broken and so on uh and then so what they'd often do is these they'd use they'd take a video of me like i've got tons of videos of me lecturing because i taught online courses for a long time and a lot of those are open You just need a few seconds without audio of me looking like I'm attempting to come onto a webcam and then it going off like a few seconds might be enough to convince a person that yeah, I really saw you.

But at the same time, you're using a virtual cam. So rather than me using a live cam, I'm just using a virtual cam.
There's like tools like Minicam or OBS or whatever else that you can use.

So you're playing video over the webcam versus actually live, a live stream. And so that was used for quite some time.

They would have a video that looked like you were trying to connect and then it would drop out. Yeah, exactly.
But that was enough to be like, well, see, look, me, I'm, I'm here. I'm a person.

I'm trying to connect. Yeah.

Gosh. Yeah.
And so you'd see that for a couple of seconds. You don't say a word.
But again, for the people who really want to believe, they want to believe. They want to know this is true.

And so that's enough to convince them. And, you know, you're not going to be hypercritical when you're vulnerable.
Yeah,

definitely. Did you ever find out who was behind this? Was it one person? Was it multiple people behind using your photo specifically to scam thousands of people? Yeah.

So every once in a while, I'd be able to talk to a scammer of some sort.

And again, this wasn't just one scammer. Like these were,

I can't tell you for sure. It could be dozens.
It could be hundreds. But when I did get a chance to talk to a scammer, I'd guilt them.
They'd be from certain countries.

I'm not going to get into the countries they're from just because I don't want to racialize these types of scams and so on. But they would be part of a criminal organization.

They'd often say that they were the foot soldiers, like they were people who were in conditions that they're basically forced to do this as part of, you know, this organization that they're within.

And I'm not going to, I'm not going to totally let them off the hook in that sense, but there is some coercion that we don't perhaps anticipate or understand in

this world. Like even in some cases.

From what I understand is some of the people that were victimized, so some women in the US, for instance, or in Brazil that I ran into, like online when they communicate with me, they became so vulnerable because whether they were coerced or, you know, falling in love with the people that were actually behind them, in some cases they'd said, I'm not Alec Kuros, I'm this person, and then they'd fall in love with this person.

They'd actually be vulnerable over these other people that they'd be okay with the fact that it wasn't me in the first place. But maybe they'd lose their house, lose all their money,

all their financial bearings. And these people would be enlisted to do some of the scams themselves.

So they become the mothers and the daughters and you know so they became part of the project as well because they're financially and emotionally vulnerable and so they become part of it so it's not only just foot soldiers so they would have lost all of this money to having been scammed and then realized it and then the scammer would say we can help you get this money back here's what you have to do Absolutely.

So you become part of it. So you're emotionally vulnerable because you are connected to this person.

And even though they're not the person that they said that they were, you still have an emotional tie because the words were theirs.

Whatever they, they say that they're still that person who they are.

They sometimes say that they would, the scammers would say, like, actually, I was trying to scam you, but over this course of time, I actually fell in love with you. Oh my gosh.

They twist the narrative a little bit. Whether it's true or not, I can't tell you the heart of the scammer.
But, you know, I'm thinking that it's just,

they got to find out, so they have to switch gears. You know, they have to to switch gears and do that sort of thing.

So the person remains in love with them and vulnerable, and then all of their economic liability is gone. So they become part of these gambers.

And they're even more vulnerable from a legal perspective because they're in the U.S. in most cases and governed by the laws there.
And so they're the ones who are doing the transactions.

They're the ones who are sending money to these countries and so on. They're the ones that could potentially be prosecuted if it came to that because

as we see more and more, especially with international scammers, there's like this huge question of jurisdiction.

And I mean, there's a lot of problems with getting any kind of justice, but if someone's in another country, like the U.S. local law enforcement's not going to do anything about it.

Yeah. I did a keynote presentation about these deep fake scams at the, it's a Canadian organization for all of the police chiefs in the entire country.

And basically at some point, I said, what are you going to do about this? And it was absolute silence

from police chiefs who you would think that across Canada would have some sense of what they can do about it. But it was just like, we can't do anything about this.

Like there's too many of these problems. It's outside of our jurisdiction.
We have no teeth elsewhere. We can't do much about it.
I mean, they can deal with some of the local ones, but as I mentioned.

just before,

these aren't the people that are probably the ones that should be prosecuted to the extent of the law. They're not the ones that initiated these things.

They're not the ones that control the transactions or benefit from the transactions. They're victims who have been re-victimized in many ways.
Yeah. Yeah.

It's like, I wonder if maybe not that this is a solution, but just educating people who are in more vulnerable populations, falling for things like this, like maybe.

you know, elderly people or whoever their main sort of target is. And I don't know exactly how you reach them, but just getting the word out.
See, that's a good point.

Like this is how they, one of the scammers mentioned, this is how they found their victims.

They look for, in particular cases, they look for highly religious individuals who are widowed and of a certain age. And back then, it was much easier to find those people on Facebook.

Like you can pull up a victim list very quickly if you're looking for keywords that for like widowed or widower, God-fearing, that sort of thing. And those are that particular perspective.

And so the widowed widower,

you know, these are women who are middle-aged or older, we're elderly, who have never done online dating before.

And it was amazing how many times I heard from, you know, a victim who said, the only reason I started finding these people online is because I was with my husband my entire life.

I never dated online. And then my daughter said, go get out there and you can find someone and so on.

And That's the worst advice you can give to your elderly parent who hasn't had any perception of what the internet is or internet scammers and so on like it's not going to be a good ride for them uh there's not a lot of people out there that are going to be sort of available in the pool that you want yeah right so i i would not recommend it to anyone so in many ways daughters implicate and not daughters in all cases but you know whoever encouraged people to get online but it was even things like it wasn't just dating sites like there was all sorts of dating sites implicated like you know christian mingle and eHarmony and all of those sites but it was things like words with friends i don't know if you remember that yeah yeah what that one was like quoted a number of times where someone just became your words with friends partner and you basically played with them long enough and you gained a relationship over there.

So it was like, wow. What's the demographic of a word? It's for friends.
It's not like young hipteens for the most part, right? Right.

Well, this is the big question because I think that educating people is super important. I mean, I think talking about scams.
Patia and I care about that a lot. We've talked about it.

We continue to talk about it on our podcast because it's just happening more and more and more. And so educating is certainly important and spreading the news that this is happening.

So like, be careful. But the advancement is happening so quickly.
It's like there's a gap between

how quickly these scams are progressing and evolving

and how slowly we are to respond.

I'm thinking about even Facebook, you know, as an example, and how much we started to see this happening of people being scammed on Facebook only because it was like one of the first sort of social media sites where people got on and were sharing tons of photos and it was used by such a wide portion of the population as opposed to smaller social media things.

Then it just started happening and it was such a long period of time, realistically, until Facebook responded and only recently has really cracked down on this.

But then as you have explained, it just diverts the scammers to a different platform and a new platform and apps, like a game game that you play on your phone or dating apps. And now we have AI.

So, you know, it's something that I'm curious. I imagine you probably think about a lot as a professor and someone who talks about social media and technology about like what needs to happen.

I don't know if you think that policy, like from a governmental level would work or if tech companies need to start changing, but it sort of feels like we're just not responding quickly enough.

I agree.

I think there's some regulation that could be done. I mean, I think big governments are really reluctant to put any regulation on social media companies, or we'd have

much more pleasant ways to go.

There's particular articles around online safety that puts away the liability of social media companies. Like anything the users do, it's not the platform's fault.
That's a big issue for sure.

But I think, you know, you were speaking earlier about educating people.

And I do think that's the biggest thing is sort of having much broader and much, you know, much more uniform and universal education on some of these scams.

Like yesterday, I heard from, you know, Mudd, the bank that I bank with, and they're putting out information around deepfakes.

And I think that's great to be worried about deepfakes and that sort of thing. But like, where were you five years ago when it started or 10 years ago when this started?

And all of a sudden, it's becoming a big issue because banks are becoming implicated and it's affecting their bottom line. Because you're seeing examples of

people pretending to to be um you know whoever a banker on the other end and they're getting your you know bank information so people don't get a sense of that but like just like two days ago or three days ago like sora 2 you know based on when we're recording this podcast you know the sora 2 which is the video engine from open ai came up with a cameo feature so you can have sam altman and you create a video of him saying whatever and that could be saying something like you know like send me money or i'm you know i'm going public with open ai and you know if you want to be an early investor, like you can do that with that app right now, like if you have access to it, it's incredibly realistic.

Google's B03 has been around for a while. And although they say that you can't create celebrities, it doesn't have to be celebrities.

You can create really convincing videos saying whatever, creating personas, saying anything you want. So you can do this live.
You can do this, create videos of this. The genie is out of the bottle.

Like it's, we're at the point where the technology is just so incredibly convincing. It's only getting better every single day.
If you're not good at Facebook, it doesn't matter.

You can use Google's Gemini today just to get into a bunch of tools just to say, I want a person that looks like this holding this with a sign saying this.

And, you know, it's really, really simple to do that within seconds. So you don't have to know Photoshop.
You don't have to have technical skills to create fake looking things.

You just have to speak in natural language. Like it's not about coding anymore.
It's natural language. If you can speak in terms of what you want, you can have what you want.
And it's scary.

Like it's really scary. And then I can project it over a webcam.
I can take someone's over face, someone's face over a webcam.

I can have this entire conversation with you just using someone else's face. Like, so, you know, the education is long due.
Regulation is not going to happen as quickly as we'd want it to happen.

And a lot of people are going to get burned. Yeah, I think recently in the news, there was a story about a woman who unfortunately was scammed into thinking that she was dating Brad Pitt.

And they were like these kind of awful photoshopped pictures of him. But there's also this side of it that is like the non-celebrity of it all makes it that much more believable.

And deep fakes are,

I mean, they're so much more common now even than they were. It's like I'll be on Instagram and I'll be scrolling through the ads and I'll see a deep fake of Oprah promoting something.

I'm like, there's no way Oprah's behind this. Right.

Scott

Gellerman, or I forget his name, but there's a lot of people in that space, you know, who are Joe Rogans or whatever else.

Like you have prominent podcasters that are saying buy these vitamins or whatever else. And it sends you to a link that's something that's totally

different. And things that are plausible for these particular influencers.

You can develop that, but it can be, again, anyone. So I can just, I can create a fake profile on something like Tinder.
I can fake my location. So I'm, and it's happened in some cases.

Like I've had people that I know through social connections and they say, oh, by the way, you just showed up on tinder in north carolina or i don't know some some problem some state or something like that and then they kind of laugh and it's so they notice me and they know who i am just because i have a fairly large online profile and so at least they know but from that point if i connect with someone you know through that app or or whoever you create the most handsome or beautiful person just to you know try to get you know your swipe left or right i don't even know i've never used the app uh one of those two you know, and then connect with someone.

Then, of course, from that face, you can use and create video. You can connect online.
So it can be incredibly, incredibly convincing. So again, really

tough to discern truth from think bake today. Yeah.
On this note, just the difficulty of telling something that's real from something that's not. I don't know.

It's like, I think because it's getting so much harder to decipher that. Yeah, like a lot of people will be tricked.
So it's like, what do you do if you're trying to date on Tinder?

You meet someone and it looks very convincing. I guess you just have to like see people in person.
Like, I feel like that's, is that like literally the only answer?

Basically, I think, I mean, there's, there's, there's things that social media companies could do to make those things better, but they kind of interrupt the whole privacy piece too.

Like, I think it's great to be able to have.

like a verified profile like something that on the web that says like these things are me and this can these profiles are connected to me and i think social media companies can do that but at the same time people are targeted in that way.

So like there's something around anonymity, as much as free speech is happening in different ways and looked at different ways in the U.S. right now.
And it's a bit in turmoil.

There's a need for many people that they're incredibly vulnerable to be able to speak anonymously.

And so when you apply, you know, if you apply a solution for dating and deep fakes and that sort of thing, that is much more like we need to verify profiles.

you might take away from some other problem on the web where people need anonymity.

So I kind of understand and recognize that tension that, you know, if we fix one problem, we're going to, you know, make something really much more difficult for other people as well.

And so, yeah, I think you're right. Like, I think, you know, meeting someone face to face, that that's going to be an important piece of that.

But some people, you know, they recognize that, you know, you're not going to be able to meet face to face. Like, I remember You know, back in my day, like falling in love with someone over the phone.

Like

the phone was enough. I didn't have to see this person.

You spend hours and hours talking to someone charging up tremendous long distance bills right back in the day and like any medium where you can connect to someone you're gonna you have the potential to fall in love and there are people who have long distance relationships that are valid and are beautiful and have all those things but we have to be able to be able to do that too.

So there's still a number of people who are going to be vulnerable, who are sort of getting into those relationships where it's just not feasible to find your life partner or your soulmate or whatever it might be through a very early initial face-to-face interaction, right?

So I think people are finding each other much more globally and, you know, not necessarily from their jurisdiction.

We're not, we're not in the generation where you're going to marry the person who you met in kindergarten. Right.
Yeah.

It's like the beautiful part of the internet, an early internet where it opened up and it was like, wow, I can meet people outside of my town, my like specific area.

I mean, probably most people that are together these days met online. Like I wouldn't be with my partner if it weren't for online dating.
I met my husband on match before there was an app. Like

we were both 24 and I would have never met him. He, he lived in Westwood.

That's it. That's that's exactly it, right? Like I think, and like saying it's the beautiful part of the web, that is the beautiful part of the web.

And like, to deny that from others, just because like we have to, we're getting to the point where it's so,

the web has become so difficult to trust like i think it just takes a big part of like the web is us it's it's life it's beauty it's you know i i often use the hashtag shiny happy internet it's like it's just there are some things that we see online especially in the early web that were just beautiful um you know stories of people connecting and so on and so it's really tarnished that aspect of it and and i think it really does take away your dating pool and your possibilities for happiness and you know companionship i'm curious, I guess it's changing gears a little bit, but I'm curious, when was the last time you received a message from someone who believed that you were someone else?

It's been a couple months and this is really rare. So like, and it's just probably this past year, I've maybe received seven or eight, I think.
So it's, it's slowed down a lot tremendously.

And I don't see as many reports. Like there's a scam site that I used to check all the time.
And I haven't seen many pop up there anymore.

So like I was wondering for the longest time, like, why, like, I'm not, like, I'm not a web celebrity in a big sense, but I'm out there enough that people can recognize, like, they can do a Google search and verify who I am.

I was always wondering, like, why

they were using my photos at all when they could use someone that would be much less known, I guess, much easier to find. So on.

Like, I know this is happening to me. But I think there's a lot of people who don't know that it's happening to them.

So, like, going back earlier to that advice where, you know, people could lock things up.

If someone maybe, maybe their Facebook profile was just public for just a little while, then they lock things up.

Those people's photos might be being used and those people have no idea that their photos are being used.

And I guess part of for me to understand, like for me to have known this in the first place, it's kind of a double-edged sword to have it open, I guess.

People are able to find me and tell me about this, but some people who've been compromised in a very small way, or there's been one of the websites hacked, for instance, and then there's website hackings that happen all the time.

You know, if you get your photos get compromised, you may not know this is happening to you. But I really do think that AI has really been the change here.

Like, if I was a scammer, I wouldn't be using anyone's photos. Like, that's kind of the silliest way to do these things.
You're going to get caught.

I have another question, actually, about people reaching out to you, which is,

even though, you know, now you have like a way to show them pretty quickly, here's what has happened.

In instances where people have given up a lot of of money or lost something to these scammers, has anyone ever then asked you for their money back? Unfortunately not.

Or fortunately not, I guess. I don't know how to look at that.

So at that point, like the most that's ever come up from those circumstances, they're not, except for that, the Russian man. I think he's the only one that's after me.

I've never been asked for the money back. But I have been sort of like, so are you open to a relationship? Are you single? That sort of thing.

Like, and that's one of the sad things I see on a lot of this is

I'll even say, I'm sorry that he lost his money. And the common response from many of these victims is like the money, like I'll, I'll deal with it.
I'll live with it.

What I can't live with is my broken heart. Like, like, it's, it's really like these people have been drawn into this thing and they don't care about the money at that time.

Like, of course they care about it, but. The betrayal is not about money.

The betrayal is about, like, I've spent months or even years in these cases where I've given you not just money, but I've given you my heart.

I've given you my, some of the best years of my life, you know, some of the dating years that, you know, the opportunities that I've lost, maybe to be in a relationship with someone else.

Heartbreaking. And so that's what they've lost.
You can't, you know, you can find money at some point, but you're not going to be able to take those years back, right? And the betrayal and the trust.

And heartbreak is hard. Yeah.

I was wondering if anyone had ever asked you as a follow-up to that to corroborate their story if they filed a police report or anything like that?

No, not that I know of. In one case, sort of the opposite.
I've had one person who's been,

well, she stopped over the last year, although I think in the last year she sent me one, but probably since about 2015, there's this one person in the U.S.

that's been

really convinced. I think she's particularly vulnerable.

I don't think she's, her mental health is very well,

or she's not doing very well from that perspective.

She sent me all sorts of images and she sent me lots of communications where i have to convince her like i think i'm convincing her that i'm not in a relationship with her and then she'll send me something else like that she's been in re-contact with the other version of me and then she believes she's in a contact with me and she thinks i'm just kind of going back and she's confused and so on she sent me like really explicit pictures and so on and stuff that's gross in the sense that it's like she talks about my children like she knows them and that she's going to be with them.

And at some point, like, she harassed me to the point where I had to call the police on her. And just like, I sort of identified where she lived.
I called the local police.

And it was interesting that this was like a small town in a state somewhere.

And the police knew who she was as soon as I mentioned who it was. And they go, so like, there's some story there.
And they realized that she may be mentally unwell.

And again, that's sort of like a victim who's been,

I think, compromised in a particular way and being really leveraged in that way. So I feel really bad for this person.

But

this is one person who, for the longest time, she was posting, like she's had websites where she's like the future Dr.

Koros and like, and she's posted that onto my, like, and it has lots of multiple profiles. And she posts that onto my.
socials as well.

Like she finds a new profile and posts it on some of my profiles, which is just, you know, for people who don't know me, like I always, there's a lot of people that know me pretty well and understand this is going on.

For the person who's, you know, doesn't know me well and who's new to me, like seeing that sort of stuff, again, I don't like taking those hits on my reputation. That's understandable, for sure.

Yeah.

Yikes. Yeah.
Yeah. Sad, sad all around, but you got to do what you got to do.
And I feel bad for this person.

And I hope she gets the help she needs, but she's really, really, you know, being victimized. Yeah.

Acknowledging that the betrayal and the heartbreak is where you see these victims hurting the most, I'm curious just to get a sense of the scope here, if you have any sort of ballpark estimate of how much money these scammers have taken from people just using your persona.

Yeah, it's hard to know that for sure, but what's been estimated to me, like I've seen houses, in some cases, figures of hundreds of thousands of dollars. For some reason,

I see certain countries victimize more.

So, you'll see like it'll be reported on US dollars. So, I got a lot of people from Brazil that tend to be victims, for instance.

South America seems to be very big, a lot of southern states, some places in Europe, for instance.

But what I can ascertain from what they've said, just the numbers that they've shared, there have been well over, like well over a million dollars. And that's just from a few cases.

Not everyone implicates. Like, I have a on the one that I mentioned that's sort of this long-term person that I've had to call the police on.

She sent me like photos of like gift cards, like there's probably a hundred gift cards. And I don't know what the values are on all of those.
And that's often a way that they'll get money.

So I don't know what that's worth. But this is a person that doesn't have a lot of money, but every time she has money, she sends gift cards.

So I have all of these images of gift cards that have been scratched and revealed to other people.

So at least a million dollars from what's been declared to me, I suspect that's probably only about five percent of what I'm probably seeing. So I'm assuming there's quite a bit more.
Yeah, wow.

And I can't verify any of that for sure. Yeah, but I mean, just it's it's telling just from what people have shared with you.

And yeah, I mean, it's an incredible loss for anyone who found themselves in a situation where they believed that someone loved them.

I mean, if you're dating someone and you are that deep into it, I'm sure you've told people in your life about them too. And so it's probably not even a secret in their world.

And then they have to reconcile, actually, I got scammed. There's so much, even though there shouldn't be shame and embarrassment around it, because it could truly happen to anyone, there is.

And that is just, it's heart-wrenching.

Well, and that's one of the tactics that these scammers do is they try to get you away from their friends because often they can set the alarm and that sort of thing. So they will try to isolate you.

Like they'll say things like, our love, people wouldn't understand it. And, you know, because it's an online thing.

I think you have to recognize that this is not just only uneducated or vulnerable people.

I've had very well-educated professors and, you know, professionals who have said, I am incredibly embarrassed by it. Like I fell for this.
And they just happen to be of that certain demographic that.

They're vulnerable emotionally, not necessarily

from a

lack of understanding. They just got kind of caught up with these things and they thought it it was true.
And so this happens to everyone. And I guess lack, I mean, lack of general education.

They may not have known a lot about scams, but, you know, well-educated in other respects, highly intelligent and so on. This can happen to anyone.
Oh, yeah.

I mean, Hannah and I have been covering different instances of fraud for so long now, and it is certainly not. determined by someone's intelligence or level of education.

The people who do this, who scam people, are just very good at it. They're very good.
And the scripts they share, it's not only the photos they share, they share scripts, scenarios.

They are incredibly organized in terms of what they need to do. Like this is just so well done.

They know psychology better than most psychology grads will understand in terms of how they can actually dominate, leverage human psychology and really, you know, get people to do what they want.

Like this is incredible persuasion. And this is done because of so much repetition.
They're doing this over and over again. They're successful.

They're sharing it with friends or their colleagues, I guess. And yeah, I mean, at that point, I mean, we are

beings who are incredibly vulnerable from a psychological perspective, from an emotional perspective. And you see this in politics, you see this in government politicians and so on.

People can be made vulnerable, and that can be leveraged for your advantage in whatever way you might want to do that. And so,

yeah.

So be careful out there. Yeah.

Don't send anybody money.

Or if you see a picture of me, just it's not me. It's not me, Alec.

Well, you're a student who

called out our podcast. She has great taste.

I think she does. Yeah, for sure.

Thank you so much for joining us, Alec, and talking us through all of this. It's been really interesting and informative.

It's been great. It's nice to be able to voice this out and just say the things that, you know, it kind of helps me put things together as well in my mind and reform this.

And so I really recognize the, you know, the power of these questions. And for you to be able to share this to a wider audience, I think it's great.

I really appreciate your desire to do that and for being a guest today. Thanks for taking the time.

So, Hannah, after our off-record episode, which is number 122 for anyone who wants to go back and listen that hasn't, after that episode released, you heard from Alec.

Yeah, he listened to the podcast and reached out to me and was like, Thanks for spreading the word.

And then because

there weren't any recent articles about him, I think the last one that I had found was like from 2020, I was curious to talk to him about if it was still happening, especially with the use of AI now.

Like things have just changed so much in the last five years. So I was really excited that he agreed to come on the show and like talk to us more about his story.

In the episode, I think you asked him, you know, do you know how much money was taken overall by this scammer or group of scammers using his photo? Yeah.

And I think he estimated like a million dollars or something. He estimated a million dollars.
Yeah. So then he actually emailed me and followed up after the interview.

You know, he said, after reviewing some of the information and considering my previous messages, I realized that I likely underestimated the total amount involved.

There are people that reached out to him, said that they had to like foreclose their house, who had given, you know, a lot of their savings to different scammers. Like people lost a lot of money.

And he thinks, he said he can't can't verify this, but he believes that it would be more like multiple millions, probably between three and ten million

that he would estimate as he just pieced together messages he's gotten from people. So this is like a massive scam being orchestrated with his face.
With his face.

And in other instances, like more pieces of his identity than just that. So this estimate he's giving us is still only based on the people who have managed to find him and share their story.
Yes.

And not all of the people that we know haven't. Yeah, that's a good point.
So it could be much more than that. So much more.
Yeah. I mean,

I think it's pretty great that he has chosen to face this head on when he could easily not respond to these messages. This has nothing to do with him.
Yeah.

Other than that someone stole his photo, but he takes the time and he has taken the time to like, here's the story so that he can relay that to someone who's going through it and hopefully stop them from giving more money to these people.

Yeah.

It was interesting though to hear him talk about these type of scams and how they run like well-oiled machines. Yeah.
And how usually it's not just like one person doing this.

It's someone who's connected to an organization that is scamming people and that there could be a lot of factors at play.

Like people could be coerced to be part of this, you know, scammer organization. And I feel like we see more and more of that actually happening.
Yeah.

So I actually listened to an episode of Criminal. It was titled The Compound, and it was about a woman who thought she had gotten a new administrative role.

This is in another country outside of the U.S. And she was given all these directions.
She was relocating for this job.

And she gets there and realizes that she's basically held captive and being forced to operate as part of this.

organized crime unit scamming people everything from romance scams to other types of fraud and essentially a prisoner there. And they have to meet these quotas.
And she never wanted to do this.

She never wanted to be there. It's called the compound.
It's on the criminal feed, and it was just a really informative episode. Wow.
I mean, we love criminal. We love a great show.

Yeah. Yeah.
You know, okay. So I think that is something that is happening so often.
And

like when you get a call or whatever from a scammer, that it's probably not just a person randomly doing this. They're probably involved in some sort of scheme or organization.

Maybe not always, but probably about a year ago, I got a call. And look, I think I pretty quickly like realized, I think this is a scam, but of course I was sort of interested to see where it went.

So this guy calls me and he's like, he says his name is Lieutenant Justin Bruce. I mean, it sounds like someone we would have reached out to at some point.
Really?

And he's like, you know, basically the whole thing he's trying to say is, you didn't show up for jury duty. It's one of these scams.
And, you know, now there's a fine.

He gives me this reference number, FTA1129-like, you know, so official. And I'm like, where am I supposed to put this reference number in?

You know, and so I sort of started Googling and quickly realized like, this is for sure a scam. He was trying to get me to pay $500 plus a $32 service fee so that you're not in contempt of court.

And eventually I just was like, well, I know this is a scam.

And I was surprised because he was like, oh, you do? And I was like, yeah, I actually work in podcasting and true crime. And I, I do a lot of research about scams.

And so I'm pretty familiar that this is a scam. And he was like, oh, wow.

Yeah. So then he just starts talking to me.
He says he's been in prison in Georgia for seven years. Oh, my gosh.
And he was, he was going to get out in like six months or something.

So I just started to ask him like, what is the scam? You know, like, do you make money on this? Do people, he's like, yeah, you know, I don't know.

Most people like don't fall for it, but sometimes we do get people who are giving money.

And he said that he worked for basically a gang like in prison and that he had connected with them in order to be safe and survive in prison.

And part of his role was that he kept all the cell phones that they used in his cell and that he had to do a certain amount of calls and that there was someone in the group who would come up with these schemes.

There was multiple of them. You know, this Lieutenant Justin Bruce was one of these.
So they come up with a reference number and all of this stuff to try to make it seem real.

Like a lieutenant of what, sir? Yeah, what are we talking about? But I don't know.

It was interesting because he was like, he kind of was looking at it like a job that he had and that he was able to survive this way.

And he's like, I don't feel good about it, but it's not like I have other ways of making money in here.

And I've been able to survive. Wow.
Anyway, so I. I sort of wanted to interview him, but then he started to get like sort of creepy and flirty.
And I was like, ooh, God.

No, we're going to have to hang up and never talk to you again. But I do wish him the best.
And I thought it was interesting to hear that, wow, like these scams are even coming out of prisons.

I mean, similar to this episode I was talking about with on the criminal feed, it's he doesn't want to be doing this. He feels like he has no choice.
And maybe he doesn't.

I've, I've never been in that situation, but it's terrible because a lot of the people that fall for these scams are elderly. Maybe they're alone and they don't know any better.

There's no one they can ask or they can't hop on Google and see. Yeah.

And yeah, one of those people was almost my grandpa. Oh my gosh.
Yeah. And so I called him Poppy.
He

has since passed away, but my whole life was just so close to Poppy. He was just the best.
I love that. Yeah.
And we talked all the time.

And when I actually was going through my archives to pull up this letter about the scam I'm going to tell you about, I showed you on Zoom. It was so thick.

It was like five inches thick of just letters from him. He was the best.
And I talked to him all about like my life. You know, we, we just talked about everything.

And I had moved to Los Angeles a few years before this happened. So he knew I was like in this big city.
And I think he worried a little bit. But yeah, so we'd been talking all the time.

And then in October, I got a letter from him, which usually was just like a silly old family photo with the story and socks from Costco. Like that's usually what he sent.

But this letter, so I got it and I'll read it because this is all the context I had when I received it was just the letter. Okay.
Patia, can't get over our recent phone talk.

You only had one glass of wine. Don't want to call your father.
You were vague on the rules and of bonds.

I didn't not call your father because you made me promise not to.

For me, this doesn't add up. You surely sound poorly.
So very sorry. So sorry, Poppy.
Oh my gosh, that's heartbreaking. Yeah, heartbreaking.
And he was in his 80s.

And so I call him when I get this and I'm like, what is this letter? I said, I don't know what you're talking about. I had no idea about the scam at this point.
I was not familiar.

And he said that he had gotten a call from me or who he thought was me saying that I was in jail on the East Coast and that I had been drinking and driving and been pulled over.

And I needed him to bail me up.

And I didn't want my parents to know. And he's not like a tech savvy person.
He didn't know how to like get online and give money. So thankfully he didn't end up giving them any money.
That's good.

But he was distraught emotionally because for the week that passed between us talking and me getting this letter, he thought that I was in jail. Why didn't he try calling you? So I don't know.

And it's possible that he did. And I just, for whatever reason, hadn't called him back yet.
Okay. But if I had to guess, he didn't call because he just thought he would hear from me when I got out.

Yeah.

Because he really believed it. Yeah.

And he didn't know how to FaceTime or anything. So all of our communication was just letters and phone calls because he lived in Naples, Florida, and I was in Los Angeles.
Yeah.

So, yeah, I call him and I said, I haven't been traveling. I've been here the whole time and I wasn't drinking and driving and I've never been arrested or to jail for anything.

And he was like, I think hesitant to believe me. Wow.
And so then I'm getting online and I'm like, oh, scam. This is scam.

And so then I told him, I was like, Poppy, like, you can always call my parents. Like, if you ever think I'm in trouble, you can always call my parents.
Those are the kind of parents I have.

And you don't have to keep any secrets from them. I think that made him feel like, oh, okay, you probably, this was probably not real.
And then I got another little letter.

It said, I'll never get over thinking you were in jail in Boston, Poppy.

Like, I mean, it's so sad. Oh, no.
Yeah. Yeah.

So luckily, he didn't give any money, but he was very upset because he thought I was just sitting in some jail cell on a DUI charge. Which is heartbreaking.
Heartbreaking.

I'm glad that he believed you and came around to understand that. I know.
It's horrible. I know.
I'm like, oh, what a sweet grandpa. He had my back.
He kept my secret.

Not that I think he should have, but he did really well. Yeah.
Yeah. So, I mean, it's, you know, these scams have gone more elaborate over time, but it could really happen to anybody.

And I know we say that all the time, but it's true.

And something Alec talked about also is like the shame and embarrassment that people feel. And it's just really sad.
And I think it's awesome that Alec's out there talking about it. I do too.

I also am like, I'm really hoping that there's some sort of protections that happen with AI, because if that had happened, the same thing with your grandpa had happened in like, I don't know, a few years.

I don't even know. Maybe now.

Like someone could use an ai version of your voice yeah and then it's like how is anyone supposed to know if it's real or not oh totally or like the deep fakes that are coming out i mean like we post our faces on social media it's not that hard to grab a picture of almost anyone these days I watch this YouTube channel called Blacktail Studio.

It's this guy in Oregon who makes these like really cool epoxy tables. Okay.
Okay. So he just moved to this like ranch in Oregon.
And mostly my husband likes the tables. They're cool.

You like the ranch. I'm just waiting for him to get a horse.
This is my like, I'm just like, please get a horse. Please get a horse.

So, but anyway, I was watching and he actually had someone pretend to be him and sell someone a table. And these tables are really expensive.
Not that they're not worth it. Wait, it wasn't him.

Someone pretended to be him. Yeah.
And he was exposing that. Right.
And he was exposing it. I see.

The person that they were scamming was sent a video of him talking to her, but it was a deep fake.

And this is like, it's a successful YouTube channel, but it's not like this guy can't walk down the street. Right.
Right. Right.
Right. And someone's making a deep fake of him selling this table.

Yeah. And he actually found the person who had been scammed and made her a table, which is so sweet.
Oh, that's so nice. I love that.
I love that story. Yeah.
Yeah.

I mean, you know, in our conversation with Alec, it was like very focused on education, which I think is probably like the best thing that we can be in control of, right?

Is we can keep talking about this. Hopefully people will be aware of these scams.
But I also just like really feel like there's going to have to be some kind of regulation at some point.

There has to be more we can do to protect people. I mean, even the fact that on your cell phone now, it's like potential spam, I'm not answering.
And I think that's so helpful.

I like that it pops up like that. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, what an interesting conversation with Alec.
I'm so glad he joined us. Yeah.
Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.

If you have a story for us, we would love to hear it. Our email is thenife at exactlyrightmedia.com, or you can follow us on Instagram at theknife podcast or Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

This has been an exactly right production, hosted and produced by me, Hannah Smith, and me, Tayshia Eaton. Our producers are Tom Breifogel and Alexa Samorosi.
This episode was mixed by Tom Breifogel.

Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.
Artwork by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

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