Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 861: How Foreign Scammers Use U.S. Banks to Fleece Americans

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Gloria Hull Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is cognitive dissonance. Every episode, we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism and irreverence.

To any topic that makes the news makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. and there is no welcome, Matt. You're listening to this on Thursday, August the 21st. But that's not when we're recording. It doesn't matter. It's long-form day.

Tom, what did you think? I mean, like, we have a- Of this delicious cup of coffee you have me? Outstanding. Outstanding. We are recording more in the mornings now. Pour over revelation. And I got to say, I started doing pour over coffee,

and I'm a huge fan of pour over coffee. I switched to tea for a lot. little while. I did tea last year because I was like bored with coffee and I was like I'm like you know I've had a lot of coffee let me see tea. I could not get into tea. I tried. I really tried. I bought a bunch of different teas. I bought different ways to steep the tea. I read like a bunch of articles and watched a bunch of videos and how the best way to make tea. You joined the Dutch East India tea trading company or whatever. I did everything that I was just like yeah, it's all right. I never really felt like I was like, this is amazing. I was always like, that's good. Yeah, that's fine. It felt okay.

And then I was just like, finally, I was like, you know what? Sounds good as an espresso. And then I got involved in that. And then I started working on coffee. And so now I'm back into coffee. But now I'm into pour over coffee. And it is genuinely a cup of pour over coffee in the morning because we used to record in the evening. I do want to ask you a question, a culinary question, because I'm just curious because I have a few of these. And I've, I've had the fortune of having most of these through you are with you. And today is one of them. have you had what you think of or what you would recognize

as sort of like colonarily revelatory moments where you're like, holy shit that needs to be a part of my life. That's different. I'll give you a couple of examples since you know what I'm talking about. I remember the first time I had ramen.

I had ramen with you. Oh, the real ramen. Real ramen. Yeah, yeah. And it was a series of flavors and this umami and this saltiness. and textures. And it was, like,

it reached into my brain and flipped a switch that says this is part of your life now and it matters to you. Yeah. And like, I have a handful of culinary moments like that where I'm like, you know, the first time I ever had X or Y and like I'll never live a life without that now.

I know what that tastes like. There's flavors that I've never tried before or textures that like really feel like like landmark culinary experiences and honestly pour over coffee hits different. It really does.

It is a different thing. It's crazy. I feel like I've never had proper hot coffee before. It's crazy how it hits different but it really does hit different and I was really impressed and blown away

the first time I made it like two weeks ago. I was just like what the sweet fuck is happening. Why did I miss this my whole life? And I even have kind of a pour over system that I've had for years

I just haven't been using it properly. And so like it's a whole thing. It's like a whole thing. Like I like you were taught how to make coffee from your mom, but she didn't really teach you very well. Right. And so you learned a bad way. And so like I just sort of researched and learned how to do a better way and it turned out great. Same thing with pork chops. My mom didn't know how to make a pork chop. I learned how to make pork chops food for me. Pork chops's amazing. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about some stories. This story is from ProPublica. How foreign scammers use U.S. banks to fleece Americans. It's a long involved article. It is. It is. About a gentleman.

who goes by the name of Kevin, I believe, in the article, and he gets taken in by a crypto scam. So someone messages him on Facebook. There's our first point, pin in that for later. Right. he's sending off money like a lot of money, not just like a little money. Six-figure money.

We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars this guy is sending off to random places that are like shell corporations that funnel the money to other places and then he's seeing it come up on the back end of this website. So this back end of his website's printing out all the

stuff and he's getting gains on his stuff. He gets over a million dollars invested. He didn't invest that much but he's got returns of over a million dollars goes to take it out. Can't get it. Now you've got to pay us a tax. There's a tax on taking it out. So there's a tax. You got to send that money here. It's over $100,000. But then you can have all your money. And he even says, I should have known then. Has to do that three or four times. Oh, you sent it to a company and that company sees the money.

We need it again. Oh, we need it again. Oh, we need it again. And they keep milking them and milking them. And it's called a pig-butchering scam where you fat. in the pig and then you butcher it. And this is the butchering part when he's basically emptying his bank account out to try to get this money that doesn't exist that was his money that's gone. And eventually it stops at Chase because a guy just happened to have his name and company used as a fake bank account and he gets taken to court and then that's when it all starts to unravel.

But it essentially is a ton of moments where there could be consumer protection and there isn't. Yeah. And I think that's a real focus of this article that's real important for people to realize is that banks have this mandate to act as a fiduciary, which means that they have a responsibility to protect and serve their customers and make sure that their financial, that their money is safe, right? That's what a fiduciary responsibility is.

It's a responsibility to the safety of the monies that you are held, that you are entrusted with. Yeah. And these banks do the least amount possible. Yes. And people don't realize how much the least is. It's not much. It's not a lot.

It's very fucking little. So, you know, it should, there's a lot of things that, like, it should be fairly self-evident that these are scam accounts, right? They're being opened online. So for convenience and ease, you can oftentimes upload documents and just open up an account online, these accounts are being opened up online, and then immediately big money is being deposited into these accounts. And then immediately that money moves right out of the account. You would think that if a giant corporation were interested in really acting as a fiduciary,

it would be fairly straightforward to flag these accounts. New accounts, big deposits, large withdrawals, fast-moving money, no identity verification, except for online. These are just like checkboxes. I mean, I'm oversimplifying, but like not a lot. But if not a lot. But just like how you filter, you know, like let's say you're using a workout program. Right. And you filter workouts and you say, I'd like to do chess today. I own these five pieces of equipment. Right. And I'd like to do, you know, a 30-minute workout. And a computer can spit out a pretty good workout within no time. for you to do if you just give it five parameters, right? Why can't we give them five parameters in their computer system about this?

And the other big problem is they don't communicate. So you might do that at one bank and then you go to another bank and those banks don't ever talk to it. Yeah, yeah. Everything. So, and banks are supposed to have systems now that allow them to communicate, but it's entirely optional how they use it. So it's voluntary, whether or not they want to share customer information about any of these like scams or red flags or whatever. And like it's as I also like I was thinking the whole time, I would be willing to bet that the dollars invested in building good algorithms for marketing are effective dollars that build good algorithms for marketing.

They could absolutely invest money to build good algorithms to avoid this kind of fraud. and to flag these kind of scams. The problem is that there's no money to be made here. That's the thing that is important. Like Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, it doesn't matter who you are. You don't make any money stopping a scam. You just did work.

And you essentially did work for free. You just protected your consumer. But like the average consumer isn't really worth much money to the bank. You know, the average guy with a checking account that his W-2 paycheck goes into direct deposit, and then he spends money out of his direct deposit account to pay his bills. Like, the bank's not making any real money on that account. Not really. It's mostly money in, money out. They get to invest a little bit. They're going to get some overnight returns. But like your individual account is not really worth a hell of a lot to that bank.

So there's not really an aligned incentive for the bank to spend a lot of money protecting you personally. And the bank isn't held responsible for any of this. So as long as the bank doesn't have any juice, they've got no fucking skin in the game. It's like we've not built an incentive structure that would create a solution to any of this stuff. It feels like throughout, I don't know, throughout capitalism,

there just isn't any, the little guy always gets the shit. The shit rolls downhill no matter what, right? So when it comes to this, there's no consumer protections. But then we also think about labor protections. there's not a lot of those either. Right.

It's always everything gets deferred to the corporation. Right. Like the corporation gets the, they get to make the rules and they get to decide how things work. And one of the reasons is because we allow corporations to essentially decide how elections come out. So they're the ones who get to pick, who gets to decide how well they're going to be policed, how much, how responsible they will be for these things. Yeah, yeah. You notice that in this article, they talk about other companies. countries. And they say, hey, you know what happens in other countries is if they let all this

money go through their system, the people who lose this money in these scams are there is a, like, just like how if a bank goes bankrupt, we have that FDIC. Is that what it's called with like the insurance that basically like if my bank goes under, I'm still going to get my money back because banks go under and it's sort of guaranteed by the government in some way. Same thing there. It's like, if you fucking as the bank send a fucking big check in France and you didn't check ahead of time you're going to be on the

on the hook for some of that money maybe not all of it because there's a limit but some of it you'll be on the hook for some of it $80,000 or something like that yeah well it's also the case that we've got a money transfer system that has no way to do takes these

backsies so this is interesting too so if I said there's a couple of different ways to send money electronically. There's actually a lot of ways, but like just broadly speaking, as a consumer or as like a corporation, money is off. Like if I send, I can sell you, right? If I sell you, that money's gone. And Chase will tell you, or whoever your bank is like, hey, if you zeal somebody, that's it. There is a checkbox. I have to check almost every time now when I want to send money, even to like a good friend of ours. I go, I visit a good friend of ours every two weeks. And I visit him and we order

dinner. And every time we order dinner, he puts it on his credit card and I zell him the money. And so that happens every two weeks. I'm zed. And every two weeks, I get a message that's like, do you want to give circle money? I'm like, yes, I want to give circle. I give circle money every two weeks. All the time. You can do an automatic clearinghouse or ACH transfer. Those are interesting because there's a clawback period for ACH transfers. That's how your direct deposit for your W2, by the way. If you get a direct deposit from your employer, your employer is using an ACH transfer. That's actually clawbackable. So your employer can give you a paycheck and claw it back.

They can actually reach back into your account and pull it back. Most of all of these are wire transfers. Wire transfers basically cannot, I don't send me an email, but like they essentially cannot be clawed back. They are, once they're gone, they're gone. In a, like there are very, very rare exceptions to that. They happen almost instantaneously. The money is out.

The money wants it. goes to the recipient bank cannot be pulled back. We could build a system where they can be. That's what I was thinking is... You could just build a system where that's not the case. Well, I think what you'd have to build into the system is a time frame. Right. There'd have to be some sort of holding period or a holding house even where that money goes

to and we wait. We wait a few days. We double check to make sure everything's okay. And then we go through with it. I think that there also should be checks like you suggest, too, in the system. that somebody's like, man, this person, this account got a bunch of money and these people are sending money to

that thing, we're going to hold it. And you know what happened sometimes? They do do that. This article ends with that. This article ends with them suing Chase and Chase being like, yeah, we kind of had the money still. We knew something was going on, so we stopped it. We put a stop to it and here's your money back.

Yeah. The thing is like the banks can do this. And this is of particular interest to me Because in my day job, one of the, like a massive concern is wire fraud. There is a massive concern in the real estate industry for wire fraud. And wire fraud happens in lots of different ways within real estate transactions. And when it happens, it's often hundreds of thousands of dollars that get redirected, you know. And once these monies are redirected, I have only seen one successful grab back or freeze.

and then the funds eventually come back to you and the FBI is done investigating, blah, blah, like it takes like a year, but like the funds eventually kind of come back. I've seen it happen once. But it is so common. It is an incredibly common, I mean, wire fraud attempts in my industry are daily.

There are daily wire fraud attempts within our industry. And wire fraud success is not uncommon in the industry. So like, I've seen this happen. It's the money goes to the recipient account And then within seconds, not even exaggerating, within a matter of a minute, two minutes, that money is dispersed 15 different other places. And that money might be going to crypto in order to be laundered around. That money might be going to offshore accounts.

It might be going to 15 different accounts. That money gets moved and split and moved and split and moved and split. And I just don't believe that there's not a system that we could build that could fairly easily identify this stuff. Sure. right because regular people and regular course of business doesn't look like this if you were to graph this out if you were write this down on a fucking you know like charlie it's always sunny in philadelphia board with pushpins and and yarn this looks different than how most money moves around most money doesn't move and then move and then split move and then accounts don't usually open out of nowhere and then hundreds of thousands are deposited into them out of nowhere it's not how accounts work I just think it's really fascinating that we're not fixing this problem

that we are enabling the movement of American money into foreign banks and foreign scammers, some of which are national actors. Yeah. So that's the other thing is like this is a combination of criminal gangs and sponsored state actors.

Yeah. Stealing American money. And stealing from like a dude. Some guy. A guy who's going to retire eventually. And he spent this money to try to like make it so his nest day

was bigger or whatever. Yeah. And now he's screwed. I recognize that like as the consumer, you just don't have a lot of protections when it comes to this stuff. Like you can just get scammed.

I think about like all the times that I've been scammed, not scammed, but like someone has gotten my card and done something. Yeah. Stolen my card number. and gotten it. And it's never anything I've ever done, right? It's never been like I've gotten a

fishing scam and I entered my card in. It's that somebody just got a hold of my card number and just used it somewhere. Right. And I'll look on my, I remember looking on my bank account years ago, God, I remember when I didn't have two pennies to rub together. And I'm just out of college. And I got, we got hit in our bank account for, we got overdrawn. And it was just this massive amount of money. And then that money doesn't come back right away. It's not like they just shit that money back in. They're like, well, we got to look into it. And this was, years ago. So, like, we got to look into, we got to see. And, like, the whole time you're just worried, they're like, you're going to be, you're not going to have this money. And, you know,

you need that money for your car payment or for your rent or whatever it is. And it just, it's just gone at that point. And there's not a lot you can do. You're just sort of stuck. And some random dude just stole all your money and there's nothing. And there was never any even interaction with them. They just stole all your cash. Right. And there's not a lot of protections for those people. I just had to fight with a credit card, not a debit card company. recently. I had to get on an over-hour-long phone call to argue with them about whether or not I was in fucking Cincinnati at a gift shop with a virtual card I never activated. I'm just like, I'm arguing with them for an hour. And it's like, there should be easier consumer

protections out there. And I have had great experiences with credit cards in the past where I remember I saved and saved and saved and saved for Sarah and I, we hated our kitchen and for like 10 years we saved money. And then we finally got enough money to renovate the kitchen and buy new appliances. And I bought all these brand new appliances. I went to this store

that I was told to go to because they have great prices. I go there and the next month they closed down. I remember this. They fucking closed down and they took my money, but I paid on a credit card. So I paid for all these appliances

that I had just saved almost a decade to buy. And I call my credit card company up and I'm like, I just found out that this company closed. they're like, what was the transaction, sir? And I told him, like, all right, it's back in your account.

It was literally that fast. That's amazing. It was seriously that fast. It was American Express. It was seriously as fast as I just had that conversation. That's how fast it was. And it's like, I see stuff like that. And I think, like, that's how it should work.

Right. It should work that I'm protected. That the people that I trust to handle my money should be like that. If I call you as the bank and say, some guy just scam me, You should be like, don't worry, we're going to take care of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's how it should be.

Yeah. Like, it should also be the case that if I'm going to send money over a certain dollar amount, then whoever, then there should be some system in place that says, who are you intending to send this money to and give us a detail about this money transfer, right? That would prevent a lot of money scamming and money laundering. And it is intentionally not done. I think that's the important point. It's intentionally not done.

Because building these systems are actually fairly common, they're common sense. And that's why these systems exist in other parts of the world. We just don't have these systems in place here because we don't want to have anything that acts as a barrier or appears to be a de facto regulation because we don't do anything to your point to regulate these massive financial corporations. We let them run roughshod over the top of every consumer across all of history and time because that's what we want. that's who we fucking voted

or they told us to vote for when they controlled through lobbyists how our politics is governed. I think too that there is that there's a possibility that there might be a bank out there that decides to try to do this. But if your

competition isn't doing it and they're getting away with not having to pay for any of this money and not having to chase it down and not having to worry about it, not have to manpower and staff and create a program and hire a programmer to put in their program and do all the extra steps it would take in order to protect their consumer and none of the other banks are protecting their consumer and that's not a thing that anybody

cares about that it'll never happen. Yeah. Right. If you made it into a thing where that that was a series, a set of competition to get my business, that might change my mind on what bank to use, right? That might change my mind to be like, no, my money's safer over there. Yeah. I'm willing to pay the extra ATM fee on that place because I know my money's safer over there. Our money should be safe, not just at the depository level, but at the movement level. Yeah. And our money is safe at the depository level because of the FDIC, up to $250,000, but our money is completely unsafe at the movement level. As soon as we go to move that money from depository into some kind of a payment cycle, our money is completely fucking wild wested.

And like, it's as I'm just thinking about this, I went four years ago, so five years ago. So just before the pandemic, I was, I had an office and I had a bunch of people that worked for me in that office. And it was getting toward Christmas time. And I wanted to go buy everybody a $150 gift card. And I had like 88 gift cards I had to buy. So I went to the grocery store and I basically got, because I did it kind of last minute. So I went to the grocery store and I'm just grabbing dozens of gift cards off the fucking gift card rack. You know, like it's December like 20th.

You know, I was like, I got to do something for the employees. I wanted to do this. So I got all these gift cards. And then I go to buy 88, $150 gift cards. I had to fill out so much paperwork at the fucking grocery store.

No kidding. Because they were making sure that I wasn't the victim of one of these gift card scams. No kidding. Yeah. And I... It's a grocery store.

Right. So fucking like Jewel owned by Kroger now. Jewel Osco here, it's a grocery store. It's owned by Kroger. It's a big grocery store in the Chicagoland area.

They had a system in place to protect me. The fucking grocery store. Think about that your bank doesn't. I think, too, that there is something to be said about some freedoms, though, right? And I certainly wouldn't want some sort of creep to make it so like, and I say creep in the sense that something is creeping, not a person, but something's creeping. I worry that, like, what would happen to somebody who wants to make a transaction that's none of your business type of thing.

Like they want to pull a bunch of money out or whatever. I wouldn't want to interfere with something that is, you know, maybe more sensitive than others things. Not against the law. Yeah. No, that's a legitimate point. But I wouldn't want to interfere with somebody's freedoms to spend the money how they want to spend their money.

But I also think there needs to be something in there that help protect people. So there's a balance there, right? A balance between, do I have to fill this out for? every gift card or is it only when I come into buy 20 gift cards? Right. Like when is that, where's that switch get flipped and when is it not a burden on the consumer

and when is it, you know what I mean? So there's things that have to be thought about. That has to be weighed. That my speed of transaction to get that wire transfer from my bank has to be weighed into the equation too because there's going to be somebody who's like, well I've been waiting for this wire transfer for three days

and like we're doing it to protect you. They don't understand that. And I want to acknowledge too. I know that it is important to move money quickly. Yeah. Like sometimes, like I'm just thinking about my own life. Like in real estate, you have to frequently move money, large amounts of money, have to move within hours. You can't wait days for things. You got to move money from transaction A to transaction B to make transaction C happen. Like it's a, it's a reality. Yeah. But like again, this is the fucking like internet world. Like you can provide vera. identifying, identifying information that says, I am not being scammed.

Yeah. Right. And I think there is a balance, right? I want to be able to move money at my discretion, not yours, right? As the bank, I want to move money at my discretion and I want to move my money at speed. But I also want to move my money safely. And I want you to care that I'm safe because you're making a lot of money in aggregate off of holding my money.

At an individual account holder level, are you making any real money? money off of me, no. But are you making an enormous amount of money by aggregating all of these sums together? You absolutely are. So you have a responsibility to make sure that I don't get fucked over because I'm using your bank for a reason. And we're living in an age where things really don't take that much time. And the solutions are not impossible. And like I always think of like problem solving as a funnel rather than a gate so we don't have to build

we can build systems that aren't gates gates are binary, they're open or closed either work or they don't work that's a bad way to think about problem solving but filters are a better idea, funnels are filters maybe some of it's still going to squeak through

but if we can narrow the funnel and reduce the amount of errors that occur we have a responsibility to do that. I don't building gates is a problem it slows the system down it makes. But like, when we don't even build a funnel, that's when I get fucking mad, right? Because now I'm like, look, you could make a series of solutions that all have some amount of compromise in them. And then we'd be 80% safer. But instead we're like, well, it's just

and that's nothing. And I think, too, like, there definitely is pressures from businesses that don't want to be held responsible. And I think, like, there needs to be something regulatory, some sort of laws and things in place that make them responsible. And we see in other countries when they do that, they are responsible. So we need things in place here that make those big businesses

that have no, they don't have any skin in the game now, make them have skin in the game. Yes. And this leads us into the second story that we covered. This is from the Atlantic. Scammers are coming for college students and this is a long story about diploma mills

and about stealing, essentially stealing Pell Grant money and student loan money from vulnerable people and getting people to sign this away, tricking people through saying that they're going to be getting training that isn't worth anything, et cetera, et cetera. And what we had in place was a regulatory agency, the Department of Education, to pay attention to this stuff, go follow up on some of this stuff,

get complaints and follow up, follow up against these colleges that are lying, that are essentially, like, they use a great example in this story where they say, I could have a university called Cecil's University, we can figure out how much Pell money you could get right now, and then we can charge exactly that amount of money, have the government send that money to me, and then I can write in a thing that says, Tom graduated Cecil University, and I give it to him, and then we split the money. And that can happen through, and the thing is, is like, understand everybody. that's our money. That's my money. That's your money. That's everybody who's listening.

If you're in the United States, that's your money. We should care about that money. We should say that money should go to people who deserve it. I had Pell Grants. When I went to school and I am very grateful that I was able to get Pell Grants to help me go through school because without them, I wouldn't have been able to do it. And so I'm very grateful for them. But I went to accredited universities and I didn't try to scam the system. And there's these people out there that are like, I can fucking get this money. And then when you say, well, there's a bunch of waste

fraud and abuse out there, and I'm going to cut out all the people in the department who take care of any of that stuff. Suddenly we're pulling back regulation where there even was consumer protections in the past. Yeah. Yeah. The, you know,

the Department of Education, they had an entire group of people whose job it was to make sure that this kind of shit didn't happen. Yeah. And we fired them. Yeah. We got rid of them. We fired them. So what we did is we... Eight out of nine places, eight out of nine of the sort of houses that housed those people who went out and did all that work are gone. So we're trying to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse by creating an environment that is literally the perfect environment for

waste, fraud, and abuse. Exactly. That's a, that's, you know, that's like saying, you know, I'm going to get rid of the mold problem in my house by walking around and spritzing the house with water. Yeah. To make sure that all of my surfaces are wet. And a different mold i don't want black i want green what the fuck is like what are we doing here we are creating a breeding ground for scammers if we don't have anybody checking on this stuff when we don't have anybody checking on this stuff so we and this should come as no surprise because essentially trump university yeah that's a great point this scam it's a great point that's a great point yeah so if it was like if if i'm trump and i'm like yeah well

wasn't a fucking problem when I did it. I built an entire business model on it. You know, like there are a lot of, and there's a lot of accredited universities, too, that run that cusp where you're like, how fucking useful is that degree? Yeah. There's a lot of them where, like, the degrees are not particularly valuable. They are not particularly marketable. They market heavily, certain types of secondary education models, market heavily toward different,

vulnerable groups of people in order to create a for-profit education that at the end of the day doesn't yield a result that gets people work that increases their economic livelihood at all that doesn't benefit them at all. You know, there's a lot more secondary education than just the traditional four-year college or university system. And many of those, like, less traditional spaces are eligible for federal monies. Yeah. And like there's a lot of people that go and get degrees or certificates or other kinds of educations that then

turn out to be fucking worthless. Yeah. It doesn't work. It's not worth anything when you're finished with it. One of the things that struck me was it sounds like there was only a few people already who were doing way too much work and then we fired them all. Yeah, man. Yeah. It sounds like a Herculean task

every day to go to work and have a, you know, it's like the the cartoonish desk that has just got the in, the papers that are as high as you can see, and the out is empty because there's just constantly work that's being turned over. Every time I hear stories about government and what kind of shoestring budget essentially they had

to try to be the protectors for you and I, right? There's a group of people out there that are dying to get their hands on this money, right? They are dying to get their hands on this money, and they want to make sure that they can scam whoever they can to get that money because it's easy money. It's easy money to pretend that you have a university and then to pay a bunch of people to take out a bunch of loans that they'll never pay back. And it's easy money that can come in and you can scam the entirety of the United States populace, right? There's not one person. You're scamming the United States.

And when you cut out all the people who are the regulatory body to double check on that stuff, suddenly that opens it wide open. first thought I had was like, I think that there's going to be a lot of religious institutions that are going to be gobbling that money up. Oh my God. Yeah, you're right. Because they build a lot of these sort of like educational facilities. Yeah. And think about all the Bible institutes and all the other thing that you can go. You're talking about, talk about a worthless degree. Oh, I know. Get a Bible degree. Yep. I got a degree in reading an old book. And those people will go and spend a ton of money at these Bible institutes. Yeah. And now they'll probably be federally funded, right? I mean, like, why wouldn't they be? And then they can get federal loans and

federal money. Dude, you're right. And that's what, that's what initially popped into my head when I was, when I saw this stuff because I was like, oh, they're going to just, they're just like the voucher system. Yeah, man. They're going to, they're going to squeeze that money out of the United States government. And it's our money. It's my money. It's your money. Yeah. And there should be somebody there who says, that's fake. That's bullshit. You're charging exactly how much. much a Pell Grant should be to give somebody a worthless degree. Yeah. Well, you know, it does doved, God, I didn't even think about that, man, but it dovetails so much with the sort of ideological change where like, because obviously, like one of the solutions to this is to say that like these

types of money can only go to organizations that have been accredited in some way. And they mentioned that in the article, yeah. But we are also moving away from the idea of valuing expertise. in general. And accreditation is a sort of like institutionalization of the valuation of expertise, right? We're saying you really are an expert. You are providing something of value because these are the standards that you've decided intellectually and otherwise educationally are going to be met at our unit. We're already moving away from that as a held, a shared value. So if we move away from that as a held and shared value as a nation, the idea of accreditation gets murky. Why should my, why should my organization not be accredited

and yours is? Well, I mean, mine's Harvard and yours is like fucking Joe's Bible Institute. Jordan Peterson University. Yeah. What's that fucking fake university? Like the online fucking fake bullshit sounding university? Prager. Prager, Prager, you. Prager You sounds like something, right? There's a lot of this stuff that sounds like something. I am aware that, like, the veneer is the easiest thing to put on. There was a part of the Joe Rogan show that I listened to with Jordan Peterson, where they're talking about Jordan Peterson University. And Jordan Peterson was arguing against accreditation because he was saying he's like,

people were asking if our university is going to be accredited and whatever. And he's, but he said, I don't think. that I should be judged by any ivory tower stuff, et cetera, et cetera. And if you go on their website, they have a whole thing that says, like, we're not accredited now, and we're not sure we ever will be

because we're not sure we want to bow. We want to, we want to, we value intellectual honesty and we feel like we'll be handcuffed in intellectually if we have to bow down to these accreditation procedures that they suggest, et cetera, et cetera. So they're lying to you to say that the thing they have is worth more than an accredited degree, because they think that they're

that they're sort of like they're on their high horse they're like those people in the Ivy Tower are trying to tell us what to do and what to teach you and what's value but we know better than them and we're going to teach you these things that they don't want you to know about

and that's why you should pay us money and don't I mean understand that without somebody in the Department of Education to make these decisions places like Jordan Peterson University might be available for federal money dude you're not wrong and I think that's going to happen I would not be surprised if that happens in the next three and a half years.

I wouldn't be surprised about that at all. Because it's the, we're already seeing a, you know, secrets they don't want you to know type government. Right? Like look at Maha. Yeah. Maha is all built on they don't want you to know that vaccines are dangerous. They don't want you to know that raw milk is totes magoats amazing. Yep.

Like, they don't want you to know. So if universities like Jordan Pee. Peterson University, which is not a university. It's not a university. It's not a thing. It's a fucking podcast. Right. It's a podcast. That's not an education.

Like just somebody, this is not, if, then there's there's glory whole university. There's fucking glory hole. Glory hole. Glory whole college. Let's do this. Let's get some of that sweet, sweet pell money. CISO let's get rich.

They got to stick the check through the hole. That's how you pay for it. Jesus Christ. I, when I was listening to these stories, I was so disheartened by the people who get scammed, both in the education field, right? They, you know, you're trying to better your life. Yeah. You're just, all you're trying to do is just better your life.

You're just trying to, you're trying to get out of, you know, a sit. Because clearly, you don't go to school if you're comfortable, I don't think. I think you go to school very specifically to change and to do something else afterwards. You're not doing it. On occasion, people will do it to reinforce the things that they're involved. in, but most of the time it's to do something else. It's, I'm, I'm in school now. I'm a executive assistant, but I really want to be a lawyer.

Right. And so I'm going to law school. Trying to better your life in some way. And I appreciate the shit out of that. As a, like a person who comes from a background where people in my life didn't have college degrees, I was, I always thought was an unattainable goal. I really appreciate that. And to see somebody use that as a way to trick other.

people is abhorrent to me, really disgusting. And then to fire all those people that take care of you is awful. It's just such a, it's such a backward shitty way to handle things. But then I also saw the other people in the other article. This poor guy is sending money after money after money after money to try to get some of that money back that he had already wasted, that he had already known he was scammed, I mean, he already knew he was scammed on, but just hoping you could get some of it back and then sending that money out and sending that money out and that hole that he's digging deeper and deeper and I feel so bad for all the people that get scammed. I feel so bad and it's and it's just not it's not a trivial amount of money. Like if you get life saving. If like you lose your

wallet or something, that's a totally different thing than this, you know? This is life savings money. I guess like like as you're talking like what occurs to me is that when you have when you have an executive who is basically the entire government whose entire ethos is built upon scamming the little guy selling you a fucking watch that says rump you know selling you golden shoes the rump watch selling you digital baseball cards creating meme coins just juicing you for everything you're worth when when that's the guy in charge is it any wonder is it any wonder that what he wants to build is a buyer beware culture. Yeah.

If you build a buyer beware culture, you place the onus to prevent scams on the little guy, and that allows the scammer to flourish. The scammer to flourish every time. You know what? I'm also, I put a pin in it at the beginning of the episode, and I want to pull that pin out. The reason why this person in this other article

about the banking scam got contact to us through social media, they eventually banned this account, right? But I really feel like there's something to be said and some sort of protections that need to be in place for social media. I think social media, they talk about all the ways in which they're communicating

on this, Tom, signal. And the signal backrooms that these people have where they're literally selling accounts online. So you go into this signal backroom and telegram backrooms and you can walk in and there's a whole group of people that are like, I have this account

at this place, in this bank, and you can deposit money and take money out. I will rent it to you for a little amount of time. You pay me a little bit of money, but the money that comes in and goes out, that money comes in and goes out, and you have the account numbers, et cetera.

And people, they deal in these fake accounts, in these backrooms, on these social media things. As soon as ProPublica says to them, hey, you're doing, this is fucked up, they immediately delete the accounts. Right. Every time Facebook gets contacted because somebody used their platform

to find a pig to butcher, they immediately delete the account after. afterwards. And then they send a statement to ProPublica says, the safety of the people on our platform is of utmost concern to us. And we immediately terminated the account once we found out. This is an account that's reaching out to a bunch of people. Like, there should be better safeguards. There should be better safeguards. And the people who facilitated it along the way, these companies that hold these things. And now I don't know, I understand too, the people who will send me a message and be like, yeah, well, on signal I have a support group, a support group

that is for people who are, you know, possibly fleeing from, you know, abusive husbands or something. Sure. Right. And so our maintaining secrecy is super important. And to get rid of that is a bad thing. And I get that. And I understand that. And I want you to have that.

But I also recognize that along the way, there is a way for anybody to get a wedge in there and hurt someone else along the way. There's a way for these people to use that wedge to get into signal and, create these backrooms to then sell to all these other people. Yeah, I agree with that. I think these companies have, they're making billions and billions of dollars off of us. They're making an enormous amount of money.

They have a responsibility. They just do. Like, it's not enough for them. If pro-publica can find these, then telegram or signal or Facebook, they can find them. And again, can they find them all? No, it's not a gate, it's a funnel. But are they looking?

How many are they finding? Are they finding enough? They should be finding more. What mechanisms are you using to find more of these problems? They need to be constantly working. They should be, it's an arms race. And like, it is not enough to say this is hard, so we're not doing it. I know it's hard.

Fucking do it. All right, that's going to wrap it up for our long-form discussion this week. We'll be back on Monday with a full show, but we'll leave like we always do with the skeptics creed. credulity is not a virtue it's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue hypno-babelon bullshit couched in scientistian double bubble toil and trouble pseudo quasi alternative acupunctuating pressurized stereogram pyramidal free energy healing water downward spiral brain dead pan sales

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