Next Unicorns: Preventing future fraud using AI with Sardine CEO Soups Ranjan | E1802

0:00So fraudsters, you know, as they use AI, we are using AI as well. So we think that the future of identity verification online is actually a battle of bots. Extrinsic AI versus intrinsic. This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkSquares. Life for in-house legal just got a whole lot easier. From contract creation to execution and more, LinkSquares is the go-to for all your legal needs. Learn more at linksquares.com slash twist. LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a free$100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com slash nextunicorn. And Roots, invest in the only real estate investment trust that creates wealth for you and its residents at investwithroots.com slash twist.

0:57Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's our next Unicorn series. If you don't know about the unicorn series, go to this week in startups.com slash unicorns. And what you'll find is all the companies that we have on, when they're growing fast, and they figured something out, they got product market fit, you have a pretty good eye and a pretty good track record for figuring out when those companies are going to get to that coveted unicorn status, which means absolutely nothing. All that matters is your customers. But hey, we use this term unicorn, it's good branding. Everybody loves it.

1:26It's a milestone. But you know, typically, when a company hits that unicorn status it's because you're doing something very important in the world now ai it's empowering people we know that every day every week especially on mondays with sundee on this show we look at all the progress being made and it is extraordinary but there's going to be downsides downsides to every technology look at the smartphone everybody gets a smartphone now nobody's sleeping oh kids have anxiety eating disorders and so as a technologist as somebody who is a capital allocator in technology or somebody just covering technology I'm all three actually, you really need to be aware of the downsides.

2:03Nothing's free in this world. You know, you want to put in nuclear power, you get the downside of nuclear weapons, or, you know, a nuclear power plant, tragically, you know, causing having a meltdown. So everything has its ups and downs, even, you know, putting in these big solar farm or wind farms, hey, there's birds that get impacted or eyesores of, you know, wind windmills. So what is the big downside to ai i've been talking about this i got laughed laughed off my home podcast all in pod when i said i think this ai is going to result in a lot of financial fraud think about all the phishing and misinformation if you train an ai to look at the data and to pick targets and to refine its emails and its ways of trying to phish say a body of users it's going to get better just like hackers get better but it might get better faster and so uh the company we're going to talk to today and the founder is exactly focused on that.

2:58And this is what we call in the industry skating to where the puck is going. I mentioned this last year during the AI revolution and watching chat GPT three come out and blow everybody's mind. Well, founders have been working on this issue and anticipating it for even longer. This is why founders are such a precious and important resource in the world. Founders think about the future, they skate to where the puck is going, They invest, and this is why capital allocators are important, they invest capital allocators' money knowing that 70, 80, 90 % of the dollars will go to zero. They'll be wiped out as we try to predict the future and build products and services to delight and protect and entertain customers, customers known as human beings on planet Earth.

3:41Fraud, gosh, it's one of the biggest issues. And there's a certain amount of fraud that's acceptable in every ecosystem. And our job is to keep it to that acceptable level. I don't think any of us expects that there's not going to be some amount of piracy, some amount of shoplifting, some amount of credit card fraud, or even online fraud. So Sardine is the name of the company we're going to talk to today. They were founded in 2020 to try to identify and stop bad actors. Their algorithm helps customers detect fraud before it happens. And Supes Ranjan is the co-founder and CEO of Sardine. Supes, welcome to the show.

4:18Thanks for having me, Jason. really excited to be here big fan of your show oh thanks pal i appreciate it have you been have been watching for a long time were you one of these people who watched in college and then makes me feel old no i'm i'm i'm uh getting on the older side as well no i watch occasionally yeah okay great i appreciate that i think that's the right way to watch this week in startups if you're busy you know if you're a young founder every episode is essential for you now you get busy you should maybe scan we do four or five episodes a week you scan it you pick the ones that are most important put them on a playlist and start with those right i i understand that we're producing a lot of content here maybe you can't get through every all five hours a week but you cherry pick the top two hours i think you're gonna do pretty well i had somebody on the program soups uh who was like oh yeah i listened to you in high school and i'm like how old are you 27 i said wait a second so i was i've been listening since like the 10th episode i said ah that makes sense yeah so now you got the name Supes.

5:13How did that go in high school? Everybody must have had a hundred jokes, huh? Yeah, well, growing up, no one actually ever called me by my first name. It's very long. It's Supranamya. Supranamya. What does it mean? It means, the root word actually comes from pranam, which is really hello, or namaste in Hindi, right? Namaste, yeah. Yeah, so it's a good hello. Oh, I like it. Very nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautiful. So then somebody gave you the nickname Supes, your mom your dad your siblings who gave it to you oh no no not my parents my undergrad my undergrad friends they did ah it's a great nickname great yeah totally and in india it's good growing up it's very common to just go by your last name so all my growing up years i went just by my last name ranjan until i came to the u.s and i was like okay i have to do something with my first name so i chose what my nickname my friends gave me i love it a good nickname.

6:09I'm here for it. All right. So you worked at Coinbase during the formative years 2015 to 2019. And you had a great title director of risk management and data science. And this is really at a company that not only had a lot of stake finance, this was a completely new area that had a couple of traits. One, these projects and these tokens that were being sold they move instantly and the transactions are not reversible and so there's a permanence to getting hacked here where it's not like you can have some window to reverse the charges it's instant it's irreversible in many cases uh some of these things have global actors so what did you learn to the extent you can talk about it obviously i know you got some confidentiality there but brian's a friend of the show what did you learn taking on such a seemingly insurmountable challenge and did you succeed or how did you do yeah no absolutely it was a great learning experience because as we say if you can solve for fraud in crypto you can actually solve for it anywhere exactly for the reasons as you mentioned because crypto is fungible it's not reversible and it's instantly transferable and instantly you can sell it and deposit the fiat into your wallet of choice right so what i learned was that um as the world of money movement becomes increasingly global right and we've seen that not just via crypto but via all the other new banks which have been popping up in every country on the planet as money movement becomes instant and fast you know the same characteristics that crypto has are actually present in all sorts of faster payment methods as well, right?

7:55Because they're also instantly transferable, and they're not reversible. So look at Zelle in the US, look at PIX in Brazil, look at UPI in India, right? So for me, the biggest learning was that as money movement becomes instant and global, the impact of fraud or scams is going to be huge. And in fact, we are seeing that today. If you go look at in the UK, the amount of money being lost to scams has actually quickly overtaken the amount of credit card fraud losses that they typically used to have. And I'm pretty sure with FedNow or RTP ramping up in the US, the same story is going to hold true very much over here as well.

8:36Life for your in-house legal team can be so hard, chasing down signatures, pouring over contracts, toggling between all the different tools, the back and forth with the sales team. It's brutal. And legal stuff, oh my god, bane of my existence, right? There's just so much. It's a deluge. But it doesn't need to be that way. All you have to do is use LinkSquares. It's the first AI-powered end-to-end contract management solution. What does it do? It gives your legal and your revenue teams the tools they need to help sales close deals faster while delivering a seamless experience for your customers.

9:11So you can create, review, approve, and execute your contracts easily in one place while prioritizing tasks and integrating with the tools your team already knows and loves. LinkSquares is where all your legal needs come full circle. Start streamlining your contract management process today and make life for those in-house legal people so much easier with just a few clicks. Learn more at LinkSquares.com slash twist. that's link squares.com slash twist to start streamlining your contract management process today and if you're not doing your contracts right it's going to cause all kinds of downstream problems do it right link squares.com slash twist when you look at the attacks and you look the attack vectors if you were to put them into buckets i'm a neophyte on this i can guess but i'm sure there are certain buckets of fraud that occurs in crypto and then wider you know in finance let's just start with the finance kind of area we'll leave out corporate espionage we'll leave out you know foreign actors trying to get and just talk about people trying to get money of people trying to get money where are these actors based and what uh are what are the attack vectors they're using or trying we all know there's like the classical uh what's the country in africa that everybody associates with the classical phishing scam yeah nigerian the nigerian prince scam then we've got you know china uh you've got russia the mob and then you've got domestic actors like maybe organized crime here in the united states you got cartels probably south of the border i don't know tell us the buckets of where financial fraud is coming from and who are the actors broadly speaking yeah absolutely so i would actually broadly bucket it into the following categories one is synthetic identity right so i create a synthetic identity out of thin air it could be you know i'm using a dead person or a minor or a child's social security number apply for a loan using my own name and then the first time i do it i get denied but the next i do it the bureau thinks that yeah this is uh this is a legit person and then they approve me so that is one type of fraud the second one i would say is mules money mules right so uh it could be uh money mules that you recruit right on the street right like you pay someone a couple of bucks to create an account you do kyc for a new bank or a bank right and you pay them for doing that or they could be recruited via a social media forum right on instagram or facebook etc right then the third category i would call is your regular credit card theft right so i obtained you know a bunch of stolen card numbers previously if i had a bag of stolen card numbers the first thing i would go buy would be uh you know a smart tv right because that was the most expensive thing I could buy, but then I would have to worry about disposing it off.

12:13But now in the day and age of crypto or NFTs or neobanking, the best thing I can do is actually load money into a digital wallet and then find ways via which I can take money out of that wallet. Maybe I create a virtual card in that neobank, put that virtual card in an Apple Pay or a Google Pay wallet, and now I can go spend on that Apple Pay, Google Pay. So the world of stolen card fraud has become much more murkier, much more harder to unravel because what used to be a simple point solution-based mechanism to defeat it does not work anymore, right? And the most interesting one and the most prevalent one is the world of just scams in general.

12:55So they used to take the form of Nigerian print scams, right? Where those emails were full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, right? Yes. But in this day and age, with gen ai and llms it's very easy to write perfect perfectly curated in fact even personalized email targeting uh anyone right i could target a message to appear to be like me to you jason for example right and then uh it's all all these scams are some form of social engineering they originate via a text or via uh an email oftentimes like jason by the way do you do you often get these your wrong number text messages for example yes i have gotten uh many wrong texts i don't reply to them i block them i assume if somebody knows it's me they're going to start with jacal uh and literally uh yeah i have to change my phone numbers on some regular basis because i am paranoid about scams yeah 100 and what turns out is that there's a there's a big uh gang of uh folks who are based somewhere in southeast asia right and it's a it's a common scam known as pig butchering right what that involves is in fact even involves human traffic so these are the accomplices in the scam are people who've been trafficked and they are being you know coerced into perpetrating these scams they are given these phone numbers of you know americans or you know eastern western europeans whom they are texting trying to engage with them and once they engage with them then they will actually always have a ploy saying hey i can help you double your money via some investment at a brokerage or a crypto exchange right and in that case they're going to actually walk you through the steps of kyc creating an account connecting a payment method and they will even show you screenshots saying that your money has doubled but in the back end it's just a fake software which is showing that you know your money is doubling by just moving the bits and bytes right and a lot of people have lost their life savings to scams like that right and this is fascinating uh pig butchering because what you're saying is there's two tiers going on here you have exploited people who are forced to do this so instead of being forced into some horrible life doing terrible uh things they're being uh forced to perhaps in addition to whatever other horrible things are being forced into doing doing these scams which maybe are more profitable because if you get one pig and the concept of a pig here is the i think um you know uh the old expression on wall street that pigs get slaughtered in other words if you get too greedy you're going to get slaughtered so they're referring to the marks as pigs and these are people in america who see other people claiming to have doubled their money on an nft in a month we say okay i'm going to double my money but i'm just going to take my 50 000 life savings i'm going to double it and what people don't understand in this situation is because you'd say who's stupid enough to fall for this all you need is one person who's weak at one moment in time you don't need and it could be one out of a thousand if it takes you but one minute to do each person in a thousand minutes if you get one thousand minutes isn't a lot of time you're talking about 15 20 hours of work two days of work you get one every two days and that person you know sales for what five thousand dollars ten thousand dollars that's a pretty good living yeah yeah totally and then the um and then of course there's the the classic irs scam or the you know folks who are impersonating elon musk and asking them to to send money to a crypto wallet so that they can double their money right Right.

16:36So fraud and scam is as old as money. People always innovate and find newer ways of making money off of other people's greed. And in the world of generative AI, it's that that problem is going to get even worse, much, much worse. Right. So, yeah. And I just as a quick note for folks, if I'm asking you for money, people tell me that they've been getting scammed by social media accounts for myself. or if elon's asking for money i can assure you that we're okay and that we don't need five thousand dollars i think somewhere i'm going to find the five grand to cover my flight back from wherever my passport was stolen and i think elon's going to do okay i don't think you have to worry about his five thousand dollar you know bitcoin i'm sure he'd appreciate a bitcoin but i don't think you need to send him one i think he's okay yeah uh so this is super fascinating um that all these scams exist the question is um if it's only one out of a thousand people and they're you know who fall for it i don't know what percentage of people fall for it every year here in the united states uh but it does seem to be targeting specific demographics those demographics seem to be the least technically adept people they go after retirees they go after non-technical people who you know can't identify which cryptocurrency to buy or which gift cards to buy my favorite of all of this is there is a youtube channel called kit boga i don't know if you've ever seen this one i've seen that one uh k-i-t-b-o-g-a kit boga show and this guy pretends he's a grandma i guess he gets a bunch of phone numbers puts them into databases but he's a hacker himself and then he puts on a voice modulator and he lets people try to scam him and what they always do is these scammers at call centers and it seems like it's coming out of india maybe or manila um i think it's like you said southeast asia kind of area where there's low cost workers or maybe traffic workers tragically and they will dial for dollars and then they try to convince somebody that they need to upgrade their windows software they're gonna you know have some problems and their accounts have been compromised and they say they're calling from bank of america or they say they're calling from their bank or whatever they get them to log in and all they do is say put in a gift card type in the numbers and then uh we'll solve the problem and then what he does is he claims the gift cards as opposed to giving it to them and they yell and scream on the phone no no no no no give me the code don't type in the code it's it's pretty hilarious to watch it uh but maybe you could talk about that attack 100 yeah so kit boga is is doing a phenomenal job at you know bringing to light how these scams are being perpetrated the attack vector is the following so typically you'd get this email or text again right like claiming to be irs typically the victims are elderly or they could be a bank refund scam where you know i i tell you jason for example that hey uh i'm calling you from chase uh you know chase owes you a refund of a hundred dollars but in order for me to give you a hundred dollars you first have to send me a hundred dollars and now the real weakness in the ecosystem is not neo-banking it's not banking it's nothing to do with the financial infrastructure the real weakness in the whole infrastructure is actually the fact that in our telephony and our email infrastructure, we never actually built sender verification.

19:58So I can easily pretend to be Chase. And actually, the phone number would look like it's coming from Chase, right? So that's weakness number one in the infrastructure. Second part to it is that the attacker typically then convinces the elderly victim to install tools like team viewer any desk citrix these are remote access tools they allow typically customer support to you know control the screen of of a user so they can guide them through whatever was wrong in the machine but scammers are exploiting that tool what they then do is they actually walk the grandma into creating an account at an exchange or a brokerage right and they will actually take control of the screen move the mouse you know help type in stuff and then at at a particular moment in time, they may actually black out the entire screen.

20:46And these tools actually allow you to do that. I can actually be in your computer, Jason. I can black out your screen and you would not have any clue what am I doing. In fact, I could be now wiring money out of your bank into mine, right? And yeah, it's oftentimes too late because once money is gone, it's gone, right? Now, what we realized, and this was actually the founding story of Sardine, was that when I got together with my co-founders, Zahid and Naditya, these sort of social engineering scams in 2017, they were like the fastest growing attack vector during my days at Coinbase. And I was not able to solve for it.

21:23So 2019, 2020, when I met my co-founders, I was like, hey, we got to solve for this, right? And the first thing, the very first thing we built is a behavior biometrics product, which allows us, if we are embedded in the banks portal, it'll allow us to tell the bank and warn the customer if the screen of the customer is being controlled by someone else if someone else is typing on the screen someone else is moving the mouse on the screen or if you know you are doing a bank transaction jason and i'm actually on the phone with you we do active phone call detection or i'm asked i may be asking you to take screenshots because i as a scammer may actually want to take screenshots because i have a chain of command I need to actually provide proof to my bosses to get paid that actually Jason did this money movement, right?

22:11So this is your solution. And how does it work? You install something on the consumer's product, you install something in the web browser in the app. Where do you try to protect users and or provide this tool to providers? And which providers are you providing to who are the customers who pays you? Yeah, yeah. So the solution looks like an SDK. And then there is an API, right? The SDK is available in both a JavaScript form as well as a mobile SDK, both Android and iOS native SDKs. And very lightweight, privacy-aware. We don't really look at what are you typing, right? We are more interested in someone else typing than you or the typing speed, etc.

22:57And today we offer this off-off fraud and compliance solution to a variety of customers. So we have 250 plus customers worldwide. There are banks, banking as a service platforms, many new banks, both B2C and B2B new banks, gift card exchanges, NFT platforms, crypto exchanges, as well as, you know, we're branching into many other newer categories as well, like auto marketplaces, etc. So wherever there is risk of money movement, we are there. So looking at this, you provide that software development kit. That's what SDK stands for. They drop it into their app. they drop it into their desktop stuff.

23:37And then this bank, we'll call it Acme Bank, or some gift card exchange, we'll call it giftcardexchange.org, whatever. They may not be up on the latest security. So your team is looking for all these patterns and then everybody gets to share in that defense. So instead of each organization having to recreate the wheel, they go to your organization, they pay you a reasonable fee, I'm sure, I'm guessing tens of thousands of dollars a year. I don't know. How do you price it? Yeah, we price as a SaaS model, as well as a usage based on top of it. The SaaS model covers for a platform, which includes a dashboard, which gives you full visibility into the vector, network graph analytics, a low-code rule editor, such that a fraud or compliance professional who does not, they don't need to know SQL.

24:28They can create new rules on the fly. And of course, behind the scenes, we are doing machine learning to catch all sorts of fraud and scams. When you're selling to business to business buyers, you want to get your pitch in front of the decision makers. Why? Upper level execs make purchasing decisions, right? And these high level folks are busy. They're hard to find. They're impossible to target on most social media platforms because those social media platforms don't have what LinkedIn has, which is 950 million members and the entire database of where they work, what city they're in, how many people work for them, and their titles.

25:07In that 950 million member base at LinkedIn, there are 180 million senior level execs. That tracks, right? About 15 % of people would be senior level execs. And about 1%, 2 % are the C-level executives. LinkedIn Ads is specifically built for business-to-business marketers to get to those 10 million C-level executives with 180 million senior level executives. No other platform can do it. period, full stop. And LinkedIn is going to help you reach audience in a very respectful business environment. When people are on LinkedIn, they want to do business. That's why I say LinkedIn, you think business, I say business, you think LinkedIn, it's that simple.

25:45So make B2B marketing everything it can be and get a hundy$100 credit on your next campaign, go to linkedin.com slash next unicorn to claim your $100 credit. That's linkedin.com slash next unicorn terms and conditions do apply. yeah so that's the next piece of it is how is ai playing a role here i just saw the other day this study of keyboards i'm sure you're aware of it yeah now you can look at the cadence or maybe the sounds coming out of each key once they train on a particular keyboard they can look for patterns they know you're typing and just like a keyboard interceptor which is a little usb device that you put on a most people have wireless keyboards now but in the i remember back in the day when i was it you could get a little uh usb device that would go into the back of the computer you'd plug it in the person would never see it just a little dongle plug the keyboard in and it's recording every keystroke that that person's doing uh or you can hack a keyboard and there's keyboard hacks and this is how the cia fbi everybody does it they just swap your keyboard out with the one with the chip in it that remotely sends your keystrokes once they have the keystroke logger you're done anything you do is you'd have to have a biometric to get around that so new attacks are coming in you have ai looking at them and uh or have machine learning looking at them and then you can identify new scams in real time and then some operator or hacker white hat hacker in your company has to define that and make a new rule set how does that all work how does it work in real time explain to us like what you've caught and how you do it yeah 100 yeah i want to answer your question in two parts.

27:21First, I wanted to address the threat of Gen AI to the world of fraud prevention. We already talked about how our voice or our videos are all online, so it's very easy to clone it. I could clone it to talk like you, Jason, or to write like you. We actually call that world as extrinsic AI because that's the world which is trained on publicly available information however uh we think increasingly that in order to detect identity fraud or to protect from payment fraud you need intrinsic ai as well intrinsic ai is trained on intrinsic features about you which are not in the public domain right which for example meaning like you're typing speed or the way you hold your phone right so what do you mean the way you hold your phone so the way you hold your phone all of us have a very intrinsic behavior biometric right It's not accurate enough to replace passwords, not accurate enough to replace your thumbprint or your touch ID.

28:21However, it's a great fraud signal. For example, if I picked up your phone, Jason, and I have shoulder surfed you and I know how you type your PIN code, right? Then I could actually be in your phone into all your banking apps and I can move money out of them. however if you have our sdk embedded then we would be able to tell you that the way i'm typing anything is very different than the way you type it right it'll be about 85 accurate again not accurate enough to be an authentication method but a great fraud signal right wow so let me pause there for a second and reflect back to you what you said if i'm holding my phone and you know i am a hunched over person and my phone is on a more of a flat angle or if you know i have good posture and i always hold it straight up and i'm at 100 the accelerometer and how my phone is being held and then you know my keyboard typing so you know i'm a two them typer or a one them typer typically you know i type 60 characters a minute versus 120 uh you're going to figure out uh that hey maybe somebody else is holding the phone or maybe this is an emulator uh because there there's no accelerometer turned on and how would the fraudster know to set your accelerometer and how would they know your accelerometer settings am i correct i had no idea that you guys were doing that level of fidelity that's insane yep yep that's exactly right yeah so fraudsters you know uh as they use ai we are using ai as well so we think that the future of identity verification online is actually a battle of bots extrinsic ai versus intrinsic right and to verify identities and payments online you increasingly need these intrinsic ai signals when you look at what's coming in ai let's talk about the future because as i said in the opening you ain't got to skate to where the puck is going what's coming down the pipe because i at the top explained hey what if these ais that are hacking are you know doing reinforcement learning they obviously have an unlimited number of cycles so unlike the hackers that we talked about whether they're sophisticated russian hackers sophisticated north korea hackers or they're less sophisticated you know people who are just simply being trafficked or paid three bucks an hour to try to maybe every month hit a ten thousand dollar bingo uh with some elderly person in florida who gets greedy and they do a pig scam uh pig slaughter whatever you called it So where is this all going?

30:52And give us the doomsday scenarios of what really makes you stay up at night. You spend your life worrying about this. What keeps you up at night? Yeah, the doomsday scenario is actually pretty clear. Number one, as I alluded to earlier, we don't have proper text or phone call verification of a sender built in. So I can easily spoof anyone's phone numbers. with generative AI tech, I can actually pretend to be that person. So there are now, you're constantly seeing versions of these scams already appear, like white hat hackers have tried training an LLM model on their own voice, and they have beaten voice authentication systems of banks using the LLM-generated voice.

31:41folks have also reported things like you know somebody could call my parents and pretend to be me using my voice right saying that hey I've been kidnapped and there's a big ransom payment that is needed right so people are losing money like that so in my mind you know generative AI is really going to arm the clever sophisticated fraudsters you know a lot and we need to step up our game as well right what are they working on like so you know i i know there are some people already using ai for hacking what are the early um warning signals we're seeing or you know sometimes there's a kind of the gray hat community uh you know black hat somebody with nefarious goals white hat hats the people who work for your company who are trying to fight the black hats but there's also the gray hats uh maybe they're looking for bounties maybe they're a little aggressive and going for bounties but they kind of exist in a little you know um uh neutral zone if we're going in the dungeons and dragons you know they're not evil they're not good they're sort of neutral uh sometimes chaotic neutral sometimes chaotic good who knows i don't know if you know these dungeons and dragons references tell us yeah about you know the alignment of those gray hats in the middle and what they're warning about what are they saying here's some stuff i i ran just to show you what i can do what are they doing right now that is out there yeah no absolutely so uh besides the one example i shared which was this gentleman who uh used an llm to train his voice against barclays in the uk against barclays bank in the uk that's one uh uh gray hat type of a scenario we know of before i answer the question let me just caveat it unlike the world of security where this world of you know uh gray hats is actually very well established in the world of fraud we haven't had that right so we don't really have a lot of you know gray hats coming up and saying hey hey you know i found this or that so therefore internally we have to always deploy a team of people who are constantly you know testing and using new technology to see how we how fraudsters could be using it right so you have to have your team say attack and pretend you're a black hat so you actually do there's a term for that i forgot what it's called you can hire people to do this against your company red team yeah i got a red team right so the red team you red team something it means you try to break the security of it um and so i don't advise people do this if you red team like security at your airport and you try to see if you can get a knife or gun through you're going to be arrested so i think they have their own red teams don't do this people so you create a red team that's going to be a unique personality who wants to be on the red team huh yeah and that's why we uh at sardine right the way we are different than other fraud companies is that everyone at the company including us the founders as well as the founding engineers and the the founding product managers or the sales people we've all actually been fighting fraud for like a decade or two, right?

34:48So we've seen what is it like to fight fraud internally at the companies that we sell into nowadays, right? And we've seen how difficult it is to fight fraud internally, because you never have infinite resources to go build stuff, right? You have to always, you know, like, allocate your resources to building the product, you should not be allocating resources to fighting fraud. And that is what our mantra is that, you know, we are the world's foremost experts in fraud fighting. And you know, you can hire the world's foremost fraud experts via one API. Right. Imagine owning real estate properties, where are the people living in your property wanted to succeed as much as you do?

35:26Well, now you can. Let me tell you about roots roots is a read that stands for real estate investment trust that breaks real estate investing stereotypes, starting with the landlord tenant relationship. This is such an innovative idea. I love it. Roots is the world's only REIT that builds wealth for both the investors in the REIT and the residents living in the units. So this creates a win-win partnership that delivers better returns. Here's how the model works. You invest, then Roots buys properties. They fix them up, they rent them out, and the renters get invested in the fund for paying on time, taking care of their property and being good neighbors.

36:09And the model's working the fund is up 36 % since its launch in 2021, according to roots. And unlike other alternative assets, your investment isn't tied up for years, the roots fund offers liquidity every quarter. Oh, that's a very interesting device. You can't do that in venture capital, I can tell you that. So head to invest with roots dot com slash twist to sign up and start investing today. And such a clever idea. I talked to the founder and I was just absolutely blown away about how smart this win win win is a win for roots a win for the people living in the properties and a win for the people who are investing in the read there are no entry fees and you can start with as little as a hundred dollars that's invest with roots.com slash twist to sign up today if we look at the other side uh which is people hacking you're in fraud which is to protect people's money etc commercial applications if you look at just uh other espionage and other hacking going on there that's adjacent to you are you going to expand into that category and try to protect you know uh i don't know a school or you know a local government uh and their employees are you will you work with those kind of folks as well is that on the roadmap because it would seem that there is some great overlap between these techniques so talk to me about sort of yeah the cia the fbi governments You know, they have their own ways to protect against this.

37:32But then you got the other, you know, it could be a benign agency, like education or something. But they could have really important information. They could have money. They could have people's private information. You could have health organizations. You know, it seems like they're not on the front line of our defense department, but they still have attack vectors. These things all overlap, right? The techniques, the actors, there's some amount of overlap. Yes or no? Oh, 100%. What we've seen is that with the rise of embedded fintech and as money movement is becoming embedded in all sorts of industries like education or construction, etc., industries which were not at the forefront of fraud fighting, they increasingly have to be.

38:12In fact, you reminded me, we do work with the education sector. We work with local governments. We work with federal three-letter agencies as well. and for the education sector for example what we have seen one of the crazy stories was that folks were applying for a federal student loan right with a synthetic identity right and all those private colleges were actually short of the money right they were on the they were left holding the bag right then let's and of course like at the state level right the we are all aware of all the money that the government's lost to PPP scams, right? And again, the challenge over there was no one at the state level has a good repository of who are the people registered who work in that state.

39:04And since they don't have a good online repository of folks, I could actually pretend to be a worker in the state of Ohio, right? And I could have applied for a PPP loan, right? And then the state of Ohio is left holding the bag, right? at the federal level the the the challenges are different the the at the federal level the challenges are you know uh more like can we be uh how can we be best prepared via solve these red teaming type exercises that i said to make sure that you know we are not being uh uh attacked by any of the bad actors right so just for people to recap here you're going to get phished with the pig scams know about that one tech support scams you got to know about that one these are obvious um then you got hey friend is trapped in another country needs money their wallet was stolen whatever you know about that one uh so the investment scams pick scams are one of them you got of course uh social media impersonation people like you know pretending to be me or other people dming you i will never do that if always click on the profile check the profile make sure it's a verified profile look at the look at the follower count duh scroll down and see how many tweets they posted they usually don't take my entire archive of tweets or instagrams and paste them but on instagram they do they take my entire archive of photos and put them in there a follower account would tell you uh and then what we've started doing uh in the investment community in venture in startups is we will do two points of contact or three points of contact when there's a transaction occurring so if somebody was investing in a startup and they were part of a party round and they're sending ten thousand dollars they're gonna you know call you on the phone let you know get the banking details they call you back and then maybe a second person the organization will call you and confirm the details and we have two people in the loop this is what we do because people try to scam me we've had an alert go out in the venture capital community where people are using voice modulators trying to say hey i'm an lp in this fund i want to give you my banking information in order to when i get a distribution send the distribution So literally like, hey, we're going to send our Uber shares or Robinhood shares to somebody, or we're going to give you a cash distribution.

41:10Now, I don't know if that's ever worked, but that is happening in the world. And so now you have the identity, the social media impersonation, as you're saying, is moving to voice modulation. You just have to be hyper aware of all of these scams. And you want to have good tools like the ones you're building and have partners who are just never ending fighting against this stuff. Listen, you've been a great guest. thank you so much for taking the time. How can people learn more about the product if they're interested in using it? And then I always like to point out great companies like this are hiring.

41:44So if you're hiring, give us the one or two positions that are the most important and what it's like to work at your company. What's the culture you're trying to build over there, Supes? Absolutely, yeah. So first of all, you can find us on website at www.sardine.ai. And we are also on Twitter. You can follow us on at Twitter. and I occasionally, actually daily, write on both Twitter and LinkedIn so you can follow me also on LinkedIn. My handle is just Supesranjan on LinkedIn as well as Twitter. And the most important positions that we're heading for right now are in our strategic account management team.

42:22So we have an opening for someone who's really passionate about solving fraud or compliance, has had a background in those areas and wants to help our customers fight fraud on their behalf amazing uh soups ranjan you've been a great guest everybody follows soups ranjan on twitter s-o-u-p-s-r-a-n-j-a-n get it right from the ceo here are the different stories stay up to date on this and protect your grandma your grandpa your brothers your sisters anybody over 50 or is under 50 and is greedy and you know just not so technically aware it's been another great episode of this week in startups we'll see you next time bye

43:02Thank you.