July 22, 2025 • 19 mins
What would you do if a friend sent you an email asking if you would be willing to buy them a gift card? For most of us, our default reaction would be to say yes and help out our friend. Because most of us are generally nice folks, we are prone to be the victim of an email gift card scam. This scam recently happened to my mom and this week we talk about how it works.
Let’s Talk About Scams is broadcast live Tuesdays at 8AM PT on K4HD Radio - Hollywood Talk Radio (www.k4hd.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Let’s Talk About Scams TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Let’s Talk About Scams Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for individual professional / legal advice. The podcast information was carefully compiled from vetted sources and references; however, R.O.S.E. Resources / Outreach to Safeguard the Elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall victim to a scam.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/let-s-talk-about-scams--6483699/support.
Let’s Talk About Scams is broadcast live Tuesdays at 8AM PT on K4HD Radio - Hollywood Talk Radio (www.k4hd.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Let’s Talk About Scams TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Let’s Talk About Scams Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for individual professional / legal advice. The podcast information was carefully compiled from vetted sources and references; however, R.O.S.E. Resources / Outreach to Safeguard the Elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall victim to a scam.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/let-s-talk-about-scams--6483699/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This program is designed to provide general information with regards
to the subject matters covered. This information is given with
the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station
are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial, legal, counseling,
professional service, or any advice. You should seek the services
(00:23):
of competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas.
The information contained in this podcast is intended for informational
purposes only and is not a substitute for individual professional
legal advice. The podcast information was carefully compiled from fted
sources and references. However, Rose Resources outreach to safeguard the
(00:45):
elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall victim to
a scam. Let's talk about scams. It's the must listen
show for anyone who wants to protect themselves and their
loved ones from scams. Every Tuesday at am Pacific time
on K four HD Radio, Joyce Petrowski, founder of Rose,
(01:05):
and her guests will provide valuable insights and practical tips
on how to recognize and protect yourself from scams. And
now here is your host, Joyce Petrowski.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Good morning and welcome to let's talk about scams. My
name is Brian Watson. I am a community outreach specialist
for Rose Resources Outreach to safeguard the elderly, and I'm
obviously not Joyce. Joyce is going to be out for
a few weeks and I am very happy to fill
in for her. I love doing this radio show. I
(01:42):
hope the information we share today is very helpful, and
as always, share this information with someone you love and
someone you care about. You can have them watch live,
you can have them watch the podcast later on. But
information is only good if it's used and shared with
people that you know and love. So please, if you
(02:05):
enjoy the show today, if you learn something, think about
someone who might use this information. So today's show is
titled When in Doubt Call your Friend and I'll explain
what that is as we go along, I'm going to
pose a question for you. What if you were at
(02:26):
home and you open up your email and it's from
a friend of yours, someone that you know for a
long time, someone you trust, and the person asks you
do you have Amazon? You know, the most likely thing
would be you would respond back to them like, yes,
I do. Do you need me to buy some cards?
(02:46):
Do you need help ordering something online? The normal human
reaction would be to help them out. Well, there's a
scam going around and it actually happened to my mom,
and it actually happened twice, so I'm going to tell
you both stories. But the email basically is do you
(03:07):
have Amazon and can you buy a gift card for me?
And there's always a reason why the person sending the
email can't do buy the gift card themselves. Either they
don't have Internet access, or they don't have an Amazon account,
or you know, they're not feeling good, they're sick, something
like that. So if you received an email like that,
(03:27):
most of you, including myself, would say yes. My default
is yes because most of us are good people that
just want to help others. We want to help our
loved ones, we want to help our friends. So because
most of us are nice folks, we are prone to
fall victim for this email gift card scam. And like
(03:49):
I said, this happened to my mom sometime last year.
And here's how it works. A criminal was able to
access my mom's email. We don't know how, but somehow
that criminal got into my mom's email account and basically blasted,
(04:09):
meaning send an email to every single person in her
contacts list, so every in that it was a very
simple question, do you have Amazon? And then some of
them were a little different. They were they said something
to the effect of, can you do a favor for me? Now.
The reason why this particular scam works is it doesn't
(04:31):
look like a phishing email. You know, phishing email is
a fake email made to trick you that it's coming
from a company or government agency or something like that.
But this one works because it comes directly from the friend.
These emails that said do you have Amazon? Came from
my mom's email account her It looked completely legit. Now,
(04:58):
most people my mom's contact list recognize the scam right away,
just because they've probably seen it before. And a lot
of them emailed her right back and said, hey, I
think someone's got it into your email, and they are
all these different versions. Everyone emailed her back. Very few
(05:20):
people called. And that's what the subject of today is.
Too many of us don't want to pick up the
phone because we don't pick up the phone like we
used to anymore. We always text people ahead of time, like, hey,
are you around you have time for a call. It's
sort of like we don't want to bother people now
(05:41):
that we're in this era of emails and text messages
and social media messaging and things like that. But yeah,
most people recognize the scam email my mom and told
her something was going on. But if you didn't recognize
the scam, you might applied back to the email saying, yes,
(06:03):
I have Amazon, what can I do for you? So
this starts an email conversation with the scammer. And what
we learned with this particular one with my mom, these
people would had the ability to move the email to
a different email, So it started out coming from my
mom's email to her friends. But then when the if
(06:25):
anybody bit you know, they took the bait, the scammer
would move it offline to a separate email. So that's
what why this thing works too well. I would say
ninety nine percent of my mom's friends identified this email
as a scam, but however there's only one percent. And
(06:46):
that's the deal with scams. Criminals only have to be
lucky one percent of the time and then it's profitable
for them. So one of my mom's friends drove to
an Apple store in California and attempted to buy a
three hundred dollars gift card that she was going to
mail to my mom. And but it really wouldn't have
(07:09):
gone to my mom because that's that's part of the
scam too, you know. They actually would have emailed it
to the scammer, and the scammer would have taken the money. Well,
I want to give kudos to the Apple store. They
trained their employees and they sniffed out that scam, and
the employee talked to the lady, talked to my mom's
(07:31):
friend and said, you know what, ma'am, I think you're
being scammed, and and stopped it. And he basically saved
her three hundred dollars. So in the end, I don't
think any of my mom's friends lost any money as
far as I know. But this person who went after
my mom obviously went after hundreds, maybe of thousands of
(07:54):
other people. So here in Arizona, my wonderful adult young
children or my young adult children, recognize the scam immediately,
and they went into action without me even having to
do anything, and I was so proud of them. They
contacted my mom, their grandmother and teamed up to fix
(08:15):
the issue. My son's the computer specialists in terms he
knows everything about computers. He sent my daughter to my
mom's place and they were able to change her email
password right away. And that's the key. If you think
your email's been compromised, don't ignore it. You need to
change it right away. New email, don't reuse them longer
(08:40):
emails are better. And then they were able to make
some adjustments on her computer that would make something like
this a little less likely in the future. So thank
you to my kids for doing that. And what was
interesting when they were changing the password, the criminals were
still in my mom's email doing stuff. They were trying
(09:01):
to update things. They had not given up on my
mom's email account. But nothing bad has happened since she's
like I said, she's updated her password. Everything's good. So
please be aware that this gift card scam exists. So
if you're ever in doubt, pick up the phone. I mean,
(09:21):
we have these cell phones. Call your friend. Don't be
afraid to call. You know if you're not sure, and
you know, if the let's say the email is legitimate
and your friend does need you to buy a gift
card for them for some reason, you've confirmed it's legitimate.
You that way, you know you haven't, then scam and
(09:42):
then you can have a nice conversation with your friends.
So many of us just don't talk on the phone anymore.
For those of us who grew up in the pre
internet days, the telephone was the way we talk to
each other, and we were on the phone all the time.
You know, a lot of young people don't even use
the phone anymore because they look at it as an
(10:04):
antiquated way of communicating. But don't be afraid to pick
up the phone when in doubt, call your friend. And
here's the other thing too that we talk about all
the time. Criminals want you to move quickly and make
a bad decision. They like urgency, They want to elevate
(10:24):
your emotions, get you excited, get you scared, get you nervous,
and when you are in that state of mind, you
tend not to make good decisions. So we want time
as our friend when it comes to scam prevention. Move slowly.
I have a friend who works for AARP and I
(10:49):
heard her speak once and she said, you want to
be like a sloth. Sloths don't do anything fast. So
if you get an email and you're not sure, instead
of clicking on it right away or responding right away
or calling look at it carefully, think about it, sleep
(11:10):
on it overnight, ask a friend, go for a walk,
look at it in the morning when you have a
fresh brain. But you want to be a sloth and
move slowly. So I mentioned at the beginning of today's
show that this happened twice to my mom. The story
I told today was when someone had taken over her
email and sent out the scam emails about the Amazon
(11:33):
gift card to all of her friends. Well about two
years ago, my mom received one of these emails from
her friend. And my mom is one of those people
who's always willing to help out. And she got an
email from her friend, Gloria, and it said do you
(11:53):
have Amazon? And my mom said yes, And then she
started this conversation online with the scammer, and then there
were a few clues that jumped out to my mom.
She said, the request started to get really complicated, and
she happened to be out of state visiting my brother,
(12:15):
and she asked for some help. And then my brother
he looked at it. He sniffed out the scam right
away and said, Mom, you are being scammed. That's not
from your friend. Gloria. You know there, this is what
scammers do, and he was able to stop the scam.
But you see see how it works. My mom her
(12:37):
default is to help people, and she's helped her friend
Gloria before in a volunteer capacity, and she was able.
You know, I'm glad she just told my brother because
if she hadn't told my brother, she probably would have
bought the gift card. And then what these scammers do
is they tell you to take a picture of the
numbers and send it to them, and then they they've
(13:00):
got they've got the numbers, and you're out whatever money
you bought for the gift card. So when it was
all said and done, I sat down with my mom
and we went over the email. And I was very
careful not to shame her because when it comes to
scam prevention, the last thing we want to do is
(13:20):
tell someone everything they did wrong, because there's an embarrassment
factor and a shame factor. So I didn't do that.
I just said, hey, Mom, let's look at the email,
and I just pointed out a couple of things that
didn't sound right, and you know, including some misspellings, and
there was a couple other little clues, And when I
(13:43):
pointed that out to her, my mom said, yeah, you're right,
you're right. But you know, these criminals are getting better
and better. They run their emails through artificial intelligence otherwise
known as AI, and they can clean it up, especially
if they're sending emails and they're coming from another country
and English isn't their first language. But there's some clues.
(14:06):
But you know, the best thing though, like I said,
when you got an email from a friend like that,
call them up and say, hey, what's up. Are you okay?
But like, let's not be afraid to pick up the phone.
At a minimum, text your friend and say, hey, let's talk.
I just got an email from you I'm not too
(14:26):
sure about. But don't be afraid to do that. You know,
I tell my audiences when I do fraud prevention presentations,
I don't like living in a world where I have
to assume every email and every text message and every
message on social media is a scam. But unfortunately that's
(14:49):
the world we live in right now. We have to
be very leery of everything, and that's the downside of technology.
I mean, with technology, I can pick up my phone
here in order pretty much anything I want and it
shows up today or tomorrow. When I was a kid
and we wanted something, you had to go to the
store or you could go through the serious catalog and
(15:10):
it would show up in six to eight weeks, you know.
And we're so spoiled right now. But because we're spoiled
right now with this technology, these criminals can get money
from us extremely fast. But that's just the reality of
our high tech society. Move very slowly, make sure every
email's legitimate, look for clues, and then when it comes
(15:34):
to the cell phone and emails, I basically don't respond
to any emails on my cell phone. I'll read stuff,
maybe I'll delete things, but if I'm ever going to respond,
I just wait till I get home. Why Because I
have a bigger screen at home. I can look for clues,
(15:57):
I can research things. I'm very, very careful because the
screen on your little cell phone is far too small
and you're going to miss out, especially when it comes
to phishing emails and things like that. We really want,
if we really want you to sign up for our
monthly email. If you go to Rosadvocacy dot Org, which
(16:20):
is our website, right on the front page, you can
sign up for our monthly email. It's free. We just
need your name and your email and it shows up
at the beginning of every month. It's a great place
to get one stop shop of all the latest scams
and just some other good articles and videos and things
(16:40):
like that. If you like it, share it with your friends,
tell them to sign up. If you don't like it
and you unsubscribe, we won't be offended. We want to
provide quality information to you. I guarantee you you'll like
this newsletter. And then now we are doing every Tuesday
morning a little tip that comes out, so it's sort
(17:02):
of a mini version of our monthly email. Again great information.
And then also we are on social media. We're on
Facebook and LinkedIn, so sign up and it's just more
information that you have to prevent being scammed. I tell
people all the time. We have trusts, we have wills,
(17:24):
we have financial planning, we have an investment advisors. But
what is your scam prevention plan? If your scam prevention
plan is I hope this doesn't happen to me or
my loved one, that's not a plan. That's just wishful thinking.
We need to be proactive, and being proactive means watching
this podcast, and if you're watching it today, obviously you're
doing a great job. Signing up for our email, monthly email,
(17:49):
going to Facebook, signing up on our Facebook page, our
LinkedIn page, all really good things. Next week, on July
twenty ninth, I'll be and I'm going to tell another story.
And this story involves me kind of being a nosy
person at a doctor's office. It was a very small
(18:12):
doctor's office, and I overheard a man being scammed. And
I try to stay out of other people's business, I
really do, but I had I had to jump up
and intervene that day, and I'm going to tell you
that story, and it was a little uncomfortable, but it
has a happy ending. So that's next week's Next week's
(18:35):
radio shows can be called sometimes we have to intervene,
and it's me at the doctor's at my mom's doctor's office,
and we'll tell that story. So thank you for listening today.
Like I said, share this, share the podcast with your
friends and family members, and we'll see it next Tuesday
morning for the next installment of Let's Talk About Scams.
(18:57):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Well, that's all the knowledge for this episode. Tune in
every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio
at KFORHD dot com as Joyce explores a variety of knowledge,
so you have the power to make scam protection your
healthy habit, and until then, feel free to reach out
to Joyce and let's talk about scams.
This program is designed to provide general information with regards
to the subject matters covered. This information is given with
the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station
are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial, legal, counseling,
professional service, or any advice. You should seek the services
(00:23):
of competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas.
The information contained in this podcast is intended for informational
purposes only and is not a substitute for individual professional
legal advice. The podcast information was carefully compiled from fted
sources and references. However, Rose Resources outreach to safeguard the
(00:45):
elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall victim to
a scam. Let's talk about scams. It's the must listen
show for anyone who wants to protect themselves and their
loved ones from scams. Every Tuesday at am Pacific time
on K four HD Radio, Joyce Petrowski, founder of Rose,
(01:05):
and her guests will provide valuable insights and practical tips
on how to recognize and protect yourself from scams. And
now here is your host, Joyce Petrowski.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Good morning and welcome to let's talk about scams. My
name is Brian Watson. I am a community outreach specialist
for Rose Resources Outreach to safeguard the elderly, and I'm
obviously not Joyce. Joyce is going to be out for
a few weeks and I am very happy to fill
in for her. I love doing this radio show. I
(01:42):
hope the information we share today is very helpful, and
as always, share this information with someone you love and
someone you care about. You can have them watch live,
you can have them watch the podcast later on. But
information is only good if it's used and shared with
people that you know and love. So please, if you
(02:05):
enjoy the show today, if you learn something, think about
someone who might use this information. So today's show is
titled When in Doubt Call your Friend and I'll explain
what that is as we go along, I'm going to
pose a question for you. What if you were at
(02:26):
home and you open up your email and it's from
a friend of yours, someone that you know for a
long time, someone you trust, and the person asks you
do you have Amazon? You know, the most likely thing
would be you would respond back to them like, yes,
I do. Do you need me to buy some cards?
(02:46):
Do you need help ordering something online? The normal human
reaction would be to help them out. Well, there's a
scam going around and it actually happened to my mom,
and it actually happened twice, so I'm going to tell
you both stories. But the email basically is do you
(03:07):
have Amazon and can you buy a gift card for me?
And there's always a reason why the person sending the
email can't do buy the gift card themselves. Either they
don't have Internet access, or they don't have an Amazon account,
or you know, they're not feeling good, they're sick, something
like that. So if you received an email like that,
(03:27):
most of you, including myself, would say yes. My default
is yes because most of us are good people that
just want to help others. We want to help our
loved ones, we want to help our friends. So because
most of us are nice folks, we are prone to
fall victim for this email gift card scam. And like
(03:49):
I said, this happened to my mom sometime last year.
And here's how it works. A criminal was able to
access my mom's email. We don't know how, but somehow
that criminal got into my mom's email account and basically blasted,
(04:09):
meaning send an email to every single person in her
contacts list, so every in that it was a very
simple question, do you have Amazon? And then some of
them were a little different. They were they said something
to the effect of, can you do a favor for me? Now.
The reason why this particular scam works is it doesn't
(04:31):
look like a phishing email. You know, phishing email is
a fake email made to trick you that it's coming
from a company or government agency or something like that.
But this one works because it comes directly from the friend.
These emails that said do you have Amazon? Came from
my mom's email account her It looked completely legit. Now,
(04:58):
most people my mom's contact list recognize the scam right away,
just because they've probably seen it before. And a lot
of them emailed her right back and said, hey, I
think someone's got it into your email, and they are
all these different versions. Everyone emailed her back. Very few
(05:20):
people called. And that's what the subject of today is.
Too many of us don't want to pick up the
phone because we don't pick up the phone like we
used to anymore. We always text people ahead of time, like, hey,
are you around you have time for a call. It's
sort of like we don't want to bother people now
(05:41):
that we're in this era of emails and text messages
and social media messaging and things like that. But yeah,
most people recognize the scam email my mom and told
her something was going on. But if you didn't recognize
the scam, you might applied back to the email saying, yes,
(06:03):
I have Amazon, what can I do for you? So
this starts an email conversation with the scammer. And what
we learned with this particular one with my mom, these
people would had the ability to move the email to
a different email, So it started out coming from my
mom's email to her friends. But then when the if
(06:25):
anybody bit you know, they took the bait, the scammer
would move it offline to a separate email. So that's
what why this thing works too well. I would say
ninety nine percent of my mom's friends identified this email
as a scam, but however there's only one percent. And
(06:46):
that's the deal with scams. Criminals only have to be
lucky one percent of the time and then it's profitable
for them. So one of my mom's friends drove to
an Apple store in California and attempted to buy a
three hundred dollars gift card that she was going to
mail to my mom. And but it really wouldn't have
(07:09):
gone to my mom because that's that's part of the
scam too, you know. They actually would have emailed it
to the scammer, and the scammer would have taken the money. Well,
I want to give kudos to the Apple store. They
trained their employees and they sniffed out that scam, and
the employee talked to the lady, talked to my mom's
(07:31):
friend and said, you know what, ma'am, I think you're
being scammed, and and stopped it. And he basically saved
her three hundred dollars. So in the end, I don't
think any of my mom's friends lost any money as
far as I know. But this person who went after
my mom obviously went after hundreds, maybe of thousands of
(07:54):
other people. So here in Arizona, my wonderful adult young
children or my young adult children, recognize the scam immediately,
and they went into action without me even having to
do anything, and I was so proud of them. They
contacted my mom, their grandmother and teamed up to fix
(08:15):
the issue. My son's the computer specialists in terms he
knows everything about computers. He sent my daughter to my
mom's place and they were able to change her email
password right away. And that's the key. If you think
your email's been compromised, don't ignore it. You need to
change it right away. New email, don't reuse them longer
(08:40):
emails are better. And then they were able to make
some adjustments on her computer that would make something like
this a little less likely in the future. So thank
you to my kids for doing that. And what was
interesting when they were changing the password, the criminals were
still in my mom's email doing stuff. They were trying
(09:01):
to update things. They had not given up on my
mom's email account. But nothing bad has happened since she's
like I said, she's updated her password. Everything's good. So
please be aware that this gift card scam exists. So
if you're ever in doubt, pick up the phone. I mean,
(09:21):
we have these cell phones. Call your friend. Don't be
afraid to call. You know if you're not sure, and
you know, if the let's say the email is legitimate
and your friend does need you to buy a gift
card for them for some reason, you've confirmed it's legitimate.
You that way, you know you haven't, then scam and
(09:42):
then you can have a nice conversation with your friends.
So many of us just don't talk on the phone anymore.
For those of us who grew up in the pre
internet days, the telephone was the way we talk to
each other, and we were on the phone all the time.
You know, a lot of young people don't even use
the phone anymore because they look at it as an
(10:04):
antiquated way of communicating. But don't be afraid to pick
up the phone when in doubt, call your friend. And
here's the other thing too that we talk about all
the time. Criminals want you to move quickly and make
a bad decision. They like urgency, They want to elevate
(10:24):
your emotions, get you excited, get you scared, get you nervous,
and when you are in that state of mind, you
tend not to make good decisions. So we want time
as our friend when it comes to scam prevention. Move slowly.
I have a friend who works for AARP and I
(10:49):
heard her speak once and she said, you want to
be like a sloth. Sloths don't do anything fast. So
if you get an email and you're not sure, instead
of clicking on it right away or responding right away
or calling look at it carefully, think about it, sleep
(11:10):
on it overnight, ask a friend, go for a walk,
look at it in the morning when you have a
fresh brain. But you want to be a sloth and
move slowly. So I mentioned at the beginning of today's
show that this happened twice to my mom. The story
I told today was when someone had taken over her
email and sent out the scam emails about the Amazon
(11:33):
gift card to all of her friends. Well about two
years ago, my mom received one of these emails from
her friend. And my mom is one of those people
who's always willing to help out. And she got an
email from her friend, Gloria, and it said do you
(11:53):
have Amazon? And my mom said yes, And then she
started this conversation online with the scammer, and then there
were a few clues that jumped out to my mom.
She said, the request started to get really complicated, and
she happened to be out of state visiting my brother,
(12:15):
and she asked for some help. And then my brother
he looked at it. He sniffed out the scam right
away and said, Mom, you are being scammed. That's not
from your friend. Gloria. You know there, this is what
scammers do, and he was able to stop the scam.
But you see see how it works. My mom her
(12:37):
default is to help people, and she's helped her friend
Gloria before in a volunteer capacity, and she was able.
You know, I'm glad she just told my brother because
if she hadn't told my brother, she probably would have
bought the gift card. And then what these scammers do
is they tell you to take a picture of the
numbers and send it to them, and then they they've
(13:00):
got they've got the numbers, and you're out whatever money
you bought for the gift card. So when it was
all said and done, I sat down with my mom
and we went over the email. And I was very
careful not to shame her because when it comes to
scam prevention, the last thing we want to do is
(13:20):
tell someone everything they did wrong, because there's an embarrassment
factor and a shame factor. So I didn't do that.
I just said, hey, Mom, let's look at the email,
and I just pointed out a couple of things that
didn't sound right, and you know, including some misspellings, and
there was a couple other little clues, And when I
(13:43):
pointed that out to her, my mom said, yeah, you're right,
you're right. But you know, these criminals are getting better
and better. They run their emails through artificial intelligence otherwise
known as AI, and they can clean it up, especially
if they're sending emails and they're coming from another country
and English isn't their first language. But there's some clues.
(14:06):
But you know, the best thing though, like I said,
when you got an email from a friend like that,
call them up and say, hey, what's up. Are you okay?
But like, let's not be afraid to pick up the phone.
At a minimum, text your friend and say, hey, let's talk.
I just got an email from you I'm not too
(14:26):
sure about. But don't be afraid to do that. You know,
I tell my audiences when I do fraud prevention presentations,
I don't like living in a world where I have
to assume every email and every text message and every
message on social media is a scam. But unfortunately that's
(14:49):
the world we live in right now. We have to
be very leery of everything, and that's the downside of technology.
I mean, with technology, I can pick up my phone
here in order pretty much anything I want and it
shows up today or tomorrow. When I was a kid
and we wanted something, you had to go to the
store or you could go through the serious catalog and
(15:10):
it would show up in six to eight weeks, you know.
And we're so spoiled right now. But because we're spoiled
right now with this technology, these criminals can get money
from us extremely fast. But that's just the reality of
our high tech society. Move very slowly, make sure every
email's legitimate, look for clues, and then when it comes
(15:34):
to the cell phone and emails, I basically don't respond
to any emails on my cell phone. I'll read stuff,
maybe I'll delete things, but if I'm ever going to respond,
I just wait till I get home. Why Because I
have a bigger screen at home. I can look for clues,
(15:57):
I can research things. I'm very, very careful because the
screen on your little cell phone is far too small
and you're going to miss out, especially when it comes
to phishing emails and things like that. We really want,
if we really want you to sign up for our
monthly email. If you go to Rosadvocacy dot Org, which
(16:20):
is our website, right on the front page, you can
sign up for our monthly email. It's free. We just
need your name and your email and it shows up
at the beginning of every month. It's a great place
to get one stop shop of all the latest scams
and just some other good articles and videos and things
(16:40):
like that. If you like it, share it with your friends,
tell them to sign up. If you don't like it
and you unsubscribe, we won't be offended. We want to
provide quality information to you. I guarantee you you'll like
this newsletter. And then now we are doing every Tuesday
morning a little tip that comes out, so it's sort
(17:02):
of a mini version of our monthly email. Again great information.
And then also we are on social media. We're on
Facebook and LinkedIn, so sign up and it's just more
information that you have to prevent being scammed. I tell
people all the time. We have trusts, we have wills,
(17:24):
we have financial planning, we have an investment advisors. But
what is your scam prevention plan? If your scam prevention
plan is I hope this doesn't happen to me or
my loved one, that's not a plan. That's just wishful thinking.
We need to be proactive, and being proactive means watching
this podcast, and if you're watching it today, obviously you're
doing a great job. Signing up for our email, monthly email,
(17:49):
going to Facebook, signing up on our Facebook page, our
LinkedIn page, all really good things. Next week, on July
twenty ninth, I'll be and I'm going to tell another story.
And this story involves me kind of being a nosy
person at a doctor's office. It was a very small
(18:12):
doctor's office, and I overheard a man being scammed. And
I try to stay out of other people's business, I
really do, but I had I had to jump up
and intervene that day, and I'm going to tell you
that story, and it was a little uncomfortable, but it
has a happy ending. So that's next week's Next week's
(18:35):
radio shows can be called sometimes we have to intervene,
and it's me at the doctor's at my mom's doctor's office,
and we'll tell that story. So thank you for listening today.
Like I said, share this, share the podcast with your
friends and family members, and we'll see it next Tuesday
morning for the next installment of Let's Talk About Scams.
(18:57):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Well, that's all the knowledge for this episode. Tune in
every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio
at KFORHD dot com as Joyce explores a variety of knowledge,
so you have the power to make scam protection your
healthy habit, and until then, feel free to reach out
to Joyce and let's talk about scams.
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