Title: The Latest Tips For Avoiding Email Scams [music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Before we close out today's show, we want to talk about something serious happening behind the scenes here at All Of It. Someone has been using my name, the show, my image to scam people. The impersonator has been reaching out to invite authors to talk about their books, promising an interview and social media exposure in exchange for money. We've had publicists and authors let us know this is going on, because they thought it smelled fishy.

At first, we heard about it at the end of March. Several shows at WNYC have been impersonated since, including the New Yorker Radio Hour, and just yesterday, we heard that Brian Lehrer Show has also been roped into the scammer's efforts. It's been a pretty upsetting ordeal to have your name used to hurt people. We wanted to warn our listeners that, first of all, this is going on, and also zoom out to talk about how the landscape of email scams and how to avoid falling into those traps. Lily Hay Newman joins us now to talk about it. She's a senior writer at WIRED, focusing on information security, digital privacy, and hacking. Lily, thank you so much for joining us today.

Lily Hay Newman: It's good to be with you.

Alison Stewart: Before we talk about the very specific example of ours, what's the basic anatomy of a classic email scam?

Lily Hay Newman: I think the crucial thing with an email scam is it's trying to, first of all, convince you that it's real, draw you in, and then often produce a sense of urgency, or in this case, in the example here, an excitement or an action that someone might want to take out of it. Motivating action, that's what a scam email is trying to do.

Alison Stewart: You've used the words world-building to describe how scammers work. What does it mean for a scammer to build a world around the person they're targeting?

Lily Hay Newman: I think it's narrativizing to draw someone in so that they feel like, "Well, I know who I am and I'm starting to get a sense of who this other person is. There's a reason that they're contacting me." It all makes sense in the context of the world, and then someone would feel more comfortable to take that next step or take the next action. It might feel very natural versus a very unsuccessful scam email. We've probably all seen them. You look at it, and you say, "This is a scam. This is not real. There's typos everywhere," or "Why is this public figure contacting me?" It might not make any sense. Then the world-building hasn't happened and has been successful, versus when you feel drawn in, and you feel like, "Oh, it's checking a lot of boxes. It's plausible."

Alison Stewart: What data do we have to explain the scale of the problem? How many people have been impacted, how much money goes to these scams?

Lily Hay Newman: Digital scamming, there are a lot of elements and venues. It's not just email. Probably, people have all gotten weird SMS texts or messages on other platforms. Digital scamming is massive, so overall billions, trillions of dollars. Email scamming, because email is like a more historic communication technology, is one of the first. This has impacted lots and lots of people all over the world for decades. I would say it's not a hard number, but the best indication we have that scammers make a lot of money doing this is that it's still going on, and that it's gone on for so long, and that there are endless innovations scams on new platforms. It feels like it never ends. That's the proof that scammer feel like it's worth it.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, have you or a loved one been a victim of a scam, or maybe you were targeted and caught it before you gave out any money or personal information? We want to hear about your scam experiences or any questions you have about scammers today. You can post them to our guest, WIRED senior writer Lily Hay Newman. Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Lily, you've heard about our situation. You read one of the emails impersonating me. Does anything strike you about the way scammers are tailoring their approach in these false emails?

Lily Hay Newman: Yes. First of all, I'm sorry this is going on. I'm sorry you all are dealing with this. It's a very invasive feeling when you feel like someone is assuming your identity or pretending to be you or colleagues, and, like you were saying, misleading people who you build trust with and then violating that trust on your behalf. It's very upsetting. One thing I noticed about the example you all provided is that it's pretty lengthy. Just to give people a sense, I'm not talking about hundreds or thousands of words, but it's not a two-line email. There's bullet points. It's like a whole thing, and it is well-composed.

There aren't typos or weird turns of phrase. It reads very clean, and it's socially adept or gracious, thanks for your time, warm regards, things like that. I don't know. I'm not saying this as an official assessment or something. My guess would be that possibly this was generated by AI, and that I think generative AI, as an emerging technology and with broad consumer availability, is enabling scammers to target even more types of people, sectors, even more esoteric types of impersonations and get it right or do that world-building more successfully.

They can be working in tons of different languages at once. There's just a lot less specialization that human scammers like people behind the keyboards need in order to generate a lot of content for scamming now, versus even a few years ago. Again, that's a guess. It's possible someone composed this themselves, but I think broadly that's an important trend for people to be aware of.

Alison Stewart: Here's a statement and some info from our IT team. We've been looking into this. IT says, "We are aware of these scams and are working closely with our listener services team and our hosts. We are assisting everyone who has contacted us on a case-by-case basis, and we have reported the fraudulent email addresses to Google and filed reports with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. If you are contacted by someone impersonating New York Public Radio, WNYC, or On-Air Talent, do not engage or interact with them. Simply forward the email to scamreport@nyc.org.

If anyone has actually paid a scammer, we recommend contacting their bank and filing a police report." Are there certain industries or certain kind of works or kinds of people who are especially vulnerable to scams like this? We've noticed that a lot of these targeted authors, many are self-published.

Lily Hay Newman: Yes. That's interesting. I think broadly, I would say no, that there isn't one formula for how to know which industries are more susceptible to scams. Perhaps a takeaway or something broader we could take from that is scammers are looking for that dynamic or that relationship where someone is going to be interested or intrigued by their message, and again, want to take action or just be interested in learning more. I think any time they can find a way to seem to have a value proposition or something that would be enticing, that's the type of leverage they're looking for, the type of interaction and space they're looking to occupy.

One of the challenges is that I can't just give you a list of, like, here are these industries that are the most susceptible or where it's most common. I think that is scammers use that to their advantage, that they think out of the box and are willing to try anything that could work, because then people don't know what to expect, or they don't know which venue of their life to be worrying about.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a couple of calls. Neil's calling from Brooklyn. Hey, Neil, thank you for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

Neil: Hi, Alison. They got into my email listing and my address book on April 21st. It said my name, first name, last name, is inviting you to join us in celebrating a special moment. I publish a newsletter that's distributed via email. They got a bunch of names of people that know me who've asked for my newsletter. It probably went to several hundred names who are real addresses. Fortunately, I heard back from about a dozen of them, and with one exception, all of them said, "This looked fishy to me. I presume this is a spam." I confirmed that. With Windows 11, you have something called Defenders, and I also pay for Malwarebytes, but somehow they got in. This is my first hacking experience in years, and it was very upsetting. There's something in today's New York Times about it.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling, Neil. We'll look that up. Paul is calling from Brooklyn as well. Hi, Paul. Thanks for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

Paul: Hello, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my call. I'll be brief. Last October, I booked a flight with an airline, and then I called the 1800 number. Googled it, called the 1800 number just so I can get a refund. As I'm speaking to the gentleman, they constantly put me on hold. The gentleman is like, "Yes, we need to charge your card in order to refund you." I was like, "Okay, that seems strange." Then the next thing was, "We need the six-digit code." When they message me for the six-digit code, at that point, my gut kicked in, and I was like, "No, I'm not even going through with it."

Alison Stewart: That was smart on your part. We appreciate you calling. We are talking about cybersecurity and email scams with my guest, Lily Hay Newman, senior writer at WIRED. Have you or a loved one been a victim of a scam? Maybe you were targeted, and you caught it before you gave out any money or personal information. We'd like to hear your stories. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Lily, are scams today dramatically different than they have been in the past?

Lily Hay Newman: I would say the core of all scamming is the same, going back thousands of years or something. It's not to be cute or something, but it's just important, I think, to understand conceptually that a lot of the underpinning is always the same. There's that moment where you need to trick someone and get them in the mindset and get them on board. Then, similar to what the callers are describing, and this is very historic too, sometimes people can realize that it doesn't feel right or go with their gut. That has always been and continues to be, I think, the most valuable and important protection is if you hear that voice in your head or the flag in your mind, to really stop and listen to that rather than just pushing it away.

More to your question, digital scamming, these initial reach outs and trying to just make an email or a text or something seem as real as possible, that's been going on for quite a long time. The ecosystem around all of this and the scale at which scammers are working, and then, the numbers of people they're targeting on a given day or hour or however we want to look at it, all of that is scaling up and up and up. Not only AI, but technologies like generative AI and others are really allowing scammers to push the envelope way beyond what was going on 10 years ago, 5 years ago, even.

Alison Stewart: There are so many different payment systems now. There's Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, Cash App. Does this make us more vulnerable to scams as a society, that there's an abundance of software like this?

Lily Hay Newman: Yes, potentially, and especially ease with which money can move. The caller was talking about, "You'll pay us, and then we'll refund you," or things like that. That's very common, or they'll say, "You're going to see a charge, but that's just us fixing the other thing." I think reducing the friction, certainly, and the fact that all of this can be remote, and this is before we even get into scammers who get people to convert fiat currency into cryptocurrency, things like that. All of this it's a lot smoother than if you need to physically have cash change hands. I definitely think it's a factor, but still, the roots of all of this go back generationally.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to John in White Plains. Hi, John, you're on the air.

John: Hi. Thank you. I wanted to share a recent incident. I received a call, and they said they were from Chase Fraud and that there were two Zelle transactions for roughly a

$100 each that were suspicious. They pull you in. "Oh, they were made from Phoenix. They were done on an iPhone. Could this be you?" Of course, I said no. I was already suspicious because anything like that. They gave me Chase numbers, and they said, "We want to transfer you to Zelle."

I know from the past, Zelle is a different company, different organization. You deal with them separately from Chase. They transferred me, and the first thing he said was, "How do I access my computer?" I'm like, "Why would he need to know that?" I said, "Are you going to ask me to access my account?" He said, "Yes." That's where I said, "Okay." I hung up on him. Then he called me back and said, "You hung up on me." I didn't answer him. Then I called Chase immediately and said, "Here's what's going on," and they told me, "No, that wasn't us. We would never call you," which at first I thought that's what the rule was, but anyways.

Alison Stewart: The nerve. I like that I called you back. That's an amazing story. Thank you so much for calling, John. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you a few more questions. First of all, how did COVID impact how scammers work? I have to imagine that must have had made a difference.

Lily Hay Newman: There's a lot here. Just to say briefly, what I was alluding to about the scale of all of this and the ecosystems, essentially, during the pandemic lockdown era, in those years when travel was significantly reduced, when everyone was home, there was a big coalescing or organizing of scammers, particularly in certain regions of Southeast Asia, to industrialize scamming and systematize and professionalize it. That is not the only change going on globally, but one of the biggest drivers.

People may have heard this type of scamming referred to as pig butchering scams. These types of trust-building, investment scams, confidence scams, romance scams, all of that was massively expanded during that era because of the conditions of the pandemic. That is a big driver and one big factor in the uptick people may be feeling.

Alison Stewart: Let's say someone has sent scammers money or personal information before they realized what was happening. What's most important items that they should have on their I've been scammed checklist to do, which they do right away?

Lily Hay Newman: It's a very difficult situation if you realize that's happened. I agree with the advice from your IT folks to flag it to your bank and start to have a dialogue with them or whatever financial institution is relevant, to file a police report. There are some other organizations that try to provide information, guidance, counseling. To be honest, the scale of the problem is way beyond the resources right now. It's a very difficult position to be in. Just want to say to everyone out there that if you have been scammed and you're struggling to figure out what's going on, just know that it's not your fault that it happened. I hope you don't feel shame around it. That's the whole point is to trick you. That's what all of this is about. It's not your fault if a scammer sometimes succeeds.

Alison Stewart: In our last minutes, let's get to Elizabeth in Verona, New Jersey. Hi, Elizabeth, you're on the air.

Elizabeth: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to share that my mother, who's elderly, almost fell for this scam where they called and said, "Your daughter is in trouble. She needs $5,000. She's been hurt." She immediately gave them my name, "Oh, Elizabeth," and they're like, "Yes." She got a ride from a friend to her bank, and she went into the bank, and she was all, I guess I'm imagining, stressed, trying to take out $5,000. The manager saw her. My mother always makes it a point when she goes into the bank to get to know everybody there.

The manager saw her and came over, "What's going on?" She said, "This is a scam." Then she even called my husband to verify that it was a scam. He said, "Yes, she's fine." They prevented her from getting the money and sending it. I just think the human connection is just something that is so valuable, even in your case.

Alison Stewart: Elizabeth, thank you so much for calling and sharing that story. We have been talking with Lily Hay Newman, senior writer at WIRED. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. We really appreciate it.

Lily Hay Newman: Stay safe out there, everyone.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.

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