November 19, 2025 • 36 mins
If it feels like you’re getting more scammy texts in the past few years, you’re not imagining it. Scam texts have exploded since 2020, and the operation behind them has become a massively lucrative industry. Dexter talks to Eric Priezkalns, a self-proclaimed ‘troublemaker’ in the telecommunications world and founder of the website Commsrisk, about the new technology that’s making scam texts easier than ever, what some of the weirder, long-game schemes are after, who’s behind these operations, and if there’s anything we can do to stop them.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read:
- Eric’s website Commsrisk: https://commsrisk.com/
- Eric’s article on Huang, the boy sold to a Myanmar scam compound: https://commsrisk.com/17-year-old-chinese-girl-accused-of-selling-boyfriend-into-myanmar-scam-compound-slavery/
- How to turn off 2g for android: https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/cellular-security/toggle-2g
Listen + Watch:
- Labi Siffre - Bless the Telephone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpy2O6fYiTk
- A Tribe Called Quest - Skypager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYc50S23pQY
- kill switch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8oh6zDRg1zgHkyOfikoeQS7cafAytstv&si=zrCE7MYWVBgmpWqi
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Let me read you the last text that guy, great
opportunity up ahead. A stock is about to go up
sixty percent. Would you like a trading signal? Here's another
one that I got earlier. Hi, Jennifer, what's the news?
That's all it says. I get these all the time.
You probably do too, maybe even call you Jennifer. And
it seems no matter what I do, these things keep
(00:30):
coming in. So scams themselves aren't new, but technology is
definitely adding to it.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
What's changed is that now people are using computers to
do the communications, to create the communications, where previously they
would have literally had to press buttons on the phone.
It opens up the floodgates in terms of the volume
of messages that you can create, on the numbers of
(01:00):
people that you can hurt around the world.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Eric Prescons has been in a telecommunications business for a
long time. He's worked at T Mobile, at Sky, at WorldCom,
and that's just some of the places. In two thousand
and six, you founded a site called Comm's Risk, and
he left the Corporate World. Comm's Risk reports on the
telecom industry and specifically the crimes that are associated with it,
including the influx of scam texts, He says it. Scams
(01:25):
via text have risen over the last decade as technology
has made them easier to send on mass, and.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Then you had the pandemic and criminalists couldn't commit some
of the crimes that pretty musly committed before, So that
became an accelerant for those changes.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
If it feels like you're getting more scam text these days,
it's not just your imagination. According to consumer reports, scam
texts have increased by fifty percent in the last year alone,
and they're not just increasing in number, they're getting a
lot more convincing.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
The sophistication of now the criminal patents we're seeing is
a lot more elaborate than they were in the past.
This is a very rapid evolution we're seeing now where
we've gone from machines that make very very simple, repetitive
scam communications so now far more subtle patterns that may
not be so easy to identify.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Talking to Eric was an opportunity to get into the
world of text scams, how they're being sent, who's behind them,
and if there's anything you can do to stab them.
Just as a short answer to that last one, yes,
we probably could start scam text but it's a lot
more complicated than it sounds.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Sometimes our use on the triviality of scam an organized crime.
Oh you've got an annoying message. Oh I got a
phone call. I didn't like the phone call. We're not
seeing the bigger picture of how this is having an
impact on people's lives. That's become almost unimaginable.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, this is kill switch. I'm
Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
I'm sharing. I'm sharing Goodbye.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
When I say scam text, you probably know exactly what
I'm talking about. These are things like fake recruiter messages,
fake delivery messages, wrong number texts. Some of these are
obviously scams because they come from weird email addresses or
use weird characters and place of letters. These are all
workarounds that scammers are found to bypass some of the
security measures that telephone companies are put in place, but
(04:11):
some of the newer methods that scammers are using or
getting harder and harder to detect by the telephone networks
and by us. One that's getting really popular around the
world is called a simbox.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Think of them as phones, but with one hundred sim
cards or two hundred SIM cards in them, so instead
of like a phone making one call or sending out
one message at a time, it can do two hundred
things at once.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
There's nothing nefarious about the basic technology behind these symboxes.
I mean, think of a phone with a dual SIM feature.
If you're in the middle of nowhere and the first
phone network dies, you can just switch over to the
other network. It's not that easy to do normally, but
if you have two simcards, one from your primary network
and one for your backup network, it's really easy to do.
So just imagine that would say dozens of SIM cards
(04:57):
or hundreds, and now you have the basic idea for
a symbox. From here, you can combine multiple symboxes to
make what people call a SIM fharm and that can
send out millions of messages per minute.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
In New York, three hundred of these things were found
by the US Secret Service recently.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
This was back in September, and we still don't know
a whole lot about this operation. What we do know
is what the Secret Service has told us, and they
reported that they uncovered a massive symbox operation in New York.
Three hundred symboxes containing a total of one hundred thousand
SIM cards spread across multiple abandoned apartment buildings within a
(05:36):
thirty five mile radius.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
They could as send an AEMS message to every American
within twelve minutes. That's the level of capacity we're talking
about here.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
That's not to say that they did that. We actually
don't know what these scammers were doing. One of the
agents on the investigation said that this operation could have
quote disabled cell phone towers and essentially shut down the
cell phone network in New York City. So it goes
beyond just sending some annoying texts. And again, the Secret
Service isn't really telling us what these scammers are doing.
(06:08):
But if we look at some other cases, we might
find some hits.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
In Latvia, two hundred of these things were found, and
it's almost certainly the case that what happened in New
York was the same as what happened in Latvia. What
were they used for distributing child pornography extortion? But one
of the big things that they were being used for
was to receive one SMS message. Why would you want
(06:37):
to receive one SMS message? Well, if you're setting up
a WhatsApp account. It gets tied to a phone number.
So if you're creating all other spam scam accounts on WhatsApp,
you need somebody to provide the phone numbers to create
the accounts. They're using the SIM maybe only once then
throwing it away because they have the phone number. The
(06:59):
WhatsApp account gets validated because it received the one time
password by SMS to create the account, right, and then
it doesn't matter if even the telco blocks that SIM
card because the WhatsApp account exists. So you can create
hundreds of thousands of online accounts, and in the Latvia
(07:20):
they estimated that forty nine million online accounts had been
created by that particular criminal outfit.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Eric points out that scam messages are coming to us
in all different ways, not just through SMS messages, but
through WhatsApp, through Signal, and all kinds of different messaging apps.
Telecom companies can try to detect suspicious activity and block
certain numbers, but scammers are usually a step ahead, and
the latest technique bypasses the telephone companies completely. It's called
(07:49):
an SMS blaster.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
That's a device that essentially does the same thing that
the radio antenna on a mobile phone network does. When
you connect to your mobile phone to the network. The
difference is it's not a legitimate part of the network,
so that's why they're called sometimes fake based stations, false
space stations, rogue based stations. When you're normally walking around
(08:15):
the city, walking around a town, or driving around, you're
going to be transferred from one base station to another
base station on your same provider's network, whichever is the
strongest signal. These rogue based stations will have the strongest
signal for people in their specific location. It's like being
connected to a network, except of course, now the base
(08:36):
station is a rogue one. It can fire lots of
messages at you, and that's typically how they're used.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
These SMS blasters can connect to your phone without you noticing,
and once it's connected, it can send you messages and
because it's directly connected to you, the telecom company has
no ability to black it. An SMS blaster can also
spoof the cinder ID to look like, say, for example,
a legitimate text from your base So what's the stop
in SMS blaster from just spamming everyone in the country. Well,
(09:06):
they don't have very good range, but that doesn't really
matter because they're portable.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Just the other day, somebody had been using one of
these SMS blasters on the London Underground, the capital's subway system,
to fire out lots and lots of scam SMS messages
to people as they're standing on the platform or traveling
through the trains through the underground. Really in Auckland, for example,
(09:33):
there was a student. He was paid four hundred dollars
a day to drive around one of these devices sending
scam SMS messages to whoever was in range. And then
the point of the message is it includes a hyperlink
that points towards a phishing website that impersonates something that
looks like for legitimate business or government function.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
The technology behind SMS blasters, again was not developed specifically
for scamming. It's just been co opted by the scammers.
It's actually similar to the technology behind what's known as stingrays.
You might have heard about stingrays recently. Those are the
devices that police sometimes use to capture data from people
at protests. But instead of taking data off your phone
(10:13):
for surveillance, the SMS blasters push data on your phone
in the form of very convincing scam texts.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
We're not talking about a completely new, separate technology that
was the only creates for criminals. We're talking about radio
technology for communications networks, and it's just being adapted slightly
tweaked for a different kind of view.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
So in a way, these almost sound kind of primitive.
I mean, it's really just like brute forcing its way
into your phones. But you got to drive up pretty close.
What is the range of these things is like a
couple of miles or something like that.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
It varies. Some of them are less, so you could
have a handheld device that has only a few hundred yards.
The advantage of that, of course, much more discrete, much
easier to carry around. There's been cases where people have
carried them around in backpacks through show malls, for example.
Or you might have a larger device with a larger
range than heavier, so you'll have to put it in
the back of the car or somewhere like that. In
(11:08):
one case in Bangkok, there was said to be a
particularly powerful device that had a range of three kilometers
and was able to send something in the order of
one hundred thousand SMS messages per hour. Wow, but that's
not necessarily a good thing. In terms of being a criminal,
because you don't want to be caught. And that's why
I would argue the London underground example I talked about,
(11:29):
that's like almost the perfect example because it's about how
many people you have passing by. You don't necessarily need
to have.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
A huge range. So that's in background on how you're
getting these texts. It's kind of wild to think that
when you get one of these, it could just be
some random person with a backpack across the street. So
who are these people and what do they actually want?
That's where it starts to get heavy, and that's after
the break. I want to walk through a sample scam
(12:06):
text and if you could tell me what's going on here?
What are they trying to do? So I'm just going
to read you one here. Hi. I'm Caroline from the
We Work Remotely human resources team. We recently saw your
excellent background would like to introduce you to a remote,
high paying job opportunity. The work is so easy you
can do it from home. You'll work about sixty minutes
a day and will provide you with free training. Daily
(12:26):
pay ranges from three hundred to seven hundred. If you're interested,
please contact us via WhatsApp or telegram. What's the endgame here?
Speaker 2 (12:35):
There's a couple of things going on. The always bear
in mind that criminal is just looking for potential victims.
Some people are more suggestible, some people are more open
to suggestion, and so just the very fact that you
respond means that you now a better target for all
sorts of scams. So there doesn't have to necessarily be
(12:56):
a linear relationship between the content of the message and
the scam. But in that case, the linear scam would
typically be they've got you on the hook. They're gonna
convince you that you're gonna make a lot of money
down the line, and maybe you have to pay a
fee in order to have your application processed or something
like that. So they're going to hook you in for
(13:16):
spending some money in order to then get the money
that's going to be promised to you later on.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
And maybe if.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
You pay once, then they're gonna make you pay a
second time, because once you've paid once, you really don't
want to have that money wasted by not paying a
second fee. So then you can see how a more
susceptible person gets dragged along until eventually they've realized they've
got to stop, So that would be a very typical
way in which that scam would evolve.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
It's interesting because these scam texts are so diverse, because
another one that I think a lot of people seen
is just a completely random text out of the blue
saying how do you what's going on? Or hey Jennifer,
how are you? And I'm not Jennifer, O my right
now I can say this isn't Jennifer wrong number.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
We tend to call them now in the industry, the
high dad, the hey mom scam, because it's quite often
a term like that, right, so it seems like it's
somebody familiar. You associate it in your mind with somebody
that you know, and that's the start of the process.
But again it's the same sequence there where they're just
looking to see who's going to reply. They just want
(14:24):
to get you into a conversation. And then maybe you
do reply back and you go I'm not your mom,
I'm a man, and they go, well, I'm very sorry, right,
I have the wrong number. But you see, the point
is you've already replied back, You've already engaged with them
on some level, and so can they turn the conversation
around to selling cryptocurrency or something like that. It's all
(14:46):
about that initial engagement. It's also about trying to get
you off maybe the channel of communication that was used
in the beginning, which could be an SMS message, towards
something encrypted, because if it's encrypted, it's much harder for
any technology to be used to monitor the behavior, to
intervene to protect you. So that's another thing that they're
(15:07):
looking do to is just to try and get you
somewhere else. So some scams are very simple, They stop
very quickly and the goal is very clear very early on.
Some is a long game. They just want to hug
you in and they will take you as far as
they possibly can. They're running a lot of scams, these
organized criminals. They'll just find the one that will be
(15:27):
the one that you are most susceptible to.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
So who exactly are these criminals with the time and
patience to play out a long game of this scale.
The world behind this is a lot bigger than whoever
sent you that annoying text.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
When we talk about some of the cyber crimes that
go on in the world today, there's this pattern where
we talk about kids, maybe teenagers, maybe early twenties. They're
learning from each other on discord. They're going to certain
forums and they're showing advice on how to commit crime,
and that's definitely a way in which crime gets propagated.
(16:05):
But to some extent those people are amateurs. Not everybody's
an amateur. So what I think you're seeing is a
degree to which the professionals are teaching each other how
to commit crime. And also they're franchising crime, so they
may provide a criminal service, and the point of the
criminal service is that somebody else will come along and
(16:28):
use the service to commit a more specific crime on
top of it, and that then has a multiplier effect.
Not every criminal needs to understand how a phone network works.
It's capitalism. But in the criminal world, why try to
do everything yourself when you can get very very good
at a layer of crime and then sell your services
(16:51):
to somebody at a different layer.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
This is when you know crime is getting sophisticated when
people specialize in one area to reduce their liability. So
that text about a great crypto deal or even the
random high Jennifer text likely has a lot of people
working on different layers behind it, and it gets pretty
dark pretty quick.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
In Mi and Mah in Cambodia and in Laos, which
are the three countries that have taken a lot of
the scam compounds that used to be based in China
and have become the new homes for scam compounds. It's
estimated that there's about one hundred thousand people working in
scam compounds, and there's a lot of tragic stories about
(17:33):
people being murdered, tortured, hichacked. It's effectively modern day slavery.
We're talking about huge numbers of people being persuaded to
move to a foreign country to work in these ones
with offers of jobs or well paid jobs, well paid
it job. Some people move just because they know they're
going to work for a criminal enterprise and they don't
(17:53):
care other people Hi chacked. I mean, there was a
terrible case that I was reading the other day. Nineteen
year old old Chinese boy was sold into slavery by
a seventeen year old Chinese girl. You know, she had
befriended him, she had become his girlfriend. She had told
him that she had family running businesses in me and Mark.
(18:17):
They flew to Thailand. They traveled overland to the border,
and when they arrived at the border, there's a bunch
of goons to grab a hold of him. She went
and had a ten day holiday in Thailand, and she
had pocketed her I think it was something in the
order of fifteen thousand dollars she'd got paid for selling him,
selling him to slavery. And to be fair to the
(18:39):
Chinese government, who are alive to this problem, they are
now prosecuting her. She returned to China and they're going
to do something about her. But that poor boy was
working sixteen twenty hour shifts in the scam compound in
Myanmark for four months until his friends and family were
able to pull together a ransom of five thousand dollars
(19:01):
to get him out. In the meantime, the poor lad
was beaten, beaten because he's not meeting his targets. That
poor Ladders lost some of his hearing as a result
of the beating. And that's not even by far the
worst case that I could recount to you. I mean,
there are some absolutely appalling stories. The only good thing
you can say about AI is that if AI gets
(19:22):
so good that you don't need to make a human
being a slave to do it anymore, at least we
won't have the problem with the human trafficking In a way,
I look forward to that because the level of human
misery that's occurring in some places is it's quite upsetting.
It's quite upsetting when you.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Read the stories. A lot of the scam text that
you get about stocks or selling crypto, or job recruiting
or the random high mom oops, wrong number, those kind
of texts, the ones that are after the long game,
these likely originate from these scam compounds. This kind of
scam has exploded since twenty twenty. Why well, there is
(20:01):
a pretty simple theory behind it. Chinese organized criminals had
built casinos that were sitting empty during the pandemic, and
they needed something to do with the empty buildings, so
they converted them into scam compounds. So if you engage
with one of those scam texts, there's a good chance
of the person you'll end up talking to is in
one of those buildings being watched by guards in case
(20:21):
they try to escape.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I'm the criminal. I will hook you into talking to
somebody who's gonna appear like a beautiful woman. I'm will
to talking to somebody who's gonna try and sell your cryptocouncy.
So what do I do, I send you a message
and then oh, whoops, it was the wrong number. I'm sorry,
I didn't mean to message you right. That message was
an automated message. The follow up message was an automated message.
(20:47):
They're sat in the scam compound waiting to see if
you're the kind of person who's gonna respond, who's gonna
get into a conversation. And that's why they employ all
these people in these scam compounds, just to haveversations with people,
weeding through the population to find who are the ones
who can be exploited, who will be open to this idea,
(21:10):
that idea. Maybe your weakness is a pretty girl. You
don't know that you're messaging some guy from Manila, but
you're going to be seeing a picture of a beautiful woman.
They'll have a beautiful woman in the compound who will
be brought out to do the live video conversation when
it's needed. The rest of the time, they're just working,
(21:31):
you working, you working.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
This is the background of all this stuff. On the
receiving end, we just see an annoying text, but the
operation behind each message can be massive. There's a technology
on the ground, and then there's the buildings full of
forced laborers. This hurts a lot of people, but it
continues because it's a viable business. How many people have
to actually answer and get hooked into this thing for
(21:55):
it to make money for you?
Speaker 2 (21:56):
It will depend on the scam. If I'm running a
scam compound and i have somebody who's my prisoner who
has to sit at like a screen and then cheat
you over the course of six months, well I'm going
to need a much bigger amount of money from you
to make it worthwhile to do it. So it does
very a lot depending upon the scam. But what I
would say is all the evidence shows that these scams
(22:21):
are so incredibly lucrative, whether at the low end or
at the high end. This thing is just ramping up
and up and up. They're just taking the accumulated profits
that they're generating from crime reinvesting it in more crime.
And the things that we're doing to chip away to
we're not keeping pace. We're falling further and further behind.
So their margins, their profits are getting higher and higher
(22:43):
and higher, and we are not at all sophisticated and
doing anything about tackling it.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
So far, authorities haven't been able to stop these scams
from continuing to pop up. But is there anything that
we can do to stop these scam texts? That's after
the break. When it comes to stopping scam text the
(23:10):
advice you usually hear is learning how to spot them,
watch out from misspellings or weird formatting in the text,
don't click links if you don't know the sinder, maybe
don't reply. We also hear that certain demographics are more
vulnerable and that we need to teach them to be
more savvy. But all of this is kind of missing
the bigger picture.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
It's been argued that all the people are more vulnerable
to scams, but then there's also some conflicting data that
says actually, young people spend a lot more time on
the phone, they're a lot more casual, shall we say,
about what they do. They think of themselves as savvy,
so they fall for scams. And I think, really what
(23:48):
we should be learning from the criminals is however much
you train people, how much you educate people to be
scam aware to improve the whether it's still be less
likelyful for it. Those criminals, they're gaining a lot of
data about what works in terms of mental tricks, psychological ploys, manipulations,
(24:09):
Their masters are it, and they have an enormous amount
of data about what actually works in practice, so they're
always getting better and better and better. I'm not a psychologist,
but from what I understand about the topic, suggestibility is
not well correlated to intelligence, and that's what the criminals
(24:29):
are looking for. Are you suggestible in some ways? Can
they plant an idea that you will act upon? Can
they hook you with something that tempts you and motivates
you in a certain way? And they're looking for your
weakness and different people will have different weaknesses.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
I mean, I think this is the really difficult thing
here is because I think there are probably some people
who started listening to this who are thinking this is
going to be great. Dexter got an expert here who's
going to give me the top three tips for that
far and victim to a scam. And it doesn't sound
like you want to give that to me.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
I mean, look, I could do that, and I could
say things like don't let your phone get downgraded to
a two G network because that's typical for the format
for SMS blasters, And I could say look for spelling
errors in the message, and you know, if there's a
high pull link, if it's a link that's been shortened,
be suspicious or stuff like that. You know, if someone
(25:23):
makes a call, don't receive the call, call back to
your bank rather than it's all that's all good stuff,
that's all common sense stuff. I'm not going to argue
that you shouldn't do that, but it's not enough. It's
never going to be enough. The rate of acceleration in
criminal sophistication. To try to solve the problem like that
is fundamentally the wrong method.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
So there is one small thing that you may be
able to do. If you have an Android phone, assuming
it's relatively recent, you can block those SMS blasters from
even being able to connect to your phone at all.
It's pretty simple. You just disabled two G switch in
your settings to do it. I put a link in
the show notes to a guide that walks you through it,
and trust me, its very simple. It takes like thirty seconds.
(26:08):
For iPhones. Unfortunately, you're kind of stuck. You can't turn
off two G unless you use lockdown mode, which would
also limit other functions in your phone that you probably
want to keep on other than that. Again, base rule.
If you get a text with a link in it,
don't click it, even if it looks legit, even if
it's a text from your bank or your doctor, call
(26:28):
them and confirm that it is actually from them. I
know it's annoying, but it's better safe than sorry. But again,
all these things, even the features that let you report scams,
that's treating the symptom. If we really want to stop
these scams, the solution probably isn't in your phone settings.
It's in the phone companies.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
The correct method is for the businesses to look at
who they do business squit, who's buying the SIM college,
who's making the book communications these criminals. I had one
hundred thousand SIM cards in New York. Now that's a
lot of SIM cards. A phone network should be saying,
where have all our SIM card's gone? Well, all these
(27:11):
strange customers on a network, why are they not behaving
like a normal person. Let me give you an example
about normal and abnormal behavior that a network should pick
up on. When you carry your phone around, When you
go around, you move, you move from place to place.
While simbox doesn't move. When it's in a New York apartment,
it's sat there, not moving at all. That should be
(27:32):
a red flashing warning like, why have I got such
a peculiar customer? Why have I got so many peculiar
customers are in the same place, never moving. Perhaps they
only make outbound communication. That would be weird because of
normal person sends and receives. There should be lots of
(27:54):
flashing warning lights going off in those telcoasts.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
I mean, this really reminds me of also of the
conversation about detecting AI right, which is to say, there
was a point at which you could give people tips
and you'd tell them, hey, look for too many fingers
on one hand. And I remember, and I was saying
this back here on the same show back then. You
were fooling yourself if you think that you were gonna
(28:18):
be able to use those same tricks six months from now.
And sure enough, you look at AI generated pictures, AI
generated videos, the hands look perfect. The idea that we
can just educate the public and that will solve everything.
It sounds like bringing a knife to a nuke fight,
you know, pardon the American violent imagery here, but it
(28:39):
just seems like it's not functional.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
So true. I mean, for myself personal experience, a few
months ago, I received my first ever spam call from
an AI, and I think I'm a pretty savvy guy
about this kind of stuff. And I listened to the
spam AI talked to me, and I had to ask
the question, are you an AI? Because it was not obvious. Now, thankfully,
(29:09):
that particular spam AI did honestly answer the question. Yes,
I am an artificial intelligence because it had been programmed
that way. But I had to think about it. I
had to ask the question. But what really upset me
about that interaction was I continued my conversation with the AI,
not trying to buy the thing it wanted to sell me,
(29:29):
but actually trying to investigate learn what was happening. It
claimed it received my phone number from one of the
world's biggest telecoms industry associations, a conference that I had
attended shortly beforehand, where I have to hand over my
phone number in order to register and participate. What does
(29:51):
that say about our attitude towards data? That call was illegal.
It was illegal because my number is on the list
in the UK. There's essentially you're not allowed to call
me for marketing purposes. And yet one of the world's
biggest telecoms associations has handed over that data to another company,
(30:12):
doesn't bother to check the laws. Just made the spam
call because they're going to make some money from me today.
And that's where the rotten heart of it lies. In
the end, the problem we're trying to solve this is
that a phone company makes money for carrying calls, for
(30:32):
transmitting messages, for doing the communications. They don't make money
for blocking things. If all those calls got blocked, if
all those messages got blocked, if all those bad actors
were taking out the ecosystem, revenues would go down. Why
would you go out of your way to find crime
if your job is to increase the amount of traffic
(30:55):
on your network, if your job is to increase the
revenues of that network. That's the conflict of interest, that's
the fundamental issue here. They may not be actively choosing
to enable crime, but they'll also not get any reason
to work harder to prevent crime. There's a lot of
money being made off the back of scams. Ultimately, the
(31:21):
result is corrosive for society. You don't trust the call
coming into your phone, you don't trust the messages. I
don't answer phone calls anymore. I use other modes of
communication now, And that's sad that when somebody maybe really
does want to speak to me on the phone, that
I'm rejecting them. But it's also bad for society. The
(31:42):
phone network was a beautiful thing. It was a thing
where you could pick up a phone and with ninety
nine point nine nine percent probability you could dial a
number to anywhere in the world and it would connect.
And now people don't want to pick up the phone
at the other end, what does that say about how
we've gone backwards spending terms of how we communicate with
(32:03):
each other.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
I mean, you're not wrong, I'm thinking of Actually, there's
a text thread that I got added to that I
just assumed was spam, and people are making plans for
having dinner here in LA and I'm thinking, man, they're
getting sophisticated. Come to find out these were actually people
A friend had added me into a group. I just
(32:25):
wasn't familiar with everybody. After the event, they sent pictures
in the thread it looked like a good time. I
didn't respond once because I thought it was a scam.
Now I got like ten people I got to apologize
to because they think I'm ignoring them. Because I'm scared
to answer text.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
And here's the thing, right, it's about what we comes
to the normal. There was a time your phone you
could trust that people are basically only people. You know,
people want to communicate you. Someone with a genuine reason
to call you would call you. And that was your
attitude towards your phone. Right, what's your attitude towards email.
It's not the same, is it. No, your email is full.
(33:01):
You've got a junk folder. There's lots of crap in
your junk folder. Maybe sometimes a good message gets into
your junk folder. Maybe you send a message and you're
annoyed it didn't get through to someone else because it
ended up in their junk folder.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
M hm.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
We are transferring from a scenario where essentially your phone
voice communications, message communications, you generally would trust them, to
the scenario like email. It's gonna be like that in future.
And yeah, we're gonna use technology, and yeah we're gonna
weed it out and we're gonna get with some of
the bad stuff. But is that the level that we
now want to be communicating at that level of trust
(33:36):
and confidence. That's a step back.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah, And that's.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Sadly the way we're going about solving problem because a
lot of it is that we're trying to solve the
problem in the way that the problem was solved for email. Email.
This email, it's not something where I am in an
emergency and I want to speak to you, I send.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
You an email.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
When I'm in an emergency and I want to speak
to you, I want to call you.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah, So to start.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Turning that kind of communication into level of email, we're
losing something in society that makes me shock.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
It makes me shock, you know. A little after we
recorded this conversation, a friend of mine sent me a
song that I had not heard in a long time.
It's this really simple and beautiful song by this guy
named labby Siffrey, and apparently it's been going viral recently.
I can't play it here, you know, copyright all that
sort of thing, but I can read you part of
(34:25):
the lyrics. It's strange how a phone call can change
your day and take you away from the feeling of
being alone. Blessed the Telephone, and that's the name of
the song, Blessed the Telephone, which is something I think
you could still say. Sincerely in nineteen seventy one, when
it's recorded, and then I think to twenty years later,
to nineteen ninety one when Tribe call Quest put out
(34:47):
a song called Skypager, which is seriously just a song
about how cool it is to have a device that
lets people contact you when you're outside. At some point,
the ability to contact someone instantly was this future or
even magical thing. I'm not that young, but I guess
I'm not old enough to really remember that time period
because by the time I was really using my own
(35:09):
phone and especially using email, it was already something that
we saw as potentially suspicious. And now forget about it.
When's the last time you heard someone say that they
even like their phone. Anyway, we'll leave the links to
those songs and the show notes if you want to
check that out. Thank you for listening to another episode
(35:30):
kill Switch. If you want to talk to us, you
could email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC,
or we're also on Instagram at kill Switch Pod, and
you know, please think about leaving us a review. It
helps other people find the show, which in turn helps
us keep doing our thing. And once you've done that,
you know we're also on YouTube, so if you want
to watch this interview rather than just listen to it.
(35:52):
There you go. The link for that and everything else
again is in the show notes. Kill Switch is hosted
by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produce by Sheen Ozaki, darl
Of Potts and Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by
me and Kyle Murdoch and Kyle also mixed the show
from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin, Mcgueshatikadur and
(36:12):
Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville
and Nikki E. Tor Catch on the next one, Goodbye,
Let me read you the last text that guy, great
opportunity up ahead. A stock is about to go up
sixty percent. Would you like a trading signal? Here's another
one that I got earlier. Hi, Jennifer, what's the news?
That's all it says. I get these all the time.
You probably do too, maybe even call you Jennifer. And
it seems no matter what I do, these things keep
(00:30):
coming in. So scams themselves aren't new, but technology is
definitely adding to it.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
What's changed is that now people are using computers to
do the communications, to create the communications, where previously they
would have literally had to press buttons on the phone.
It opens up the floodgates in terms of the volume
of messages that you can create, on the numbers of
(01:00):
people that you can hurt around the world.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Eric Prescons has been in a telecommunications business for a
long time. He's worked at T Mobile, at Sky, at WorldCom,
and that's just some of the places. In two thousand
and six, you founded a site called Comm's Risk, and
he left the Corporate World. Comm's Risk reports on the
telecom industry and specifically the crimes that are associated with it,
including the influx of scam texts, He says it. Scams
(01:25):
via text have risen over the last decade as technology
has made them easier to send on mass, and.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Then you had the pandemic and criminalists couldn't commit some
of the crimes that pretty musly committed before, So that
became an accelerant for those changes.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
If it feels like you're getting more scam text these days,
it's not just your imagination. According to consumer reports, scam
texts have increased by fifty percent in the last year alone,
and they're not just increasing in number, they're getting a
lot more convincing.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
The sophistication of now the criminal patents we're seeing is
a lot more elaborate than they were in the past.
This is a very rapid evolution we're seeing now where
we've gone from machines that make very very simple, repetitive
scam communications so now far more subtle patterns that may
not be so easy to identify.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Talking to Eric was an opportunity to get into the
world of text scams, how they're being sent, who's behind them,
and if there's anything you can do to stab them.
Just as a short answer to that last one, yes,
we probably could start scam text but it's a lot
more complicated than it sounds.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Sometimes our use on the triviality of scam an organized crime.
Oh you've got an annoying message. Oh I got a
phone call. I didn't like the phone call. We're not
seeing the bigger picture of how this is having an
impact on people's lives. That's become almost unimaginable.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, this is kill switch. I'm
Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
I'm sharing. I'm sharing Goodbye.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
When I say scam text, you probably know exactly what
I'm talking about. These are things like fake recruiter messages,
fake delivery messages, wrong number texts. Some of these are
obviously scams because they come from weird email addresses or
use weird characters and place of letters. These are all
workarounds that scammers are found to bypass some of the
security measures that telephone companies are put in place, but
(04:11):
some of the newer methods that scammers are using or
getting harder and harder to detect by the telephone networks
and by us. One that's getting really popular around the
world is called a simbox.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Think of them as phones, but with one hundred sim
cards or two hundred SIM cards in them, so instead
of like a phone making one call or sending out
one message at a time, it can do two hundred
things at once.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
There's nothing nefarious about the basic technology behind these symboxes.
I mean, think of a phone with a dual SIM feature.
If you're in the middle of nowhere and the first
phone network dies, you can just switch over to the
other network. It's not that easy to do normally, but
if you have two simcards, one from your primary network
and one for your backup network, it's really easy to do.
So just imagine that would say dozens of SIM cards
(04:57):
or hundreds, and now you have the basic idea for
a symbox. From here, you can combine multiple symboxes to
make what people call a SIM fharm and that can
send out millions of messages per minute.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
In New York, three hundred of these things were found
by the US Secret Service recently.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
This was back in September, and we still don't know
a whole lot about this operation. What we do know
is what the Secret Service has told us, and they
reported that they uncovered a massive symbox operation in New York.
Three hundred symboxes containing a total of one hundred thousand
SIM cards spread across multiple abandoned apartment buildings within a
(05:36):
thirty five mile radius.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
They could as send an AEMS message to every American
within twelve minutes. That's the level of capacity we're talking
about here.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
That's not to say that they did that. We actually
don't know what these scammers were doing. One of the
agents on the investigation said that this operation could have
quote disabled cell phone towers and essentially shut down the
cell phone network in New York City. So it goes
beyond just sending some annoying texts. And again, the Secret
Service isn't really telling us what these scammers are doing.
(06:08):
But if we look at some other cases, we might
find some hits.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
In Latvia, two hundred of these things were found, and
it's almost certainly the case that what happened in New
York was the same as what happened in Latvia. What
were they used for distributing child pornography extortion? But one
of the big things that they were being used for
was to receive one SMS message. Why would you want
(06:37):
to receive one SMS message? Well, if you're setting up
a WhatsApp account. It gets tied to a phone number.
So if you're creating all other spam scam accounts on WhatsApp,
you need somebody to provide the phone numbers to create
the accounts. They're using the SIM maybe only once then
throwing it away because they have the phone number. The
(06:59):
WhatsApp account gets validated because it received the one time
password by SMS to create the account, right, and then
it doesn't matter if even the telco blocks that SIM
card because the WhatsApp account exists. So you can create
hundreds of thousands of online accounts, and in the Latvia
(07:20):
they estimated that forty nine million online accounts had been
created by that particular criminal outfit.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Eric points out that scam messages are coming to us
in all different ways, not just through SMS messages, but
through WhatsApp, through Signal, and all kinds of different messaging apps.
Telecom companies can try to detect suspicious activity and block
certain numbers, but scammers are usually a step ahead, and
the latest technique bypasses the telephone companies completely. It's called
(07:49):
an SMS blaster.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
That's a device that essentially does the same thing that
the radio antenna on a mobile phone network does. When
you connect to your mobile phone to the network. The
difference is it's not a legitimate part of the network,
so that's why they're called sometimes fake based stations, false
space stations, rogue based stations. When you're normally walking around
(08:15):
the city, walking around a town, or driving around, you're
going to be transferred from one base station to another
base station on your same provider's network, whichever is the
strongest signal. These rogue based stations will have the strongest
signal for people in their specific location. It's like being
connected to a network, except of course, now the base
(08:36):
station is a rogue one. It can fire lots of
messages at you, and that's typically how they're used.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
These SMS blasters can connect to your phone without you noticing,
and once it's connected, it can send you messages and
because it's directly connected to you, the telecom company has
no ability to black it. An SMS blaster can also
spoof the cinder ID to look like, say, for example,
a legitimate text from your base So what's the stop
in SMS blaster from just spamming everyone in the country. Well,
(09:06):
they don't have very good range, but that doesn't really
matter because they're portable.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Just the other day, somebody had been using one of
these SMS blasters on the London Underground, the capital's subway system,
to fire out lots and lots of scam SMS messages
to people as they're standing on the platform or traveling
through the trains through the underground. Really in Auckland, for example,
(09:33):
there was a student. He was paid four hundred dollars
a day to drive around one of these devices sending
scam SMS messages to whoever was in range. And then
the point of the message is it includes a hyperlink
that points towards a phishing website that impersonates something that
looks like for legitimate business or government function.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
The technology behind SMS blasters, again was not developed specifically
for scamming. It's just been co opted by the scammers.
It's actually similar to the technology behind what's known as stingrays.
You might have heard about stingrays recently. Those are the
devices that police sometimes use to capture data from people
at protests. But instead of taking data off your phone
(10:13):
for surveillance, the SMS blasters push data on your phone
in the form of very convincing scam texts.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
We're not talking about a completely new, separate technology that
was the only creates for criminals. We're talking about radio
technology for communications networks, and it's just being adapted slightly
tweaked for a different kind of view.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
So in a way, these almost sound kind of primitive.
I mean, it's really just like brute forcing its way
into your phones. But you got to drive up pretty close.
What is the range of these things is like a
couple of miles or something like that.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
It varies. Some of them are less, so you could
have a handheld device that has only a few hundred yards.
The advantage of that, of course, much more discrete, much
easier to carry around. There's been cases where people have
carried them around in backpacks through show malls, for example.
Or you might have a larger device with a larger
range than heavier, so you'll have to put it in
the back of the car or somewhere like that. In
(11:08):
one case in Bangkok, there was said to be a
particularly powerful device that had a range of three kilometers
and was able to send something in the order of
one hundred thousand SMS messages per hour. Wow, but that's
not necessarily a good thing. In terms of being a criminal,
because you don't want to be caught. And that's why
I would argue the London underground example I talked about,
(11:29):
that's like almost the perfect example because it's about how
many people you have passing by. You don't necessarily need
to have.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
A huge range. So that's in background on how you're
getting these texts. It's kind of wild to think that
when you get one of these, it could just be
some random person with a backpack across the street. So
who are these people and what do they actually want?
That's where it starts to get heavy, and that's after
the break. I want to walk through a sample scam
(12:06):
text and if you could tell me what's going on here?
What are they trying to do? So I'm just going
to read you one here. Hi. I'm Caroline from the
We Work Remotely human resources team. We recently saw your
excellent background would like to introduce you to a remote,
high paying job opportunity. The work is so easy you
can do it from home. You'll work about sixty minutes
a day and will provide you with free training. Daily
(12:26):
pay ranges from three hundred to seven hundred. If you're interested,
please contact us via WhatsApp or telegram. What's the endgame here?
Speaker 2 (12:35):
There's a couple of things going on. The always bear
in mind that criminal is just looking for potential victims.
Some people are more suggestible, some people are more open
to suggestion, and so just the very fact that you
respond means that you now a better target for all
sorts of scams. So there doesn't have to necessarily be
(12:56):
a linear relationship between the content of the message and
the scam. But in that case, the linear scam would
typically be they've got you on the hook. They're gonna
convince you that you're gonna make a lot of money
down the line, and maybe you have to pay a
fee in order to have your application processed or something
like that. So they're going to hook you in for
(13:16):
spending some money in order to then get the money
that's going to be promised to you later on.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
And maybe if.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
You pay once, then they're gonna make you pay a
second time, because once you've paid once, you really don't
want to have that money wasted by not paying a
second fee. So then you can see how a more
susceptible person gets dragged along until eventually they've realized they've
got to stop, So that would be a very typical
way in which that scam would evolve.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
It's interesting because these scam texts are so diverse, because
another one that I think a lot of people seen
is just a completely random text out of the blue
saying how do you what's going on? Or hey Jennifer,
how are you? And I'm not Jennifer, O my right
now I can say this isn't Jennifer wrong number.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
We tend to call them now in the industry, the
high dad, the hey mom scam, because it's quite often
a term like that, right, so it seems like it's
somebody familiar. You associate it in your mind with somebody
that you know, and that's the start of the process.
But again it's the same sequence there where they're just
looking to see who's going to reply. They just want
(14:24):
to get you into a conversation. And then maybe you
do reply back and you go I'm not your mom,
I'm a man, and they go, well, I'm very sorry, right,
I have the wrong number. But you see, the point
is you've already replied back, You've already engaged with them
on some level, and so can they turn the conversation
around to selling cryptocurrency or something like that. It's all
(14:46):
about that initial engagement. It's also about trying to get
you off maybe the channel of communication that was used
in the beginning, which could be an SMS message, towards
something encrypted, because if it's encrypted, it's much harder for
any technology to be used to monitor the behavior, to
intervene to protect you. So that's another thing that they're
(15:07):
looking do to is just to try and get you
somewhere else. So some scams are very simple, They stop
very quickly and the goal is very clear very early on.
Some is a long game. They just want to hug
you in and they will take you as far as
they possibly can. They're running a lot of scams, these
organized criminals. They'll just find the one that will be
(15:27):
the one that you are most susceptible to.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
So who exactly are these criminals with the time and
patience to play out a long game of this scale.
The world behind this is a lot bigger than whoever
sent you that annoying text.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
When we talk about some of the cyber crimes that
go on in the world today, there's this pattern where
we talk about kids, maybe teenagers, maybe early twenties. They're
learning from each other on discord. They're going to certain
forums and they're showing advice on how to commit crime,
and that's definitely a way in which crime gets propagated.
(16:05):
But to some extent those people are amateurs. Not everybody's
an amateur. So what I think you're seeing is a
degree to which the professionals are teaching each other how
to commit crime. And also they're franchising crime, so they
may provide a criminal service, and the point of the
criminal service is that somebody else will come along and
(16:28):
use the service to commit a more specific crime on
top of it, and that then has a multiplier effect.
Not every criminal needs to understand how a phone network works.
It's capitalism. But in the criminal world, why try to
do everything yourself when you can get very very good
at a layer of crime and then sell your services
(16:51):
to somebody at a different layer.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
This is when you know crime is getting sophisticated when
people specialize in one area to reduce their liability. So
that text about a great crypto deal or even the
random high Jennifer text likely has a lot of people
working on different layers behind it, and it gets pretty
dark pretty quick.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
In Mi and Mah in Cambodia and in Laos, which
are the three countries that have taken a lot of
the scam compounds that used to be based in China
and have become the new homes for scam compounds. It's
estimated that there's about one hundred thousand people working in
scam compounds, and there's a lot of tragic stories about
(17:33):
people being murdered, tortured, hichacked. It's effectively modern day slavery.
We're talking about huge numbers of people being persuaded to
move to a foreign country to work in these ones
with offers of jobs or well paid jobs, well paid
it job. Some people move just because they know they're
going to work for a criminal enterprise and they don't
(17:53):
care other people Hi chacked. I mean, there was a
terrible case that I was reading the other day. Nineteen
year old old Chinese boy was sold into slavery by
a seventeen year old Chinese girl. You know, she had
befriended him, she had become his girlfriend. She had told
him that she had family running businesses in me and Mark.
(18:17):
They flew to Thailand. They traveled overland to the border,
and when they arrived at the border, there's a bunch
of goons to grab a hold of him. She went
and had a ten day holiday in Thailand, and she
had pocketed her I think it was something in the
order of fifteen thousand dollars she'd got paid for selling him,
selling him to slavery. And to be fair to the
(18:39):
Chinese government, who are alive to this problem, they are
now prosecuting her. She returned to China and they're going
to do something about her. But that poor boy was
working sixteen twenty hour shifts in the scam compound in
Myanmark for four months until his friends and family were
able to pull together a ransom of five thousand dollars
(19:01):
to get him out. In the meantime, the poor lad
was beaten, beaten because he's not meeting his targets. That
poor Ladders lost some of his hearing as a result
of the beating. And that's not even by far the
worst case that I could recount to you. I mean,
there are some absolutely appalling stories. The only good thing
you can say about AI is that if AI gets
(19:22):
so good that you don't need to make a human
being a slave to do it anymore, at least we
won't have the problem with the human trafficking In a way,
I look forward to that because the level of human
misery that's occurring in some places is it's quite upsetting.
It's quite upsetting when you.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Read the stories. A lot of the scam text that
you get about stocks or selling crypto, or job recruiting
or the random high mom oops, wrong number, those kind
of texts, the ones that are after the long game,
these likely originate from these scam compounds. This kind of
scam has exploded since twenty twenty. Why well, there is
(20:01):
a pretty simple theory behind it. Chinese organized criminals had
built casinos that were sitting empty during the pandemic, and
they needed something to do with the empty buildings, so
they converted them into scam compounds. So if you engage
with one of those scam texts, there's a good chance
of the person you'll end up talking to is in
one of those buildings being watched by guards in case
(20:21):
they try to escape.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I'm the criminal. I will hook you into talking to
somebody who's gonna appear like a beautiful woman. I'm will
to talking to somebody who's gonna try and sell your cryptocouncy.
So what do I do, I send you a message
and then oh, whoops, it was the wrong number. I'm sorry,
I didn't mean to message you right. That message was
an automated message. The follow up message was an automated message.
(20:47):
They're sat in the scam compound waiting to see if
you're the kind of person who's gonna respond, who's gonna
get into a conversation. And that's why they employ all
these people in these scam compounds, just to haveversations with people,
weeding through the population to find who are the ones
who can be exploited, who will be open to this idea,
(21:10):
that idea. Maybe your weakness is a pretty girl. You
don't know that you're messaging some guy from Manila, but
you're going to be seeing a picture of a beautiful woman.
They'll have a beautiful woman in the compound who will
be brought out to do the live video conversation when
it's needed. The rest of the time, they're just working,
(21:31):
you working, you working.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
This is the background of all this stuff. On the
receiving end, we just see an annoying text, but the
operation behind each message can be massive. There's a technology
on the ground, and then there's the buildings full of
forced laborers. This hurts a lot of people, but it
continues because it's a viable business. How many people have
to actually answer and get hooked into this thing for
(21:55):
it to make money for you?
Speaker 2 (21:56):
It will depend on the scam. If I'm running a
scam compound and i have somebody who's my prisoner who
has to sit at like a screen and then cheat
you over the course of six months, well I'm going
to need a much bigger amount of money from you
to make it worthwhile to do it. So it does
very a lot depending upon the scam. But what I
would say is all the evidence shows that these scams
(22:21):
are so incredibly lucrative, whether at the low end or
at the high end. This thing is just ramping up
and up and up. They're just taking the accumulated profits
that they're generating from crime reinvesting it in more crime.
And the things that we're doing to chip away to
we're not keeping pace. We're falling further and further behind.
So their margins, their profits are getting higher and higher
(22:43):
and higher, and we are not at all sophisticated and
doing anything about tackling it.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
So far, authorities haven't been able to stop these scams
from continuing to pop up. But is there anything that
we can do to stop these scam texts? That's after
the break. When it comes to stopping scam text the
(23:10):
advice you usually hear is learning how to spot them,
watch out from misspellings or weird formatting in the text,
don't click links if you don't know the sinder, maybe
don't reply. We also hear that certain demographics are more
vulnerable and that we need to teach them to be
more savvy. But all of this is kind of missing
the bigger picture.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
It's been argued that all the people are more vulnerable
to scams, but then there's also some conflicting data that
says actually, young people spend a lot more time on
the phone, they're a lot more casual, shall we say,
about what they do. They think of themselves as savvy,
so they fall for scams. And I think, really what
(23:48):
we should be learning from the criminals is however much
you train people, how much you educate people to be
scam aware to improve the whether it's still be less
likelyful for it. Those criminals, they're gaining a lot of
data about what works in terms of mental tricks, psychological ploys, manipulations,
(24:09):
Their masters are it, and they have an enormous amount
of data about what actually works in practice, so they're
always getting better and better and better. I'm not a psychologist,
but from what I understand about the topic, suggestibility is
not well correlated to intelligence, and that's what the criminals
(24:29):
are looking for. Are you suggestible in some ways? Can
they plant an idea that you will act upon? Can
they hook you with something that tempts you and motivates
you in a certain way? And they're looking for your
weakness and different people will have different weaknesses.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
I mean, I think this is the really difficult thing
here is because I think there are probably some people
who started listening to this who are thinking this is
going to be great. Dexter got an expert here who's
going to give me the top three tips for that
far and victim to a scam. And it doesn't sound
like you want to give that to me.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
I mean, look, I could do that, and I could
say things like don't let your phone get downgraded to
a two G network because that's typical for the format
for SMS blasters, And I could say look for spelling
errors in the message, and you know, if there's a
high pull link, if it's a link that's been shortened,
be suspicious or stuff like that. You know, if someone
(25:23):
makes a call, don't receive the call, call back to
your bank rather than it's all that's all good stuff,
that's all common sense stuff. I'm not going to argue
that you shouldn't do that, but it's not enough. It's
never going to be enough. The rate of acceleration in
criminal sophistication. To try to solve the problem like that
is fundamentally the wrong method.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
So there is one small thing that you may be
able to do. If you have an Android phone, assuming
it's relatively recent, you can block those SMS blasters from
even being able to connect to your phone at all.
It's pretty simple. You just disabled two G switch in
your settings to do it. I put a link in
the show notes to a guide that walks you through it,
and trust me, its very simple. It takes like thirty seconds.
(26:08):
For iPhones. Unfortunately, you're kind of stuck. You can't turn
off two G unless you use lockdown mode, which would
also limit other functions in your phone that you probably
want to keep on other than that. Again, base rule.
If you get a text with a link in it,
don't click it, even if it looks legit, even if
it's a text from your bank or your doctor, call
(26:28):
them and confirm that it is actually from them. I
know it's annoying, but it's better safe than sorry. But again,
all these things, even the features that let you report scams,
that's treating the symptom. If we really want to stop
these scams, the solution probably isn't in your phone settings.
It's in the phone companies.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
The correct method is for the businesses to look at
who they do business squit, who's buying the SIM college,
who's making the book communications these criminals. I had one
hundred thousand SIM cards in New York. Now that's a
lot of SIM cards. A phone network should be saying,
where have all our SIM card's gone? Well, all these
(27:11):
strange customers on a network, why are they not behaving
like a normal person. Let me give you an example
about normal and abnormal behavior that a network should pick
up on. When you carry your phone around, When you
go around, you move, you move from place to place.
While simbox doesn't move. When it's in a New York apartment,
it's sat there, not moving at all. That should be
(27:32):
a red flashing warning like, why have I got such
a peculiar customer? Why have I got so many peculiar
customers are in the same place, never moving. Perhaps they
only make outbound communication. That would be weird because of
normal person sends and receives. There should be lots of
(27:54):
flashing warning lights going off in those telcoasts.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
I mean, this really reminds me of also of the
conversation about detecting AI right, which is to say, there
was a point at which you could give people tips
and you'd tell them, hey, look for too many fingers
on one hand. And I remember, and I was saying
this back here on the same show back then. You
were fooling yourself if you think that you were gonna
(28:18):
be able to use those same tricks six months from now.
And sure enough, you look at AI generated pictures, AI
generated videos, the hands look perfect. The idea that we
can just educate the public and that will solve everything.
It sounds like bringing a knife to a nuke fight,
you know, pardon the American violent imagery here, but it
(28:39):
just seems like it's not functional.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
So true. I mean, for myself personal experience, a few
months ago, I received my first ever spam call from
an AI, and I think I'm a pretty savvy guy
about this kind of stuff. And I listened to the
spam AI talked to me, and I had to ask
the question, are you an AI? Because it was not obvious. Now, thankfully,
(29:09):
that particular spam AI did honestly answer the question. Yes,
I am an artificial intelligence because it had been programmed
that way. But I had to think about it. I
had to ask the question. But what really upset me
about that interaction was I continued my conversation with the AI,
not trying to buy the thing it wanted to sell me,
(29:29):
but actually trying to investigate learn what was happening. It
claimed it received my phone number from one of the
world's biggest telecoms industry associations, a conference that I had
attended shortly beforehand, where I have to hand over my
phone number in order to register and participate. What does
(29:51):
that say about our attitude towards data? That call was illegal.
It was illegal because my number is on the list
in the UK. There's essentially you're not allowed to call
me for marketing purposes. And yet one of the world's
biggest telecoms associations has handed over that data to another company,
(30:12):
doesn't bother to check the laws. Just made the spam
call because they're going to make some money from me today.
And that's where the rotten heart of it lies. In
the end, the problem we're trying to solve this is
that a phone company makes money for carrying calls, for
(30:32):
transmitting messages, for doing the communications. They don't make money
for blocking things. If all those calls got blocked, if
all those messages got blocked, if all those bad actors
were taking out the ecosystem, revenues would go down. Why
would you go out of your way to find crime
if your job is to increase the amount of traffic
(30:55):
on your network, if your job is to increase the
revenues of that network. That's the conflict of interest, that's
the fundamental issue here. They may not be actively choosing
to enable crime, but they'll also not get any reason
to work harder to prevent crime. There's a lot of
money being made off the back of scams. Ultimately, the
(31:21):
result is corrosive for society. You don't trust the call
coming into your phone, you don't trust the messages. I
don't answer phone calls anymore. I use other modes of
communication now, And that's sad that when somebody maybe really
does want to speak to me on the phone, that
I'm rejecting them. But it's also bad for society. The
(31:42):
phone network was a beautiful thing. It was a thing
where you could pick up a phone and with ninety
nine point nine nine percent probability you could dial a
number to anywhere in the world and it would connect.
And now people don't want to pick up the phone
at the other end, what does that say about how
we've gone backwards spending terms of how we communicate with
(32:03):
each other.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
I mean, you're not wrong, I'm thinking of Actually, there's
a text thread that I got added to that I
just assumed was spam, and people are making plans for
having dinner here in LA and I'm thinking, man, they're
getting sophisticated. Come to find out these were actually people
A friend had added me into a group. I just
(32:25):
wasn't familiar with everybody. After the event, they sent pictures
in the thread it looked like a good time. I
didn't respond once because I thought it was a scam.
Now I got like ten people I got to apologize
to because they think I'm ignoring them. Because I'm scared
to answer text.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
And here's the thing, right, it's about what we comes
to the normal. There was a time your phone you
could trust that people are basically only people. You know,
people want to communicate you. Someone with a genuine reason
to call you would call you. And that was your
attitude towards your phone. Right, what's your attitude towards email.
It's not the same, is it. No, your email is full.
(33:01):
You've got a junk folder. There's lots of crap in
your junk folder. Maybe sometimes a good message gets into
your junk folder. Maybe you send a message and you're
annoyed it didn't get through to someone else because it
ended up in their junk folder.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
M hm.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
We are transferring from a scenario where essentially your phone
voice communications, message communications, you generally would trust them, to
the scenario like email. It's gonna be like that in future.
And yeah, we're gonna use technology, and yeah we're gonna
weed it out and we're gonna get with some of
the bad stuff. But is that the level that we
now want to be communicating at that level of trust
(33:36):
and confidence. That's a step back.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah, And that's.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Sadly the way we're going about solving problem because a
lot of it is that we're trying to solve the
problem in the way that the problem was solved for email. Email.
This email, it's not something where I am in an
emergency and I want to speak to you, I send.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
You an email.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
When I'm in an emergency and I want to speak
to you, I want to call you.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah, So to start.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Turning that kind of communication into level of email, we're
losing something in society that makes me shock.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
It makes me shock, you know. A little after we
recorded this conversation, a friend of mine sent me a
song that I had not heard in a long time.
It's this really simple and beautiful song by this guy
named labby Siffrey, and apparently it's been going viral recently.
I can't play it here, you know, copyright all that
sort of thing, but I can read you part of
(34:25):
the lyrics. It's strange how a phone call can change
your day and take you away from the feeling of
being alone. Blessed the Telephone, and that's the name of
the song, Blessed the Telephone, which is something I think
you could still say. Sincerely in nineteen seventy one, when
it's recorded, and then I think to twenty years later,
to nineteen ninety one when Tribe call Quest put out
(34:47):
a song called Skypager, which is seriously just a song
about how cool it is to have a device that
lets people contact you when you're outside. At some point,
the ability to contact someone instantly was this future or
even magical thing. I'm not that young, but I guess
I'm not old enough to really remember that time period
because by the time I was really using my own
(35:09):
phone and especially using email, it was already something that
we saw as potentially suspicious. And now forget about it.
When's the last time you heard someone say that they
even like their phone. Anyway, we'll leave the links to
those songs and the show notes if you want to
check that out. Thank you for listening to another episode
(35:30):
kill Switch. If you want to talk to us, you
could email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC,
or we're also on Instagram at kill Switch Pod, and
you know, please think about leaving us a review. It
helps other people find the show, which in turn helps
us keep doing our thing. And once you've done that,
you know we're also on YouTube, so if you want
to watch this interview rather than just listen to it.
(35:52):
There you go. The link for that and everything else
again is in the show notes. Kill Switch is hosted
by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produce by Sheen Ozaki, darl
Of Potts and Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by
me and Kyle Murdoch and Kyle also mixed the show
from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin, Mcgueshatikadur and
(36:12):
Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville
and Nikki E. Tor Catch on the next one, Goodbye,
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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