1346: David Maimon | Going Undercover in the Fraud Underworld

21:12If I remember back then, it was 800 euros because it was, I think, a European actor selling passports to any country that you can imagine, right? I mean, there was like a menu and you could have just pick your passport and then get it delivered right to your home. We'll be right back after a quick word from the only people in today's episode not actively selling your social security number in a Telegram group. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell and AMD. Dell Technologies has just dropped the Cybersecurity Tapes, which is a new podcast series that dives into today's biggest cybersecurity challenges.

21:45And I know that sounds a little bit technical, but this is a really good format to teach cybersecurity because it's story based. So on a recent episode, Gemini, which is a chat bot that's like a customer service bot, it starts leaking corporate secrets. And there's a lot of plot twists in there, which they did pretty well, in my opinion. Maria, of course, is a seasoned security pro who's seen it all. She runs her own consulting gig. She knows how to untangle tech messes. And then they put her skills to the test. And I know that it's like, OK, there's a lot of stories about cybersecurity. but reading articles about this stuff is not really the greatest way to learn this.

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23:43We don't earn commissions from sales, but when companies see that listeners use the code, they keep buying ads on the show, which keeps the lights on around here. So, hey, if you plan to sign up for anything or buy anything, please use our code. It's usually Jordan, but not always. Those codes are always on the deals page at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. It's really a win-win. You get a great deal, and you help keep the show going strong. Thank you for your support. Now, back to David Maimon. It would be kind of cool to have a novelty fake North Korean passport or diplomatic passport. I assume that it's a felony for me to even have a foreign country's fake passport for any purpose at all, if it looks even remotely real.

24:23I'm not sure about that. I mean, I'm sure that you're not allowed to use it. Of course you're not allowed to use it. I don't know. It's too expensive to be a joke, but there is a world in which I want five passports that'll have my face on them and then hide them around the house and my wife finds them and she's like, who are you? We'll make an interesting conversation. That's right. Right around the table. That would have been, oh God. When I was dating, I would have loved to have had something like that. They're in a drawer and I'm like, hey, can you go grab a knife from the, and then she's like, oh my God, he's a spy.

24:48I would have definitely done that. But you can have it with driver licenses. You can have it with so many driver licenses. And the driver licenses that you get from China right now are like$200. It's nothing, man. And the quality is impeccable. Forget about the driver licenses we use in order to get into a bar when we were 16. No. They have the holograms on that. They have the watermark on them. It's unbelievable. They're putting on the right cars. It's just unbelievable. I got to look up the statute of limitations, but I'm going to assume that it's been up for a while. In the 90s, I used to make these fake driver's licenses because what I would do is I would go and get all of the expired licenses that I could, my own, my parents' old licenses.

25:25And it was Michigan, so they had this raised laminate and it was hard. And it said Michigan had the state seal on it. What you could do is on the back, you could just cut it really slightly with a super sharp razor, pull the original license out. No one had Photoshop. No one had photo printers. So I had Photoshop and a photo printer. And I would just make an exact replica, change the birthdays and slide it back into the laminate. And then I would heat it up really, really hot. And the laminate would just sort of stick to the photo thing with this little cut in it that if you bent it, it would crack open, but nobody's going to do that to your license.

25:57And so I remember showing it to my friend's dad, who was a judge. And he was like, hang on. So he called his buddy over. It was like the chief of police and he goes check this out and he was like where did you get this and i go probably shouldn't tell you this but i made it and he's like i'm taking this home don't ever do that again and i was like okay i didn't tell him i had made 20 already for my buddy so why did you do that and i'm curious why just to see if i could do it i didn't even use it for anything my friends went and bought beer with it once for me all this stuff is can i do it not then i want to use it for something illegal.

26:32I shouldn't say I never used it. I think I went to Canada once and bought beer with it because I wasn't old enough to look 21, but I was old enough to look 19, which is the drinking age there. So I go to like Windsor and buy beer and be like, you worked. It was like a dumb kid doing something. So I'm lucky because I definitely could have gotten arrested and they would have been like, oh, you're getting hit with a felony because you just manufactured 20 of these. And now somebody went out there and did something real bad with it. And so it was a dumb, idiotic kid thing to do, but I just wanted the challenge.

26:59It was so easy to do it in the past. Still easy to do it nowadays with all the tools you have, with the AIs, with the Photoshop you mentioned, and there are some other tools that are out there. If you engage and you have the balls to do that, then you can make a lot of money. And so that's what we're seeing out there. And then the supply chain out there on Telegram, on the darknet, supports you selling and marketing your skills. You know how to make those driver licenses. I need to open a new bank account because I want to deposit a stolen check. So let's do business. And so those skills now are very sought after.

27:31And there's an ecosystem which will allow you to advertise your skill and make money out of it. Unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of kids doing that. A lot of kids wanting to do that. Because I don't know if you're seeing on Instagram and telling them a lot of folks are spreading. You know what spreading is? I mean, they spread money on their arms. So they take 100 bills, like stacks of 100 bills, and then they spread them all over their arms or their foot or whatever, right? And everybody wants to do that. They don't really know that you can buy the fake notes. And you should buy fake notes and use them, but they want to make money.

28:03And so they want in the ecosystem. They want to be able to get those driver licenses and open bank accounts and deposit those checks and engage in first-party fraud, which is essentially returning something to the store and get reimbursed for that. It's just sad, right? That's pathetic. Like, I'm actually really glad that none of this stuff really existed in the sort of easy-to-access industrial form that it did in the 90s because I would have been super interested in that. I was cloning cell phones. You know what that is? I don't know if they do that anymore. I don't know why you'd bother. Well, you swap SIMs.

28:30That's what we do right now. Yeah, I mean, this was you had to program an analog phone with somebody else's serial number and phone number. And you had to get that by diving into a dumpster at a cell phone store. And then you could program the phone and make free phone calls. You could also change the phones into test mode and listen to people's phone calls and stuff like that. that was cool. That was a technological challenge I really enjoyed. I would have been really interested in this, but it's probably really difficult, especially for a young person to go, cool, I just made a bunch of fake checks.

28:56I should test one. Oh, it worked. Well, I'm done with that. That's what I did with my license, right? But if you just got$1 ,000 from a bank, why would I not get$100 ,000 from a bunch of banks? 100%. And then unfortunately, folks are not really aware of the potential repercussions. I would never think, oh, I'm going to get arrested and thrown in actual jail. I would have been like, oh, I'll just give the money back. How about the banks not banking you anymore and you're not being able to get, that's a consequence. I never thought about that. So banks, yeah, I guess it makes sense. Banks ban people for life?

29:25If they see that you're engaging first party fraud, they don't want to do business with you. I never thought about that. Now you have a lot of banks in this country for sure. I don't think they share information. So banks will not tell the other banks that this guy was engaged. You're taking potential responsibility, right? Of folks not wanting to work with you. What do you do if you're 17 or 18 and you do that and then you're 38 and you're like, hey, I've been a lawyer for 12 years. Can I get a bank account? Do they change their mind at all? It's like too bad, pal. That's a great question, right?

29:54I mean, I don't know the answer for that, but you don't want to be in that position. Folks need to understand the consequence of their behavior. We were all kids, but I don't think many of us were involved in fraud. I think that we're seeing more and more kids now wanting in the fraud ecosystem because it's easy money. It's easy money. Man, I would imagine some of the stuff that companies you know are working on, If they're using AI to create fraud, they're going to use AI to crack down on it, I would imagine. But the question is whether that is the answer, right? Whether you need to fight fire with more fire.

30:22I don't know. Maybe not. We'll see. Tell me about Medicare fraud. This is identity theft at its core, right? They're just pretending to be a person eligible for Medicare. Well, it depends, right? I mean, so Medicare is really interesting because you can create fake companies and then start taking folks' identities, stealing identities or even sort of work with people. and then essentially charge the government with services you never really provided. So this is essentially what Medicare fraud is, Medicare, Medicaid. Is this what happens when there's a couple older people in my family and they'll say, I got a bill for this thing.

30:53And we're like, oh, did she just forget she had that procedure because she's 89? Unfortunately, yeah, we see a lot of it as we actually see people selling victims identities along with their Medicaid and Medicare numbers for those companies to charge them. And I had a conversation with someone over that offering to sell Medicaid numbers for folks who live in Florida, for Floridians, for$10 an identity. So you get the source security number, date of birth address, and the Medicaid number for$10. And if you buy in bulk, you can get a really good price. They're willing to give you$7 an identity. So you take all those identities and then you essentially charge them, right?

31:28I mean, you charge the government with providing services to them, sending medical equipment to these individuals. Obviously, it never happened. And so that's where you start to see a lot of the victims complaining about getting all those bills, right? And all those unfamiliar charges on their statement. That is essentially what Medicare... And I can tell you that I travel around the country, try to find those facilities. And often case, a couple of months ago, I was in Marina del Rey. Yeah, in LA, basically. So there was supposed to be like a facility. And we know for sure there are charges of government the last five years or so.

32:02I went there. There was nothing there. There was just a building. There was a FedEx office. I went into the FedEx office, asked, are you familiar with this company? I said no. And you would expect a company that charges$17 million to the government should get some mail from FedEx that is right across the street. Nobody knew what I was talking about. Went into the leasing office. Nobody really even wanted to answer. Of course, this is a residential building. There's no medical facility here. So$17 million for a non-existent business in Marina del Rey. And this is just one business traveling across the country, Florida, Ohio.

32:36We tried to track those businesses and I wouldn't get in trouble, right? But for doing this with the bad guys, so much Medicare fraud in this country. It's just a shame. And so they're making a lot of money doing this because this is$17 million, one fake business. Why not have 20 fake businesses? That's right. And that's what they're doing. Yeah, that's essentially what they're doing. I hope now there will be more scrutiny. I know that there's more scrutiny right now on Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Hopefully that will continue. We'll be able to flag more of it and we'll be able to prevent more of it because at the end of the day, it's just our money.

33:07Yeah. Taxpayers' money. That's a thing. That needs to go to real people, not real businesses and not completely bogus organizations. What's the scale of this? Tens of billions? We're talking about billions of dollars, yeah. So you could do something with that money. You could do a lot of things with that money. Oh my gosh, yeah. And they get this information, I assume the Medicaid, the Social Security, this is data breach stuff, right? This is when, oh, such and such company got hacked and you go, I don't use Equifax. Yes, you do. And your info is in there. And oh, they lost how many identities?

33:36350 ,000. Oh, okay. Well, what are the odds? That's me. That's a lot, but it's not a lot, right? Okay, whatever. No, there's 350 ,000 fake Medicare patients that they can use to feed this business for a decade. So you definitely have the data coming from data breaches. But if you look at some of the scams going on right now, they're trying to collect those numbers and those identities with regular scams. So I will send you a postcard to your home and I will let you know that something happened with your Medicaid service. You need to enroll from scratch. And then I will send you to a website or send you a text to sort of enroll.

34:08And then you provide me all the information. So it's not only a data breach. That would totally work on me if I got a postcard. I feel like I would fall for that. And we have a lot of examples for that. postcards coming from Medicare or Medicaid where you have to go to a specific website or talk to a specific person to provide her information and you want to make sure that you're still eligible for benefits, you immediately call. You want to make sure that you're still eligible to give away all your information. I feel like I got to text my parents. And now someone has all your information. I'm literally looking from my phone to text my parents right now.

34:36Hey, don't do anything. Luckily, my dad's always like, hey, can you help me do this? I got to go to this website and do this thing. And there have been a couple of times where we're like, that does not sound like something you need to do. My dad's gotten scammed before the printer stopped working, which is an old person's worst nightmare because they had no idea how to hook this thing back up, especially if it's wireless. I don't know how to bring it back up either. I guess I'm old. Maybe. So he Googles HP printer support. And the first result in Google was a scam. It was an ad bought by a company.

35:05He calls them. They're like, you need to install this thing, TeamViewer, on your computer. He does it. Then he's like, what are you doing? And the guy's like, oh, I'm looking for printer drivers. And my dad ripped the cord of the computer out of the wall because he finally was like, wait a minute. And then he took the computer to Apple who basically locked it down because they're like, we're going to get rid of TeamViewer and all this remote access stuff that they had to set up. But I had to change my bank passwords and he had to change his bank passwords because it's like the guy was probably looking for a note file where you keep your passwords or something like that to steal your money.

35:37And my dad was like, I just don't understand how the first result in Google was a scam. And I'm like, that's because Google doesn't give a crap if an advertiser is a scam company. They just don't. They don't police this. It's all around us. And the fraudsters are clever. They're nimble. They adjust quickly. And they take advantage of vulnerabilities and opportunities. And it's all over the place. That's why I think it's extremely important to study fraud and expose those fraudulent activities that these guys are involved in. It's tough to fight it, right? Because my dad goes, all right, next time I talk to a person who has that accent on the phone, I'm going to know it's a scam.

36:13And I'm like, dad, you can't say that every person with a Filipino or Indian accent on the support line is a scammer because that's every single person on every single support line at every company in America. But once he instilled this suspicion - Now he's suspicious about a lot of things. So you can ask questions. Once people are more vigilant about that, they look around and look for the signals and then they will disconnect, right? Yeah. Now he just asks us, is this how you do that? And I'm like, that is good. And that's amazing. How often do these guys get caught doing this fake businesses or the Medicare fraud?

36:42Because it's just got to be so hard to police this kind of thing. Part of the problem, right? The probability of detection and punishment is so damn low. And the criminals know that. And they continue to do it. That's part of the problem, unfortunately. I feel bad for the scam victims. I mean, we're losing tax dollars. But I really feel bad for the people whose identities get stolen. there was a segment you were on that I watched where I don't know it's like a Dutch guy who lives in the Netherlands and I think he went to college here or something in the United States and it screwed up his credit score he flew back here to try to straighten things out because otherwise he can never come back here without getting probably arrested for whatever happened so he has to come back maybe retain a lawyer go straighten things out with banks and he's like this is not something I wanted to spend money and time and mental health doing but I want to be able to visit people in the United States at some point in my life and not have a criminal record or whatever.

37:33But think about our kids. I have like a 19 years old. And if someone takes her social security number and starts using it, she will not know till she's, what, 25? Yeah, she's going to try to buy a car and they're going to be like, what about the last five cars you defaulted on? Think about the consequences for her, right? And so we hear of many kids, like my daughter, whom their identity being stolen and being used in the context of bust out operations, meaning... What's that? So a bus start is when you have someone's identity, you open a bank account, then you apply for credit, and then you accumulate more and more credit until you get to the maximum credit, and then you simply run away with$100 ,000.

38:08I see. Once you do that, someone will have to pay the bill, usually the banks, but they will first reach out to the real people and ask them, is this you? Why aren't you paying the loan you just took from us? And that obviously will have an impact on their credit score, and it's a big deal, right? And it takes years for these guys to recover from this event. So we're talking about formerly legal immigrants. We're talking about adolescents and youth. We're talking about children. Think about it. Yeah. Newborn. You've got to lock your kid's credit with the credit bureaus, right? As soon as they get born.

38:38That's what we're seeing out there. Because one of the things that I'm seeing on the darknet is infants, social security numbers being offered for sale. Walk yourself through that process, man, infants. So you have... But it's a good one because if you don't want to be discovered for a decade and change, buy a baby's credit certificate. 100%. It's a dormant identity. You sit on it. And I have some really cool story to tell about this. It's still very early stages and we investigate. But we know of criminals using those babies' identities for a long period of time. It's mind-boggling how much money you can steal.

39:08You can build a whole life around those identities. And nobody will know, right? Former show guest Jack Barsky, he's a former Soviet spy. And one of the ways that he pretended to be an American was he just found a dead kid's identity. I think the KGB did it for him But he found a dead kid's identity And got documents And basically became The adult version of this baby That died around the time That he was actually born So it was approximately the same age And he said yeah I mean and the baby was Jack Barsky The guy's real name is He's got a German name He just became this fake dead body And he still uses that name Which is a little creepy actually Now that I think about it Right Unfortunately folks are definitely Using those babies identities And they live their whole life With those identities Yeah Wow.

39:51Every time I cover stuff like this, whether it's fraud or rampant, organized shoplifting, somebody in the comments inevitably says, who cares? It's a big company. The bank eventually pays for it. You're mildly inconvenienced. The corporations don't care about us. Why should we care about them? I would love for you to respond to these idiots. Yeah, eventually we will pay the bill, right? Because it doesn't really matter if we're dealing with a bank or a retailer. If they're losing money, they don't want to lose all this money. They will roll the expenses on us. So we definitely want to make sure that they're not losing money in order for us not to lose money.

40:22People complain about the prices going up. Yeah, when you have thousands of dollars in fraud every single day, they just raise the price on the goods that honest people pay for so that they can stay in business. And also think about friction, right? I mean, criminals or the fraudsters who at the end of the day make our life, the normative people life, more complicated with the banks. Because if the banks or the retailers do not trust us, they will make, you know, a lot of obstacles to get things from them. This is why I got to freaking wait and push a button to get deodorant at CVS because some idiot stole all of it for the last six years.

40:54And now I got to have a permission. So they're ruining it for everyone. Before we continue spelunking through this fraud swamp, I guess you don't really spelunk in swamps. Don't at me on that. Let's hear from the brands keeping this show free legally, which is apparently an important distinction today. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Marathon. At Marathon gas stations, every stop is the start of fun. Like the awesome fuel savings you can get with Marathon Rewards. Join Marathon Rewards today and start earning rewards on every gallon of gas. You can redeem rewards at any time, saving up to$1 per gallon.

41:27And don't forget, marathon stations are packed with all the conveniences you need to stock up and live life on the go. Marathon, where fun runs on full. Available at participating marathon locations. Terms and conditions apply. See MarathonRewards.com for details. This episode is also sponsored by AG1. Summer is one of the routines that make you feel like a functioning adult go completely off the rails. You're crossing time zones and eating differently. That's why I appreciate things that are easy to stay consistent with. AG1 is one of those things, and personally, I like taking it first thing in the morning because it feels like I put one point on the board before the day gets chaotic.

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42:58We're happy to surface codes for you. It really is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to David Maimon. I guess the clearest example is TSA. I used to be able to walk through a metal detector to make sure I didn't have a gun on an airplane, and that was it. Now I got to take off my shoes and do all this crazy stuff and be there an hour early because they have to have security for 0.0001 % of people want to blow up a plane. Same thing with fraud. The reason we even have all of this nonsense, this tax on our time, sanity and funds is because of this exact thing.

43:29That's exactly right. Yeah. So fraud is an industry now and not a crime. They're not loan hackers, right? It's a supply chain looking at it. It's identity thieves. Then there's document forgers to give me fake documents for that identity. than maybe, I don't know, somebody who presents well enough to go open an account and they open accounts all day. And then I don't know what money launderers or something thereafter. The roles seem like they're specialized, at least looking at the telegram and the other things like that. Yeah. So you definitely have the suppliers. You have the hackers. We'll get you all the identities.

43:58We're talking about an identity theft supply chain, right? Identity theft and synthetic identities. Synthetic identities are completely bogus identities. So we're not talking about babies or real people identities. We're talking about me coming up with a completely new identity, bogus identity, and using it to create bank accounts, get credit score, take loans. Why not just steal a real identity if it exists and it's so easy? You can definitely do that as well. With synthetic identities, though, you have more leverage. No, you're not competing with anyone else on the identity. It's just you. And so if I steal your identity, then both you and I are using the identity.

44:32So I may be maxing. you may be locking your credit score, right? Your credit lines, and I won't be able to take any loans under your name. With the synthetic identities, I'm controlling it. So I will build the identity in such a way that will allow me to open a bank account. I see. So this is a fully backstop. Completely, exactly. Okay. And that will lead to the bust out. And so when we talk about the supply chain, we know that our suppliers are both the stolen and synthetic identities. We know that there are a lot of producers out there who will help you with the documents. And we talked about the documents a little bit.

45:04But not only the driver licenses and the passport, we're talking about utility bills. We're talking about if you don't want to use your face, we will be able to find someone who will be willing to give away their face for you to use when you're involved with the bank. Now with AI, you don't even need that because you just create the faces out of scratch and the producers will help you with that as well. But you definitely have that service. So then you have the distributors, folks out there on Telegram, on Darknet, selling the service, selling the identity, helping you getting the credit score you really need in order to take the loan.

45:36And then customers all over the place, right? I mean, so the supply chain is out there, is available, fairly easy to access on Telegram. The Darknet is very simple. I know folks don't like when I say that, but all you have to have is just Tor browser on your computer and then know the right URL. You can get some of those documents. And you get the URL, well, I don't know, it's Google or Telegram? From Google, yeah. Oh, wow. There's a website called Tor Taxi. Tor Taxi? Okay. Tor Taxi will give you all the names and URLs of all the live markets. So all you have to do is just copy from Google, paste on Tor, and then get to the market.

46:11Wow. So it's as simple as pasting from one browser to another. 100%. Oh, my gosh. That's exactly what it is. Wow. Yeah. Tor Taxi, yeah. Tor Taxi, right? Access to all the markets, all the live markets. That's where you can buy drugs, I assume. Yes. Then you have some of the forums. A lot of hackers and folks who are interested in hacking will be on the forums, but a lot of fraudsters will be there as well. XSS is a Russian one. All you have to do is just copy and paste to the Tor. Can we look at Drug Hub? Everybody knows what drugs are. Yeah, let's see. Yeah, all right, let's go here. So now we're using Tor.

46:44Okay. Wow, and you just boom, paste it in. I just paste it. Now let's see what we get. And the thing with Tor is that it's slow. Yeah, it's slow, yeah. Very slow. because it's encrypted, right? It's encrypted. It's encrypted and the encryption takes time, right? And it runs it through a different algorithm. So the way Tor works, can you give us like a 10 second overview of Tor and why it works? It's not just a special web browser. It's a special way of looking at the internet. Right, I mean, it's a special way to communicate with server, right? So usually on the regular internet, your computer will connect to a server, right?

47:17I mean, the traffic will be encrypted, but people will know where you're communicating from and where you're communicating to. In Tor, it's very difficult to tell. And that's why you have an increased level of anonymity. That's why the criminals really like using this website for their operation. And I know people are going to say, why do internet service providers allow Tor to be used? And the answer is Tor was invented, what, by the U.S. Navy? Yes, it was, yeah. And the reason was so that they could use it, correct? You know, to make sure that the traffic is not being exposed. And we have special agents here.

47:47We need to allow everybody to sort of use it. So the more traffic that is on tour, the harder it is that somebody under their watch is using it to talk to the CIA or whatever. Let's look at BlackBet. Yeah, we have it ready. So BlackBet is one of those websites which allow you to actually buy, right? Identities and bank accounts. And we can just browse through what we have here. So what are you in the mood for, man? When do you want to buy? Yeah, let's see. Let me get a fake identity for sure. Okay. And probably a bank account that already has money in it so I don't look like a broke-ass loser.

48:17So in that sense, to be clear, it's expected whether you want someone's real bank account, like a compromised bank account, because you can get that, or you can get a bank account someone created and there's some money in it for the bank account to be used as a drop account or sort of a new account. So let's start with, you said driver licenses. Yeah, yeah, why not? Or a passport if it's just as easy. I want to see if I can get a foreign passport. Land borders without getting caught. This is one of the things I really wanted to do, you know, like I wanted to buy a passport and then hopefully with TSA permission or DHA's permission, try and figure out whether they will be able to flag it.

48:52That was one of my questions is, look, I assume that when I have to scan it, it goes into a database and goes, this is not a real passport. But does it do that or does it go, this number, it passes the checksum that's in our computer, just let the guy go. It's a great question. We don't have the answer to that. Remember old credit cards? You could type it into a machine and if it didn't have the internet, it would just say, this is a valid number because it's formatted properly. So that's what they did in the 90s, right? You'd go buy a pizza and they would go, this is real. And then they'd find out on Friday when they called the bank and reconciled all the numbers manually that that one was not real.

49:25But they didn't find out for five or seven days. I think it was called a checksum. It was like, do the numbers do something algorithmically that makes sense? And if so, this is a real number. I agree. So there are ways to discover that you're dealing with a fake passport, but I want to see whether folks actually are doing it. I think it'll be extremely interesting to do red teaming it. Because what happens if you go, hey, this won't scan and they go, oh, you know what? It's bent. Oh, okay. I want to see what happens. Yeah. I would love to try that. So here, I mean, here you see driver licenses, ID plus passport.

49:57And so you can get all that for$150, right? Wait, hold on. What am I getting? Bulk documents? You're getting driver license plus ID plus passport front or some both sides. Digital images thereof. Okay. You get those for$150. What about printed documents that look legit, like forgeries? Maybe I'm no slouch and I'm an international drug dealer. I can afford to pay 20 grand for a really good passport. But you don't need to pay 20 grand. That's what's shocking to me is that it's a tenth of the price. You don't need to pay. That to me just blows my mind. Yeah. So let's look at bank accounts, right?

50:29We talked about bank accounts. okay so maybe you want to describe what you see yeah because it's very intuitive i mean you have to be an expert it is no this is not something where i'm reading something that looks like greek right i'm still on black bet they're advertising their telegram channel where you can probably get tech support or whatever and what's really funny is at the top it says okay banks with online access octo session that probably means some kind of security protocol and this is important to be eligible for a refund due to an invalid account you must provide a continuous video recording from the moment of purchase to the moment of logging into the account.

51:02Without this video, no refund will be issued. So basically, they're offering like a money back guarantee if the thing doesn't work. You have a refund if it doesn't work. They're like, hey, look, we might be scamming for a living, but we're not scamming you. It's all about customer service. So why do they want a continuous video to make sure that you didn't give the account to someone else? To make sure that you purchase it, right? Then you're actually sort of trying to log in, right? And that it's actually you doing this. I see. Okay. And so if we scroll down, right? Yeah, look, first result, Bank of America balance, sorry,$545.

51:32I don't know what extra is. It's some kind of URL. I'm going to show you what an extra means. So you can just open it. Okay. And then maybe you want to - Yeah, and then it says Bank of America business online access Octo browser session with cookies. And then when it was added, right? When it was added. And then you can see - Today. And then you see the price. Yeah, the cart, 56 bucks. And then if you look at the extra, this is the link we just clicked on. And you actually see the compromised bank account. Ah, okay. Okay, so that's just to prove that it exists. That proves that you actually have access.

52:00Okay. You can take control. And what does it mean, OctoSession with cookies? What is that? It's essentially the actual sort of remote desktop protocol that will allow it to connect to the bank account from the victim's computers. Oh, so they were going to give you a way to make it look like you're connected using a different... Bypass security. Ah, okay. Because otherwise it's going to try and text the person. So it just makes it look like you're logging in from a verified browser. That's my understanding of this. I see. Jeez, I can't even do that on my own browser with my own account. You don't need to, right?

52:30Because it comes with the cookies, right? Oh my gosh. And then there's Chase. I mean, as we scroll down, and these are all like 50 bucks. Well, I mean, it really depends on the balance. I mean, you see here. Oh, I see. Price of the accounts are higher. Why is that higher? The balance on the account will be higher, right? I mean, it's 8 ,200. So wait a minute. If I'm logging into a bank account that has an$8 ,000 balance, but I bought it for$500, can I just drain these all day and make money? Or is that tricky? If you know what you're doing, then yes, right? I mean, you need to be very careful about what you do.

52:58So you're not going to drain$8 ,000 immediately, right? You need to be very strategic about it. You need to look at the spending patterns on the account. And then you need to insert spending that will be similar to what you're seeing out there. And then, yeah, you'll, I mean, maybe not drain it completely, but use it for all kinds of purposes, right? I don't think that you'll be able to drain it because that will raise a huge red flag. You're going to use it for all kinds of purposes. You will start paying your electric bill. You will start sending some money to, I don't know, friends, buy gift cards, Zelle some money to people.

53:30But you're not going to drain all$8 ,000 immediately. But if I'm paying 500 bucks, if I remove 500 bucks from it using Zelle to a friend of mine who's a money mule, it's free. You will be able to do that. But again, there's high probability that the bank will be flagging you if you do that immediately. You need to be strategic about this. I don't have the patience for this. It really depends how much you invest and how much you get. The prices vary. What is lookup info? Does that mean I can find information about a person? About the person, yeah. That individual, yeah. Can people find information about me using this?

54:01Or anyone? So lookup info, it will give you information about the victim, the actual victim. If someone took over your bank account. Oh, I see, I see. And they will be able to look information about you. What is Jabber? Email and Jabber? Jabber is like a text message application. I see, okay. So that you can contact them using... Over Jabber, yeah. I see, okay. And see, that's part of the reason why people don't like working with a dark net. and I like Telegram instead because it's just so damn slow. This is quite slow. Telegram, you just what? You DM the person whose channel you're in and say like, hey, I'm interested in a pack of checks.

54:31Yeah, and it's easy to scroll. Here, I'm going to show you. I mean, if we've done that, I'll show you Telegram. I don't know if you've seen Telegram. Oh yeah, I use Telegram. Not for this, obviously. But have you seen illicit commodities being offered for sale? Oh yeah, usually the stuff I've used Telegram for that would be considered, not illicit really, but I was following Hamas in there. Okay, yeah, that's not illegal. That's not illegal. I'll show you some. They put their uncensored footage in there because I was like, I want to see if this is really as real. This is like October 8 or something.

54:57Yeah. I did that. But I've seen people selling things in there that are like credit cards or identities, but it was amateur hour. I mean, they were idiots from another country that were not professional. So Telegram channels that we spend a lot of time and you can buy drugs, you can buy weapons. We see more and more of those channels where illicit commodities are being offered for sale being blocked. But still, there's a lot going on. People add me to stuff like this without my permission sometimes, thinking that I'm interested in. I don't know if it's this that they're adding you. There's like investment scam ones that I've added to, but then there's other ones where as soon as I joined one that was for some sort of SIM card thing that was illegal that I was trying to check out and investigate, I got auto-added to, hey, you want to launder small amounts of money?

55:44It was stupid stuff, like check, kiting checks. It was just amateur nonsense where the people couldn't even tell. So have you seen those checks in the past? Not like what you're showing me right now. I'm looking at a check for 5 ,000 bucks that somebody had stolen. Yeah. These are corporate checks. Yeah. And you see the dates on them, right? Yeah. 1 ,800 bucks. It's a construction company. It's signed by somebody. I mean, this is a real, that's a real check. It's a real check. Yep. Iowa State Bank, Construction LLC. I don't want to say the full name of the company because. Yeah. No, we don't want to say it.

56:13But you see all these checks are being offered for sale, right? So you can just buy the actual check. Yeah. We'll be right back after this because apparently fraud as a service has a better revenue model than podcasting and I refuse to let criminals out monetize me.

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57:58Available at Lowe's. Our newsletter, Weebitwiser, is making quite a splash. A lot of people are angry and a lot of people are unhinged, but most of you are positive when you read this thing and you let me know by hitting reply. It's an under two-minute read just about every Wednesday. It'll affect your psychology or relationships and your decisions. hopefully in a good way. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to check it out. It really is a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with David Maimon. So my dad, his tax check, his payment got stolen.

58:30It's$30 ,000. They took the check and they deposited it into Navy Federal Credit Union. And so my thought was, are these the dumbest criminals in the world? Because the name, of course, is attached to the Navy Federal Credit union bank account? Well, it depends, right? If it's a real person. It depends on so many things. First of all, it depends whether they maybe found a victim, a scam victim, like a kid, and they told them, listen, help us here, deposit this check in your bank account, right? We're going to give you$200 just for that, send us the rest of the money. Yeah. If that's the case, you have two victims.

59:02You have your father and then the kid. If they are using CPNs, and this is what we're looking at right now, right? I mean, we're looking at credit profile numbers. So this is what we're seeing here. These are the bogus identities, that they have credit reports. You see the age of the fake people, see when they were added, and you see how much you can buy it. So if they use that, then they don't give a crap. I just figured Navy Federal, don't you have to be an armed forces member to use that? Or you can anybody... Well, I mean, you can fake everything, right? I mean, it's not that big of a... He got his money back almost immediately.

59:30He was like, how come they haven't got my taxes? Oh, it got deposited. And they were like, oh, boom, fraud. the credit union. I mean, it was deposited into an account that wasn't the IRS. How do you deposit an IRS check into a personal bank account? That one's on the credit union. Come on, guys. Again, I can't really comment on the credit union. I can tell you that this is very common, and we're seeing this all over the place. I mean, what we're looking at right now is a compromised account. Yeah. If this is key bank, some kind of free account, six grand in there, says FDIC insured, available balances of yesterday,$6 ,100.

1:00:02And they actually showed you... Oh, it looks like on May 11th, the person deposited that in there. So it seems something very similar to what we've just talked about, right? It seems like someone has used this bank account to deposit this check, right? And now they're bragging about the fact that they have the$6 ,000 and that it will run away with it. So again, this is very popular on Telegram. That's a nice fat check there,$14 ,000. Yeah, and you see the date, right? I mean, it's all... A person's handwriting needs work, yeah. But they're renovating their basement and wine cellar. Come on, Stephen.

1:00:32We see all that, right? I mean, and this is offered for sale, right? So you can just buy that check? Yeah, we can buy a check right now. I mean, we're not going to do that, obviously. No, sir. Not from my kitchen. Yeah, right. I really want to know if I can get a diplomatic passport and not just a regular passport. Because that's much harder to get. And also, that's the kind of thing where you get pulled over in, I don't know, Panama, and you pull out your diplomatic passport and they just let you go without a bribe because they don't want any trouble. Once you're in the right market, you can get whatever you want, right?

1:01:01This is really interesting. I mean, this is Telegram. So this channel is a channel that helps recruit people to the scam compounds in Cambodia and China. I see this. Yeah, I was going to ask you about this. Have you seen it? Okay. Yeah, I've seen similar. So this is global recruitment, high paying job. It looks like that was what the Philippines flag up there? Oh, Laos, Thailand hiring. Oh, hiring Filipinos. Yeah. Okay. So it is Philippines customer service staff hours noon to midnight, four days off per month, half day part-time on Saturday, Sunday, salary options,$1 ,000 plus$500 USD, whatever that means.

1:01:33And then you have all these people wanting to get the job. So she's interviewing for this position, maybe? So she's from Pakistan and she thinks she's interviewing for what now? I'm still confused about. What do these women think they're applying for? I think they're... I don't want to say that they know they're applying for the scam compound. The jobs that they're advertising are modeling, right? That other one was customer service. This is a modeling gig. Yeah. They're all modeling gigs. You just need to sit to a computer and talk to people. That's the way they sell. That's essentially what the scam compounds are doing.

1:02:01I see. Anyone HR agent who can arrange the above required. Because this is Chinese, global recruitment, high-paying jobs. That immediately is scary. Yeah. Dubai support services. Yeah. So you see the location, Cambodia. You see the salaries. Hiring Indonesian male and female in Cambodia. Salary, work location, interest to candidate. So that just screams we're going to lock you in a scam compound for the next three years. Maybe to us, right? Because we know what this is. These people just see a job. So again, bank accounts, more bank accounts for sale. And this one, I mean, you see the balance.

1:02:35You see the OctoTransfer, as we said earlier. Logging access. You get the gender. You get the state where they live, date of birth. No phone. Yeah, no phone number. And then you can even get the security question, which is really good. That's great. Right? I suppose it's great if you're in the market. Yeah, sure. Okay. So any sort of banks, any sort of checks. And then there's a Lid Depot where you can get fake license plates and everything like that. There you go. I mean, these are some driver licenses for sale if you want. Oh, yeah. And let's see what they do here. Oh, that's showing that you can scan it.

1:03:06Wait, you can scan it? That's what they say. Many of the driver licenses, yeah. But it doesn't show up in the computer as the actual... I don't know what they show. I've seen a lot of images and a lot of videos of these guys here. There's Donald Trump on a Missouri driver's license. Yeah. A lot of those driver licenses will scan. A lot of the passports will scan. I've seen a lot of the passports which are being scanned and all the information of the individual on the computer, on the passport, pops up on the computer. So the biometric ID or whatever it's called works, the scan works, and it contains the data, but it won't necessarily check out if they use a database to reconcile.

1:03:40Yeah, it's scanned and it will show up the names. And that's old already. I mean, we're talking about 2023. We've seen those videos, right? Wow. Yeah. So we've seen the driver licenses. So these are the drop bank accounts we're talking about. So the drop bank accounts, I'm taking someone else's identity or a bogus identity. I go to the bank, I open the bank account and then now I have a drop account, like a mule account to sell. And so if you see what, you know, the picture right now is a smartphone with a zero balance on the bank account that is open on it and then a credit card, a debit card.

1:04:10A debit card, yeah. Plastic card. And essentially the criminals are selling that for you to use in your fraudulent operation. So you have a stolen check and you want to deposit a stolen check, you'll have an account to deposit in it. I see. That's what they're selling here. And of course, you're getting the identity, you're getting sometimes even the phone they use to open the bank account with. That's what you're seeing on the screen right now. I see. So I just buy a bunch of bank accounts, a bunch of cards to go along with it. I buy a bunch of stolen checks. I deposit stolen checks in several of the accounts.

1:04:37I wait for a few of them to clear. I withdraw that money and I just vanish. It's a very simplistic way to do it. You have to sit on those bank accounts a little bit because you need to know when the bank will have less scrutiny on those bank accounts. You will wait on them and then you will buy the checks, deposit and disappear. So maybe you use it for a few weeks or a few months to like, I don't know, buy packs of gum and ride the subway. So this guy, yeah, exactly. 100%. Here they're showing you the identity of the person that they use to open the bank account. David Smile. Yeah. And we see it on the bank account website.

1:05:10Oh, I see. That's why they show the website. Yeah. Just to show like, hey, this is real. So more driver licenses. Yeah. These are cloned. Oh, yeah. So it looks real. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Oh, yeah. This is a passport, right? Or driver's license. What is it? Real ID kind of identification document. Yeah. Oh, it's New York State. New York driver's license. Oh, see, I see. There's no photo on it. That's just the blank. That's right. And so it just shows you how it looks under ID. But you see, it's the right piece of material. Yeah. You just need to print on it. That's got to be Chinese because who's making something that advanced here?

1:05:39That's an industrial project to make those kinds of blanks. So the detection gap on this, how far in advance are fraudsters? Are they 12 months ahead of defenses, six months ahead of defenses, five years ahead of defenses? Very difficult to say. I mean, I think that usually they're 10 steps ahead of us. The industry is constantly trying to keep up with these guys. The problem is that these guys are smart and then they find vulnerabilities in the new technology and keep going. So very difficult for me to quantify the exact time gap. Some people say 18 months. Other people say two years. Other experts believe we're here, but it really depends on the actor.

1:06:16If you're talking to a nation state, for example, who's trying to defraud us, then the gap is huge. But if you're looking at someone from New Jersey right now selling titles, I don't know whether we can't really keep up with that gap quite quickly. Do you know Christo Groziev, does that name ring a bell, from Bellingcat? So basically he uncovered this Russian spy ring because he looked at the passports that they had and he ran the numbers and they were all part of the same series. So Russia was basically creating these fake passports, but they all had consecutive numbers, something along those lines.

1:06:47And I just thought, wow, what a move. But at the end of the day, they were making real identities for these people, but they just screwed up the numbering and made it really obvious. This will be - They won't do that again. The oddball, exactly. Yeah, they won't do that again. So fraudsters are really, really sophisticated at this point in an ancient state who are essentially using the same ecosystem I'm showing you right now. You have all those services being offered out there. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, so I'm speaking. Look, banks use static checks, fragmented data, not just banks, any institution.

1:07:13And fraudsters, obviously, they're using coordinated networks and reused infrastructure. And the systems are just going to detect the fraud after the damage is done. There are a lot of solutions out there. Yeah. We just need to make sure that we keep up with the fraudsters because they're constantly advancing. They're using AI, they're using machine learning, they know what they're doing. And we need to make sure that we are keeping up with them. Is it a tech problem or an incentives problem for these institutions to clamp down on this stuff. Again, I mean, you're talking to humans, right? I mean, and the fraudsters really know what they're doing.

1:07:41And the tech, it takes time to come up with better technology quite quickly. So it's a huge challenge. We're talking about bureaucracy and in those organizations as well, it takes time to deploy and implement. The criminals are very fast and they're agile. And once you disrupt them, they will be able to come up with you from a different angle. It's a very difficult game to play. It is, yeah. Something that's important to note is it's not just grandma getting scammed and targeted now, right? Because young people can participate unknowingly because of social engineering. But you mentioned before, if they found a victim at Navy Federal and they said, hey, man, deposit this check and we'll give you 200 bucks.

1:08:15You hear about this online, like a kid thinks he's talking to a girl, he sends her a nude, she turns out to be a dude who goes, hey, look, I'm going to expose these if you don't take this check and deposit it in your bank account. That's all I want. I'll go away after that. And the kid freaks out and goes, fine, all I got to do is deposit a check into the bank and then sell you 5000 bucks. Fine, make it stop. So then they catch that kid and then he just tells what happened because he's going to go to jail for check fraud and then says, yeah, sorry, mom, police. I got this guy who did this thing to me.

1:08:42And then what are you going to do? The poor kid's a victim too. And then the bank just eats that 30K. Again, the fraudsters are very sophisticated. I mean, I can tell you one of the things that we're seeing right now going back to online romance scam and the sort of new trend in online romance scam. And folks are essentially hooking up with people like older folks online. They look for specific profile of individuals. So they will look for individual credit score of 750 and above. They will look for people who own homes with at least$50 ,000 to a million dollars in equity. Then they will team up with them.

1:09:15They will hook up with them on some of the dating apps, Facebook, Twitter, whatever. They will build relationship with them. They will coerce them to open bank accounts using their own name. And then they will coerce them to take home equity lines loans and then funnel the money to those accounts. This is where we're at right now. And so when you're talking about the victims, the journey there is just so sad. I mean, it'll be very patient. They know exactly what they're doing. The MO is very clear. They look for a specific victim to work. And at the end of the day, those individuals will be losing a lot of money.

1:09:47So you have the kids, you have the older folks. Everybody is susceptible to this. Yeah. So this is shifting from hackers stealing something by cracking your password to people being manipulated and giving them a bunch of the money. What do you think is the most likely way somebody listening gets scammed in the next 12 months? romance scam, some kind of identity fraud. What do you think? I think identity theft. I think that's the major thing that we're experiencing in our country. All our identities are out there. We hear about data breaches every day and the criminals have access to it. Now with agentic AI, they can bring it to the next level, so to speak, because you have all these identities.

1:10:19All you have to do is just feed the identity in an agentic AI tool. And then the tool will allow you to simply create those bank accounts, create those social media accounts and build a facade around them quite easily without you even doing anything. So that's what we're going to be looking at. That is insane. So what are three things people do each day that you think make them easy targets? Is there any sort of specific actions that people are taking or not taking that make them low-hanging fruit? We're all out there, right? I mean, on our smartphone, on our iPads, we're looking to connect, we're looking to consume things, we're reading things that we're not really sure about, but then we're taking actions on them.

1:10:52I think one of the important things people should do is when they consume all the material, when they get the email, when they read something on the internet, they should pause a little bit, right? Think about what it is that you read. Try to make sense out of it and only then take an action. Our attention span is so short at this point and we just want to go to click on things. That is one of the things that makes us extremely vulnerable to all these types of frauds I just discussed. What's a behavior change maybe that can dramatically lower your risk? Slow down, man. Slow down. You're not good at that.

1:11:23We need to slow down and think about things that we're getting over our mail. does it make sense for us to click on this? Does it make sense for us to... Yeah, just because you got a postcard, don't go to the website on the postcard. Exactly, yeah. I mean, everything, don't trust. In cybersecurity, this concept of zero trust, I think we should all try and adopt it in the context of fraud because fraudsters are out there and they're trying to drain our wallets. They're doing a very good job, unfortunately, and during the last five years, we need to slow down, right, and think about what it is that we get.

1:11:49Don't click on stuff. Don't send stuff. Don't disclose your information. Be more aware of what's going on out there and protect your identity. You mentioned the agentic AI. Is this essentially a bot that can, what, open bank accounts for you? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's a very sophisticated bot. Even nowadays, we can use agentic AI to do all kinds of things for you. You can have the agentic AI call the bank and start negotiating your rates with them. You can have your agent do everything for you. In the context of my work as a professor and my students, we were able to show that you can program those agentic AI to create accounts, to create bank accounts, to create retailer accounts fairly quickly.

1:12:29You can pace the time and make sure that it's not like a bot which will just bombard the bank or the retailer with requests. I mean, she can pace it. You can just feed it with identities. If you're thinking about bogus identities, then you don't even need to feed any identity. You just tell the tool to create it and then build a facade around it. We talked about it. When you have a synthetic identity, you want to make sure that the synthetic identity has some public record around it. So you want to have a Best Buy account. You want to have an Auto Depot account. You want to make sure that you have a treadline associated with that.

1:12:59It takes time to do that. That's essentially what you buy when you buy the identities online. The tool will be able to do that for you quite quickly and get it to the next level. So fascinating stuff. It's not that we're getting hacked. It's that we're getting played really. Whether you know it or not, right? You're already out there. Everything is out there for them to grab and work with. So is there a point where verifying identity online just stops working? I mean, if you've got like a fake face and a fake voice and a fake backstop, how do you verify that somebody's real online? That's a great question.

1:13:29I'm a sociologist in training. My PhD is in sociology. And I remember at the time we're talking about Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, community and society. When we were a community, we all knew each other. And so when you went to the bank to try to get a loan or open a bank account, the banker knew who you were, right? I mean, so if you ask for a million dollars, right? Yeah, you totally papered my house in 97. I'm not giving you a million. Only half a million. So they knew who you were, but now we're a society. I mean, we can't know everyone, right? But we need to find a way to touch each other as many times as possible in order to verify our identities.

1:14:02So solutions out there should have that in mind. You need to have solutions that take into consideration where you were, when did you apply to a specific bank accounts with which telephone number, from which address, from which IP address have you tried to apply. You know, take into consideration all these historical signals before you actually upload all the driver licenses and the selfies and the liveness test, just to take a look at whether the information you're using in order to try and onboard is someone that we've seen in the past. If it's not, if someone is using your identity from a telephone number we've never seen, it'll be like a huge red flag.

1:14:38So those solutions need to take into consideration those historical signals. And that's, in my mind, the way to verify folks' identities nowadays. All right. So what's something that you personally do that most people would find paranoid, but you think it's justified? I don't use the mail anymore. At all? At all, man. Like the postal mail? Only UPS every now and then, and only if I need to ship things for some of the operations. Okay. But I don't use the mail anymore. You just don't send anything in the mail? I don't send checks to pay my bills, right? And that is because I'm really paranoid about the mail theft.

1:15:09I mean, looking at those stacks of checks, I will never use a check again. That's ridiculous. Like, there were thousands and thousands of checks in that one stack, that one image had where the guy just said, hey, I'm selling checks. 100%. I check my bank account quite often because of what I just showed you. Yeah, I bet. Me too. I mean, how does that guy even steal that many checks? He has to work in a place where they collect them? Or is he just running around Manhattan opening mailboxes? It depends, right? It could be an insider having access to the behind the scenes and then getting all our envelopes or they rob the mail carrier for the arrow key, which opens hundreds of mailboxes across the city.

1:15:45And then you simply go at night with a car and simply collect the mail. And that's how you're going to get all these checks. Yeah, that's just brazen as hell. Man, if someone ignores everything else that we have just said, what is the one thing that you would like them to remember? I think that folks need to be aware of the fact that their identities are out there and they need to have protection. That's the most important thing. What kind of protection can we have? So folks need to have an identity theft protection plan on their identities. Someone is using your identity. There are companies out there which will allow it.

1:16:16Like LifeLock? Like LifeLock. Exactly. Yeah. So make sure you have that. I think it's important for you to freeze your credit. Yeah. That essentially means that folks will not be able to take new loans under your name. It doesn't mean that they will not be able to open new bank accounts. So it's important for you to also go to websites, early warning or check system and ask for an annual report of all your bank accounts you have under your name just to see that you identify everything. These are the major thing that I think folks need to be aware of and be vigilant because, again, our identities are out there and the criminals are using our identities to engage in all kinds of fraud.

1:16:47We need to make sure that we get the signals. David Maimon, thank you so much. Really interesting slash terrifying episode. Thank you so much for having me. And I really appreciate you doing the homework. Oh, yeah. No, that's kind of how this show goes. I appreciate that. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to check out, here's a trailer of our interview with Jack Barsky, former KGB spy, who posed as an American in a truer-than-life version of a Hollywood movie. This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union, secretly becoming a real American.

1:17:25We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War, and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture. I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport control. So a young person, it really feels good because I never liked rules. How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? I know they tried to call you home. Can you take us through that? They called me back as an emergency departure. They've done this in the past. They call back an agent. And as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are jailed. or even executed.

1:17:59I was stalling the Soviets. And then one day they send one of their resident agents. And he said to me, you've got to come home or else you're dead. It was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell them that I'm not returning. I will not betray any secrets and please give the money on my account to my German family. Wow. Tell us how you got caught because this story is just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past. I was stopped on the other side of a toll gate. It was a state trooper. Just like to check your license and registration. And could you step out of the car?

1:18:36I step out of the car, still not having a clue what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, somebody approaching me from the back. The fellow introduced himself. He says, Joe Riley, FBI. And he showed me this badge. We would like to talk with you. The first question I asked, am I under arrest? And the answer was no. Then I said, what took you so long? For more from Jack Barsky, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI and what happened after that, check out episode 285 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Big thank you to Dr. David Maimon for taking us inside a fraud economy that is way more organized, scalable, and professionally disgusting than most people realize.

1:19:17And by the way, y 'all, I did actually get my fake passport and wow, does this thing look real? I'd post a photo, but it's so realistic. That just seems like a bad idea. I kind of feel the need to say that I may or may not be setting something fictional right now and I'm not in possession of a fake US passport. Anyway, it's complete with an AI video of me doing identity checks, moving my head and face around. This is all created based on photos of me, which means it can be made for anybody. The big takeaway here, you're probably not getting hacked by some genius supervillain in a hoodie. You're getting played by systems designed to weaponize urgency, trust, fear, greed, loneliness, convenience, basically the entire human operating system.

1:19:58And the bad guys don't need to be brilliant anymore, really, at all. AI has lowered the bar. The dark web sells everything they need. Fake IDs, fake faces, fake voices, synthetic identities, fake businesses. Really, the whole criminal buffet is now self-serve. So protect your identity. Freeze your credit. Freeze your kids' credit. Be suspicious of urgency. don't trust random links. Well, that's the 90s call. They want their tips back. Verify through another channel. And remember, if somebody online is making you panic, rush, hide something, send money, or just confirm this one little code, you are not in a conversation.

1:20:29You are on the menu. All things Dr. David Maimon on the website and the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show on the deals page, jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking as well over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. And it's occurred to me that a lot of them are remote and many of them I've never met.

1:20:58And now I'm wondering if they're even real. We'll find out someday. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in the dark web, fraud, identity theft, or just cybercrime in general, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

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