Scam Security Starts at Home
Scams today are personal – and much more dangerous than many people realize. Criminals leverage technology to engineer the perfect timing and take advantage of your trust. They’re targeting everyday people, and it’s working. We have to understand that real scam security starts in our homes and communities, and it’s everyone’s responsibility.
See The Scam You Never See Coming with Ian Mitchell for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.
Ian Mitchell has been fighting fraud across the world for over twenty-five years and led teams in fourteen countries. In college, he was a model and singer-songwriter looking at getting into acting, but tripped into the fraud fight and has been doing it for a long time. He founded the nonprofit organization The Knoble, which is a network of financial services personnel around the world fighting human crimes – crimes like human trafficking, child exploitation, scams, and elder financial exploitation.
Ian does a variety of other things fighting scams and fraud, including founding Mission Omega, which provides fraud services to financial institutions, producing a movie called Follow the Money to raise awareness on crimes of exploitation, and continuing to record music regularly. He is incredibly passionate about how crimes of exploitation have moved into our houses. There’s only one way to fight back, and everybody has to be involved in the fight, from trained professionals to our children.
These crimes of exploitation … have moved into our houses and our homes.
Ian Mitchell
Discovering A Counter-Fraud Career
During the dot-com boom, Ian worked for an internet company. He was just out of college and planning to pursue a career in film. But while processing email orders, he started noticing customers placing huge orders of random things, like bottles of vitamins or perfumes. The distribution center often wouldn’t have the full quantity. So he tried to reach out to the customers to offer different fulfillment options.
Some of these big orders were from product testing companies, or from corporations stocking their break rooms, and things like that. Then there were a group of customers he just couldn’t reach. So he called the company of the card on file. That’s when MasterCard told him it was fraud. Ian started looking closer at the orders coming in. Over one weekend, he worked with the credit card companies to decline about $300,000 in fraudulent orders.
Monday morning, he was brought into the Chief Financial Officer’s office to explain why he’d canceled all those orders. After Ian presented his case, everyone realized the company had a problem. And that’s how they let an aspiring actor right out of college build one of the first internet fraud departments. He learned a ton digging into the trends and watching what happened when he put controls in place. And he was fascinated. He kept doing music, but the rest of his career shifted to fraud and scam security.
It was a pivot point between traditional fraud and the digital age, and Ian was one of the first of a new type of fraud fighter. One of the great times to be alive is when we’re at a switching point between something old and something new, and the fraud fight shift between old school and new school was one of those.
The Evolution of Fraud and Scams
Old-school crimes, like stolen credit cards, are more impersonal. Newer scams and fraud are more personal, with a human manipulation element. And it’s gotten so much bigger. Banks used to be able to dismiss it as a rounding error. But fraud and scam security are on everyone’s mind right now. Part of that is because the old tactics aren’t gone; criminals have just added new ones. And the quantity has gone way, way up.
Fraud, from a bank perspective, used to be a rounding error, and now it’s top of mind.
Ian Mitchell
Every time we open a new way of moving money around, there are new scams and ways of committing fraud. We’ve seen shifts from credit card and check fraud that focus on the specific instrument to various types of identity theft to open new accounts, commit tax fraud, or take over existing accounts. Then they got into first-party fraud, turning customers into fraudsters. When organizations started putting in controls, they started to look for the weakest link. And they discovered the weakest link is us.
What [fraudsters] discovered is the weakest link is all of us.
Ian Mitchell
The problem really scaled up after covid. Card fraud and check fraud haven’t gone away, but now we have a much bigger scam problem. Scam security is now a crucial issue. But there’s also a lot more people working to fight fraud. When Ian first started, there were around twenty. Now he estimates around 600,000 people across the world fight fraud every day. Criminals have diversified and are scaling their operations using tech and people. Fraud fighters are working to do the same.
Banks Implement Fraud and Scam Security
Interacting with your bank is one of the most sensitive interactions you can have. Hopefully, it’s also one of the most trusted. Banks and financial institutions started thinking about fraud and scam security about twenty years ago. They didn’t mention the word, because they didn’t want customers to think their bank was getting hit by fraud. But there are things we take for granted that are there to fight back. Authentication, CAPTCHAs, being asked questions when you open a new account, all of these are measures to fight back against these crimes. We’ve accepted it, not realizing that we’re involved in fighting fraud every day.
But criminals have now moved to all of us individually. It’s easier for them to create a relationship with us and build trust that rivals what we have with our bank. That’s the point where scammers have been really successful. Ian talked to a victim recently who was in a relationship with a scammer for eight years, and they didn’t start asking for money until year six. That’s the longest case he’s heard of, but two or three years isn’t uncommon.
Criminals connect with us, build a trusted relationship, and find ways to make you trust them more than you trust your bank. Some will explicitly tell you not to trust your bank because they’re in on it. Ian hears stories all the time of criminals coaching victims while they’re talking to the bank teller. The teller is trying to tell them it’s a scam, and the criminal is countering that message. They’re using relationships to create a bond that rivals what should be a very trusted relationship between you and your bank.
[Criminals are] using relationships and they’re creating bonds that rival the most trusted relationships we have in our society.
Ian Mitchell
The Timing Factor
Timing is also a critical part of these scams’ success. If you get a text message about an unpaid toll in the middle of driving across the country, you’re more likely to trust it than if you hadn’t been traveling recently. If you get an email about your retirement account, it looks more trustworthy if it has the right company’s name on it. When you get an email or letter about owing taxes on a property you don’t own, it’s easy to recognize it as suspicious.
Ian got a phone call about a year ago from a hospital in Las Vegas saying he needed to pay his ambulance bill. He’d been in Vegas six times over the last twelve months, but hadn’t been to any hospital. He thought it was a scam and ignored it. But they kept calling, and eventually it went to collections. It turns out that he had been a victim of medical identity theft. Someone had given his name, home address, phone number, and credible insurance information during an ambulance ride. The collections company looked at Ian’s website and thought it seemed pretty credible that it was him considering how many times he was in Vegas. It took Ian eight months to convince them because it looked so trustworthy.
Everyone is Vulnerable
Scam security matters because everyone is at risk. Ian can’t even tell you how many Chief Risk Officers and Heads of Financial Crimes have called him and told him they fell for something. We all work too fast and we’re too busy. Fraudsters prey on us being too busy to double-check. At some point, we’re all a little greedy, or we’re all a little lonely. They prey on that human factor in all of us.
We’re all vulnerable. It doesn’t matter what your job is.
Ian Mitchell
If you look at the vulnerability heat map at different points in life, different messages resonate at different times. The YouTube algorithm has managed to give Ian videos he’s interested in that he hasn’t asked for. Criminals are doing the same thing. Sextortion, for example, targets children ages thirteen to sixteen, primarily boys. It takes advantage of budding sexuality to exploit them. Ian wrote a song, “Protect Our Children,” a couple months ago talking about this issue and reminding people that having those awkward conversations is essential for scam security. These conversations have to happen. We’re at risk, and the vulnerable people in our lives – our kids, our elders – are too.
This conversation needs to happen in our homes. We’re all at risk. Our children are at risk. Our elders are at risk.
Ian Mitchell
The only way to deal with our inherent vulnerability is to have those conversations. If we’re not doing it, that void of discussion creates even more vulnerability. There are things that need to happen on a national and international level, but the best line of defense starts at home. There are big gaps of dialogue on these tough subjects. We have to fill those gaps.
Scam Security Requires All of Us
Scams and fraud are pure evil. They isolate victims from loved ones. They create distrust in what should be trusted societal institutions, in family members and friends, and even in your own ability to recognize when things are trustworthy. They’re using tech to create credible stories to manipulate us. And they’re doing it even in healthy environments. That’s what we’re up against.
This is the breakdown of our entire social fabric and interaction model. That’s what’s at stake. We need security professionals to lean into scam security for the sake of society and better relationships, whether or not there’s a return on investment. If we can’t figure out how to justify protecting our communities and our most vulnerable, we have a problem. There are more good people in the world than bad. But we all have to do our part. We can have conversations in our communities in unique ways. It doesn’t have to be your career, but you do have to do something.
Not everybody needs to start a nonprofit or become an anti-scam expert. … What you need to do is just take interest.
Ian Mitchell
As soon as we start having conversations, checking in with our neighbors, and challenging ourselves, we’re actually fighting back in a meaningful way. One thing AI just can’t compete with is human contact – impactful in-person conversations and personally checking in with your neighbors and friends. AI can do a lot, and it’s very powerful to catch complex and dynamic crimes and validate identity in the right hands. But we also need that human connection if we’re going to fight back and improve scam security.
One thing that AI can’t compete with is you knocking on your neighbor’s door and saying, ‘Hey, I just want to make sure you’re okay.’
Ian Mitchell
The Scam Security Conversations We Need to Have
There are good people out there waking up every day trying to protect you and improve the world’s scam security. The sleeping giant of banks has woken up to the problem, and there are lots of great people doing that work. Ian is very excited to see what protections will be coming out of that world.
But it’s not just up to the professionals to defend us. If we’re going to really fight back and protect our communities and our loved ones, we’re going to have to get everyone involved. And everyone means everyone, down to your children. It all starts with having crucial conversations about scam security and staying safe.
There’s really only one way we can fight back, and it’s [getting] everybody involved in this fight, from the most trained professionals down to our children.
Ian Mitchell
Protect Your Kids
Ian has three children, so this one is near and dear to his personal life. He pleads with every parent to put parental control software on their kids’ devices. Protecting your child’s eyes is so important. We have to create a safe environment for kids to experience the beauty of the internet and digital media without being exposed to the dangers.
So many problems kids run into when they get older start when they’re young. When he was speaking at the United Nations a few years ago, Ian heard from leaders around the world about the cellular-level damage abuse does to children. He can’t overstate how important it is to protect them.
That means having awkward conversations with your kids. It means talking about why they shouldn’t take compromising photos of themselves. It means them hating you because you won’t let them go to certain websites. This is where we have to fight back.
Protect Your Parents
There’s a stereotype that most victims of scams are older adults. That’s not actually true, but it is true that scammers like to target older people – both because retirement accounts make a good payday and because people assume older adults are going to be more vulnerable. It’s not just the elderly being attacked. But scammers are stealing a lot of generational wealth through retirement accounts.
Ian loves his dad to death. He’s in his 80s now and still sharp as a tack, and incredibly knowledgeable about all kinds of financial matters. But despite living with Ian and hearing stories of the work Ian does, his dad has still been scammed. Talking about these things, opening the conversation, and checking in are so important. Create a safe word to protect from grandparent scams and other voice cloning tricks. Have these conversations with your parents and elders in your community.
Don’t Let Scam Security Disrupt Your Life
A while ago, a movie came out about human trafficking called Sound of Freedom. There’s been some negative things said about the movie, but overall it was well done. Not long after that, Ian was renting a car when the woman there saw his pin for The Knoble and asked about it. Ian talked about the work they did fighting human trafficking. She brought up Sound of Freedom and explained that after seeing that, she doesn’t let her sixteen-year-old daughter go anywhere without her.
Ian thinks that’s the wrong approach. He doesn’t want to create a spirit of fear around these crimes. If you start thinking every text message coming in is a scammer, it destroys the fabric of being a human in society. We have to have a balance between vigilance and creating fear. The only way to do that is education. That way, when you get something you don’t recognize, it doesn’t trigger that fear response. Fear happens when we don’t think we’re in control. When someone’s asking something from us, whether it’s a text saying “Hi, I miss you” or that you owe $10,000 in back taxes, the fear response creates urgency. That’s what they prey on.
The best scam security is not to let fear in. Pause and analyze it. Have conversations. This is the way we actually create a working society and maintain the fabric of our culture. Don’t let fear invade the way you interact with the world.
Learn more about The Knoble or reach out to them at theknoble.com. You can find Ian Mitchell’s music on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you get your music. You can connect with Ian on LinkedIn and on Instagram @ian.t.mitchell.