Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Why Kidnapping Conspiracy Theories Are Everywhere

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

Sarah Marshall and Robert continue their deep dive into the wide world of kidnapping conspiracy theories and the horrible consequences thereof.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, what's up y'all, this is Eric Andre, but I made a podcast called Bomming about absolutely tanking on stage. I tell gnarly stories, and I talk to friends about their worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways. Bomming on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life. Like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set

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or wherever you get your podcast and start your morning with me. every week day on the I Heart Radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and start your morning with me. So how does a half American, half Nicaragua party girl from New Orleans with absolutely no journalism experience? Break the biggest story of the eighties. That's what journalista is all about. I'm a woman, wife, theater, t-shirt, not wearing a bra, curses like a

saver. I got balls bigger than any man, Dan Rather used to call me his secret weapon. Listen to Journaliste every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Ah! Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the ever-present fear of death and anxiety, pain that is never leaves that's just always there in the heart of every single person and drives us to most of the terrible crimes that we commit as a species. Are you doing it? Sarah? What is this here and I'm scared.

Yeah, we're all, so I keep and raise goats and one of my goats gave birth this year. So I've been milking her. You can milk a goat for about a year after they give birth. Something like that, it kind of depends a little bit. Is it also birth control for the goat? I don't know enough about goats' biology to tell you that, Sarah.

But I appreciate you're accepting that that's above your pay grade. Yeah, that's well above my pay grade. I've just figured out milking. So I got this little lady goat. She's an Igerian dwarf, so she's small. She's about the size of a small dog. Nothing bad has ever happened to this animal. She has never been threatened. She's never, she's about the size of a small dog. Nothing bad has ever happened to this animal.

She has never been threatened, she's never been attacked, she's never been harmed. All that people have ever done for her, all that I've ever done for her is bring her food and other things that she likes. And all that the milking process is her receiving treats while she's milked. And still, if I move the wrong way around her,

if I like, you know, like I have to be, there's very specific ways that I move when she's in there, because if I move the wrong way, she will freak out and run away, right? And that's because she is descended from a long line of prey animals that had to always be ready to be attacked and to try to run away from danger, right? It's the same reason why, you know, people had a whole fun thing on the internet the other

a couple of few years ago about like if you put like a cucumber or somethings out, like the outside of a cat's field of vision, they'll freak out because the their instincts tell them this is a snake. And we all know this about animals. I'm not like people love to scare their cats. People love to scare their cats to make them feel like, you know, they're, and it, it, it's interesting to me because like currently in right wing media, there's this huge thing with like biological reality.

And you know, we're going against these deeply programmed things when people are allowed to be transgender or like biologically men are meant to fight in a fail-anx with a spear and like, you know, this is why you need to pay $10,000 to have a man yell at you while you do push-ups otherwise you're not connected to your, like, ancestral masculinity. You got to eat raw meat, you know, whatever kind of fucking nonsense. And everyone's fine with like, or all of these people are fine with the idea that like, you know, my ancestral men were hunters and fighters. So I need to do hunting and fighting stuff in order to be like truly happy. But nobody likes the, nobody likes being told, nobody's willing to accept it like, well, your ancestors were constantly at threat

from various kinds of animals. And so there is always fear in your heart. And nothing, nothing will ever make that go away. Like you just have to learn how to deal with it and cope with it because we grew up in a world that was deeply, deeply dangerous in ways that like it is not anymore. And that's just will always be with you. And then of these people want to accept that. They want to, they want to take the parts of like ancient humanity that are like standing with a shield and a spear or trying to hunt a fucking gazelle, but they don't want to accept that the actual thing

that will never leave us because of our ancestors is fear. I don't want to be too dramatic, but I feel like I'm having a breakthrough right now because I feel like I have been treating like my life and also the therapy that I've been doing as an approach to like, well, I feel really fearful and anxious a lot. And that's a failing on my part. Or like, not a moral failing, but like, that's something that's wrong with me that has to do with my personal history and it's a problem. And I, you know, and I, to be clear, like I do think that

I need to deal with that. And we all need to learn how to manage fear in our own ways. And also to trust it at times. But seeing it as something that's just part of the organisms we are and sort of this idea of like an invading presence that shouldn't be there, like it's just right. It's like it's natural for us to be afraid. That's what we're, how, what we are. Yeah, what I'd like people at home to do, you know, the next time the fear hits you, right? And you find yourself wondering, why am I so afraid? Instead of burrowing into like whatever you said

and you're like going on Twitter and you know, doom scrolling or any of that stuff, get on the internet and look up a picture of the School of a Cave Bear. Cave bears don't exist anymore, but they're much larger than all of the all present day bears are small compared to cave bears. They were like the elephants of bears and they used to murder the shit out of us. And look at the school of a cave bear and realize like that's why I'm scared right now. It's because many, many years ago, my ancestors had to constantly be worried

about this fucking thing, charging out of whatever cave and murdering their entire family. And so now I'm sitting at home in my air conditioned house where there are no cave bears. And I'm scared. Like just look at a picture of the cave bear. That's why you're scared. Like, it's also to bring it into horror movies as I must. Like it's fascinating how so many horror movies, because the house without a cave bear makes me think of Barbarian.

And that so many horror movies are about the idea and horror stories before that are about the idea of something that wants to kill your reew coming out of the past. Yeah. Because of, you know, traumas or misdeeds of the past are just from the past in some way because we actually like the present is all about our thriving and having fun and being wholesome. But really, when we're focusing on that, we understand on some level, like modernity itself is sort of a denial of death. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's like what all of these like Silicon Valley dudes who just like were born

at the right time to get incredibly lucky gambling on, you know, fucking tech companies and suddenly made a billion dollars or whatever. Like none of them can get over the fact that they're always scared to despite all their money and their bodyguards. And so they can cock these, you know, insane things to like, I'm going to live forever if I do this or, you know, it's this, it's this, it's all this denial of the reality and inevitability of death. And also this denial that like fundamentally we're descended from like little bitty dudes and ladies who there were bigger things around that ate them. And so we were scared of those

things. We used to be birds that ate horses. Like it's only it's so recently in human existence that we've stopped getting eaten all the time. Yeah, we were constantly getting eaten by shit. We were scared little guys. Like, and so were our cats. I know, like just, like that's the same reason. Like, so you got, you get like a duck. Why is my dog anxious all the time? Well, it's because it's descended from like little guys

who had to be worried all the time. We all are, it's fine. Anyway, Sarah, on the 79th or whatever anniversary of the day, the classic Michael Bay movie Pearl Harbor was inspired. A woman named Katie Sorenson, 30 years old, visited a Michael's craft store in Petaluma, California with her four year old son and one year old daughter.

Now, Petaluma is basically a suburb of San Francisco. This is relevant to the tech industry stuff we were talking about. The median household income is over $100,000 a year. This is a wealthy suburb, and the crime rate in Petaluma is about 1.4 times below the national average, so fairly safe place. But despite how safe and affluent this suburb she lives in is, Katie Sorenson was scared. And Katie Sorenson was also a small time influencer on Instagram. She's like a mommy influencer, right? Now, her shit has been thoroughly scrubbed from the internet because of what happened next, but based on context clues,

I think it's fairly safe to say that none of her frequent updates prior to December 7th got that much traction. She was, in other words, like a failing mom fluencer who was desperate to find something that would bring followers to her account. And here is the post that she made in an attempt to do that. This week, my children were the targets of attempted kidnapped, which is such a weird thing to even vocalize. But it happened. And I want to share that story with you in an effort to raise awareness as to what science to look for and to just encourage parents to be more aware of their

surroundings and what is going on around them. I think right now we are so distracted by everything that's going on in the world that we are kind of have our guards up so much about masks and wanting to keep our children safe that way that we're forgetting the most important way to keep them safe and that is with us. It's not up and taken. So I'm going to share our story in an effort to raise that awareness, but it's, I'm not ready. I, this is hard for me. I'm not ready to share this story, but I know it's important, and I would rather be uncomfortable and awkward, and get the message out sooner than wait until I feel composed. Okay, that's probably enough, Sophie. So, you can see here both, you think back to the chain letters, we were talking about, right?

If you think back to that murderer in the back seat, chain letter, we read, you can see the same structural harm hallmarks here, right? There's the claim that like parents are not someone, like the person that this is meant for, you're not paying enough attention to a danger that you're not aware of, but it's present, right? You need to be more aware of this danger. You need to be more aware of the threat that your kids are always facing, right? There's this, it's framed in this, like here are suggestions, like I'm telling you this so that you can avoid the stages, that you can protect yourself and your loved ones.

And from there on, like from the point that, you know, we stopped that video, the story that she was giving continued. And I'm going to read a summary of what she said in this in another video, from a local Sonoma paper, The Press Democrat. She described being followed by an unknown man and woman at the Petaluma Michaels craft store on North McDowell Boulevard. From the time she arrived in the parking lot with her children until they returned to her car.

In the parking lot, she said the couple approached her as she was putting one of her children in a car seat and what she suspected was an attempt to grab the stroller, a separate man who spotted Sorenson and recognized she was in danger stepped in to help. She said in the videos. Meanwhile, she said the pair drove off. And like, first off, if you are taking your kid to a Michael's craft store, the worst thing that is going to happen to you that day is being in a Michael's craft store, right? They are not going to get kidnapped. Other unpleasant.

I'm not taking that. Yeah. I would prefer to be kidnapped to being in a Michael's craft store. You know, you meet better people getting kidnapped than you do with Michael's craft store due to you. I don't know. I have nothing to get to Michael's craft store. don't know. I have nothing to get Michael in the picture. Are you back to a Michael's craft story?

Yes, actually, I have the last time. I needed Styrofoam cones. And if you need a cone in a shape that's made out of Styrofo, or if you need something made out of Styrofoam, that's where you go is a Michael's. I've had many pleasant experiences at Michael's craft story just saying and was never kidnapped. No, no, no.

I, I, I, I, I only go, I rolled to the Michaels like I'm, I'm heading to like downtown Fallujah in 2005. You know, you gotta be ready at a Michaels. That's where shit goes down. It's the heart locker. It's the heart locker. Yeah. I'm like, like rolling into a Michaels in in that in that hurt locker body armor

This will stop them from taking me. Yeah, I don't know any glitter from getting That's right. That's right. That's right. So sorenson in addition to posting these videos the first of which almost immediately gets to like two million views Which was had never happened to her account before she makes a kidnapping report to the petaluma police, right? So they deemed this a suspicious person's case. So her video goes viral, she makes her report to the police, she publishes a second video, and here's there's a number of dumb things that that Sorenson does, but the stupidest mis like error that she makes in this grift is in her second video, she brags that there are, like, in order to market it, she says there are details in the video that she didn't give the cops, which is like saying in your viral video, I made a false police

report. You know, don't do that. As a, as a heads up, if you're going to commit this crime, don't, don't make that mistake. So that said her marketing is good. These videos get about four and a half million views combined together, but it's a bad idea from a not getting arrested standpoint because well, if you don't make a police report, you can get away with this kind of thing any amount of time, right? If you're just like posting videos saying, my kids were nearly kidnapped. Here's what to avoid. That's fine. Once you make a police report, you have created a situation in which you might get in trouble. And sorenson probably still would have been okay, but in addition to making a police report, she made the further mistake of accusing specific people who have names of having been

the one to be pedophile child of doctors, right? So the specific people that she made allegations against were another couple that was just at Michael's that day, Eddie and Sadie Martinez. Again, like she sees like a Hispanic couple in the store. She decides and she claims in her videos that she heard them describing her children on the phone with a third party. So she thinks they're like spotters talking back to the kidnapping base about like these kids they can steal.

And just talk about this operation. Like they're like, yeah, we're running on three year old white kids, grab her. Yeah, yeah, we got, we needed it. We need another like this, this one's like blonde. She's got to jump around. Do we need another jumper kid? Yeah, like go ahead and get her. So she, not only does she give these people's identification,

she like describes them to the police, but she takes pictures of them in the store and she posts it on her Instagram. Oh, honey. So now, the Martinez is find out about this because these post go viral and her son comes up to Sadie Martinez and is like, Hey, mom, somebody claims that you were part of a kidnapping gang at Michael's.

You might want to be aware of this. I also love how like, okay, so you're in this elite kidnapping gang. Love it. You're like, where should we go to pick up kids without being noticed? Yeah. Michael's craft. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store.

Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store.

Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's craft store. Michael's. That's definitely where you're gonna abduct. Or like, or guys who are weirdly in the model trains. Yeah, you're gonna get a lot of that stuff at a Michael's. But like, kids don't go to Michael's.

Children do not like Michael's. It's not the place to get like, kind of vaguely unsettling Christmas decorations. That's what I go to Michael's for. Right, you know. Kid Appers love, so. Yeah, Kid Appers love. So maybe they're on an errand. Anyway, and again, theppers love. So yeah, kid, they're there on an errand.

Anyway, and again, the Martinez's are the kind of people who go to, to a Michael's, right? They're like a middle-aged couple shopping for whatever kind of decorations together. But this lady decides like, nope, they're part of a kidnapping gang. That's the only reason why, you know, a couple would be at a Michael's craft store is to steal my children. People would learn about shop. Yeah, it's to steal my white children. Now this, this happens. Nobody wants white children.

They're terrible. No, no, horrible. You can't see them anything anymore without them having an incident. No, they all got allergies, you know, which is because they're not actually abiding by the primal principles and eating nothing but raw liver. Exactly. You got to eat the raw liver. Have you ever, you'll never got big and strong like that man who was not on steroids? Thank you. Look, this is why I am getting in to the liver influencer business.

And I'm specifically selling freeze-dried polar bear liver. Now Sarah, a lot of doctors, the same guys and the pharma industrial complex will tell you that even a single bite of polar bear liver will kill you because of how concentrated the vitamins are. It's basically poison. That's what doctors say. But you know, if we've learned one thing from the pandemic, it's that you can't

trust doctors. So I'm going to start selling polar bear liver. I think the grenades are going to be more ethical, but, you know, yeah, forget, forget about the Franklin expedition. Yeah. Look, whichever one they all died from doing that. Yeah. Yeah. It's the future. Look, they died because they didn't have a grenade launcher. If you have a grenade launcher and you eat the polar bear liver, then you're fine. Then all the ever- That's the fifth-scent fear of death will leave you. Yeah, and that's, you know, small price to pay.

That's what, $5.99 a month for your, your liver club. It's like $347 a week. What a bar is that? It is not. Sarah, the feds do not like you taking this many livers from this many polar bears. It has made a lot of problems for me, but I do it for you listeners.

But you see, you know, the cost covers legal fees. Yeah. So Sorenson makes this post and accuses the Martinez of being pedophile kidnappers. Right in the middle of that period, you remember a couple of years back where there were a bunch of viral stories of like white people calling the cops on people who are not white for bullshit reasons, right? There's that lady who threatened that black bird watcher in Central Park. There was a lady who called 911 on like a black family in Oakland,

cooking barbecue in the park, you know? These are kind of like, again, in that like, Karen sort of viral story thing, which is almost as reliable a traffic Gitter as a kidnapping stories. So as soon as the Martinez is like came forward and are like this fucking mommy blogger like or mommy Influencer or whatever like accused us of being a pedophile gang The virality that had been really good for sorensen's Follower account initially kind of came back to bite her in the ass. So the Petaluma police made a timely update being like, you know, there are inconsistencies between the police report she filed

and the story she did on Instagram. Sorenson compounded her mistakes by doubling down and was like, I want to see these people prosecuted, I'll testify in court, but they were trying to steal my kids. The Michaels people, you know, the cops talk to them and Michaels is like, we didn't see anything problematic happen. There's no evidence of anything happening. So this all ends in Sorensen getting charged in 2021 with three misdemeanor counts of false

report of a crime. She was convicted on one count and sentenced earlier this year, just a couple weeks ago, to 12 months of what's called informal probation, which restricts her from using social media and requires a four hour implicit bias training. She's gonna spend probably. What's all of that? Definitely, like, look, I, yeah, hard to argue with the fact that like this lady being off social media

is good for her, right? She should not be on the internet. None of us really should. None of us really should, but especially not her. Especially not her. But wow, I mean, you know, I don't think harsh your punishment fixes anything for anybody. It's a question of who gets too much rather than who gets too little. But it is, I mean, that is, and that's a remarkably light sentence for fucking up so I'll say that. I'll say that. She's probably gonna spend, I think, like 30 days in jail

and then she's got like a work release program. So, you know, it's not, I don't know, like what I would say is like the proper penalty here or whatever. I'm not angry that it's like too harsh. I'll say that much. Right. So while this has been celebrated online, as soon as this lady got convicted, people were

obviously like, look, this dumb racist committed fraud and they paid the price. Despite the fact that that's kind of how the story has gotten remembered now, Sorinson had a pretty good reason to think that this will work out for her because again, fake kidnapping stories are one of the most reliable kinds of viral content in multiple forms of social media. In 2019, Snoop started receiving inquiries about a Facebook meme that warned of a sex trafficking plot in Florence, Kentucky. Variations of this meme tended to show a photo of a red rose stuck to a car door with text like this.

There have been recent incidents in northern Kentucky about sex traffickers leaving roses on victims' cars. The roses have a chemical on them to make you pass out so they can grab you. What incident happened in a Walmart parking lot in Florence, Kentucky? Please be careful, ladies. Um, yeah. First of all, there's a lot worse happening in a Walmart parking lot. Oh, God, especially.

It's for all humanity comes. Yeah. But it's a, I'm glad to hear it's not Southern Kentucky, just Northern Kentucky. There you go. Yeah. Very localized. Well, you know, the, the specific poison that you can put on a rose only grows in Northern Kentucky.

So it's, it's hard to get down with the sound. Yeah. Yeah. I don't like it. If I were going to start a sex trafficking ring, I would go for a population center. I would be worried about starting from scratch. But I'm not an expert. Yeah. No, no, no. We do talk frequently about what we would do where we're running a sex trafficking ring. But I think we can all agree Florence Kentucky is where it is where you start. That's the, this is like, you know, Michelle remembers the book that started the satanic panic is like

there are two centers, World Wide Centers for Organized Satanism and they are I think Geneva, Switzerland and Victoria BC. And it's like, yep, yeah, of course. Why did they, was it for the climate? Do they go on to take walks in the woods? Yeah. St. Ness love rain too. Yeah, they do. They do. They do.

They do. They do. So comments on one example of this meme, which was shared about six and a half thousand times on Facebook range from readers pointing out that it's an obvious fake to crying about how to crave the world has become and talking about how they always bring a gun with them everywhere Snowes quickly found that the photo for the initial version of the meme was a fake it was pulled from an unrelated blog post It was just like someone I don't know people who roses and car doors or whatever is like a here's your Valentine's Day You know thing honey or whatever like that's I think

I'm sorry. I cheated on you. I hope you see this when you finish your shift at our bees. Yeah, there, like something like that. So what that means though is because the original photo had nothing to do with a kid napping conspiracy, there was intent behind the fake, right? We can debate as to whether or not maybe Sorensen was like someone who just was unreasonably paranoid or whatever, although I think she was probably making a conscious fake, but this was definitely a conscious fake. This is not somebody panicking because their brain got poisoned by viral media or whatever. This is someone choosing to knowingly spread a false kidnapping story.

And I'm going to read another quote from that Snopes article. The 2019 Rose Hoax was not the first sex trafficking scare to emerge from Kentucky in recent years. In late 2017, some social media users in the Louisville and Florence area in the north of the state claimed to have been approached or harassed in public. Those purported incidents were quickly linked without evidence to human trafficking, and the local branch of a controversial church was forced to defend its member against allegations of sex trafficking. And this is a little where it gets weird, because a big part of why Kentucky is key to that or is is center to so many of these

Memes is that there's a church in northern Kentucky called the world mission society of God It is absolutely a cult. It's one of those weird seventh-day Adventist cults that was founded in South Korea by a guy who declared himself Jesus Christ You know it's one of those things. There's a couple of those, right? Um, and they have been, they, it's definitely one of those things were like, they've been accused of like brainwashing and abusive psychological control tactics, but they don't take people off the street. What's happening here is that like, this cult is in, is local.

People know it's shady. And when folks come up to them to prostilatize, they think that they're about to be like kidnapped. And so that's part of where all this comes from. They have been accused of human trafficking and a bunch of places, but they've never been convicted of anything. Police have cleared them. I don't even need to decide to defend this cult, but I don't think what they're doing is like pulling people off the street. I think it's what, what cults do, right? It's normal cult stuff. Right, and this case, because here it is, maybe our most successful cult

Scientology, like you don't have to grab people, you just let them wander into your center downtown and then you traffic them. Yeah, it's like a tunnel spider or the snakes that were the ancestor of the cucumbers that scare our cats. That's, I think that works. Yeah, that's more of a spine. So in this case, in the case of the specific conspiracy theories, the police in Kentucky

where light have been like reasonably good about being like, there's no evidence behind this. But as a general rule, law enforcement is usually part of the hype cycle of these sort of like fake kidnapping rumors, then they are part of washing the hype cycle. In 2019, Facebook memes started spreading in college station, Texas, about a kidnapping plot that involved zip tying a victim's windshield wipers together and then abducting the inevitably female victim while she struggles to take them off. One version of the meme ends with this very chain lettery call to action.

I've made this post public and would love it if you'd share it with your friends and family. Please be aware of your surroundings and drive somewhere safe with a lot of people around before trying to remove them if this happens to you. And the college station police started getting queries once this post went viral and so they took to Twitter and they posted on Twitter, did you see the post about zip ties and human trafficking? We don't know whether traffickers are doing this or if it's a distraction technique used

by a would be thief. Either way, always be aware of your surroundings and hashtags. See something say something. So they immediately like buy into this and spread this absolute nonsense. And then roughly a week later, after people get angry at them, post an update saying, to be clear, zip ties, we're described to officers as having been found in a college station mall parking lot. However, it is extremely unlikely this tactic would be related to human trafficking.

Hashtag verify facts before sharing alarming posts. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. That's not how hashtags work. College Station Police Department. But also you are the ones who didn't verify shit before sharing it. That's so weird. That's so weird.

Hey, past self three hours ago, do better. Don't tip done. It's also like, well, why else would people be zip tying windshield weapon? I don't know. Kids are fucking with people. Look, I may have at a certain point when I was drunk and younger, stolen a bike lock and locked the gates of an apartment complex, you know,

for no reason, other than I was a drunk little asshole, you know, maybe I did that. Sometimes. These stories never allow for the existence of drunk little assholes and it's a mirror flop. Yes, yes. Yeah, like, and it's a major flaw. Yes. Yeah. Like, and it's, again, it's, it's this Ockham's razor sort of thing.

What is, what is the, is the simplest, likelyest explanation human trafficking gangs are carrying out a complicated plot? Or some asshole did a thing. Like, and it's probably someone being a shitty. I feel like some asshole is it, you know, 98% of the time and then the other two percent, it's pretty much the government. Yeah, it's either an asshole or the government, right? Speaking of the government, you know who governs my life, Sarah.

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Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Rainy Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. and a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder.

There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another, for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why? In that moment, I'll

rage. And why do you some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the murder Years on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's up y'all? This is Eric Andreik, but I made a podcast called Bomming about absolutely tanking on stage. I'm talking about your most amazing

and as a role experience, it's a performer. I tell gnarly stories and I talk to friends about their worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life. Like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big A-maker punch to my nose. I want to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high.

There was there ever a time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up Subscribe to my podcast bombing with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and my friends I'll have guests like Sam Jay to say Sloan Michelle buto, Max DeMarco DJ Doug Pound Saturday night lives Sarah Sherman and more listen to bombing with Eric Andre and Will Ferrell's big money Players network on the I.I.R. radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Wow Those products my god have you ever seen a service like that? No

Sarah, I have to like the college station police say, I'm going to do the C something say something thing here because you knocked over your recorder and then bent down to get it without checking to see if a kidnapping gang was any they might have knocked your recorder off the desk so that they could get you. I mean, the thing is there's been a kidnap or under my bed for three weeks now, but I mean he's just passed out under there. I think he just needed a place to relax. And it's fun.

Yeah. Thank you again, by the way. Hashtag kidnappers need shelter to. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing there. So it is like, yeah, the kidnapper is a great way to see any person in your field of vision who you don't want to see as a fellow human being. So yeah, yeah, they're kidnappers. They're pedophiles, they're a rape gang or whatever.

Yeah, that's part of how this thing can be utilized by fascists. Fundamentally, fascism's power comes from the fact that we're all anxious and scared all the time. If you can convince people that you can take that anxiety away by hurting a specific group, then you can do a lot of things. You can get away with quite a bit. It turns out. And you can all wear snazzy little outfits because apparently what men want is to wear snazzy little outfits, but it doesn't occur to them to just do something harmless, like

drill team. Yeah. And unfortunately, I feel like we were trying for like for a while, there was the idea that like, what if we let men dress up in snazzy little outfits and pretend to be soldiers or fascists? Will that make them less likely to do real world harm? And no, apparently not. Yeah, we tried it.

We tried it, we tried it, folks. No, sorry. So another frequent spreader of bullshit kidnapping stories are local radio stations, which often find themselves desperate for content that they can read live on air to hopefully keep people tuning in and also who often like run little SEO websites that exist to pull in views based on keywords and shit in order to get advertising money. Our employers come into this story in a little bit.

So one example of this comes from February 2021, when a local Omaha radio station, KFAB, posted an article on their website titled, If you find a water bottle on your car, drive away, you might be in danger. Now the tightest ruin Jessica's water bottle. Yeah, yeah. So the title there is a pretty perfect blend of both SEO-friendly click, you know, click getting titleing and old school chain letter tactics, right? The article warned readers that unspecified abductors were leaving water bottles on cars

to mark their targets. This is a tactic used by traffickers and kidnappers to get you to exit your vehicle and take whatever is on top of the car off. If you have this happen and something is on the hood of your car when you come back to it, leave it there, drive away, it'll fall off on its own. It's like, also, like, and I say this in exasperation frequently, but has no one seen Henry

Portrait of a serial killer, you just got to follow somebody home, you don't have to do the water bottle trick. Henry, is that what's in his money on water bottles? Yeah, that gets expensive and to do the water bottle trick. Henry is not wasting his money on water bottles. Yeah, that gets expensive and it's bad for the ocean. We support, here at Cool Zone, ethical kidnapping, right? If you're going to run a kidnapping gang, I'm abducting people from target parking lots, please don't waste water bottles

or use recycled water bottles, right? Those boxes of water, you can put a box of water on top of somebody's car, steal them, traffic them, you know, sell them to Algeria, right? You know, that's fine, that's a- I can't box water, do. Yeah, that's why when we sell enslaved suburban white people here at Cool Zone Media, each one of them comes with a guarantee

that no plastic water bottles were used in the abduction, right? All of those, it's all those like cans of liquid death. That's what we do. You know, we have a sponsorship with the liquid death people for kidnapping gangs. It's so hard to have to. We can't have these days. It's great to know people are still doing it.

Yeah, it's worth it. It's worth it, Sarah. You know, the extra, it costs us a little more. It does cut down on profits a little bit, but I feel like, you know, that's our responsibility is a member of the community, you know. We wanna give back. But you're not just kidnapping to make money, you're kidnapping because you love it.

It's the love of the game, right? It makes me so sad that there's all these nickel and diamond kidnappers out there, right? You're in the best industry in the world, baby. You know, enjoy it. See? That's all there is to it. Yeah. So again, I probably don't need to tell you there's zero evidence that kidnappers are using water bottles to trick people. If someone has already entered their car and you need them to exit it again to take off

a water bottle, it seems like you've had ample opportunity to kidnap them already. Like, if you need to kidnap, it makes much sense. None of it makes much sense. And I probably don't need to tell you that there's zero evidence for this. Snopes notes that the origin for this video was a TikTok video posted by quote, a woman who said she had a random encounter with a stranger acting oddly around her car in a mall parking lot. And later found a water bottle on the hood of her car and posited based on nothing that these two things were somehow related.

Let me tell you something. I had a weird interaction in a parking lot last night at Winco. And you know what that was? It's because I was at Winco. People at Winco are having a time and we're all getting through it. And I mean parking lots are one of the rare spaces where people from different walks of life are forced to interact, and you can see that in these reactions.

That's why so many, that's why it's all parking lots, and that's why like affluent people have to use the same parking lots as everyone else. And they often resent that deeply. And they're probably a lot of them are the same kind of people who believe that like the existence of homeless folks is like a constant threat to their life. Right? That like it's the greatest threat in the world is that there are homeless people somewhere.

Or that, you know, if the more high density low income housing is created in their town, it'll like ruin, you know, their life or whatever. Like it's, it's this, you, it's the same reason why rich people hate the TSA with a special passion that they don't reserve for like regular cops. It's because they can't avoid the TSA unless they're super, super bitch. But like normal rich people have to go through the same TSA that the rest of us do and they hate it. Um, yeah, anyway, it's whatever. I, uh, I, like, I, it's, it's, I think a lot of this probably is the result of people who don't normally go out in the world in a situation where they don't have total control. And they encounter someone who is either having a mental health crisis or just is a kind

of person they wouldn't socialize with normally. And this sets off that part in their brain that corresponds to the part of the brain that gets set off in a cat that sees a cucumber, right? And they and they feel like I'm in danger now. I'm in danger because something like unfamiliar has occurred. And then the pattern making parts of our brain like put together, you know, the rest of it, right? But like, oh, I found a water bottle on my car and 30 minutes earlier, I saw a person who was like talking to themselves. And so this must be evidence of an international kidnap and gay.

And so who would put a water bottle on my car, but someone having a mental health episode who really is therefore in the perfect position to run a kidnapping ring? Yeah, it's great. So. And it's like, I mean, think of when little kids meet somebody new

Yeah, and that they feel unsure and they are freaked out and then they need a second to warm up and then they take it and they Don't develop a conspiracy theory about that person which I think is really charming of them What I what I love Sarah what makes me really happy and feel good about the future is thinking about how many of the people who make these little conspiracy theories based on anodine shit, then repeat those conspiracy theories to their children and say you must be worried at all times. There's always kidnapping gangs everywhere. Mommy saved you from kidnappers today by noticing the water bottle and then pulling her glock out and the parking lot, you know, like it's great. It's cool that that happens. It's great for the kids. It's known to be great for the kids. My God. Yeah. It's dope. So what we are seeing here in that story I just related is evidence of the kind of food

chain that these fake crime kidnapping panic stories exist in. So the story is cooked up initially by a mix of people who are just a little out of their minds or by actual bad actors wanting to spread conspiracy theories and paranoia and stuff on Facebook or TikTok. Oftentimes it's people who like our spreading stuff they know is not true because they know we'll get them followers. And then the laziest actors in our media ecosystem, the people putting together these shitty

little SEO grabbing articles for like local news sites and shit, take this viral story, churn out a quick article with no fact checking. And that helps the story spread even further, right? And it makes it seem like it's a real thing because now look, that's a news station that's covering this thing. There must be an epidemic. I found one example of one of these articles on Distractify, which exists, making taking shit that went viral on the internet and turning it into very low quality content. The article seems to have been inspired by a TikTok video posted by a woman named Aaron Don,

who recorded a four-minute video about coming back from a shopping trip and finding a sheet of paper on her car door, she claims was soaked in a chemical that injured her. Now, Erin provides no photographic. No, we'll get to that, but like, she provided no evidence that this had happened at all, but she did film a recreation of finding the paper on her car.

We're like, she put a piece of paper on her car and filmed herself finding it. You're an Robert Stack. This is not unsolved mysteries. Yeah, it's so, everyone gets to be Robert Stack now. That's what TikTok has given us. Oh my God. Oh my God.

No. So she narrates over this recreation that she films. When I saw it, I just picked it up with my fingernails and I tossed it out. I didn't touch the napkin, but guess what? I still open the door with my fingertips. I asked my husband, did you put a napkin in my door? And he was like, no, so immediately I started

looking for hand sanitizer. Now, she experienced no real symptoms because poisons like this are so difficult to make and apply that they functionally don't exist, right? It could someone make a poison that you could like put on a napkin and it could impact. Yes, but it's like, that's like't exist, right? It could someone make a poison that you could like put on an napkin and it could impact. Yes, but it's like, that's like the CIA, right? Like random kid, like, or like, Putin or Putin.

And like here's the thing, like Putin has done it a few times, right? But like, it didn't work for like the wrong people got got a lot of the time. Like, if you look up, we've covered like the fucking Sydney gotly, by think he was the CIA's poisoner and chief. And like they were bad at it. Like they kept trying to make these poisons and like usually it would not work fair. That's like fiddle Castro was still alive, right?

None of this stuff works very well. It certainly does not work reliably enough to be abducting people from target barking lots as like a casual deal. So he is on what is her name? Aaron Dawn. Yeah, they're like, let's use like really top-notch stuff on Aaron. Now, it's one of those, it does remind me a little bit about like right after 9-11 happened, kids in my middle school were like, Al Qaeda's gonna get our school next and it's like, I don't know, man, I don't think Al Qaeda, I don't think Osama bin Laden is aware of Plano, Texas.

Like, we're probably good, actually. But it is like, you know, I think that it like after 9-11 people believe that kind of shit because they just seen an insane thing happen on television, right? People flew and I think part of why folks are more primed to believe stuff like this is they, you know, they're on the news and they hear like, oh, all of these cops, you know, had seizures because they were near a fentanyl thing and like, that's bullshit. That's not real. But like a lot of the cops who are having these reactions near a fentanyl thing and like that's bullshit, that's not real. But like a lot of the cops who are having these reactions, like a lot of them are lying,

but a lot of them are just people, like they bought it, right? Like they're having a hysterical reaction because they are also dumb little monkeys who are scared all the time and someone gave them a focus for it, right? And Aaron, whether she's a con artist or a dumb little monkey claims that she had horrible reactions as a result of this poison that her hand went numb, she had her husband take their, and it's really interesting because like her husband, she had her call 911 and she specifically says that they called 911 because they weren't in their normal area and didn't know where the nearest ER was, which I also feel like says a lot about them. We're like, we're always thinking about where the nearest ER is, you

know, but we'd left our normal area, you know, don't ever leave your normal area because then you won't know where the like, if when you get poisoned by kidnappers, it's very like Terry or Laxich. Yeah. You're just like to be in my area. It's and it's like, okay, but yeah, that means that your fears when you're outside your area aren't necessarily about what's really happening. Yes. She claims that the doctors at the hospital diagnosed her with acute poisoning from an unknown substance. Karen. It's interesting. I'm mainly interested in this because of the way that this gets covered by Distractify, who they dress, their article about Aaron's bullshit.

And like, I would say it's like the panoply of journalism, right? They put journalism's clothes on this story, but it's not really journalism. Here's how the article opens. According to the ACLU, there are anywhere from 14,500 to 17,500 people trafficked in the United States each and every year. In 2019, California reported the highest number of cases in the country. With 1,507 people trafficked in the state alone. A staggering 32% of people who are trafficked were purportedly done so by an inanimate partner of theirs. However, there have been a growing number

of kidnapping stories, attempts circulating on social media that are tied to trafficking. So you see what they're doing. They're first talking. Like, hey, you want to know what all those most of those human trafficking cases are and like fucking California and whatever. It's not suburban moms getting abducted in parking lots. It's the people who pick your fucking fruit, right? Like it's, that is super common. And obviously is a huge problem, but it's not the kind of problem that you can make Aaron

Don care about, right? Because she wants to go viral on social media. She's got a lot of likes, grapes. Yeah, she likes her nice, great grapes. She likes her nice, great grapes. So again, it's also like, let's start with, you know, huge, the biggest chunk of people who are traffic are done by a lot, are trafficked by an intimate partner.

Like, that's how trafficking actually occurs. However, we've seen a lot of stories on social media, So like that's literally like all there is to this claim. Anyway, the article then brings up the tragic case of Eliza Fletcher who was an actual young woman who was abducted and murdered while jogging not all that long ago. And again, shit happens, right? tragic stores like this do occur,

but not often there's 380 million people in this country or whatever, right? It's very sad about what happened to Eliza Fletcher. Probably not something you should take general information about your life on. And also that it's a some asshole crime. Yeah, it's definitely a problem, definitely bad. Not evidence that you are in danger.

And it's frustrating because the reasonable way to respond to a lice of fletcher is like, yeah, you should try to be aware of your surroundings and stuff because shit does happen. You should generally keep an eye out. Don't lose yourself completely and you know, whatever you're doing, you know, have some situational awareness, but that always gets turned into like beast frightened at all times. When you really, it's like, you know, look both ways before crossing the street, you know? But I don't know.

And assume the absolute worst about everybody, like not just the worst within the context of the situation, but the worst thing a person could possibly do. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that 2018 story of a shirt on a car being used to market is repeated in the article as evidence that these things are a quote, common ploy of traffickers. And that's an example of kind of the article, you know, form of spreading this disinformation. Another good example of of how the shit spreads

is this 2021 TikTok video, posted by a user named Mims. There, so I went to church on Sunday for about an hour, and I came back out and there was melted cheese on my car. So I called my friend and her mom to come help me scrape it off. And as soon as they came, this white van with like stickers and they were wearing masks, smoking,

pulled out of a parking space that was too spot away from me. And they went to the other parking lot across the street where they could watch us clean off the cheese, and here's a picture of the cheese. So this is the cheese like halfway scraped off or two pieces. It literally took an hour for me to scrape all this off. I personally had no idea that they were using this as a tactic to take people now.

And if I hadn't called my friend that I could have easily been taken within the hour, that took me to take off the cheese. And this happened at my church. So I can't even imagine where they're trying to use it. An hour to scrape off the cheese. It is a single slice of craft America. I'm so drive home, drive home honey. Yeah, I do deal with the cheese. Also, it was like a craft slice.

Like, I don't know how that could take that long. There's people humans, but go on. Do these people live in a universe with that little brothers? No. Obviously, we all saw the numbers on that video. It's been shared thousands and thousands and thousands. The huge, it's very, it went super viral.

It is, there's a lot going on there. Like the fact that she's like these people in a white van were wearing masks and smoking. Were they doing both of those things, Mims? Really? How, how does one do that? Maybe there are some lefties having a cigarette. You never know.

Yeah, it was Antifa. The fact that it happens in her, like, right, I think it's, again, I don't know, these things are kind of an even mix between people who are just looking for conspiracies everywhere because the internet has so thoroughly damaged them and people who are lying to get virality and followers. I don't know which one mims is. The fact that she says it's in a church

parking lot, like even a church you're not safe, right? Like everywhere is dangerous. You know, they're coming after Christians. Yadda yadda yadda. Oh, I'm sure it's definitely not safe. I also wonder to what extent this is about like having an experience that you don't understand the logic of like there's cheese on your car if this actually happened or something like that and being trained to see any object in this case as a threat and then being like and then leaning into it and when you want and maybe like elaborating and embroidering because there's like this huge incentive both to go with your fear and then to like tell this ridiculous story about it because it'll you know, because not only is it out through a stick, but it's gonna get you a tension and followers. Yep. Yep. And yeah, that's that's cool. So I look into mims because I'm trying to figure out

which one is she is she someone who's who's just terminally pilled or is she somebody who's running a con? Her oldest video is from the start of the pandemic. She's in a car looking at a friend who's sitting in the car next to her. Pretty normal snapshot of the loneliness that came from that period of time, right? There are videos where she does like her makeup or she dances or she lifts weights,

but all of those on her account get between a couple hundred and at most two or three thousand views. She has one video of herself in kind of like form fitting athletic wear, hugging a friend dressed similarly with text that says, when you hear big titties are out displayed, that's got 22,000 views. It is her second most popular video. Several of her videos are just like athletes try dancing, you know, stuff like that where she's with a friend and they're like doing dances or whatever. Normal

TikTok, I would say normal shit that looks like attempts to go viral on TikTok, right? This looks like the account of someone who's trying out stuff to be an online influencer, right? I'm going to try doing the makeup, see if that works. I'm going to try doing dancing videos or work at and see if like that goes viral for me. And none of that stuff really took off. Like I said, her biggest other video is that like when you hear big titties around video at 22,000 views,

this, if you find a slice of cheese on your car video has 446,000 videos and I suspect, views and I suspect is responsible for most of her 4,000 or so followers. Mims' post was duly picked up by the bottom feeders of the internet. In this case, our corporate overlords at iHeartRadio, who posted an article titled, if you find a slice of cheese on your car, you might be in danger. There's no attempt to even provide journalistic context on this one, just the line, it might sound silly, but a TikTok user named Mimi is very serious about her experience. There's no attempt to even provide journalistic context on this one, just the line.

It might sound silly, but a TikTok user named Mimi is very serious about her experience. Great, great, great work, guys. Now, all of this would be easy to ignore, it's just more harmless disinformation if it weren't for shit like Phoebe Copus murdering Daniel Garcia, right? That's the grounding. This is all seems like sillyilly is a internet bullshit, but this affects people. It causes them to think they are in danger

and they take steps to defend themselves and that sometimes leads to people getting, it's the same as those stories of folks shooting at people who back into their driveway to turn their car around. People die from this shit and I guarantee you, sometimes it's Fox, sometimes it's TikTok, sometimes it's fake, but it's all this shit that's everywhere, right? So, you know, stuff like this have part of what's going to spread cases like this and what's going to spread like death is the fact that stories like this are everywhere because they're a profitable industry, right? This is a business spreading the shit.

I found this video on TikTok while I was doing my research for that article that's going to be on my substack, Shatterzone, that's got 6.9 million views and it's just a collection of everything we've talked about, like watch this thing. Nice. If you see this run, if you see money in your windshield, you need to run away fast. They're trying to get you to get out of your car and grab the money. If you see this, you need to get in your car some other way. This is a sign that this is probably laced with something. People's hands have gone numb. They have passed out. It is a trick. Do not touch this. If you see this, they have labeled

this. This is what they're labeling. They're saying this is a woman. Do not touch this. If you see this they have labeled this. This is what they're labeling They're saying this is a woman who is alone that someone has been watching you. They see your alone They think you're vulnerable. You need to go home and you need to cut this off This is meant to pause you so that someone from underneath the car can cut your Achilles heel And so that you're distracted to give them enough time But you're gonna notice this one. It's gonna be placed here after you're distracted, it gives them enough time to get close. This one looks the most innocent. But you're gonna notice this one, it's gonna be placed here after you're already in your car. Your goal is to take you out of your car.

You just wanna check your surroundings, okay? Because there's so many different ways for people to get through, they wanna get out of your car and be texting you don't wanna go to your car and be texting. This has so many views, it's been shared so widely. It's just, again, it's, it's, let's make people scared and then sell them weapons using affiliate links

on my TikTok, 6.9 million views. It's literally everything from the snopes, like I think this, this was definitely made by someone who went through all of those snopes collections of like different, they look like, you know, zip tie on the door, piece of cheese, you know, fucking napkins, stuck in, and they just made a video to scare people collecting all that shit. They use the disinformation debunking stuff as a source. Like, that's what this lady did.

I hate this person. It's, it's, God. Yeah, it's very crafty. I'll say that. She's crafty like ice is cold. Yeah, she's crafty, crafty like ice is cold. And you know who else is crafty? The sponsors of our show, who definitely don't have anything to do with that article we talked about earlier. We're gonna get in trouble for that one, Sophie. Nah. All Alright, well.

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911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss.

In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another, for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why? In that moment, I so rage. And why do you some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't

say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the murder years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. of her experiences as a performer. I tell gnarly stories and I talk to friends about the worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life, like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big A-maker punch to my nose. I want to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high. There was a time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up Subscribe to my podcast bombing with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and my friends

I'll have guests like Sam Jay. So we'll say slow and Michelle buto. Max de Marco. DJ Doug Pound Saturday night lives Sarah Sherman and more listen to bombing with Eric Andre on Will Ferrell's big money players network on the IHR radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts We are back Anyway, so It's cool and in addition to causing you causing, we've talked about how all of these paranoid conspiracy theories about kidnapping and addition to causing brain damage to some people.

This stuff provides cover for other kinds of scammers. And this brings me to a particular new kind of con that's been enabled by modern AI tools. This is fun, Sarah, you're gonna like this. You've ever heard of fake kidnapping scams or virtual kidnappings? Ooh, I think it has like a phishing strategy. Yeah, the idea has existed for a while. I found a 2014 warning from the San Antonio FBI press office, and I'm gonna read that to you now. This is how it existed. This is other stuff worked prior to AI, right?

Over the past several years, San Antonio FBI along with many state and local enforcement partners received reports from the public regarding extortion schemes often referred to as virtual kidnappings. These schemes typically involve an individual or criminal organization who contacts a victim via telephone and demands payment for the return of a kidnapped Bailey member or friend while no actual kidnapping has taken place. The caller's often used co-conspirators to convince their victims of the legitimacy of the threat. For example, a caller might attempt to convince a victim that his daughter was kidnapped by having a young female scream for help in the background during the call.

Now, that's like not an easy con to pull off in the pre-AI era. Like not only do you have to have multiple people, but like, I don't know, like, let me talk to him, right? I'm not going to give money to a kidnapper if I can't hear from the person kidnapped, you know? But AI has made that possible. Particularly the thing that's made it possible is both the existence of various AI tools that can let you kind of like clone or fake a voice. And the fact that basically every young person is posting videos on TikTok

that have their voice all the time, right? Like, so there is, it provides you with the ability to mimic particularly people's kids with pretty reasonable accuracy. And that's what we've started to see. And I'm gonna post for you another TikTok video, this one not spreading disinformation. Well, kind, well, here, I'm just going to play this thing.

New scam alert, I usually don't fall for scams, but they got me. Listen to this. So I got a call from my mom last night around 7 p.m. The call came in, it showed her number, it showed her name, how I have it stored in my phone. I answered, hey mom, what's up? And I heard my mom's voice kind of fading away, like someone was taking the phone away from her.

And I heard like weeps. This guy then gets on the phone and he goes, hey, I have your mom. And if you don't send me money, I'm gonna kill this bitch. And I was, okay, who is this? Like what is going on? Now mind you my mom works in home health so her job is to go to patients homes and do self-assessments. So in my head I'm like it's happened. Like a patient has

taken her hostage and this is for real. And the guy on the phone, him and his girlfriend or whoever she was were such good actors. So he's like yelling at me and really pressuring me to get this money sent back. So like, first off, I wanted to clip, put this because it is an example of a viral TikTok post that's not spreading disinformation. This is a real thing. I have no reason to believe this woman's not telling the truth. And there is evidence from good, like reputable journalism that fake kidnapping scams like

this have become more common. Because with these kind of tools, you can fake someone's voice, you know, and all you need is a second to say, honey, help me or whatever. And then a person gets on and you do the, you do the con from there, right? And like, you know, this lady I think did find out what was happening, but like, you can see like, it's interesting, because like she says, well, you know, my mom's job is going into people's house

so she's a home health care worker. So I've always in the back of my mind been worried that something might happen to her, right? So it's both this, I've always, everyone's always anxious because we're, we're stupid monkeys. And also, you know, we all have things that we, you know, fears that are cognizant, right? If you have like a loved one who's got a long commute or whatever, you worry about them dying in a car crash or something.

In this case, you know, this, this, this, this like woman gets a got like these people target her for whatever reason. And like, yeah, that's tough. Cause like, you're not stupid. If you hear your loved one's voice and someone say, send me money, I have, you're not dumb or gullible for falling for that. That's an insane thing to have to be worried about, right?

That like someone can fake your mom's voice. That's nuts. That's like, like, again, it's, and it's, but it's also, I do think the climate of all of these fake stories makes decent people more likely to fall for stuff like this because they're already primed to believe there's kidnapping gangs everywhere, right?

And because everywhere you look, there's something you've never heard of happening. So, in a sense, why not this other thing? This is why my general response to anyone who calls me is go ahead, kill them. I don't care. I say that no matter why they call. That's actually how you answer the phone. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, Hey, Robert.

And you're like, go ahead, kill them. I'm like, I'm like, all right. Is the episode. Can I publish it? Death. Yeah, so anyway. Tell them how I think so fate doing. I don't wanna do that, like again,

you don't need to be worried about kidnapping, but you should, as we're going to talk about, you should be worried about getting scammed because scams are more common than they've ever been and they are more tailored towards individual people because of the kind of tools that exist. The first of these scams have started hitting victims that I've stated in April of this year

in Arizona, family received a phone call from their 15 year old daughter who sounded distraught and handed the phone over to a man who told them, you call the police, you call anybody, I'm gonna pop her so full of drugs, I'm going to have my way with her and I'm going to drop her off in Mexico. And you see again, it's all the shit we've been talking about since Phoebe Copus, right?

There's kidnapping gangs. There's drugs that people have that will knock folks out, you know, probably a little bit of fentanyl conspiracy shit mixed into that. There's Mexico, right? You bring up Mexico, that scares people. Yeah. Like all of these, it's all, all there. Now thankfully in this case, this, the girl who like got her voice cloned for this scam,

her mom was like at a public place. So she gets the call and she freaks out, like you do when you think your daughter's been kidnapped, very reasonable time to freak out, but other people around her, they call 911 and like have the presence of mine to call her husband and be like, is your daughter around? And he's like, yeah, she's at home. And they're like, okay,

ma'am, you're good. Like something else is happening here have cried. I never doubted for one second it was her. That's the freaky part that really got me to my core. Which like yeah, that would be very frightening, right? Very, most people, now that you've been aware that this is a thing, it's kind of like, you know, kidnappers and a fuck, or it's kind of like hijackers in a plane with box cutters, right? That's a real threat when it's never happened before.

Now, if anyone tried to like take over a plane with box cutters, everyone in the plane is going to beat them to death with luggage, right? Like it's that. Yeah, the golden days are too long. Yeah, exactly. But when you're not aware that this is a scam, of course, it is fucking horrifying, harrowing. And that brings us to the hidden bastard for this week's episode. I know it's taken several hours to get to this point, Sarah. I'm sorry. We're already a thousand years old. It's getting

a little older. Exactly. Exactly. We are, we are ancients. As old as the trees, I am, I am an int, you know, I remember, yeah, anyway, whatever. So, yeah, obviously like Phoebe Copus did a horrible thing, but the part of why she did that horrible thing was that she had been kind of this ever present ecosystem of you are in danger, you are at risk, people are attacking you. Like most people aren't going to murder someone, you know, even if they buy into that stuff, but a certain number of people will murder people

as a result of this kind of shit, right? And I think one of the things that feeds into that ever-present feeling that you're at risk, that you're under attack, you have to defend yourself, is that all of us are under attack at all times through every single form of communication that we own. The attack is not kidnapping gangs, it's not human traffickers, but like, look at how many emails you've gotten today and comb through your spam filters. See how many of them are attempts for people to fish you or to like how many text messages

or phone calls did you get today that are from scam likely, you know, how many like pieces of things, like shit, did you get in the mail like what like I got a call this morning from a lovely British robot who wanted to sell me health insurance. Exactly. That is an attack, right? That's not an attack like a kidnapping. It's not something that's, but it is That is someone trying to harm you, right? Like Sarah, someone tried to hurt you today through the phone.

You know, someone is trying to hurt all of us every day through our phones and various other methods of communication. And what did we learn? How is Sarah supposed to answer the phone from now on? Kill the hostage. Kill the hostage. That's right. We all, really Sarah, all of this, we could all learn a lot

from the movie speed, right? Put a bullet in that hostage's kneecap. Do what Keanu would do. It's only Jeff Daniels. Yeah. Oh yeah, what's Jeff Daniels, huh? I like him. So I feel like the fact that we are all constantly being

attacked by con artists, even if the vast majority of those attacks fail, even if the vast majority of those are obvious and laughable contributes to the mindset that makes people more likely to believe this kind of kidnapping shit, right? We're paranoid. There's reason to be paranoid, but it's not, there's nothing fun in being like, well, because of a variety of different kinds of deregulation and just plain old failures to foresee any need for regulation,

every method of communication we have has been infested by con artists and scammers, to a degree that has never been present in human history before, and that contributes to a mindset where people never been present in human history before. And that contributes to a mindset where people don't trust anybody else, right? Instead of saying that, like, we want to believe, it's just sexier to believe that you're like the center of a taken story, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's set of being attacked by 1,000 tiny scammers every week

who are trying to make a little bit of money. It's like a fabulous SB&I kidnapping ring. Yeah, that's much sexier. And it's, but I do want to kind of, I want to spend a little bit of time here at the end talking about how bad this has gotten in numbers because I think this is something, everyone's sort of aware that we're all getting approached by scammers more often. But like there's, this isn't just a thing that you think because it happens to you might be more common. This is objectively happening. Fishing scams hit a historic high in Q4 of 2022 with 4.7 million reported attacks, which is a 150% increase since 2019. A research, right up I found from a research firm Comparitac noted, quote,

October, 2022 saw more than 100,000 unique email subject lines. The largest number ever recorded. This shows that hackers are more likely than ever to tailor their approach rather than using the same template for every victim. This is one of these things that like the increasing development of these AI tools has allowed. Is it makes it easier to kind of instead of like going for the lowest common denominator, actually tailoring stuff for individuals, right? Like you can't do a fake kidnapping scam where you're cloning somebody's mom's voice without like targeting

that person. You're not like randomly going after that, right? It's because it's, it takes some effort to clone a voice like that. You have to know something about the person. And this is what we're seeing across the board. Not only a growth in the number of scams targeting targeting Americans, but smarter and more personalized scams. Remains true that about 95% of all cybersecurity issues are the result of human error. But I think that statistic is actually the way it is framed as problematic. Because when you say 95% of cybersecurity issues, the result of human error.

What I think most people hear is that like, oh, a dummy clicked a link they shouldn't have clicked. What a dummy. No, no, no. It's a human error if you wire someone money because you believe your mom has been kidnapped. That doesn't mean it's not understandable if you're not aware of the con, right?

And the fact that people feel like if I fall for something, if I get conned, I did something dumb means they don't report when they're victimized a lot because they think people will make fun of them. This is an actual problem, right? This is a societal level problem that people feel this way when they are victimized. Zscalers Threat Labs 2023 Fishing Report, worn the chat GPT and other AI tools, can also be used to create fake login pages for users who have no coding knowledge themselves.

They can use these fake login pages in order to like fake that it's someone's banker, whatever, and they can insert malware through that, they can get, you know, there's a wide variety of ways they can fuck with people through that. And eventually, the same AI tools will be utilized effectively in software that is meant to protect people from this, but it's just not good at that yet.

There's too many false positives, like when you're scanning email using AI tools and whatnot to try to determine which ones are fishing attempts. And if a quarter of your emails are getting deleted by an AI because mistakenly thinks that they're, you know, that causes a problem for you. You just can't, it's, what I'm saying here is that I'm not trying to fear manga about the technology in general.

What I'm saying is that new technology tends to be more profitable for attackers before it becomes useful for defending people in this situation. And so that's part of the problem. The primary victims of this new wave of scams are the elderly. The FBI internet crime report last year claimed that Americans over age 60 lost an estimated 1.7 billion dollars to fraud. The highest number ever reported for any age group. And an increase, you want to guess how much this amount has increased over the last three

years? Oh, God. So 300%. Okay, well, not quite that high, but it is an increase of 84% since 2021. Like, still so much. Yeah, it's huge. It's like so much more common now. I found an article, a very good article in the advocate that gives some texture to the

kinds of scams that are increasingly hitting the elderly. Matthews 52 of Baton Rouge told victims he could make investments on their behalf, assured them that they could make high rates of return and threaten to injure them if they did not make payments, according to his guilty plea. In a similar case, in April, Muhammad Alam, 50, pleaded guilty to computer fraud scheme that targeted elderly victims in the US, including Louisiana, and took in about 340,000 fraudulent profits. Alam and other members of the scheme tricked victims into thinking their computers needed support than offered to fix them for a fee.

After the victims paid, Alam would seek access to their bank accounts under the guys that they were entitled to a discount and manipulate account balances, so the victims thought that they owed money to the computer company. So adults, age 60 and older, are not only likely to be scammed, they are the least likely to report being victimized to the authorities. They don't want to call the police. Again, this is like when these people, when victims are interviewed, the number one reason they give for not reporting that they've been victimized is they think they will be blamed

or mocked for falling for a con. Kathy Stokes, director of fraud prevention for the AARP, told the advocate this, well, you gave someone that information, so there's nothing we can do. Fundamentally, we've got to change that. People are losing what amounts to generational wealth these days. Like, we're not just talking about nickel and diamond people.

We are talking about taking someone's retirement savings, you know, taking money that they would have passed on to their kids. Like we are talking about like people are people's lives are being destroyed by this stuff. And there's again, they don't even feel like they can report having huge amounts of money stolen from them, because they'll be mocked for like being a dumb old person who fell for a scam. That's like somebody building a fake website to trap them and shit a lot of the time. Sometimes yeah, people are greedy or whatever,

and they get trapped that way. But like, phone scams are close to an all time high, phishing scams and text message scams are hitting people at the highest levels ever. And add into the fact that social media has like spent years goading people to read and report and share paranoid conspiracy theories. It shouldn't be surprising that by most measurements,

social trust in American society is at its lowest level in living memory. paranoid conspiracy theories, it shouldn't be surprising that by most measurements, social trust in American society is at its lowest level in living memory. In the early 1970s, when chain letters about backseat slasers went from mailbox to mailbox about half of Americans reported to the American National Election Survey that they believed most people could be trusted. Today, less than a third of Americans respond the same way. A recent poll found that social trust is lowest for Americans over 65, which is understandable when you realize how much of them are being bombarded by attempts to steal their fucking

savings. And it's like, I don't know, that's kind of what I've got so far. I don't know what to do about this, because like, I kind of low-key think this is one of the biggest problems in the country. This is like, you know, when you talk about people being worried that, you know, of civil violence of like, you know, we're going to have like, like, this feeds into that to a huge degree. Like look up those stories of people shooting folks in their driveway.

They're not young, right? They're old people. And I don't, please don't take this as me being like, it's understandable that they murdered a young woman in their driveway. It's like, no, but when you bombard people, both with conspiracy theories about how they're in danger and you're also constantly trying to rob them every hour of every day, some of them will lose their minds and a lot of them will have guns, you know? Like, that's a problem. We should deal with it. Yes. Yeah. And you know, and he makes some good points.

But I really think there's a bigger problem in this country. And it's that someone put cheese on a car. Someone who... Well, you know, like, like I always say, you say this often in your podcast, you're wrong about if you see cheese on your car Pull out a block and just open fire empty it into your car. If you see cheese on your car Just yeah, dump the man into it. I'm honestly The city you're in it's time to start over. This is why I always say never go Any public place without a 6,000 pound emotium nitrate bomb, you know?

Just in case you'd rather need it. You're right. You'd say that often. Better to have it and not need it, the need it and not have it, you know? That's why I always tow a writer truck behind my car. Just just always ready, you know? In case I have to detonate a parking lot

to protect myself. Can confirm. I don't know. Sarah, what do we do here? How do we fix this? Oh gosh. I mean, I think that a lot of this problem, as far as I can tell, is people replacing their actual life with the internet in various other forms of media, the epidemic of loneliness among Americans, and especially Americans over 60. I really think that part of the answer is for us to actually talk to each other more, which is um, slightly ironic for me to be saying because we are doing this over

Zoom. But uh, hey, I'm looking you in the face. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And, and I'll see you in like an hour and a half in person. Yeah. And we're going to eat popcorn together. Yeah. You want popcorn together. Eat popcorn together. Yeah. We're going to popcorn together. Eat cheese together, not alone.

But don't put it on somebody's car. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it.

Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. Eat it. So you can just hurl it at your vehicle if you see a trash bag nearby that scares you. Yeah, I mean, the point is that if you kill

absolutely everyone, you will be safe. This is why I think that's the end game of all this. Yeah, well, that's why, you know, I'm glad that we finally have a movie coming out about my personal hero, Robert Oppenheimer. I think the real tragedy of Oppenheimer is that we stopped at like 12 or 13,000 nuclear weapons, right?

We need one for every person on every, if everyone has a new thing, like look at how peaceful relations between the US and the Soviet Union stayed because of all the nukes. If we each have a nuke, right? Everything's fine. Yes, peace through proliferation, just like Ronnie said. Just like Ronnie said. Anyway. Sarah, you got

anything to plug I have a podcast called you wrong about it's also very much about bastards if if you like this show I'm not gonna tell you that you will like my show you could like my show but I don't know I won't tell you what to do but that's my show I have a like my show. But I don't know, I won't tell you what to do. But that's my show. I have a feelings podcast about movies called You Are Good. And I want to plug the Lloyd Center IceRink in Portland, Oregon.

There is talk of it being demolished. Don't let it happen. Go skating with your friends. Protect the Lloyd Center ice rink, but again, if you're in that parking lot, you know. All bets are off. You've been a Roland with an armored vehicle. Oh, good stuff.

All right, that's the episode. Bye-bye. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's up y'all? This is Eric Andreik, but we made a podcast called Bombing about absolutely tanking on stage.

I tell gnarly stories and I talk to friends about their worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life, like the time I stole a girl's phone during a sentence she dumped on stage and threw a big A-maker punch to my nose. Listen to bombing with Aircon Dray on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. words matter and reveal personal stories that show them in action in my life. Listen to I.C.'s Daily Game every weekday on the I.H.R.D. Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and start your morning with me.

So how does a half American, half-nicare-ogwin party girl from New Orleans with absolutely no journalism experience? Break the biggest story of the 80s? That's what journalista is all about. I'm a woman, wife, theater, t-shirt, not wearing a bra, curses like a saver. I got balls bigger than any man. Dan Rathie used to call me his secret weapon. Listen to journal least to every Tuesday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. the iHeart radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.