Part Two: Why Kidnapping Conspiracy Theories Are Everywhere

Sarah Marshall and Robert continue their deep dive into the wide world of kidnapping conspiracy theories and the horrible consequences thereof.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Ah, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about
the ever present fear of death and pale anxiety. Pain
that is like never leaves, that's just always there in
the heart of every single person and drives us to
most of the terrible crimes that we commit as a species.
What are you doing, Sarah?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
What else?

Speaker 3 (00:26):
I'm here and I'm scared.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Yeah, we're all.

Speaker 4 (00:30):
So.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
I keep and raised goats, and one of my goats
gave birth this year, so I've been milking her. You
can milk a goat for about a year after they
give birth, you know, something like that. It kind of
depends a little bit.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Is it also birth control for the goat?

Speaker 1 (00:44):
I don't know enough about goats biology to tell you that, Sarah, but.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
I appreciate you're accepting that. That's above your pay grade. Yeah,
that's well above my pay grade. I've just figured out milking.
So I got this this little little lady goat. She's
a Nigerian dwarf. She's small, She's about the size of
like a small dog. Nothing bad has ever happened to
this animal. She has never been been threatened, she's never

(01:08):
been attacked, she's never been like harmed. All that people
have ever done for her. All that I've ever done
for her is go is bring her food and other
things that she likes. And all that the milking processes
is her receiving treats while she's milked. And still if
I move the wrong way around her, if I like,
you know, like I have to be there's very specific
ways that I move when she's in there, because if

(01:30):
I move the wrong way, she will freak out and
run away. Right, And that's because she is descended from
a long line of prey animals that had to always
be ready to be attacked and to try to run
away from danger.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
It's the same reason why you know, people had a
whole fun thing on the internet the other cup a
few years ago about like if you put like a
cucumber or something out slightly outside of a cat's field
of vision, they'll freak out because their instincts tell them
this is a snake. And we all know this about animals.
I'm not like.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
People love to scare their people love.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
To scare their cats to make them feel like, you know,
they're and it It's interesting to me because like currently
in right wing media, there's this huge thing with like
biological reality, and you know, we're going against these deeply
programmed things when people are allowed to be transgender or
like biologically men are meant to fight in a felanx

(02:26):
with a spear and like you're you know, this is
why you need to pay ten thousand dollars to have
a man yell at you. Well, you do push ups,
otherwise you're not connected to your your like ancestral masculinity.
You got to eat raw meat, you know whatever, kind
of fucking nonsense. And everyone's fine with like or all
of these people are fine with the idea that, like,
you know, my ancestral men were hunters and fighters, so

(02:48):
I need to do hunting and fighting stuff in order
to be like truly happy. But nobody likes the nobody
likes being told. Nobody's willing to accept that, like, well,
your ancestors were constantly at threat from various kinds of animals,
and so there is always fear in your heart and nothing,
nothing will ever make that go away, Like you just
have to learn how to deal with it and cope

(03:09):
with it. Because we grew up in a world that
was deeply, deeply dangerous in ways that like it is
not anymore, and that's just will always be with you.
And none of these people want to accept that. They
want to take the parts of like ancient humanity that
are like standing with a shield and a spear or
trying to hunt a fucking gazelle, but they don't want

(03:30):
to accept that, like the actual thing that will never
leave us because of our ancestors is fear.

Speaker 5 (03:36):
I don't want to.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
Be too dramatic, but I feel like I'm having a
breakthrough right now because I feel like I have been
treating like my life and also the therapy that I've
been doing as an approach to like, well, I feel
really fearful and anxious a lot, and that's a failing
on my part, or like not a moral failing, but

(03:57):
like that's something that's wrong with me that has to
do with my personal history, and it's a problem, and I,
you know, and I to be clear, like I do
think that I need to deal with that, and we
all need to learn how to manage fear in our
own ways and also to trust it at times, but
seeing it is something that's just part of the organisms
we are, instead of this idea of like an invading

(04:19):
presence that shouldn't be there like it's just right. It's
like it's natural for us to be afraid. That's what
we're how what we are?

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, what I'd like people at home to do. You know,
the next time the fear hits you, right and you
find yourself wondering why am I so afraid? Instead of
burrowing into like whatever you said in your like going
on Twitter and you know, doom scrolling or any of
that stuff, get on the Internet and look up a
picture of the skull of a cave bear. Cave bears

(04:49):
don't exist anymore, but they're much larger than all of
the all present day bears. They're small compared to cave bears.
They were like the elephants of bears, and they used
to murder the shit out of us. And look at
the skull of a cave bear and realize, like, that's
why I'm scared right now. It's because many, many years ago,
my ancestors had to constantly be worried about this fucking

(05:12):
thing charging out of whatever cave and murdering their entire family.
And so now I'm sitting at home, in my air
conditioned house where there are no cave bears, and I'm
scared like, just look at a picture of a cave bear.
That's why you're scared.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
It's also just to bring it into horror movies, as
I must, like, it's fascinating how so many horror movies
because the House without a Cave Bear makes me think
of Barbarian and that so many horror movies are about
the idea and horror stories before that are about the
idea of something that wants to kill rye. You coming
out of the past, yeah, because of you know, traumas

(05:48):
or misdeeds of the pastor just from the past in
some way, because we act like the present is all
about our thriving and having fun and being wholesome. But
really when we're focusing on that, understand on some level,
like modernity itself is sort of a denial of death.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
I think, yeah, yeah, I mean that's like with all
of these like Silicon Valley dudes who just like were
born at the right time to get incredibly lucky gambling
on you know, fucking tech companies and suddenly made a
billion dollars or whatever. Like none of them can get
over the fact that they're always scared to despite all

(06:26):
their money and their bodyguards, and so they they can
coct these, you know, insane things to like I'm going
to live forever if I do this, or you know,
it's this, it's this. It's all this denial of the
reality and inevitability of death, and also this denial that
like fundamentally we're descended from like little bitty dudes and

(06:47):
ladies who there were bigger things around that ate them,
and so we were scared of those things.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
Like it's only it's it's so recently in human existence
that we've not getting eaten all the time.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
Yeah, we were constantly getting eaten by shit. We were
scared little guys, and so were our cats, you know,
like just like that's the same reason, like what you got,
you get like a duck. Why is my dog anxious
all the time? Well, it's because it's descended from like
little guys who had to be worried all the time.
We all are. It's fine anyway, Sarah. On the seventy

(07:26):
ninth or whatever anniversary of the day the classic Michael
Bay movie Pearl Harbor was inspired, a woman named Katie Sorensen,
thirty years old, visited a Michael's craft store in Pedaluma,
California with her four year old son and one year
old daughter. Now, Pedaluma is basically a suburb of San Francisco.
This is relevant to the tech industry stuff we were
talking about. The median household income is over one hundred

(07:48):
thousand dollars a year. This is a wealthy suburb. And
the crime rate in Pedaluma is about one point four
times below the national average, so fairly safe place. But
despite how safe and affluent the suburb she lives in is,
Katie Sorensen was scared. And Katie Sorenson was also a
small time influencer on Instagram. She's like a mommy influencer.

(08:11):
Right now her shit has been thoroughly scrubbed from the
Internet because of what happened next, But based on context clues,
I think it's fairly safe to say that none of
her frequent updates prior to December seventh got that much traction.
She was, in other words, like a failing momfluencer who
was desperate to find something that would bring followers to

(08:32):
her account. And here is the post that she made
in an attempt to do that.

Speaker 6 (08:37):
This week. My children were the targets of attempted kidnap,
which is such a weird thing to even vocalize, but
it happened, and I want to share that story with
you in an effort to raise awareness as to what
signs to look for and to just encourage parents to
be more aware of their surroundings and what is going

(08:58):
on around them.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
I think right now we are so distracted by.

Speaker 6 (09:03):
Everything that's going on in the world that we are
kind of have our guards up so much about masks
and wanting to keep our children safe that way, that
we're forgetting the most important way to keep them safe,
and that is with us and to not have them
take in. So I'm going to share a story an
effort to raise that awareness, but it's I'm not ready.

(09:25):
I this is hard for me. I'm not ready to
share this story, but I know it's important and I
would rather be uncomfortable, an awkward and get the message
out sooner than wait until I feel composed.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
Okay, that's probably enough, Sophie. So you can see here
both if you think back to the chain letters we
were talking about, right, if you think back to that
murderer in the backseat chain letter we read, you can
see the same structural harm hallmarks here. Right, there's the
claim that like parents are not someone like the person
that this is meant for. You're not paying enough at

(09:59):
take to a danger that you're not aware of, but
it's present. Right, you need to be more aware of
this danger. You need to be more aware of the
threat that your kids are always facing. Right, there's this.
It's framed in this like here are suggestion, like I'm
telling you this so that you can avoid the stangers,
that you can protect yourself and your loved ones. And

(10:20):
from there on, like from the point that you know,
we stopped that video, the story that she was giving continued,
and I'm going to read a summary of what she
said in this. In another video from a local Sonoma paper,
The Press Democrat, she described being followed by an unknown
man and woman at the Petaluma Michael's craft store on
North mcdowe Boulevard from the time she arrived in the
parking lot with her children until they returned to her car.

(10:42):
In the parking lot, she said the couple approached her
as she was putting one of her children in a
car seat, and what she suspected was an attempt to
grab the stroller. A separate man who spotted Sorensen and
recognized she was in danger, stepped into help, she said
in the videos. Meanwhile, she said the pair drove off
and like, first off, if you are taking your kid
to a Michael's craft store, the worst thing that is

(11:02):
going to happen to you that day is being in
a Michael's Craft store. Right, they are not going to
get kidnapped. O, They're unpleasant. I would prefer to be
kidnapped being in a Michael's craft store. You know, you
meet better people getting kidnapped than you do to have.

Speaker 4 (11:19):
Michael's Craft store due to you, I don't know nothing
Michael's Craft store.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
Yes, actually I have. The last guy I needed. I
needed styrofoam cones. And if you need if you need
a cone in a shape that's made out of styrophoe
or something made out of styrofoam, like, that's that's where
you go, is a Michaelson.

Speaker 4 (11:40):
I've had many pleasant experiences at Michael's Craft store, just saying,
and was never kidnapped.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
No I I I I only go I roll to
the Michaels like I'm heading to like downtown Fallujah in
two thousand and five. You know you've got to be
ready at a Michael's. That's where shit goes down. It's
their locker. Yeah, like like rolling into a Michael's and
that in that hurt locker body armor. This will stop

(12:07):
them from taking me, yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
And also any glitter from getting on here.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
That's right, that's right. So Sorensen, in addition to posting
these videos, the first of which almost immediately gets to
like two million views, which was had never happened to
her account before, she makes a kidnapping report to the
Petaluma police, right, so they deemed this a suspicious person's case.
So her her video goes viral, she makes her report

(12:33):
to the police, she publishes a second video, and here's
there's a number of dumb things that that Sorensen does,
But the stupidest miss error that she makes in this
grift is in her second video, she brags that there
are like in order to market it, she says there
are details in the video that she didn't give the cops,
which is like saying, in your viral video, I made

(12:55):
a false police report. You know, don't do that as
a as a up. If you're going to commit this crime,
don't make that mistake. So that said, her marketing is good.
These videos get about four and a half million views
combined together. But it's a bad idea from a not
getting arrested standpoint, because while if you don't make a
police report, you can get away with this kind of

(13:17):
thing any amount of time. Right, if you're just like
posting videos saying my kids were nearly kidnapped, here's what
to avoid, that's fine. Once you make a police report,
you have created a situation in which you might get
in trouble. And Sorensen probably still would have been okay.
But in addition to making a police report, she made
the further mistake of accusing specific people who had names

(13:41):
of having been the wanna be pedophile child abductors. Right,
so the specific people that she made allegations against were
another couple that was just at Michael's that day, Eddie
and Sadie Martinez. Again, like she sees like a Hispanic
couple in the store, she decides, and she claims in
her videos that she heard them describing her children on

(14:03):
the phone with a third party, So she thinks they're
like spotters talking back to the kidnapping base about like
these kids they can steal, and.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
Just talk about this operation like the last Yeah, we're
running on three year old white kids.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
Grab her? Yeah, yeah we got oh we need it,
We need another like uh this this one's like blonde.
She's got a jumper on. Do we need another jumper kid? Yeah, Like,
go ahead and get her. So she she not only
does she give these people's identifications, she like describes them
to the police, but she takes pictures of them in
the store and she posts it on her Instagram.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
Oh huh.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
So now the Martinez is find out about this because
these postco viral, and her son comes up to Sadie
Martinez and is like, hey, mom, somebody claims that you
were part of a kidnapping gang and Michael's you might
want to you might want to be aware of this.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
I also love how like, okay, so you're in this
elite kidnapping gang. I love it. You're like, where should
we go to pick up kids without being noticed? Yeah,
Michael's craft Michaels cruise around a store and a mini
mall with eight thousand cameras in it.

Speaker 1 (15:10):
That's also the least if you were to tell me
this is a kidnapping gang that specifically abducts like sixty
four year old women, Right, I'd be like, well, yeah,
that's a Michael's. That's that's definitely where you're gonna abduct,
like where you go for that, Yeah, or guys who
are weirdly into model trains, Yeah, you're gonna get a
lot of that stuff out a Michael's. But like, kids
don't go to Michael's. Children do not like Michaels. It's

(15:33):
not the it's it's the place to get like kind
of vaguely unsettling Christmas decorations. That's what I go to
Michael's for.

Speaker 3 (15:40):
Right, you know kidnappers love yeah, kidnappers, So maybe they're
there on an errand.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
Anyway, And again, the martinez Is are the kind of
people who go to to a Michael's. Right, they're like
a middle aged couple shopping for whatever kind of decorations together.
But this lady decides like, nope, they're part of a
kidnapping gang. That's the only reason why you know a
couple would be at a Michael's craft store is to
steal my children shop is to steal my white children.

(16:09):
Now this this happens.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
Nobody wants white children. They're terrible, No, no, horrible.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
You can't see.

Speaker 3 (16:16):
Them anything anymore without them having an incident.

Speaker 1 (16:19):
They all got they all got allergies, you know, which
is because they're not actually abiding by the primal principles
and eating nothing but raw liver exactly.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
Otherwise you'll never got big and strong like Thank you,
man who was not on steroids.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
Thank you. Look, this is why I am getting in
to the to the liver influencer business. Uh. And I'm
specifically selling freeze dried polar bear liver now, Sarah, A
lot of doctors, the same guys in the pharma industrial complex,
will tell you that even a single bite of polar
bear liver will kill you because of how concentrated the

(16:56):
vitamins are. It's basically poison, that's what doctor say. But
you know, if we've learned one thing from the pandemic,
it's that you can't trust doctors. So I'm going to
start selling polar bear liver.

Speaker 3 (17:08):
I think the grenades are going to be more ethical.
But you know, yeah, forget forget about the Franklin expedition,
yeah orch ever when they all died from doing that,
yeah in the future.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
Look, they died because they didn't have a grenade launcher.
If you have a grenade launcher and you eat the
polar bear liver, then you're fine. Then all the ever
fear of death will leave you.

Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, And that's you know, small price to pay. It's
what five ninety nine a month for your uh, your
liver club.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
It's like three hundred and forty seven dollars a week.
What it is not, Sarah, The Feds do not like
you taking this many livers from this many polar bears.
It has made a lot of problems for me. But
I do it for you listeners.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
You know, the cost covers legal fees.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yeah. Yeah, So Sorensen makes this post and accuses the
Martinez being petophy kidnappers. Right in the middle of that period.
You remember a couple of years back where there were
a bunch of viral stories of like white people calling
the cops on people who are not white for bullshit reasons. Right,
There's that lady who threatened that black bird watcher in
Central Park. There was there was a lady who called

(18:16):
nine one one on like a black family and Oakland
cooking barbecue in the park. You know, these are kind
of like again in that like Karen sort of viral
story theme which is almost as reliable a traffic getter
as a kidnapping stories. So as soon as the Martinez
is like came forward and you are like this fucking
mommy blogger like or mommy influencer or whatever like accused

(18:37):
us of being a pedophile gang, the virality that had
been really good for Sorenson's follower a count initially kind
of came back to bite her in the ass. So
the Pedaluma police made a timely update being like, you know,
there are inconsistencies between the police report she filed and
the story she did on Instagram. Sorensen compounded her mistakes
by doubling down and was like, I want to see

(18:59):
these people prosecute you did a'll testify in court that
they were trying to steal my kids. The Michaels people,
you know, the cops talk to them and Michaels is like,
we didn't see anything problematic appen. There's no evidence of
anything happening. So this all ends in Sorenson getting charged
in twenty twenty one with three misdemeanor counts a false
report of a crime. She was convicted on one count

(19:20):
and sentenced earlier this year, Just a couple of weeks ago,
to twelve months of what's called informal probation, which restricts
her from using social media and requires a four hour
implicit bias training. She's going to still to that definitely, Like, look,
I yeah, hard to argue with the fact that, like
this lady being off social media is good for her, right,

(19:41):
she should not be on the internet. None of us
really should, that.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
Really should, but especially not hers.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Especially not her.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
But wow, I mean, you know, I don't think harsher
punishment fixes anything for anybody. It's a question of who
gets too much rather than who gets too little. But yeah,
it is, I mean that is, and that's a remarkably
light sentence for fucking up someone.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
Yeah, I have that.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
I shall say that.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
She's probably gonna spend I think, like thirty days in
jail and then she's got like a work release program,
so you know, it's not I don't know, like what
I would say is like the proper penalty here or whatever.
I'm not angry that it's like too harsh, I'll say
that much.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
Right.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
So, while this has been celebrated online, you know, as
soon as this this lady got convicted, you know, people
were obviously like, look, this dumb racist committed fraud, and
they paid the price. Despite the fact that like, that's
kind of how the story has gotten, you know, remembered. Now,
Sorenson had a pretty good reason to think that this
would work out for her, because, again, fake kidnapping stories

(20:47):
are one of the most reliable kinds of viral content
in multiple forms of social media. In twenty nineteen, Snope
started receiving inquiries about a Facebook meme that warned of
a sex trafficking plot in Florence, Kentucky. Variations of this
meme tended to show a photo of a red rose
stuck to a car door with text like this, There
have been recent incidents in northern Kentucky about sex traffickers

(21:09):
leaving roses on victims cars. The roses have a chemical
on them to make you pass out so they can
grab you. One incident happened in a Walmart parking lot
in Florence, Kentucky. Please be careful, ladies.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
First of all, there's a lot worse happening in a
Walmart parking lot. Oh God, all humanity. Yeah, but it's
a I'm glad to hear it's not Southern Kentucky, just
northern Kentucky.

Speaker 1 (21:33):
There you get, yeah, very Kentucky. Well, you know, the
specific poison that you can put on a rose only
grows in northern Kentucky, so it's hard to get down.
Oh well so yeah, yeah, I don't like.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
If I were going to start a sex trafficking ring,
I would go for a population center. I would be
worried about starting from scratch. Yeah, but I'm not an expert, so.

Speaker 1 (21:55):
Yeah, no, no, we I mean we do talk frequently
about like what we would do where were a sex
trafficking rain But I think we can all agree Florence,
Kentucky is where it was, where you start.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
That's this is like, you know, Michelle remembers the book
that started the Satanic panic, is like there are two
centers worldwide, centers for organized Satanism and they are I
think Geneva, Switzerland and Victoria, b C.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
And it's like, yep, yeah, of course why.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
Did they Was it for the climate? Do they get
whether it's nice in the woods?

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Yeah all right, yeah, watching.

Speaker 5 (22:34):
So.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Comments on one example of this meme, which was shared
about six and a half thousand times on Facebook, range
from readers pointing out that it's an obvious fake to
crying about how to prave the world has become and
talking about how they always bring a gun with them everywhere.
Snop's quickly found that the photo for the initial version
of the meme was a fake. It was pulled from
an unrelated blog post. It was just like someone, I
don't know, you know, people put roses and cardors or whatever.

(22:57):
It's like a here's your Valentine's Day, you know thing,
honey or whatever like that's I.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
Think, sorry, I hope you see this when you finish
your shift at Derby's.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah, they're like something like that. So what that means, though,
is because the original photo had nothing to do with
a kidnapping conspiracy, there was intent behind the fake. Right.
We can debate as to whether or not maybe Sorensen
was like someone who just was unreasonably paranoid or whatever,
although I think she was probably making a conscious fake.

(23:25):
But this was definitely a conscious fake. This is not
somebody panicking because their brain got poisoned by viral media
or whatever. This is someone choosing to knowingly spread a
false kidnapping story. And I'm going to read another quote
from that Snopes article, the twenty nineteen Rose Hoax was
not the first sex trafficking scared to emerge from Kentucky
in recent years. In late twenty seventeen, some social media

(23:46):
users in the Louisville and Florence area in the north
state claimed you have been approached or harassed in public.
Those purported incidents were quickly linked without evidence, to human trafficking,
and the local branch of a controversial church was forced
to defend its member against allegations of sex tracks. And
this is this is a little where it gets weird
because a big part of why Kentucky is key to
that or is center to so many of these memes

(24:10):
is that there's a church in northern Kentucky called the
World Mission Society of God. It is absolutely a cult.
It's one of those weird Seventh Day Adventist cults that
was founded in South Korea by a guy who declared
himself Jesus Christ. You know, it's one of those things.
There's a couple of those, right, and they have been
It's definitely one of those things where like they've been

(24:31):
accused of like brainwashing and abuse of psychological control tactics,
but they don't take people off the street. What's happening
here is that like this cult is in is local
people know it's shady, and when folks come up to
them to prostolytize, they think that they're about to be
like kidnapped, and so that's part of where all this
comes from. They haven't accused of human trafficking and a

(24:53):
bunch of places, but they've never been convicted of anything.
Police have cleared them. I don't have any desire to
defend this cult, but I don't think what they're doing
is like pulling people off the street. I think it's
what cults do, right, it's normal cult staff.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
All right, maybe our most successful cult scientology, Like you
don't have to grab people, you just let them wander
into your center downtown and that you traffic them.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
Yeah, it's like a tunnel spider or the snakes that
were the ancestor of the cucumbers that scare our cats.
That's I think that works. Yeah, that's moil it's fine.
So in this case, in the case of these specific
conspiracy theories, the police in Kentucky where have been like

(25:38):
reasonably good about being like there's no evidence behind this.
But as a general rule, law enforcement is usually part
of the hype cycle of these sort of like fake
kidnapping rumors than they are part of washing the hype cycle.
In twenty nineteen, Facebook memes started spreading in College Station,
Texas about a kidnapping plot that involved zip tying a

(25:59):
victim's windshield wipers together and then abducting the inevitably female
victim while she struggles to take them off. One version
of the meme ends with this very chain lettery call
to action. I've made this post public and would love
it if you'd share it with your friends and family.
Please be aware of your surroundings and drive somewhere safe
with a lot of people around before trying to remove
them if this happens to you. And the College station

(26:20):
police started getting queries once this post went viral, and
so they took to Twitter and they posted on Twitter,
did you see the post about zip ties and human trafficking.
We don't know whether traffickers are doing this or if
it's a distraction technique used by a would be thief.
Either way, always be aware of your surroundings and hashtags
see something, say something, so they immediately like buy into

(26:43):
this and spread this absolute nonsense. And then roughly a
week later after people get angry at them post an
update saying to be clear, zip ties we're described to
officers as having been found in a college station mall
parking lot. However, it is extremely unlikely this tactic would
be related to human tres trafficking. Hashtag verify facts before
sharing alarming posts. That's not how hashtags were College Station

(27:07):
Police Department. But also you are the ones who didn't
verify shit before sharing.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
It, so so weird past self three hours ago?

Speaker 1 (27:16):
Do better, don't have done. It's also like, well, why
else would people be zip tying Whinshill weaberon. I don't know,
kids are fucking with people. Look, I may have at
a certain point when I was drunk and younger, stolen
a bike lock and locked the gates of an apartment complex,
you know, for no reason other than I was a
drunk little asshole. You know, maybe I did that. Uh.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
Sometimes never allowed for the existence of drunk little assholes.
And it's a major plot.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Yes, yeah, like and it's again it's it's this Okham's
razors sort of thing. What is what is the is
the simplest likeliest explanation Cuman trafficking gangs are carrying out
a complicated plot or some asshole did a thing.

Speaker 3 (27:59):
By feel like some asshole?

Speaker 5 (28:03):
Is it?

Speaker 3 (28:03):
You know ninety eight percent of the time, and then
the other two percent it's pretty much the government.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, it's either an asshole or the government.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
Speaking of the government, you know who governs my life.

Speaker 3 (28:17):
Sarah starting my phoneus picked that moment to vibrate.

Speaker 1 (28:22):
Like wow, wow. Well, while while Sarah checks her phone,
you should check out these advertisements. Wow, those products, My god.
Have you ever seen a service like that? Not me, Sarah,

(28:42):
I have to, like the college station police say, if
I'm going to do the see something say something thing here,
because you knocked over your recorder and then bent down
to get it without checking to see if a kidnapping
gang was any they might have knocked your recorder off
the desk so that they could get you.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
I mean, the thing is, there's been a kidnapper under
my bed for three weeks now, but I mean he's
just passed out under there. I think he just needed
a place to relax and it's fun. Yeah, I thank
you again.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
By the way, hashtag kidnappers need shelter too. I don't
know I'm doing there.

Speaker 3 (29:18):
So it is like, yeah, the kidnapper is a great
way to see any person in your field of vision
who you don't want to see as a fellow human being.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
So yeah, yeah, they're kidnappers, they're pedophiles, they're a rape
gang or whatever. Yeah, it's I mean, that's part of
how this thing can be utilized by fascists. Right. Fundamentally,
fascism's power comes from the fact that we're all anxious
and scared all the time. And if you can convince
people that you can take that anxiety away by hurting

(29:46):
a specific group, then you can do a lot of things.
You can get away with quite a bit, it turns.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
Out, and you can all wear snazzy little outfits because
apparently what men want is to wear snazzy little outfits,
but it doesn't occur to them to just do something
harmless like drill team.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah, and unfortunately, I feel like we were trying, Like
for a while, there was the idea that like, what
if we let men dress up in snazzy little outfits
and pretend to be you know, soldiers, are fascists, will
that make them less you know, likely to do real
world harm? And no, apparently not.

Speaker 3 (30:17):
Yeah, we tried it.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
We tried it. We tried it, folks, No sorry.

Speaker 4 (30:23):
So.

Speaker 1 (30:23):
Another frequent spreader of bullshit kidnapping stories are local radio stations,
which often find themselves desperate for content that they can
read life on air to hopefully keep people tuning in,
and also who often like run little seo websites that
exist to pull in views based on keywords and shit
in order to get advertising money. Our employers come into

(30:45):
this story in a little bit.

Speaker 6 (30:47):
So.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
One example of this comes from February twenty twenty one,
when a local Omaha radio station KFAB posted an article
on their website titled if you find a water bottle
on your car drive away, you might be in danger now.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
Wotius ruined Jessica's water bottle?

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Yeah yeah, So the title there is a pretty perfect
blend of both seo friendly click you know, click getting
titling and old school chain letter tactics.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Right.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
The article warned readers that unspecified abductors were leaving water
bottles on cars to mark their targets. This is a
tactic used by traffickers and kidnappers to get you to
exit your vehicle and take whatever is on top of
the car off. If you have this happen and something
is on the hood of your car when you come
back to it, leave it there, drive away. It'll fall
off on its own. It's also like.

Speaker 3 (31:35):
And I say this in exasperation frequently, but has no
one seen Henry a portrait of a serial killer. You
just got to follow somebody home. You don't have to
do the water bottle trick. Henry is not wasting his
money on water bottles.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
Yeah, that gets expensive and it's bad for the ocean.
We support here at Coolzone ethical kidnapping. Right, if you're
going to run a kidnapping gang, I'm abducting people from
target parking lots, please don't waste water bottles or use
recycled water bottles. Right, those boxes of water. You can
put a box of water on top of somebody's car,
steal them, traffic them, you know, sell them to Algeria. Right,

(32:09):
you know that's fine, that's it.

Speaker 3 (32:11):
Can't box water do Yeah, that's.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
Why when when when we sell enslaved suburban white people
here at cool Zone Media, each one of them comes
with a guarantee that no plastic water bottles will be
used in the abduction. Right, all all all of those,
it's all those like cans of liquid death that's what
we do. You know, we have we have a sponsorship
with the Liquid Death people for our kidnapping gangs.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
It's so hard to ethink we kidnap these days. It's
great to know people are still doing.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yeah. Yeah, it's worth it. It's worth it, Sarah. You
know the extra it costs us a little more. It
does cut down on profits a little bit. But I
feel like, you know, that's our responsibility is a member
of the community. You know, we want to give back.

Speaker 3 (32:53):
Just kidnapping to make money. You're kidnapping because you love it.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
It's the love of the game, right. It makes me
so sad that there's all these nickel and diming kidnappers
out there. Right, you're in the best industry in the world. Baby,
you know, enjoy it.

Speaker 3 (33:09):
See, that's all there is to it.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeahah, so again, I probably don't need to tell you
there's zero evidence that kidnappers are using water bottles to
trick people up.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Like if you if someone has already entered their car
and you need them to exit it again to take
off a water bottle, it seems like you've had ample
opportunity to kidnap them already. Like if you need to
kidnap that if.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
It makes fun at them, and I probably don't need
to tell you that there's zero evidence for this. Snope
snotes that the origin for this find of the story
was a TikTok video posted by quote a woman who
said she had a random encounter with a stranger acting
oddly around her car in them all parking lot and
later found a water bottle on the hood of her
car and posited, based on nothing that these two things
were somehow related.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
Let me tell you something. I had a weird interaction
in a parking lot last night at Winko. And you
know what that was. It's because I was at Winco
and people at Winco are having a time and we're
all getting through it. And I mean, parking lots are
one of the rare spaces where people from different walks
of life or exact interact, and you can, yeah, you
can see that in these reactions.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
That's why so many that's why it's all parking lots,
and that's why, like affluent people have to use the
same parking lots as everyone else, and they often resent
that deeply, and you know, they're probably a lot of
them are the same kind of people who believe that,
like the existence of homeless folks is like a constant

(34:36):
threat to their life, right, Like it's the greatest threat
in the world is that they are homeless people somewhere,
or that you know, if the more high density, low
income housing is created in their town, it'll like ruin
you know, their their life or whatever. Like it's it's this.
It's the same reason why rich people hate the TSA

(34:58):
with a special passion that they don't reserve for like
regular cops. It's because they can't avoid the TSA unless
they're super super bitch. But like normal, rich people have
to go through the same TSA that the rest of
us do, and they hate it. Yeah, anyway, it's whatever,
I like, I it's I think a lot of this

(35:21):
probably is the result of people who don't normally go
out in the world in a situation where they don't
have total control, like you know, and they encounter someone
who is either having a mental health crisis or just
is a kind of person they wouldn't socialize with normally,
and they this this sets off that part in their

(35:43):
brain that like corresponds to the part of the brain
that gets set off in a cat that sees a cucumber, right,
and they and they feel like I'm in danger. Now,
I'm in danger because something like unfamiliar has occurred. And
then the pattern making parts of our brain like put
together in the rest of it, right, Like, Oh, I
found a water bottle on my car, and thirty minutes

(36:04):
earlier I saw a person who was like talking to themselves,
and so this must be evidence of an international kidnapping
gay and so who would.

Speaker 3 (36:13):
Put a water bottle on my car but someone having
a mental health episode who clearly is therefore in the
perfect position to run a kidnapping ring.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
Yeah, it's yeah, it's great.

Speaker 3 (36:23):
So and it's like, I mean, think of when little
kids meet somebody new, yeah, and that they feel unsure
and they are freaked out, and then they need a
second to warm up, and then they take it and
they don't develop a conspiracy theory about that person, which
I think is really charming of them.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
What I love, Sarah, what makes me really happy and
feel good about the future, is thinking about how many
of the people who make these little conspiracy theories based
on anodyne shit then repeat those conspiracy theories to their
children and say, you must be worried at all times,
there's always there's kidnapping gangs everywhere. Mommy saved you from
kidnappers today by noticing the water bottle and then pulling

(37:03):
her glock out in the parking lot. You know, like,
it's great, it's cool that that happens.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
Great for the kids. It's known to shit to be
great for the kids. My god, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
It's dope. So what we are seeing here in that
story I just related is evidence of the kind of
food chain that these fake crime kidnapping panic stories exist in.
So the story is cooked up initially by a mix
of people who are just a little out of their
minds or by actual bad actors wanting to spread conspiracy

(37:35):
theories and paranoia and stuff on Facebook or TikTok. Oftentimes
it's people who like are spreading stuff they know is
not true because they know we'll get them followers. And
then the laziest actors in our media ecosystem, the people
putting together these shitty little seo grabbing articles for like
local news sites and shit, take this viral story, churn

(37:55):
out a quick article with no fact checking, and that
helps the story spread even for the right and it
makes it seem like it's a real thing, because now
look that's a news station that's covering this thing. There
must be an epidemic. I found one example of one
of these articles on Distractify, which exists making taking shit
that went viral on the Internet and turning it into
very low quality content. The article seems to have been

(38:18):
inspired by a TikTok video posted by a woman named
Aaron Dawn, who recorded a four minute video about coming
back from a shopping trip and finding a sheet of
paper on her car door. She claims was soaked in
a chemical that injured her. Now, Aaron provides no photographic No,
she may, we'll get to that. But like, she provided

(38:38):
no evidence that this had happened at all. But she
did film a recreation of finding the paper on her car,
where like, she put a piece of paper on her
car and filmed herself finding it.

Speaker 3 (38:47):
You're a Robert Stack. This is not unsolved, mister.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, it's so everyone gets to be Robert Stack. Now
that's what TikTok has given us. God, so she rates
over this recreation that she films. When I saw it,
I just picked it up with my fingernails and I
tossed it out. I didn't touch the napkin, but guess what,
I still opened the door with my fingertips. I asked
my husband, did you put a napkin in my door?

(39:12):
And he was like no, So immediately I started looking
for hand sanitizer. Now she experienced no real symptoms because
poisons like this are so difficult to make an apply
that they functionally don't exist. Right, it could someone make
a poison that you could like put on a napkin
and it could impact, yes, But it's like that's like
the CIA, right, like random kidd like were like Putin

(39:35):
or Putin and like here's the thing, like Putin has
done it a few times, right, but like it didn't
work fair, Like the wrong people got got a lot
of the time. Like if you look up, we've covered
like the fucking Sidney Gottlieb. I think he was the
CIA's poisoner in chief, and like they were bad at it,
like they kept trying to make these poisons and like

(39:56):
usually it would not work fair. That's why Fidel Castro
was still alive. None of this stuff works very well.
It certainly does not work reliably enough to be abducting
people from target parking lots as like a casual deal.
So he is on what is her name, Aaron Dawn.

Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah, they're like, let's use like really top narc stuff
on Aaron.

Speaker 1 (40:22):
Now. It's one of those. It does remind me a
little bit about like right after nine to eleven happened
to kids in my middle school, where like al Qaeda
is gonna get our school next, and it's like, I
don't know, man, I don't think. I don't think Osama
bin Laden is aware of Plano, Texas. Like we're probably
good actually, but it is like, you know, I think

(40:46):
that it it like after nine to eleven, people believe
that kind of shit because they've just seen an insane
thing happen on television, right, And I think part of
why folks are more primed to believe stuff like this
is they you know, they're on the news and they
hear like, oh, all of these cops you know, had
seizures because they were near a fentanel thing, and like
that's bullshit, that's not real. But like a lot of

(41:08):
the cops who are having these reactions, like a lot
of them are lying, but a lot of them are
just people like they bought it right, Like they're having
a hysterical reaction because they are also dumb little monkeys
who are scared all the time, and someone gave them
a focus for it, right, And Aaron, whether she's a
con artist or a dumb little monkey, claims that she
had horrible reactions as a result of this poison that

(41:31):
her handwet numbs. She had her husband take there. And
it's really interesting because like her husband, she had her
call nine one one, and she specifically says that they
called then one because they weren't in their normal area
and didn't know where the nearest er was, which I
also feel like says a lot about them, where like
we're always thinking about where the nearest er is, you know,
but we left our normal area. You know, don't ever

(41:52):
leave your normal area because then you won't know where
that like when you get poisoned by kidnappers's.

Speaker 3 (41:58):
Very like terry or lie. Yeah, I just like to
be in my area and it's like okay, but yeah,
that means that your fears when you're outside your area
aren't necessarily about what's really happening.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
Yes, she claims that the doctors at the hospital diagnosed
her with acute poisoning from an unknown substance. Karen, it's interesting.
I'm mainly interested in this because of the way that
this gets covered by Distractify who they dress their their
article about Aaron's bullshit, and like I would say, it's
like the panoply of journalism, right, they put journalism's clothes

(42:32):
on this story, but it's not really journalism. Here's how
the article opens. According to the ACLU, there are anywhere
from fourteen thou five hundred to seventeen thousand, five hundred
people trafficked in the United States each and every year.
In twenty nineteen, California reported the highest number of cases
in the country, with fifteen hundred and seven people trafficked
in the state alone. A staggering thirty two percent of
people who are trafficked were purportedly done so by an

(42:52):
inanimate partner of theirs. However, there have been a growing
number of kidnapping stories attempts circulating on social media that
are tied to trafficking. See like, hey, you want to
know what all those most of those human trafficking cases
are and like, fucking Californian whatever, it's not suburban moms
getting abducted in parking lots. It's the people who pick
your fucking fruit, right, Like, it's it's that that is

(43:16):
super common and obviously is a huge problem, but it's
not the kind of problem that you can make Aaron
Dawn care about, right because she she wants to go
on social media. Grapes, Yeah, grapes. So again, it's also like,
let's start with you know, a huge the biggest chunk

(43:37):
of people who are traffic are done by a lot
are trafficked by an intimate partner. Like that's how trafficking
actually occurs. However, we've seen a lot of stories on
social media, so like, that's literally like all that there
is to this this claim. Anyway. The article then brings
up the tragic case of Eliza Fletcher, who was an
actual young woman who was abducted and murdered while jogging

(43:58):
not all that long ago, and again, shit happens, right,
Tragic stores like this do occur, but not often. There's
three hundred and eighty million people in this country or whatever, right, Like,
it's very sad about what happened to Eliza Fletcher. Probably
not something you should take general like information about your
life on like.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
And also that it's a some asshole crime.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
Yeah, it's like definitely a problem, definitely bad, not evidence
that you are in danger, you know, And it's yeah,
it's frustrating because like the reasonable way to respond to
Eliza Fletchers, like, yeah, you should try to, like, you know,
be aware of your surroundings and stuff, because shit does happen.
You should generally, you know, keep keep an eye out,

(44:42):
you know, don't lose yourself completely, and you know, whatever
you're doing, you know, have some situational awareness. But that
always gets turned into like be frightened at all times
when you really it's like, you know, look both ways
before crossing the street, you know, but.

Speaker 3 (44:58):
I don't and assume the absolute worst about everybody, like
not just the worst within the context of the situation,
but the worst thing a person could possibly do.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like so that twenty eighteen story of
a shirt on a car being used to market is
repeated in the article as evidence that these things are
a quote common ploy of traffickers. And that's an example
of kind of the article, you know, form of spreading
this disinformation. Another good example of like how this shit

(45:28):
spreads is this twenty twenty one TikTok video posted by
a user named mimes there.

Speaker 7 (45:34):
So I went to church on Sunday for about an
hour and I came back out and there was melted cheese.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
On my car.

Speaker 7 (45:40):
So I called my friend and her mom to come
help me scrape it off. And as soon as they came,
this white van with like stickers and they were wearing
masks smoking, pulled out of a parking space that was
two spots away from me, and they went to the
other parking lot across the street where they could watch
us clean off the cheese. And here's a.

Speaker 1 (45:59):
Picture of the cheese.

Speaker 7 (46:00):
So this is the cheese like halfway scraped off two pieces.
It would literally took an hour for me to scrape
all this off. I personally had no idea that they
were using this as a tactic to take people now.
And if I hadn't called my friend that I could
have easily been taken within the hour that it took
me to take off the cheese. And this happened at
my church, So I can't even imagine where they're trying

(46:21):
to use it.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
An hour to scrape off the cheese. It is a
slice of crafted America.

Speaker 3 (46:28):
So drive home, Drive home, honey. The cheese.

Speaker 4 (46:31):
Also, it was it was, it was like a craft
slice like it's like a sie I don't know how
that could take that long.

Speaker 3 (46:39):
There's multiple humans, but go on, people live in a
universe without little brothers.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
No, obviously we all saw the numbers on that video.
It's been shared thousands and thousands in towns, the huge
It's very it went super viral. It is. There's a
lot going on there, like the fact that she's like,
these people in a white van were wearing masks and smoking?
Were they doing both of those things? Mims? Really, how
does one do that?

Speaker 3 (47:05):
Maybe there were some lefties having a cigarette.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
You never know, Yeah, it was Antifa. The fact that
it happens in her like, right, I think it's again,
I don't know. These things are kind of an even
mix between people who are just looking for conspiracies everywhere
because the Internet has so thoroughly damaged them and people
who are lying to get virality and followers. I don't

(47:29):
know which one, Mims. Is The fact that she says
it's in a church parking lot, like even at church,
you're not safe, right, Like everywhere's dangerous. You know they're
coming after Christians, YadA, YadA, YadA.

Speaker 3 (47:39):
Oh, definitely not safe. I also wonder to what extent
this is about, like having an experience that you don't
understand the logic of, like there's cheese on your car
if this actually happened or something like that, and being
trained to see any object in this case as a
threat and then being like and then leaning into it

(48:00):
when you want and maybe like elaborating and embroidering, because
there's like this huge incentive both to go with your
fear and then to like tell this ridiculous story about
it because it'll, you know, because not only is it altruistic,
but it's going to get you attention and followers.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
Yep, yep, and uh yeah, that's that's cool. So I
look into Mims because I'm trying to figure out which
one is she. Is she someone who's who's just terminally pilled,
or is she somebody who's you know, run a running
a con Her oldest video is from the start of
the pandemic. She's in a car looking at a friend
who's sitting in the car next to her. Pretty normal

(48:37):
snapshot of the loneliness that came from that period of time. Right.
There are videos where she does like her makeup, or
she dances, or she lifts weights, but all of those
on her account get between a couple of hundred and
at most two or three thousand views. She has one
video of herself in kind of like form fitting athletic
wear hugging a friend dressed similarly with texts that says

(48:57):
when you hear big titties are out displayed. That's got
twenty two thousand views. It is her second most popular video.
Several of her videos are just like athletes try dancing,
you know, stuff like that where she's with a friend
and they're like doing dances or whatever. Normal TikTok, I
would say, normal shit. That looks like attempts to go
viral on TikTok. Right, this looks like the account of

(49:19):
someone who's trying out stuff to be an online influencer. Right,
I'm going to try doing the makeup, see if that works.
I'm going to try doing dancing videos or workout and
see if like that goes viral for me. And none
of that stuff really took off, Like I said, her
biggest other video is that like when you hear big
titties are out? Video at twenty two thousand views. This

(49:39):
if you find a slice of cheese on your car
video has four hundred and forty six thousand videos and
I Suspect views, and I Suspect is responsible for most
of her four thousand or so followers. Mims's post was
duly picked up by the bottom feeders of the Internet,
in this case our corporate overlord's at iHeartRadio, who posted
an article titled if you find a slice of cheese

(50:00):
on your car, you might be in danger. There's no
attempt to even provide journalistic context on this one, just
the line. It might sound silly, but a TikTok user
named Mimi is very serious about her experience. Great great,
great work, guys. Now, all of this would be easy
to ignore as just more harmless disinformation if it weren't

(50:21):
for shit like Phoebe copis murdering Daniel Garcia right like that,
that's the grounding. This is all like seems like silliest
Internet bullshit, but like this affects people. It causes them
to think they are in danger, and they take steps
to defend themselves, and that sometimes leads to people getting
It's the same as those like stories of like folks
shooting at people who back into their driveway to like
turn their car around. Right, people die from this shit.

(50:43):
And I guarantee you sometimes it's Fox, sometimes it's TikTok,
sometimes face, but it's all this shit that's everywhere, right,
So you know, stuff like this have part of what's
going to spread cases like this, and what's going to
spread like is the fact that stories like this are
everywhere because they're a profitable industry, right, this is a

(51:07):
business spreading this shit. I found this video on TikTok
while I was doing my research for that article that's
going to be on my substack Chatterzone that's got six
point nine million views, and it's just a collection of
everything we've talked about, like, watch this thing nice.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
If you see this, run. If you see money in
your windshield, you need to run away fast. They're trying
to get you to get out of your car and
grab the money. If you see this, you need to
get in your car some other way. This is a
sign that this is probably laced with something. People's hands
have gone numb, they have passed out. It is a trick.
Do not touch this.

Speaker 3 (51:44):
If you see this. They have labeled this. This is
what they're labeling.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
They're saying, this is a woman who is alone, that
someone has been watching you. They see you're alone. They
think you're vulnerable. You need to go home, and you
need to cut this off. This is meant to pause
you so that someone from underneath the car can cut
your achilles heel and so that you're distracted, gives them
enough time. Something that looks the most innocent. But you're
gonna notice this one. It's gonna be placed here after

(52:09):
you're already.

Speaker 4 (52:10):
In your car.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
Your goal is to get you out of your car.
You just want to check your surroundings, okay, because there's
so many different ways.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
For you don't want to get out of your car
and be texting.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
You don't want to go to your car before.

Speaker 1 (52:21):
This has so many views, it's been shared so widely.
It's just again it's it's let's make people scared and
then sell them weapons using affiliate links on my TikTok.
Six point nine million views. It's literally everything from the Snopes,
Like I think this this was definitely made by someone
who went through all of those Snopes collections of like

(52:42):
different of like you know, zip tie on the door,
piece of cheese, you know, fucking napkin stuck it, and
they just made a video to scare people collecting all
that shit they x the disinformation debunking stuff as a source.
Like that's what this lady did. I hate, I hate
this person.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
It's god. Yeah, it's very crafty. I'll say that she's
crafty like ice is cold.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
Yeah, she's crafty, crafty like ice is cold. And you
know who else is crafty? The sponsors of our show,
who definitely don't have anything to do with that article
we talked about earlier. We're gonna get in trouble for
that one, Sophie. Nah, all right, well we are back anyway.

(53:42):
So it's cool. And in addition to causing you know,
we've talked about how all of these kind of paranoid,
paranoid conspiracy theories about kidnapping, in addition to causing like
you know, brain damage to some people, this stuff provides
cover for other kinds of scammers. And this brings me

(54:02):
to a particular new kind of con that's been enabled
by modern AI tools. This is fun, Sarah, You're gonna
like this. You ever heard of fake kidnapping scams or
virtual kidnappings?

Speaker 5 (54:13):
Ooh?

Speaker 3 (54:14):
I think as like a phishing strategy.

Speaker 1 (54:17):
Yeah, the idea has existed for a while. I found
a twenty fourteen warning from the San Antonio FBI Press Office,
and I'm going to read that to you. Now, this
is how it existed. This other stuff worked prior to AI. Right.
Over the past several years, San Antonio FBI, along with
many state and local enforcement law enforcement partners, received reports
from the public regarding extortion schemes, often referred to as

(54:37):
virtual kidnappings. These schemes typically involve an individual or criminal
organization who contacts a victim via telephone and demands payment
for the return of a kidnapped family member or friend,
while no actual kidnapping has taken place. The callers often
use co conspirators to convince their victims of the legitimacy
of the threat. For example, a caller might attempt to
convince a victim that his daughter was kidnapped by having
a young female scream for help in the background during

(54:59):
the call. Now, that's like not an easy con to
pull off in the pre AI era, Like not only
do you have to have like multiple people, but like,
I don't know, let me talk to them, right, I'm
not going to give money to a kidnapper if I
can't hear from the person kidnapped. You know, but AI
has made that possible. Particularly, the thing that's made it
possible is both the existence of various AI tools that

(55:21):
can let you kind of like clone or fake a voice,
and the fact that basically every young person is posting
videos on TikTok that have their voice all the time,
right like, so there is It provides you with the
ability to mimic, particularly people's kids, with pretty reasonable accuracy.
And that's what we've started to see. And I'm gonna

(55:43):
post for you another TikTok video, this one not spreading disinformation. Well, kit,
well here, I'm just gonna play.

Speaker 5 (55:52):
This thing new scam alert. I usually don't fall for scams,
but they got me listen to this. So I got
a call from mom mom last night around seven pm.
The call came in, It showed her number, it showed
her name. How I have it stored in my phone?
I answered, Hey, Mom, what's up? And I heard my
mom's voice like kind of fading away, like someone was

(56:14):
taking the phone away from her, and I heard like weeks.
This guy then gets on the phone and he goes, hey,
I have your mom, and if you don't send me money,
I'm gonna kill this bitch, and I was.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
Uh, okay, who is this?

Speaker 5 (56:28):
Like what is going on now? Mind you, My mom
works in home health, so her job is to go
to patients' homes and do self assessments. So in my head,
I'm like, it's happened, like a patient has taken her
hostage and this is for real. And the guy on
the phone, him and his girlfriend or whoever she was,
were such good actors, so he's like yelling at me

(56:51):
and really pressuring me to get this money sent back.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
So like, first off, I wanted to clip put this
because it is an example of a viral TikTok posts
that's not spreading disinformation. This is a real thing. I
have no reason to believe this. Woe's not telling the truth.
And there is evidence from good like reputable journalism that
fake kidnapping scams like this have become more common because

(57:15):
with these kind of tools, you can fake someone's voice,
you know, and all you needed is a second to
say honey, help me or whatever, and then a person
gets on and you do the you do the con
from there, right, and like you know this lady, I
think did find out what was happening, But like you
can see, like It's interesting because, like she says, well,

(57:37):
you know, my mom's job is going into people's houses.
She's the home healthcare worker. So I've always, in the
back of my mind been worried that something might happen
to her. Right, So it's both this, I've always everyone's
always anxious because we're we're stupid monkeys. And also, you know,
we all have things that we you know, fears that
are are con cognizant. Right if you have like a
loved one who's got a long commute or whatever, you

(57:58):
worry about him dying in a car crash or something.
In this case, you know this this this like woman
gets like these people target her for whatever reason, And like, yeah,
that's tough because like, you're not stupid. If you hear
your loved one's voice and someone say send me money,
I have dumb or gullible for falling for that. That's

(58:18):
an insane thing to have to be worried about, right that,
Like someone can fake your mom's voice. That's nuts. That's
like like again, it's and it's but it's also I
do think the climate of all of these fake stories
makes decent people more likely to fall for stuff like this,
because they're already prime to believe there's kidnapping gangs everywhere, right.

Speaker 3 (58:41):
And because everywhere you look there's something you've never heard
of happening, So in a sense, why not this other thing.

Speaker 1 (58:46):
This is why my general response to anyone who calls
me is go ahead kill them. I don't care. I
say that no matter why they call it.

Speaker 4 (58:54):
That's actually how you answer the phone.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (58:57):
Yeah, I'm like, hey, Robert, and you're like, go ahead
kill them.

Speaker 1 (59:01):
Fucking cut their throat. I don't give a shit.

Speaker 4 (59:03):
I'm like, a, is the episode good? Can I publish it?

Speaker 5 (59:09):
Death?

Speaker 1 (59:12):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (59:12):
So anyway, I think, Sophie, but I don't want to
do that.

Speaker 1 (59:16):
Like, again, you don't need to be worried about kidnapping,
but you should, as we're going to talk about, you
should be worried about getting scammed because it's scams are
more common than they've ever been, and they are more
tailored towards individual people because of the kind of tools
that exist. The first of these scams have started hitting victims,
as I've stated. In April of this year, in Arizona,
family received a phone call from their fifteen year old daughter,

(59:38):
who sounded distraught and handed the phone over to a
man who told them, you call the police, you call anybody.
I'm gonna pop her so full of drugs. I'm going
to have my way with her, and I'm going to
drop her off in Mexico. And you see, again, it's
all the shit we've been talking about since Phoebe Copus.

Speaker 4 (59:51):
Right.

Speaker 1 (59:52):
There's kidnapping gangs. There's drugs that people have that will
knock folks out. You know, probably a little bit of fentanyl,
conspiracy shit mix some of that. There's Mexico, right, you
bring up Mexico that scares people. Yeah, yeah, Like all
of these it's all all there now. Thankfully in this case,
this the girl who like got her voice cloned for

(01:00:13):
this scam, Her mom was like at a public place,
so she gets the call and she freaks out like
you do when you think your daughter's been kidnapped. Very
reasonable time to freak out. But other people around her
they call nine one one and like have the presence
of mind to call her husband and be like, is
your daughter around and he's like, yeah, she's at home.
They're like okay, ma'am, you're we're good. Like something else

(01:00:35):
that's happening here, you know. But you know it that
illustrates how advanced these scams have become. The mom in
this case later told local news it was completely her voice,
it was her inflection, it was the way she would
have cried. I never doubted for one second it was her.
That's the freaky part that really got me to my core. Yeah, which, like, yeah,

(01:00:56):
that would be very frightening, right, very most people. Now
you've been you're aware that this is a thing. It's
kind of like, you know, kidnappers in a fuck or
it's kind of like hijackers in a plane with box cutters. Right,
that's a real threat when it's never happened before. Now,
if anyone tried to like take over a plane with
box cutters, everyone the plane's going to beat them to
death with luggage, right, Like it's yeah, yeah exactly. But

(01:01:23):
you know, when you're not aware that this is a scam,
of course, it is fucking horrifying, harrowing, And that brings
us to the Hidden Bastard for this week's episode. I
know it's taken several hours to get to this point, Sarah,
I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (01:01:38):
We're already a thousand years old. It's getting a little older.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
Exactly exactly we are. We are ancients, as old as
the trees. I am. I am an int you know,
I remember? Yeah anyway, whatever, So yeah, obviously, like Phoebe
Copis did a horrible thing, But the part of why
she did that horrible thing was that she had been

(01:02:03):
kind of this ever present ecosystem of you are in danger,
you are at risk, people are attacking you. Like most
people aren't going to murder someone, you know, even if
they buy into that stuff, but a certain number of
people will murder people as a result of this kind
of shit, right, And I think one of the things
that feeds into that ever present feeling that you're at risk,

(01:02:25):
that you're under attack, you have to defend yourself is
that all of us are under attack at all times
through every single form of communication that we own. The
attack is not kidnapping gangs, it's not human traffickers. But like,
look at how many emails you've gotten today and comb
through your spam filter, see how many of them are
attempts for people to fish you or to like how

(01:02:47):
many text messages or phone calls did you get today
that are from scam? Likely? You know, how many like
pieces of things like shit did you get in the mail.

Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
Like I got to call this morning from a lovely
British robot who wanted to sell me how health insurance?

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
Exactly? That is an attack, right, That's not an attack
like a kidnapping. It's not something, but it is. That
is someone trying to harm you, right, like Sarah, someone
tried to hurt you today through the phone. You know,
someone is trying to hurt all of us every day
through our phones and various other methods of communication.

Speaker 4 (01:03:19):
And what did we learn? How is Sarah supposed to
answer the phone from now on?

Speaker 3 (01:03:24):
Kill the hostage, Kill the hostage.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
That's right, we all really Sarah, all of this. We
could all learn a lot from the movie Speed right,
put a bullet in that hostage's kneecap, do what Keanu
would do.

Speaker 3 (01:03:37):
It's only Jeff Daniels.

Speaker 1 (01:03:40):
Oh yeah, it was Jeff Daniels. Huh. I like him.
So I feel like the fact that we are all
constantly being attacked by con artists, you know, even if
the vast majority of those attacks fail, even if the
vast majority those are obvious and laughable, contributes to the

(01:04:00):
mindset that makes people more likely to believe this kind
of kidnapping shit, Right, we're paranoid. There's reason to be paranoid,
but it's not there's nothing fun in being like Well,
because of a variety of different kinds of deregulation and
just plain old failures to foresee any need for regulation,

(01:04:20):
every method of communication we have has been infested by
con artists and scammers to a degree that has never
been present in human history before, and that contributes to
a mindset where people don't trust anybody else. Right, instead
of saying that, like we want to believe, it's just
sexier to believe that you're like the center of a
taken story, right, thanks, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:40):
And instead of being attacked by one thousand tiny scammers
every week who are trying to make a little bit
of money. It's it's like a fabulous espionage kidnapping ring.

Speaker 1 (01:04:50):
Yeah, that's much sexier, and it's but I do want
to kind of I want to spend a little bit
of time here at the end talking about how bad
this has gotten in numbers, because I think this is
something everyone's sort of aware that we're all getting approached
by scammers more often, But like, there's this isn't just
a thing that you think because it happens to you

(01:05:11):
might be more common, this is objectively happening. Phishing scams
hit a historic high in Q four of twenty twenty two,
with four point seven million reported attacks, which is a
one hundred and fifty percent increase since twenty nineteen. A
research right up I found from a research firm Compaatech
noted quote October twenty twenty two saw more than one
hundred thousand unique email subject lines, the largest number ever recorded.

(01:05:35):
This shows that hackers are more likely than ever to
tailor their approach rather than using the same template for
every victim. This is one of these things that like
the increasing development of these AI tools has allowed, is
it makes it easier to kind of instead of like
going for the lowest common denominator, actually tailoring stuff for individuals. Right, Like,
you can't do a fake kidnapping scam where you're cloning

(01:05:57):
somebody's mom's voice without like target that person. You're not
like randomly going after that, right It's because it's it
takes some effort to clone a voice like that. You
have to know something about the person. And this is
what we're seeing across the board, not only a growth
in the number of scams targeting Americans, but smarter and
more personalized scams. It remains true that about ninety five

(01:06:18):
percent of all cybersecurity issues are the result of human error.
But I think that statistic is actually the way it
is framed is problematic because when you say ninety five
percent of cybersecurity issues the result of human error, what
I think most people hear is that like, oh, a
dummy clicked a link they shouldn't have clicked. What a dummy? No, no, no,
it's a human error. If you wire someone money because

(01:06:39):
you believe your mom has been kidnapped, that doesn't mean
it's not understandable if you're not aware of the con right. See.
And the fact that people feel like if I fall
for something, if I get conned, I did something dumb,
means they don't report when they're victimized a lot because
they think people will make fun of them. This is
an actual problem, right, This is a societal level problem

(01:07:02):
that people feel this way when they are victimized. Z
Scalers Threat Labs twenty twenty three phishing report warned that chat, GPT,
and other AI tools can also be used to create
fake login pages for users who have no coding knowledge. Themselves.
They can use these fake login pages in order to
like fake that it's someone's bank or whatever, and they
can insert malware through that, they can get you know,
there's a wide variety of ways they can fuck with

(01:07:23):
people through that. And eventually these same AI tools will
be utilized effectively and like, you know, software that is
meant to protect people from this, but it's just not
good at that yet. There's too many false positives, Like
when you're scanning email, you know, using AI tools and
whatnot to try to determine which ones are fishing attempts.
And like if a quarter of your emails are getting

(01:07:46):
like deleted by an AI because it mistakenly thinks that
they're you know, that causes a problem for you just
can't It's It's what I'm saying here is that I'm
not trying to fear monger about the technology in general.
What I'm saying is that new technology tends to be
more profitable for attackers before it becomes useful for defending
people in this situation, and so that's part of the problem.

(01:08:09):
The primary victims of this new wave of scams are
the elderly. The FBI Internet Crime Report last year claimed
that Americans over age sixty lost and estimated one point
seven billion dollars to fraud, the highest number ever reported
for any age group, and an increase. You want to
guess how much this amount has increased over the last

(01:08:29):
three years. So okay, well, no, not quite that high,
but it is an increase of eighty four percent since
twenty twenty one.

Speaker 3 (01:08:39):
Still so much.

Speaker 1 (01:08:40):
Yeah, that it's huge. It's like so much more common now.
I found an article, a very good article in The
Advocate that gives some texture to the kinds of scams
that are increasingly hitting the elderly. Matthews, fifty two of
Baton Rouge told victims he could make investments on their behalf,
assured them that they could make high rates of return,
and threatened to injure them if they did not make payments,
according to his guilty plea. In a similar case in April,

(01:09:02):
Muhammad Alam fifty pleaded guilty to computer fraud scheme that
targeted elderly victims in the US, including Louisiana, and took
in about three hundred and forty thousand fraudulent profits. Alam
and other members of the scheme tricked victims into thinking
their computers needed support, then offered to fix them for
a fee. After the victims paid, Alum would seek access
to their bank accounts under the guys that they were
entitled to a discount and manipulate account balances, so the

(01:09:23):
victims thought that they owed money to the computer company.
So adults age sixty and older are not only likely
er to be scammed, they are the least likely to
report being victimized to the authorities. They don't want to
call the police. Again. This is like when these people,
when victims are interviewed, the number one reason they give
for not reporting that they've been victimized is they think
they will be blamed or mocked for falling for a Khan.

(01:09:46):
Kathy Stokes, director of fraud Prevention for the AARP, told
the Advocate this, well, you gave someone of that information,
so there's nothing we can do. Fundamentally, we've got to
change that. People are losing what amounts to generational wealth
these days. Like we're not just talking about nickel and
diming people. We are talking about taking someone's retirement savings,
you know, taking money that they would have passed on

(01:10:08):
to their kids. Like we are talking about like people
people's lives are being destroyed by this stuff. And there's
again they don't even feel like they can report having
huge amounts of money stolen from them because they'll be
mocked for like being a dumb old person who fell
for a scam. That's like somebody building a fake website
to trap them and shit. A lot of the time.
Sometimes yeah, people are greedy or whatever and they get

(01:10:30):
trapped that way. But like phone scams are close to
an all time high, phishing scams and text message scams
are hitting people at the highest levels ever. And add
into this the fact that social media has like spent
years goading people to read and report and share paranoid
conspiracy theories, it shouldn't be surprising that by most measurements,
social trust in American society is at its lowest level

(01:10:51):
in living memory. In the early nineteen seventies, when Chaine
letters about backseat slashers went from mailbox to mailbox, about
half of Americans reported to the American National Election Survey
that they believed most people could be trusted. Today, less
than a third of Americans respond the same way. A
recent poll found that social trust is lowest for Americans
over sixty five, which is understandable when you realize how

(01:11:13):
much of them are being bombarded by attempts to steal
their fucking savings. And it's like, I don't know, Like
that's that's kind of what I've got so far. I
don't I don't know what to do about this because
like I kind of low key think this is one
of the biggest problems in the country. This is like,
you know, when you talk about people being worried that

(01:11:34):
you know of civil violence of like you know we're
going to have like like this feeds into that to
a huge degree. Like look up those stories of people
shooting folks and their driveway. They're not young, right, They're old.
And I don't please don't take this as me being
like it's understandable that they murdered a young woman in
their driveway. It's like no, But when you bombarded people

(01:11:54):
both with conspiracy theories about how they're in danger and
you're also constantly trying to them every hour of every day,
some of them will lose their minds and a lot
of them will have guns. You know, like it's that's
a problem, we should deal with it.

Speaker 3 (01:12:09):
Yes, yeah, and you know, and you make some good points,
but I really think there's a bigger problem in this country,
and it's that someone puts on a car.

Speaker 1 (01:12:20):
Someone well, you know, like like I always say, you
say this often in your podcast, You're wrong about If
you see cheese on your car, pull out a glock
and just open fire, empty it into.

Speaker 3 (01:12:33):
You see she's on your car, Just yeah, jump the
man off the bomb honestly, just level the city or
and it's time to start over.

Speaker 1 (01:12:41):
This is why I always say, never go any public
place without a six thousand pound ammodium nitrate bomb, you know,
just in case you'd rather need it.

Speaker 3 (01:12:51):
Do say that often better to have.

Speaker 1 (01:12:54):
It and not need it than need it and not
have it, you know. That's why I always tow a
rider truck behind my car, always ready, you know, in
case I have to detonate a parking lot to protect
my I don't know, Sarah, what do we do here?
How do we fix this?

Speaker 5 (01:13:13):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:13:13):
Gosh? I mean, I think that a lot of this problem,
as far as I can tell, as people replacing their
actual life with the Internet in various other forms of media,
you know, the epidemic of loneliness among Americans and especially
Americans over sixty. I really think that part of the
answer is for us to actually talk to each other more,
which is slightly ironic for me to be saying, because

(01:13:37):
we are doing this over zoom. But hey, I'm looking
you in the face. Yeah, that's the right thing.

Speaker 4 (01:13:42):
And I'll see you in like an hour and a
half in person. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:46):
And we're gonna eat popcorn together, even popcorn together, eat
cheese together, not alone.

Speaker 4 (01:13:53):
Don't put it on somebody's car if.

Speaker 1 (01:13:55):
You see a water on your car again. Hand grenade,
you know, keep one of those German stick grenades in
your belt at all time so you can just hurl
it at your vehicle if you see a trash bag
nearby that scares you.

Speaker 3 (01:14:09):
Yeaheah.

Speaker 4 (01:14:10):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (01:14:10):
The point is that if you kill absolutely everyone, you
will be safe. This is why game of all this.

Speaker 1 (01:14:17):
Yeah, well that's why you know. I'm glad that we
finally have a movie coming out about my personal hero,
Robert Oppenheimer. I think the real tragedy of Oppenheimer is
that we stopped at like twelve or thirteen thousand nuclear weapons, right,
we need one for every person on every if everyone
has a nuke, Like, look at how peaceful relations between
the US and the Soviet Union State because of all

(01:14:38):
the nukes. If we each have a nuke, right, everything's fine.

Speaker 3 (01:14:43):
Yes, peace through proliferation, just like Ronnie said, Just like
Ronnie said.

Speaker 1 (01:14:48):
Anyway, Sarah got anything to plug?

Speaker 3 (01:14:54):
I have a podcast called You Wrong About It's also
very much about Bastards. If if you like this show,
I'm not going to tell you that you will like
my show. You could like my show, but I don't know.
I won't tell you what to do, but that's my show.
I have a feelings podcast about movies called You Are
Good and I want to plug. The Lloyd Center Ice

(01:15:20):
Rink in Portland, Oregon. There is talk of it being demolished.
Don't let it happen. Go skating with your friends.

Speaker 1 (01:15:27):
Protect the Lloyd Center Ice Rink. But again, if you're
in that parking lot, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:15:32):
All bets are off.

Speaker 1 (01:15:33):
You better roll in with an armored vehicle. Good stuff,
all right. That's the episode.

Speaker 3 (01:15:42):
Bye Bye.

Speaker 4 (01:15:45):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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