Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Why Your Perceptions Often Deceive You & How Smart People Fall Victim to Fraud

Episode Date: May 16, 2020

Have you ever put your car in “Drive” while it is still rolling backwards a little bit? People do it all the time – yet it is terrible for your car. I’ll explore this and several other things drivers do that can ruin their car and hurt the value. https://www.thrillist.com/cars/10-ways-you-didn-t-know-you-re-ruining-your-car-how-to-make-your-car-last-longer Believe it or not, your own perceptions often deceive you. For example, would you notice something unusual if it popped out in front of you? You would think so. But it turns out you are not as observant as you think you are. Daniel Simons author of the book, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (http://amzn.to/2eLXgaX) explains why you completely miss much of what you think you see and how those distorted perceptions can cause you trouble. Why do people get goose bumps? Does it serve some sort of evolutionary purpose? Listen and discover the surprising answer. http://www.shape.com/lifestyle/mind-and-body/ever-wonder-what-causes-goosebumps It isn’t just the elderly or dumb or greedy people who fall victim to fraud. A lot of smart people get taken too. Financial crime expert Jeffrey Robinson, author of the book, There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute (http://amzn.to/2j50Qyb) explains how big a problem fraud is, how enticing fraudsters make it all seem and how to make sure you do NOT become a victim. This Week's Sponsors -GrubHub Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, there are things people commonly and unknowingly do to their cars that actually cause damage. Then discover just how flawed our intuition and self-perceptions are. For example, people who are unskilled already suffer from the fact that they're not very

good at what they do, but they also suffer from the fact that they think they're better at it than they are. So they're much more likely to be overconfident than their own ability. Then you've probably gotten goosebumps, right? Do you know why humans get goosebumps? And understanding fraud, it's not just dumb people who get ripped off. And the people doing it are not the charming sort you see in the movies. Catch me if you can. Did terrible damage

to the reputation of fraudsters because it made them look charming. Made them look like Leonardo DiCaprio. They're not. These are sleazebags. They are vicious. They will steal money

from the defenseless and they have absolutely no conscience about doing it. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to a particularly fascinating episode of the Something You Should Know podcast. How do I know that?

I've already heard it. Somebody asked me the other day, well, how do you put the show together? I mean, do you do it in order? And I realized that this segment, the one I'm doing right now, is usually the last thing I do. So I've already heard the episode you're about to hear, and it is particularly good. So let's get started. And today we start with your car.

If you drive, as I do, you may not realize that there are things you could be doing to your car that will shorten the life and ruin the value of it. And you didn't know. For instance, do you ever shift your car into drive while it's still rolling backwards? Really bad for your car. At just 4 miles an hour, today's average car exerts more force than a bullet fired out of a rifle,

and you're asking this one little small piece of metal to stop it. Transmission repairs can cost a small fortune, and if you do this a lot, you're just asking for trouble. Here's another one. You're cleaning your tinted windows with Windex. Windex has ammonia in it, and if it comes in contact with the tint film on your car's windows, it will discolor it. You should use a dedicated automotive window cleaner instead. If you've ever seen someone driving down the road with purple tinted windows, you can assume that they sprayed some Windex on it at some point. You're not slowing down for speed bumps or potholes.

This will absolutely destroy the life of your shocks and can lead to other damage to the car's undercarriage. You're not fixing the small things. A small mechanical issue can and will inevitably become a big mechanical issue and usually cost you a lot more money to fix it. And in wintertime don't defrost an icy windshield with hot water. If you don't know what happens when you pour hot water on ice-cold glass, just think about it for a moment.

It will shatter. You should park the car at night facing east so the sun hits it in the morning and then you just let nature do its work in the morning. Combine that with turning on the defroster full blast and pulling out the old ice scraper, and that is still the best way to get ice off a windshield. And that is something you should know. If something unexpected happened right before your eyes, you would notice that, right? Of course you would. would you I mean how

many times have people not noticed something obvious or or said that guy came out of nowhere I never saw him well Daniel Simons when he was a student at Harvard he conducted an experiment this was several years ago involving a guy in a gorilla suit and it kind of went viral and it illustrated just how unaware we are even though we think we're very aware he wrote a book about it a while back called the invisible gorilla how our intuitions deceive

us welcome daniel so some people may remember this but explain the experiment that you did it was a simple study in which we asked people to watch a video and count how many times three people wearing white shirts passed a basketball and to ignore people wearing black shirts who were passing their own ball. And about halfway through the video, we had a person in a gorilla suit walk into the scene, turn and face the camera,

thump her chest at the camera, and then walk off the other side nine seconds later, and we found that about half the people didn't notice the person in the gorilla suit at all. It really, I think, brought home for us the power of our intuitions, the idea that we intuitively believe that anything unexpected will capture attention, and the reality, which differs from that, which is that unexpected things often don't capture our attention. So back in 2004, we got what's known as the Ig Nobel Award, with award in quotes, for studies that make you laugh and then make you think. And we realized that this idea, that this video had caught on because it was so counterintuitive, because it forced people to confront an intuition about their own minds that wasn't right.

And the more we thought about that, the more we realized that there are a lot of aspects of how our minds work that people don't necessarily have the right instincts and intuitions about. So we kind of developed the book out of that. What's fascinating, because we think we would notice, I would think I would notice if I were watching a video, if a guy in a gorilla suit came out for nine seconds and pounded his chest and walked off. I would have noticed that, but half the people that saw it didn't. So we rely on something that maybe we shouldn't rely on. It's interesting.

My colleague Dan Levin did a study and asked people whether they would notice a person in a gorilla suit in this basketball game. And fully 90% say, of course I would. And the reason is very natural. It's something that is based on our experiences. We experience all of those cases in which we do notice unexpected events. So we're aware of all of those, but we're not aware of all the ones that we don't notice. So simply by not noticing it, it can't be part of our experience. So our intuitions that we build up about what we will and won't notice are based only on the cases that we're aware of and not the ones we miss. Well, you can't know what you can't know.

That's right. So, except for being a fascinating experiment with a guy in a gorilla suit, what does this all mean? Yeah, so as you mentioned, the original study was really designed, it was a class project designed to extend some earlier work, and it was really a study of perception and attention. We weren't intending it to have broader implications or to take off the way it did, it was just a study. But I think it illustrates how profound that intuition about the mind is,

that we all suffer from what we call in the book the illusion of attention, this belief that anything that's unexpected or important will grab our attention. And it has practical consequences in many parts of our lives. For example, when driving, we assume that as long as we're looking at the road and our hands are on the wheel, we'll be able to see and react to anything that matters that comes up. But the reality is we see far less of our world than we think we do, and unexpected events are often not going to capture attention. So the result of that is we have too much faith that unexpected things are going to grab us, and as a result, we do things like distract ourselves by talking on phones or other distractions in the car.

And where else might this be important? What other parts of life might this apply to? Yeah, well, here's one that I think is actually particularly important, swimming. So most parents, when you go to the pool, if there's a lifeguard on duty, you kind of assume that that lifeguard, if anything were happening with your kid, if your kid were in trouble, that that life guard would automatically notice that they'd spot the kid possibly drowning. And the reality is life guards have an unbelievably difficult task. In addition to having to focus on the entire pool and to scan the pool, and they're taught

good techniques for doing that, there's so many kids and so many distractions, and so it's such a hard visual search task. Kids who are drowning don't look all that different from kids who are playing, that it's actually not possible for them to notice everything that's happening in a pool at once. They simply can't see everything simultaneously. So the result is that they can occasionally miss a drowning child, which is, of course, horrific both for the child and their family and for the lifeguard. Parents, though, if you are watching your own kid, you can be much more vigilant and you can be in the water with them

and aware of what's going on with them. But if you assume that there aren't any limits on attention and that anything important will grab the lifeguard's attention, you might be tempted to chat with your neighbors or read a book or just sunbathe and not actually be watching your kids, especially kids who aren't great swimmers. A lot of rescues of kids who are in serious trouble in a pool are initiated not by the lifeguard, but by another adult who happens to be right in the pool near them. And that's in part because those are the people who are more likely to be focusing

attention on that kid. them. And that's in part because those are the people who are more likely to be focusing attention on that kid. You talk about how, for example, some award-winning movies are full of editing mistakes. And so explain how that applies to this conversation. Sure. So in the book, we discuss what we call the illusion of memory, which is the belief that we recall and remember far more detail than we actually do. So movies are a really interesting case. I've had people come into my lab and say, I always notice those mistakes in movies when somebody's got a jacket on their shoulder and then it's on their arm or they're eating a Twinkie and then it's a pancake,

that I always notice those mistakes in movies. And I know that's not right because I immediately sit them down in front of a television, show them a one-minute movie in which we made nine or ten intentional editing mistakes, and they don't notice any of them. The reality is that we keep track of far less detail about our world than we think we do. And again, this comes from the same sort of principle that you're aware of those cases of mistakes that you noticed, but you don't remember all the ones that you never saw in the first place.

We think, though, that we see and keep track of a lot more than we do. So the broader aspect of the illusion of memory is that when we recall something really vividly, so, say, a personally important event or some national trauma, say like the attacks on September 11th, for example, you have a really vivid, detailed memory of it. It feels like you're playing it back from a video recorder. And a lot of people actually believe that memory works a lot like a video recorder,

kind of accurately recording the details so you can play them back later. The reality is that those memories quite often are systematically distorted. The problem is that we rarely have evidence that they're distorted. We don't have that videotape of our lives that we can play back and reveal that they were wrong. Well, maybe we don't notice the editing mistakes in those movies because we don't need to. That's right, we don't. And our perceptual systems and our memory systems are built for efficiency. They're built to make sense of what matters in a scene. And if you're watching a movie

and noticing lots of editing mistakes, first that means that the continuity supervisor or script supervisor didn't actually catch many of them, but it also shows that you're not focused on what actually matters in the movie. You're not focused on the dialogue or the plot or the characters. So it's a sign of bad filmmaking, not so much necessarily bad editing. But that's exactly right.

And what's interesting about this, though, is we still have the wrong intuition about it. So in The Invisible Gorilla, I interviewed a couple of script supervisors, the people who are on set in Hollywood trying to make sure that nothing changes from one shot to the next. And I asked them whether they think they have better visual memory than most people do. And their reaction is, well, you know, maybe a tiny bit better than average. But really what's different about them and us is that they know how bad their memories are. They know that their memories are fallible and that what they recall really vividly can often be wrong. So I had one of them say,

I've been on some occasions, I would swear to you that I knew what somebody was holding and where they were standing, and then I'd look at the video record of it and see that I was wrong. So unlike the rest of us, they regularly get documentary evidence of ways in which their memory is wrong.

So they just have the right intuitions about what they will and won't remember, and they know not to trust those sorts of memories. You're listening to a conversation with Daniel Simons. He is author of the book, The Invisible Gorilla, How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning,

a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast.

And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy,

it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And so, Daniel, talk about the case of a police officer who runs past an assault and doesn't see it. Yeah, that was a really interesting case. This is a case from Boston.

It's a case in which somebody had been shot, and a call went out on police radio that the person who was shot was a cop. So a high-speed chase ensued with people from a number of different precincts. And the first cop on the scene following the getaway car was an unmarked police car. And an undercover agent, undercover cop, chased one of the suspects toward a fence. The suspect got over the fence, and the cop tried to pursue him over the fence. And as he was climbing over the fence, several other police officers who didn't realize that he was a cop pulled him off the fence and beat him pretty severely.

So eventually another cop arrived on the scene and managed to chase down the suspect and arrest him, brought him back, and he was arrested. The key, though, was that that cop, the one who actually finally did the arrest, ran right past the site of the beating and claimed never to have seen it. And he was the only person prosecuted in the beating case. The other cops were never charged in criminal court. He was charged with and convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for claiming never to have seen this beating, even though he must have run right past it. And it's a really interesting case because it's exactly the sort of tunnel vision and focused attention that you

would expect in that sort of a context. It's kind of a real-world analog of the guerrilla video. He was so intently chasing this suspect over the fence that he could run right past a brutal beating and just not see it. He was prosecuted based on the intuition that he must have seen it. You can't run right past something and not see it. Talk about the illusion of confidence. The illusion of confidence has a couple of elements to it, but one of them is that we often think we're better at what we do and that we know more than we do. And that applies, especially in cases of, say, stupid criminals,

criminals who do things that really, if they knew how bad they were at what they did, they wouldn't try. So, you know, the criminal who spray paints their name on the side of a wall is a form of vandalism, or the person who ro robbed the bank with no disguise whatsoever, he clearly thought that he was good enough to rob a bank and was certainly overconfident about it because he didn't realize he actually needed the disguise. So that sort of overconfidence in criminals is kind of funny and interesting, but we actually studied, Chris Chabris and I and a colleague of ours, Dan Benjamin, studied chess players who actually know exactly how good they are.

They have a rating system that is perfectly calibrated. It tells you exactly what the probability is that you'll beat somebody of your own skill level or rank and beat players who are better or worse than you and how much better or worse they are. We did a simple study in which we asked people what their rating was, which they all knew very well because that's something that tournament chess players keep track of. And we asked them what their rating should be to reflect their true ability. And what you find with chess players, the answer should be whatever their current rating is because their current rating perfectly reflects what their skill is.

But instead, they reported that they should be rated much higher than they actually were. And the weaker the player, the more they thought they should be rated more highly. It's a sense of overconfidence. In a sense, you can think about this. If you're playing chess and you make a dumb mistake, you attribute that to just bad luck or not your typical performance. And if you get lucky in a game, you make a move that your opponent makes a dumb move, you attribute that to your skill.

So people tend to think that they're better than they actually are. In lots of things? In lots of things. This applies. My colleagues David Dunning and Justin Kruger have done a series of studies on what they call the double curse of incompetence. And it's a really clever idea. but basically if you think about it, people who are unskilled already suffer from the fact that they're not very good at what they do.

But they also suffer from the fact that they think they're better at it than they are. So they're much more likely to be overconfident in their own abilities. And the people who are the least skilled, the people who are unskilled, are the most unaware of how unskilled they are. So this applies to everything from logic and reasoning, to chess, to sense of humor, to lots of other things that you can measure in studies and show that people think that they're, the people who are the worst at something tend to think that they're better than average. Well, what comes to mind is drivers. I mean, I've never heard anyone say, you know, I'm a really lousy driver. Everybody thinks they're a good driver,

but if everyone's a good driver, then who are all those idiots out there? That's right. I mean, everybody thinks they're above average drivers and more intelligent, and everybody thinks that they can talk on a cell phone safely when, but all those other people driving and talking on their cell phones are idiots and terrible. So what is all this telling us? Does this mean that we really shouldn't be trusting our instincts and our intuitions?

Well, I think that what we're finding is that intuitions are based on our experiences. And we're all, in some ways, intuitive, naive psychologists, right? We're all able to come up with theories about how our own minds work and the reasons for our behaviors. And those intuitions are based on our daily experiences, but our daily experiences are often incomplete. We lack complete information, so we don't always know all of the things we've missed, for example. And if you build up intuitions based on the things you take note of, those intuitions are often going to be wrong, especially intuitions about how our mind works. So we don't notice as much as we think we do. We don't remember as vividly as we think we do.

We tend to place too much value in confidence in general. We spot causes where they don't exist. And these are a particular class of intuitions about the mind that often lead us astray. Intuitions about other things are great. So intuitions about what you prefer and what you like or who's the most attractive or what's disgusting and what's not, those are things that are going to be done best

with gut instincts. But complex decisions where we're relying on assumptions about how our own minds work can be really flawed. So the key for us is to kind of make people more aware of what sort of assumptions that they might be making about their minds, where those assumptions come from, why we have them, and the ways in which they can mislead us. You said a moment ago, if I heard you right, you said that we see causes where they don't exist.

Is that right? Basically, people, our minds are promiscuous cause detectors. So we like to assume that one event that comes before another event, if it possibly could have caused it, then it did. So let me give you one example that seems intuitive. Let's say you have a friend who eats some berries that have some black dots on them, and your friend gets sick a couple hours later. Your cognitive system is immediately going to draw a link between those two

and draw a causal link. It's going to assume that eating the berries made the friend sick. And that's a reasonable sort of assumption to build into a system. The problem is eating the berries might have had absolutely nothing to do with your friend getting sick. And the only way to really determine that would be to do a systematic study where you assign some people randomly to eat the berries and other people not to and see whether the rates differ. But that's not something that we're built to do. We're not built to take into account the possibility that something other than the berries made your friend sick. We tend to see one positive event, like eating berries, and another one, getting sick, and link those two

together without thinking about the possibility that your friend might have been sick otherwise, or that eating the berries might have had nothing to do with it. So given what you said about how fallible we are, so knowing that, what's the advice? One way to think about this is we've had all of these limits, these limits on attention and memory and perception and cognition and thinking. We've had all these limits all along. And what our goal is is to make people aware of these limits

so that when you're in a situation where you're having to rely on your gut, you can ask yourself, should I actually rely on my gut here or might I actually be making the wrong decision that way? And there are a lot of contexts in which you can actually take advantage of this to make yourself safer and maybe to smooth over relationships you have. So one thing you can do is never talk on the phone while you're driving. That dramatically reduces your odds of running into somebody who unexpectedly steps out in front of you. If you're having an argument with a spouse or a friend over who remembers who said what some time ago, and there's no documentary or evidence, there's no videotape of what actually happened, if you know that memory

is fallible and tends to get distorted and we don't encode everything around us all the time, you can actually be a little more humble about your own memories and say, oh, you know, we remember this differently. Just because it's vivid to me doesn't mean that my memory is right, because I'm sure it's vivid to your partner too and different than what you have. So an argument of that sort, you can basically say, we don't know, so let's not argue over something that's not resolvable. So in a way, it can make you more humble

about your own abilities, but it can also lead to a safer life with making better financial investments and better decisions about what risks to take and which ones not to take, and better able to recognize what the risks are. Well, it sure would be better if we were perfect. So thanks for pointing out how flawed we are. Daniel Simons has been my guest.

He is author of the book The Invisible Gorilla, How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, and there is a link in the show notes to his book on Amazon. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. deceive us. And there is a link in the show notes didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. you have no doubt gotten that email from the Nigerian prince promising you millions of dollars if you would just let them use your bank account or some other nonsense. And you know full well that you shouldn't respond to that email because it's fraudulent. And while that's one of the more glaring examples, fraud happens all the time. And not just to the elderly or dumb people.

A lot of smart people get duped as well. So how do they do it? How do these criminals get people to give them their money? And more importantly, how can you protect yourself from becoming a victim? Someone who knows a lot about this is Jeffrey Robinson. He has authored 30 books over the years, including one called There's a Sucker Born Every Minute. Jeffrey has been called one of the world's leading experts on international financial crime, and he joins me now. So, Jeffrey, explain fraud to me in simple terms. I mean, what is it and why do people fall for it? Fraud is a two-way street crime.

It's a very simple thing to understand. I tell you a lie, you give me money, that's fraud. But in order to make it work, you, the victim, have to participate. You've got to open up your bank account. You've got to supply me with whatever information, social security number and various things that I need. So what the fraudster does is try to convince you that it is in your advantage to open up the bank account or to give him the information he needs.

And people become gullible when they see big money at the end of the fishing rod. They become greedy, and greed and gullibility drives out common sense. They stop thinking, and they hand over the information and their money. But why is it that people still fall for the same old frauds? I mean, the Nigerian prince or the minister of whatever from some foreign country, why are people still falling for that one? People fall for it because that particular fraud, which is known as 419 fraud,

was invented by the Nigerians way back in the oil boom days. It's called 419 fraud because it's named after the law in Nigeria that outlaws it. Kind of an ironic thing. They fall for it because it's a percentage game. They send out 10, 10 20 30 million emails and they're looking to hook 10 20 100 people and when you hook 100 people for 200 000 each it becomes a very profitable business but that's the thing to understand about fraud it is a business it is run by professionals who have every interest in the world to defraud you of your money. And you can't usually ever beat a pro at his game.

Sometimes I think that people don't have a lot of sympathy for fraud victims. The thinking is that if you're so dumb that you couldn't figure this out or you didn't vet this thing good enough, that you deserve what you get well yeah there are people who have never been victims who feel that way and as soon as they become victims they say to themselves how could i have fallen for it well they fall for it because the fraudsters are very good at making them believe there's some advantage now the idea of sending an email to dear friend or dear trusted uh comrade or whatever and offering the 45 a third of the 45 million dollars they've just found in some bank account someplace simply for using your bank account i mean that's that is foolish because most people

are on to that one what they do is they turn it around and they make it different they run work at home fraud they tell you you've won the lottery. They, in some cases, tell you that a warrant has been issued for your arrest because you failed to appear for jury duty. And in a panic, to avoid being arrested, common sense goes out the door and you supply the information. Not that I'm promoting fraud, but it seems like a pretty good business to be in if you're good at it, because, I mean, it doesn't seem like these guys get, I mean,

do these guys ever get caught? They get caught occasionally. One of the problems with professional fraud, and these are professional, is that most of the time they don't get caught. Very few frauds actually get reported. Too many people are embarrassed to report fraud. So something like two-thirds or three-quarters of all the frauds committed never get reported. If you do report it, the local police are going to say, well, we can't really do anything, especially if the fraudster is in West Africa or Canada or Eastern Europe. So they hardly ever get caught. If they get caught, they hardly ever go to jail. If they go to jail, it's probably for a short period of

time. And the first thing they do when they get out of jail is reoffend, because that's what professional fraudsters do for a living. They commit fraud. That's their job. Yes, it's their job. And the only way you can really protect yourself is to stop at every turn and say to yourself, why is this happening to me? Is it too good to be true? If it is too good to be true, as the old expression goes, it's not true. I can sum up in three little examples how to protect yourself. Consider the fact that nobody on earth is going to send you $40 million simply because you have an email address. Second thing is if anybody ever wants to use your bank

account, they're a crook. There's no reason ever to let anybody use your bank account. Anybody who asks to do that is a crook. And third, both literally and figuratively, if you didn't buy a ticket, you didn't win the lottery. Actually, when I buy a ticket, I never win the lottery. But when you get an email from somebody saying you've just won the Spanish lottery, and the prize is $13 million, and all you have to do is send us $92 to cover the processing of the check and a FedEx or UPS envelope back, you're going to lose your $92. If you didn't buy a ticket, you didn't win it. Well, are the majority of the frauds attempted, are they for the $92

or are they for the $92,000? They're non-discriminatory. There are so many. Email has made it so easy to commit fraud. In the old days with the Nigerian 419 letters, those letters that say you can split with us if you just allow us to put the money in your account, the $40 million, we'll give you a third. In the old days, they would have to send snail mail out, and they would send out $500,000 or a million and hope that some of them got through because they'd be using counterfeit stamps and the post office got good at pulling them out of the mail. Today with emails, it's very simple to send out millions. I tracked a guy not long ago who over one weekend sent out 13.5 million emails.

He got one response out of 1,000, and the average loss was $3,000 to $4,000. You do the math and you see it's a huge business. I remember seeing on one of those investigative TV shows where they took the bait so they could follow the trail, and they were dealing with these Nigerians, but

they were here. They were in the United States. The Nigerians especially, I mean, they've made advanced fee fraud where you pay up front for something. were here they were in the united states the nigerian especially in the native made uh... advanced fee fraud where you pay up front for something a real art form and it's an export that the biggest petroleum for them they have people spread out all over and they do whatever they have to do not only to land you but once they land you

they go back and try and get a second bite at the cherry. They try and defraud you again. And when you balk at that, they help you set up your friends to defraud your friends on the excuse that, well, we'll get your money back to you. They're vicious. I mean, one of the problems with fraud is that the movies and television and books have romanticized fraudsters. The Cary Grant riding along the Grand Corniche in Monaco with Grace Kelly, that sort of thing.

They're not romantic characters. They really are not. Catch me if you can. Did terrible damage to the reputation of fraudsters because it made them look charming, made them look like Leonardo DiCaprio. They're not. These are sleazebags. They are vicious.

They will steal money from the defenseless, and they have absolutely no conscience about doing it. Are they dangerous? Do they ever come after people who, you know, tattle on them with the police or waste their time? Most fraudsters are not dangerous because what they want to do is get the money and disappear. Some of them do become dangerous. There have been stories of people going to West Africa to try and reclaim the money and winding up dead. It's a really bad idea to do that. Unfortunately, if you go to the police and you say, I've just been defrauded, they kind of shrug and there's not much they can do about it.

Are fraudsters still doing the old, you know, standby frauds of, hi, we're calling from your bank and we need to confirm some information, like your password and your account to confirm some information like your password and your account number and all that? Everything is on the table. Everything at all. They will call you from the bank. They will email you. There are phishing sites all over the internet. Those are the sites that pretend to be like your bank or like your financial institution or like an investment or even like a charity where you can donate money, they will do whatever they can to steal money from you. And again, the trick is you have to be very, very vigilant.

You can't cooperate. And if you don't cooperate, they can't get into your bank or your credit card. Are there any frauds or any other information that people, if they don't know it, if they're not aware of it, it puts them in peril? There are times when you'll get an email or a phone call that will supply a phone number or an address or an email address of a company that sounds like the one that you do business with. It may be your bank. It may be a charity. It may be a financial institution. It may be the government. Right after tax day on the 15th of April, emails go out to millions of

people saying you're entitled to a tax refund. Click on this link and follow this link and supply the information and we'll put the money in your bank account. Never, ever, ever respond to a link or a telephone number or an email address of any kind from the email or the phone call. If it is your bank, call your bank. Don't respond to the number in the email, because the number in the email or the link in the email may very well be phony or lead to a phishing site. Get the real number. The jury duty scam where they write you a letter and say you have missed jury duty three times, so a warrant has been issued for your arrest. If you feel this is a mistake,

call this number or follow this link. It's going to lead you to the fraudster. If you get something that looks official, find the official number online and call there and report it there. You'll be surprised to find out they don't know what you're talking about because in the case of jury duty fraud, they don't issue warrants for people's arrest when they fail to appear. And anyway, if you had been notified three times and never got the letter, how come you got the letter or the email saying that you've been notified three times? I mean, you have to stop and think,

and you've got to take the time to walk back and say, could this be a scam? And if you feel that it is, avoid it. I have to say, though, that as interesting as this is, none of this is rocket science. I mean, this just seems like common sense. And yet, I guess some people just throw common sense out the window because they see dollar signs. Common sense is really the best defense of all. Why me? Why is this man

offering me this money? I mean, if you get an email addressed to dear trusted friend, dear valued customer, dear whatever, it's not you. If your bank wants to get in touch with you, or the credit card company wants to get in touch with you, they will call you by name and they will list certain numbers to identify your account. Also, the fact that the bank and credit card will never, ever, ever, and they state this publicly, they will never, ever email you and request sensitive information be returned by email. That's not how they operate. So if a bank or a credit card or somebody asks for sensitive information on an email that's not addressed to you, don't answer it. It's that simple. It's a fraud. Do the banks and the companies that the fraudsters

are pretending to represent, do they ever go after these guys? Do they ever? They have all of the big banks, all of the credit card companies have huge fraud departments. Now, I can tell you one bank, instantly recognizable, but I can't identify them because I had dinner there when I was giving a speech

to the bank of the fraud department one night and somebody came up to me and said, I'm a former policeman and gave me the name of their force. And I've been hired by the bank because I used to do computer fraud for the police. I said, oh, that's interesting. She said, yeah. She said, what we do, as soon as we get a fishing site,

as soon as we find a site that's pretending to be us, I leave the office, and I walk down the block, and I go to a cyber cafe, and I know how to knock them off the air. So I go, and I do whatever I have to do to cripple that site and then come back to the office. I said, why do you have to go to the cyber cafe? She says, because what we're doing is basically illegal. But what they're doing is illegal. So instead of going through justice and trying to bring these people to court because they're in Eastern Europe and you're never going to get to them anyway, we just fight fire with fire.

We can figure out you know kill them on the internet and we do the that site goes down three more come up so it's a it's a very busy thing but yet the banks and the financial institutions and even the government very very active in fighting these people with fire online but to little avail well when you're dealing with big numbers, and it is a percentage game, you can save some of the people some of the time, but there's always going to be somebody who's going to

fall for it. And that's what the, that's why the advantage is to the fraudsters. They're very good at what they do, and all they need is one victim out of a thousand. Well, but like you said, as soon as one fishing site goes down, three more pop up. So it's a game, and it seems like the good guys are losing. Well, it's a big business for the con men. It's an equally frustrating business for the banks who want to protect their customers and the credit card companies who want to protect their customers.

In the case of the phone calls to Grandma, please help bail me out, the Florida banks have now said that, many of them have said that, when they get a request from a senior citizen to wire money to a foreign country, or to wire money when they don't ever normally wire money, it immediately gets sent to the fraud department before the wire goes out. And someone from the fraud department calls the grandma or grandpa or goes to see them, notifies them in any case to make sure that the wire is legit as opposed to in response to a scam. And they say, you know, have you spoken to your son or daughter?

Find out where your grandson is before we send this money because there are these scams. So they're trying to help. But when common sense goes out the window, people really want to believe in the tooth fairy. They want to believe they've just won $12 million. It's tough to convince people that it's a scam when they really want to believe. Lastly, is there any good news? Is anybody fighting this and making a difference, Or is the problem just getting worse and worse? The problem is getting worse and worse because communications are getting easier and easier.

And these guys are getting more skilled with the way they use the Internet, especially Internet-based, much of it. By the same token, word is getting out to people. If you get an email from somebody you don't know, do a Google. Again, it's very simple. If you get a letter, an email from somebody you don't know,

a phone call from somebody you don't know, that dear valued friend, dear trusted comrade, it's phony. Forget it. If you didn't buy a ticket, you didn't win the lotto. It's that simple. Well, it's not great news in the sense that it sounds like the fraudsters are getting a little more sophisticated, but the good news is that it doesn't take that much to protect yourself. Like you say, if you don't deal with these people, if you use some common

sense, you'll never get taken. Jeffrey Robinson has been my guest. He's one of the world's leading experts on international financial crime, and he's author of the book, There's a Sucker Born Every Minute. And we have a link in the show notes to his book on Amazon if you would like to check it out. Just about everything the human body does, it does for a reason. There is a purpose to it. One thing the human body does that has no real purpose is get goosebumps. Scientifically speaking, goosebumps are a reflex that causes tiny little muscles at the base of each hair to contract, which makes the little hairs that cover your body stand up.

When animals get cold, this reflex helps to fluff up their hair or feathers to trap in body heat. When humans get goosebumps, it's also an attempt to make us warm, but since we have such little body hair, it doesn't really do anything. Goosebumps can be a physical reaction to cold or fear. When animals are scared, like a cat or a porcupine, they get goosebumps too, and their fur or their quills stand up, and it makes them look bigger and more fierce. Our tiny little hairs stand up too, but it's hardly enough to make us look fierce. You can also get goosebumps from hearing particular music or a touching story, or just the sound of someone's voice can give you goosebumps.

And that is something you should know. I can't tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you're spending time listening to this podcast. I've talked about it before, how during this coronavirus epidemic, a lot of podcasts have lost audience. We didn't really lose much in the way of audience, and now it is actually starting to grow again and climb. And so thank you. Thanks for listening. And if you'd like to show your support for the podcast, I invite you to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook,

where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law,

her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. To be continued... loving God, and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.