LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 58 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

CDC Mask Guidelines Shift and New Study of the Effects of  Working Long Hours! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss these topics and more, including Updates on the Colonial Pipeline Hack, the Companies with the Longest Terms and Conditions, and Phishing Attempts Continue. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 58 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. We use Bosch Camera's onboard intelligent video analytics to quickly locate important recorded incidents or events. Bosch's forensic search saves you time and money by searching through hours or days of video within minutes to find and collect video evidence. Learn more about intelligent video analytics from Bosch in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at BoschSecurity.com. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast from the LPRC. us in our weekly update series. We're joined today by, as normal, our Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Nguyen and our producer Diego Rodriguez. And we're going to talk a little bit about what's going on around the world as we continue to move through and hopefully out of the pandemic at large. And

we all know that it's really very, it's a different look anywhere you go in any given state of the United States and any given country around the world as far as where they are, what they're dealing with, what's what's rising or waning or or staying the same. been over 1.5 billion humans that have received at least one dose of a vaccine, a COVID-19 vaccine around the world. Over 275 million Americans have now received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. So we continue to make huge progress. And guess what? Wherever this has happened, we've seen precipitous drops. It seems like in Singapore or different areas, you see these places that have gotten the high level vaccine where there's no activity. Certainly fatalities have dropped to almost nothing. Thank goodness. Others have seen that, but then they see a little mini spike. We've seen sort of these anecdotal stories come out about a Major League Baseball team or whatever. But what seems interesting is that what's supposed to happen does. supposed to happen does. And so if you have somebody that's got particularly viremic super spreader, if you will, as we heard earlier on in the pandemic, they're spreading the viral particles. Others inhale that. They might test positive for COVID-19, but in these cases, you're seeing still overwhelmingly asymptomatic, don't even know they had it other tests, don't have the disease,

or just doesn't progress very far. So it seems that the vaccines are working. And so whoever the viremic person was that they just inhale some particles and push that out or with a unvaccinated or whatever. We also know that even the most efficacious vaccines, of course, are 90, 95, 96% efficacious. So there's going to be 3, 4, 5, 10% where it's not expected to work. It's just the way that the person was dosed or the way their body responds or didn't respond and things like that. So it's all to be expected. But the good news is really thanks to modern medicine, again, leveraging this, we've heard now, decades-old

technology, mRNA, with rapid development, rigorous testing, but simultaneous to that, the manufacture of the actual vaccine, not before it was even known whether it would be effective or not and safe or not, and then setting up distribution networks and so on has really done what it was supposed to do. And so we see everywhere masks are coming off unless you're not vaccinated yet. It seems the CDC is even pretty explicit about every individual is going to take their own health and health of their loved ones or those that come in contact into their own hands. And so if you're not vaccinated and you're around people that are similarly not vaccinated, or you're actually

infected and viremic and you're not masked, then you're responsible for your own health, I guess, or those that you're exposing to you. So it's a very complicated thing and nobody knows who's vaccinated or not. And it's probably just beyond difficult to come up with a way to do just that. But I can see even here at the University of Florida where yesterday they came out with that nobody has to mask inside a UF building. And today's Tuesday, the 18th of May 2021. So yesterday on Monday, but they would hope that those that are not vaccinated would continue to, other than in UF health facilities of any time there, everybody is going to remain masked for obvious reasons. They're all kind of compromised people. But most of us have teens where somebody has some kind of vulnerability, autoimmune and other types of immune vulnerabilities. And that's something that is still under study. Those that are not vaccinated, wearing masks in particular,

and particularly those that are have some of those conditions remain masked because they're very vulnerable and they can't receive a vaccine. So there are those that are that are really anxious to get a vaccine, but just are not able to for health reasons. But we know that there are 77 more vaccine candidates now in preclinical. We've got 49 vaccines that are being tested in the phase one trial. Different types of phase one trials, 37 more candidates in phase two, 27 candidates have now entered the phase three, large scale randomized controlled trial in phase. And then we know, of course, we've got the six emergency use, eight approved and with Pfizer's full approval under review now. So there are a lot of vaccine candidates continuing to move through the process

so to see what's going to end up happening around the world as far as that goes. We see that all the country that the US and other countries that are now starting to generate an excess of vaccine are sending that in mass to places like India and others that had passed theirs on and had not taken the vaccine. In so many cases, they thought the pandemic might have been waning, or they just shipped them out to other countries that seem more desperate. So people seem to be pulling together. But in the area that we hear a lot from Tom Meehan, you see a lot of fraud. I've been hearing podcasts and reading articles in India where people are being arrested for all types of fraud, oxygen generators and oxygen tanks and all types of black market

activity and so on. So we would expect that in our area. We know the international flights are still looking more like they're going to require vaccine passengers only. I've seen a couple more of those flights now. Delta announced that all new employees must be vaccinated. We're seeing the military, the U.S. military starting to clamp down and looking at mandatory vaccines so that they can remain mission capable. As with others, I know, again, when I was in the U.S. Army in the infantry, it wasn't something you could express your concern about. You were vaccinated with multiple things. So

it'll be interesting to see how this kind of plays out for the greater good. The other part is we see that spreading out the doses, I talked about this months ago, that there was a lot of research indicating that vaccine dose one, and then two, if it's a two-dose series, that they were looking at three or four weeks between. And then you started seeing evidence that if you extended that a little bit, then you might gain even more potential antibody activity and heightened immune response. And so you saw in the UK out of necessity, they decided to go with let's get everybody one dose rather than trying to get half that number. Two doses that may have been the smart play in a lot of ways. that may have been the smart play in a lot of ways.

One, they got a lot more people, a lot more rapidly vaccinated in getting that community immunity going up pretty rapidly, on the other hand, and also by spreading it out. And many vaccines, as I mentioned before in an earlier podcast, that's the case. So more studies have emerged lending credibility to that hypothesis that that's the way. Continually testing these, particularly in the real world now with not randomized controlled trials, but at least quasi-experimental trials that both Pfizer and Moderna seem to be still very, very robust against

all these different types of variants. There's certainly some escape going on, but that's not the general rule. Switching over to LPRC, we're in heavy planning, as I've mentioned several times, for October, the first week in October, 4th through the 6th for 2021 LPRC impact. Really exciting. We've got a lot of great content. great content. It really looks like at this point, it's going to be fully physical with a virtual component to it on campus at the University of Florida, the beautiful Wrights Union. And that is going to allow, if this continues on this track, right, we all know the trajectory is going to be interesting here going through 2021. But that's going to allow us to tour the five LPRC labs and do some really neat things, social engagements and outdoor components and so on.

Again, LPRC impacts never has and hopefully never will be similar to other conferences in that the learning labs, the content is evidence-based. It's research-driven. it's research driven. And similarly, there's a lot more interesting components as far as learning from active criminal offenders and engagements in the laboratories and things like that. So pretty neat. We're really excited about it. LPResearch.org is a place to go to learn more about MPAC, to get involved. We've already got a record number of registrants already at the earliest time ever for impact. So that's kind of a neat thing. The product protection, violent crime, and supply chain protection summits that those working groups, again, we've got the seven working groups here that meet year-round and work together. Three of them have their own summit. Those are up on the, go to the website, ltresearch.org. You can also for free subscribe

to the newsletter. It's really neat, short, very high resolution graphics and so on. It's a pretty neat, the Connect weekly newsletter, but that's got all that latest information and for all members to register for those three summits as well. Pretty exciting. We've had some pretty neat visits with the number ones, the VPs of asset protection and loss pension for some major change. We hosted another team last week. Today and yesterday, we had another team that we're meeting with and doing some heavy duty planning. So stay tuned for some of those things coming out. The Safer Places Lab that we've got from the UF Innovate area set up. We started to deploy technologies over in this, what we call the Southwest parking lot, which is by and large a vacant lot, and it's available for us to turn into a parking lot lab.

So you see different technologies and ways that we're marking the parking lot to look like a for real retail center. Obviously, it could be an office or distribution center parking lot. We're doing some pretty cool things there. And with Operation Onion, that's growing and going. We'll reveal more about that later. So too much to go over right now. What I'm going to do is turn the microphone over to Tony D'Onofrio. Tony, if you want to let us know what's going on.

Thank you very much, Reid. And again, a great update on both what's going on with COVID and the great work that's taking place at the LPRC. Let me start this morning with some very interesting data. So have you ever wondered when you accept the terms of use of all those things that you sign up with exactly what you sign up to. So actually, there was an interesting visual capitalist infographic that came out this week. So who has the longest terms or word count in their terms of use? And it turns out to be

Microsoft. So Microsoft, when you say yes to Microsoft and accept the terms of use, When you say yes to Microsoft and accept the terms of use, you're actually reading 15,260 words. And if you actually read them, it would actually take you over an hour to actually read at normal read rates those terms of use. Number two is Spotify. It's 8,600 words and they would take about 40 minutes. under words and they would take about 40 minutes. Pokemon Go is third with 8,435 minutes. TikTok is fourth with 7,400 words, 31 minutes. And Apple, I was shocked Apple, the people that like to keep it simple, they have 7,314 words in their terms of use. And it would take you a half hour to actually read those fine lines to see exactly what you're signing up to. So interesting to me how complex these companies make it and how these things, especially Microsoft, which is the outlier, really, really a lot of words. liar. Really, really a lot of words. Switching to the other thing that I wonder sometimes is how much money does Amazon really make and how fast do they make it? Again, a very interesting

infographic this week from Statista. So Amazon makes $800,000 a minute. So again, I'll repeat it, $800,000 a minute. That's how much revenue Amazon generates. Apple's nearly $700,000. Google has $400,000. Microsoft is $300,000. And Facebook is $200,000. So all those social and computing technologies give you an idea how much revenue they're driving, especially due to this pandemic as we're using our devices more and more.

Also very interesting this week was some data that says, do long hours really kill you? Working long hours. And I've been thinking about that because during the pandemic, some of us have lost balance between office and actually work hours because we're all working from home and some of us are actually working longer. So there was a new study from the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization. And they released the first of its kind. They actually looked, they found that 745,000 people died in 2016 due to long working hours. And the previous time that they did the study was in 2000

and it's up 29% on the year 2000. The magic number seems to be 55 hours or more is associated with 35% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease. It's more prevalent in males. And according to the World Health Organization, most of the deaths occurred among people who passed away between the ages of 60 and 79,

who worked 55 hours or more between the ages of 45 and 74. So starting at age 45, you got to watch how many hours you work because they could literally kill you. The worst region, most affected, which was interesting to me, is Southeast Asia. They had 200,000 of these deaths. And the Western Pacific was second with 200,000. And then U.S., just to give you a flavor less, it's 43,000 deaths that were affected by working log hours. Switching totally to a different set of statistics, again, we'll go back to visual capitalists. As some of you know, I'm a big follower in terms of branding and social media branding, but I got a long way to go. This week, they published the top five in the world leading

influencer, and here they are. Number one is Cristiano Ronaldo, a soccer player. So in the sports category, he has 517 million followers. Number two is Justin Bieber in music, 455 million. Ariana Grande, number three, music, 429 million. Selena Gomez is number four in music, 425 million. And Taylor Swift is fifth in the world, again, in music, $361 million. Interesting, their biggest platform for all of these guys is not what you – it was not a surprise, but then it was a surprise. It's Instagram.

That's their biggest platform. What that tells me, the world is going more and more to visual images and pictures, and really that's the platforms that are going to drive uh branding going forward also interesting that music and sports were the the drivers of the top five and let me close uh with uh the new study that just came out from uh jackay's his 33rd annual retailft Survey, and this is for the United States. And, well, very interesting insight in terms of what COVID has done to retail theft. So, as was summarized by the authors, while temporary stockbrokers due to COVID pandemic resulted in fewer thieves being caught in 2020,

resulted in fewer thieves being caught in 2020. The average shoplifting cases increased 13% and the average dishonest case value increased nearly 4% over the previous year. So summarizing the study itself, here's the key data. 22 large companies participated. They had nearly 20,000 stores and 500 billion in revenue. Apprehensions were nearly 185,000. And dishonest employees were down 41% from the previous year. But note, essential retailers, which ones have remained open, their apprehensions were up nearly 8%. Participants recovered 81 million.

And for essential retailers, again, this increase for the rest of the population, it decreased 30%. There were nearly 160,000 shoplifters, down nearly 44%, and 49 million recovered. But again, for essential retailers that stayed open uh shoplifting was up nearly nine percent dishonest employees near nearly uh uh 20 actually 20 oh just over 26 000 were represented in 2020 down 20 but again for essential retailers, design stats increased 3%. And this is the most interesting of all the data that was in here. Total theft was on average $440, up 20%. Shoplifter theft was on average $310, up 13%. And for employees, the average theft was $1,219, up nearly 4%. So number of cases went down, but the average

of what was stolen went up. So interesting year in terms of 2020. So summarizing this week, all that fine print was really a reminder that we need to keep figuring out how to make it simpler. And Apple, in my view, has got to do a lot more, again, because they project this simplicity flavor. And they are in the top five in terms of the wordiest terms of use. Tech giants like Amazon and others are making a lot of money. And if I had to translate to every second, it will still be a lot of money. Some of us are working too hard. and COVID, it could actually kill us. So we got to watch out exactly how we balance all this. The world top 10, top five influencers.

What that told me is that really the world is going to be a lot more visual and really everyone needs to figure out how to tell their story more visually to be noticed in this world where there's a lot of information available and finally the data on retail theft just confirms again all the great work that's going on at lprc to come back and why all of you should be joining us on the journey with science-based research to attack it. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, Reid. And some really interesting stats from both of you. I just wanted to touch base a little bit on the Colonial Pipeline.

We spoke about it last week and the ransomware attack. And so the Colonial Pipeline is back open. The White House has made an official statement saying while it is a Russian hacking group, they do not see any direct ties to the Russian government. This group called the Dark Side actually was known for ransomware as a service or hacking as a service where they would actually sell their service. They officially on their website, on the dark web, closed down and said, and this is an interesting one, based on pressure from the US government that they were closing their doors.

And this could be a ploy to just simply change their name and reopen, which often happens, or they could really be concerned and basically trying to shut up, close up shop and move on so that they don't draw any more attention to them. It's not uncommon for high profile groups to disband and re-engage with a different name. It is a little bit uncommon for them to publicly say this. So that's a very interesting twist with this. Obviously, this is an infrastructure attack. And so the U.S. government has a lot more interest in catching people and setting an example. And when you can catch a group and physically apprehend people in non-treaty countries like Russia, it sets the tone that we're not going to tolerate it. So generally with

these cases, what happens is someone goes on vacation, crosses a border, and then they're picked up. So I'm sure we'll hear more about it. It could be a year from now. In lieu of what occurred with the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, there's not a lot of information that was given on how the government responded, except for the fact that the White House made an official statement that they were still looking at it and that they didn't believe it was Russian state-sponsored back. I think in the cybersecurity world, there's kind of this overarching cloud that if it happened in Russia, it's state-sponsored in some way. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that, but certainly

there's more to come on that. This is, however, affecting some gas prices and gas shortages, and it's not affecting it because the pipeline was closed. It's kind of the same thing that occurred when the pandemic started and people were buying toilet paper and paper towels and bottled water, is that there was a gas hoarding event that happened throughout the Southeast. So it's very interesting because it's very state specific. It's not everywhere on the East Coast, but when you look at some of the, some states, they have basically gas, they're out of gas. And what everybody is saying is that this is not a supply chain issue. It's just that people are buying an enormous amount and filling up by cans of gas going in and in a higher degree of

fashion than normal, which is causing disruption in the delivery and that they can't keep up. So the message from the U.S. government really was to slow down that we're not out of gas, there's no danger, and to let everybody get gas versus filling up every gas can you have and every piece of equipment that you have. So I can't really speak to the Southeast or the Mid-Atlantic states because I haven't been traveling in New York and New Jersey. I haven't seen any impact, a couple cent change, but I do know that there's a lot of reports on it. And again, this is, you know, the message that I'm hearing from everybody is that this is not a true gas shortage, that it's more of people, the hoarding mentality.

And I think we all learned throughout COVID that paper towels and water and toilet paper, and it really was, the challenge was people were buying more than they needed, which weren't allowing for everybody, which created this kind of fictitious supply and demand challenge. And that is what everybody is saying is occurring with gas. So stay tuned to that. I do think it'll fizzle out. I do unfortunately think on the East Coast it will have a little bit of a lasting effect from costs because the pipeline that was down for, you know, five or six days, which is significant. It also re-highlights what we talked about last year is that the danger of our infrastructure in the United States, you know, we are one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, yet our utility infrastructure is probably,

countries in the world, yet our utility infrastructure is probably several decades behind. And while this was a ransomware attack that had a human element to it, it just shows to the fact that if you think of the size of the Colonial Pipeline and the money behind it, so this isn't a money play, this is an underfunded operation, you know, owned by Shell, KKR, and then, you know, they have funding to have proper cybersecurity. It just shows that the human element is so real. And then switching gears to something that I think actually our listeners have probably seen is there is a resurgence of a Facebook Messenger scam. So if anybody's ever received that Facebook Messenger message from your friend that says, check this video, I found the view. And this is a phishing attempt to get your credentials for Facebook. So when you click on that video, it tells you you

have to log in. And this is a unique attack because unlike most phishing, when we talk about phishing scams, we often say don't click on links when you don't know the person, when you're not expecting something. But when it's coming from a friend or a relative, you're much more likely to click on it. And the messages for about a year was always, I found this video of you, check it out, or I can't believe you're in this video. And it prompts the human side of, oh, I want to see what that is. This scam is resurfacing in a big way. And again, all of the training and teaching of don't click on a link from somebody you don't know changes here because now it's someone that you do know. And I actually, within the industry, I have a lot of friends on Facebook. Tony and Reed, we're all on Facebook together. And you know, that's the place where you see pictures of the family and things like that.

I've actually received several messages from industry folks, people that probably listen to this podcast that said, you know, check this, this video out, I found a view and it is it is a phishing attempt. So resist the urge to click. If you're listening to this and you're friends with someone that never has sent you a video before and has this awkward message, take the 10 seconds to text them and say, hey, did you send this to me? And the way this hack works is it's kind of a grow model and it is crowdsourced, if you will. So if I click on it and put my credentials in, it's going to send that message to everybody that I'm friends with. So if you think of the repetition, so if you have 500 friends, taking the simple kind of law of averages

is even if only two people click on that out of your 500 and they each have 500 friends, it grows substantially. What some of the data is showing is roughly 30% of the people are clicking on it because it is coming from a friend or a family member. So although this has happened, I think three times in the last five years, it's happening again. And this particular piece of it does not, it seems to be a credential stealer where it's trying to steal username and passwords, but there are other nefarious things that can occur. So kind of taking the grain of salt of if you're not expecting something and you can really take a few seconds to double check with someone. And that's what it is, a few seconds to send a text message. If I get a video from Tony, I'll send him a text message saying, hey, did you send me a video?

send a text message. If I get a video from Tony, I'll send him a text message saying, hey, did you send me a video? And then that few seconds can avoid a whole bunch of challenges that come about. And then lastly, kind of switching gears and Reid alluded to it a little bit with the COVID, we continue to see chatter around black market and counterfeit COVID drugs. One of the things I'll say is in the United States, what we're seeing predominantly is negative test results for sale and vaccine cards for sale. I am not personally seeing a lot of counterfeit vaccines for sale in the US. I am, however, overseas seeing a tremendous amount of, and when I say counterfeit, I should be careful, vaccines for sale, whether they're counterfeit, shipped here from China, or you don't know what you're getting. There is a tremendous

amount of that occurring. And then unfortunately in India, there's just a gamut of scams of people selling everything that's needed from PPE to oxygen to a machine, which I don't know the proper terminology, which, you know, harness oxygen. And most of the reports that we're seeing is that these are, you know, not real and that they're in dire need. So people are running and turning to the internet. And, you know, what I would say is, while a fraction of these could be legitimate, the most of the reports are not.

And we are seeing that throughout countries that are having challenges both with COVID and with the vaccination effort. So if you're in a country that has sparse vaccinations, it's likely that you're seeing a bunch of pop-ups of, you know, you can buy the vaccination here. And these websites are pretty well. And the scariest thing of all is that a lot of them are shipping something out. So I wish I could tell you I knew what that something is, but you're getting something that you're told to inject in yourself. So obviously there's significant risk there. And if it's a counterfeit vaccine, if it's a home mix vaccine, there's real risk there, but it is pretty rampant throughout the world globally of this kind of methodology. And then we did talk very high level last time. I think Reid mentioned,

I mentioned of someone who falsified a test and had jail time. I think we're going to continue to see that occurring. And while I'm not going to talk about this time, I know Reid mentioned a little bit, I think we will talk about probably in the next podcast, some of the decisions, hard decisions retailers have to make about mask, no mask, now that CDC has released some guidelines. There's a lot of folks that are taking the honor system. And then how do you manage, again, we'll talk about this because it's so new next week, how do you manage your state mandates where your company says one thing, your state says another, or you have a local jurisdiction saying something else? It becomes a very, very challenging environment to navigate for retailers and businesses. So more to come on that. Over to you, Reid. It was a perfect segue, Tom, in that this Friday, we have an all retailer member cluster call around just what Tom was describing. And that is, and when this, this podcast should come out on Thursday. So give a little bit of a heads up, but what we'll do is have a discussion around, as Tom said, very complex.

I mean, what do you do? How do you do it? Has been the question from day one over a year ago now of this pandemic. So what do we do with these different mask mandates and different ways to look at them, think about it, enforce them, whether it's for your workforce that's in close contact in an office environment or processing in the back room or in the cash office, for example. And then, course the ever popular, um, how do we handle our customers to keep them and our employee, our store teams safe themselves and those that they go home to their loved ones. Um, so tune in for that. We'll also generate, uh, some notes or recap for our SPs, our solution partner members and get that out ASAP. Um, and I'm going to, you know,

Tony and Tom are invited to be on that call of course, and participate, but I wanted to get that out ASAP. And Tony and Tom are invited to be on that call, of course, and participate. But I wanted to get that out to everybody. For all retailers that are listening, this Friday we'll have a cluster call. You should have already received an email. Diego Rodriguez is producing that as all of the science to practice engagements that he does. So more to come on that.

So thank you both, Tony and Tom, all of you out there listening, Diego, for producing. Stay safe and keep us informed at lpresearch.org. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Laws Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal,

financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.