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However, Rose Resources outreach to safeguard the 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 am Pacific time on K four HD Radio, Joyce Petrowski, founder of Rose, 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.

Welcome back, Everybody Happy, new year.

Hard to believe it's two and twenty six.

I was just thinking back earlier when I remember twenty six years ago when it flipped over to from nineteen ninety nine to the year two thousand and everybody was worried that, like the ATMs weren't going to work, and you know that the dates wouldn't transfer over and all of that stuff.

So it's hard to believe now it's twenty twenty six.

So you can find more information about what we do on our website at Roseadvocacy dot org.

You can find more resources.

You'll find all the links to our social media channels are on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and you can find all of our past episodes on YouTube under the live section.

And scroll down to the bottom.

Of the homepage and you'll find where you can sign up for our newsletters.

We do an emailed newsletter and we do a mailed newsletter.

The mail newsletter comes out once a month at the beginning of the month.

You guys should have probably already received yours for January.

Our emailed newsletter, we do a bigger one at the beginning of the month.

This month is going to be delayed a little bit because I'm changing the design on it, so it took a little bit longer to do that.

But then every Tuesday morning we do a Tuesday Tip nine to fifteen Arizona time in the morning, you're going to get a Tuesday Tip to your inbox.

Might be a tip you're not aware of, might be a tip you already know about, but that's fine because what it does is it helps reinforce your healthy skepticism to always do your research in question before just accepting that a contact is legitimate, and it helps build your scam awareness in your prevention habits.

It just reinforces it.

So anyways, today, with being the new year, we're going to go back to the basics and we're going to talk about the anatomy of a scam.

We're going to go through the different components, and then we're going to go through some general tips that you could use with any scam.

So I'm going to share my screen and pull up our Anatomy of a scam infographic.

We created this gosh I keep saying a few.

Years ago, two years ago, but now it's probably three years ago that we have created that, and we broke down scams into three different parts, and.

Let me blow this up a little bit to give you an idea of what scams are in general.

We found doing our presentations we would talk about maybe five scams that have a tendency.

To target the older adults.

But we were always.

Behind the eight ball because new scams come up all the time.

So we created this anatomy of a scam.

And if you look in the blue here, this first part is initiating contact and you can see the different ways.

You know, they can call you on the phone, send you an email, send.

You a text.

Yes, they do still send things in the mail, although not as much as you know they used to when they first started the scams.

But then online and online is.

A big way, and your cell phone, your mobile phone is a big way.

If it's connected to the internet, you know you're going to get a lot of online stuff.

You could be on social media and they could be message you, messaging you through social media.

You could have a there's a lot of different texting apps that are encrypted, like WhatsApp is a big one, and scammers like that.

You know, let's say they message you on social media, well, they very quickly want to take it off social media and take it over to an encrypted app like WhatsApp, and they're going to want to communicate with you there.

You know, they can you get your emails on your mobile phone.

Chances are that's where you're going to be looking at them, your text messages, the phone calls.

Not a lot of people have landlines anymore.

Some people still do, and they could get scam calls on their landlines as well.

But your mobile phone is a big way because we do a lot of our day to day task and we're on our phones a lot.

But now that's not to say that you're not going to get contacted through an iPad or a Android you know, laptop or.

An Android phone.

But maybe an iPad or a laptop or a desktop, anything that is you know, connected to the internet.

They can find a way to contact you.

And as I said, your mobile phone is going to be a big way.

And once you engage with them, when they contact you, they very very quickly go over into this second part in the purple, which is called creating a compelling reason to act.

This is where your emotions come into play, and they run the gamut on emotions.

They know that the longer they can keep you in your emotional state.

The better chance the better, the better they are able to get you to send them money.

That's what they want.

Yes, they might be asking for personal information, but if they want to steal your identity, it's all to be able to take credit out in your name and do things like that in order to get money.

So money's their endgame.

And you know, I hear a lot of people, doesn't matter what their age is, they fallen victim to a scam.

They say, you know, I feel so stupid that I fell for that.

I didn't see the red sign or the red flags.

But you have to understand if you are making decisions out of an emotional state, there is a very good chance that you are not.

That's not the decision you would normally have made had.

You been in a rational state of mind.

It's only after the scam that you have time to think about it, and then you start noticing the red flags and realizing, oh, I've been I've fallen victim to this.

So your emotions are a very powerful motivator in order to do what the scammer wants.

And you know, there's a ton of different emotions and depending on the scam, they might have you scared.

They might have you angry, upset, feeling like you're you know, in love, you're grieving the loss of your partner and now you have a love interest again.

We're just not thinking rationally when we're an emotional state, and they very quickly then will come down to and this says requesting payment.

It's requesting money.

I had somebody tell me once you know, I wasn't paid.

They didn't request payment for like a bill.

They requested money for a variety of different reasons.

They like wire transfers.

If you've ever done a wire transfer through your bank, you will get notified before it goes through.

As you're going through and setting it up, are you sure you want to do this?

Once you send this money, it's gone.

Is anybody forcing you to do this?

So there's prompts there that you have to go in and if you have multi factor authentications set up, which you should on all of your financial accounts, it's going to come in and you're probably going to have to get a different code as you're going through that transfer process.

Depends on the bank.

I know, depending on the dollar amount, I've had to put a code in part of the way through the process.

Of transferring money.

They also like the Venmol, the Zell's, the PayPal, those peer to peer payment apps.

Zell's are connected to your bank account.

They are run right through your bank, and you want to make sure you have all the security measures enabled if you're using Zel, because it is attached to a bank account, We're not saying don't ever use it.

You have to make the decision.

It's convenient, it's a convenient way to send money, and you have to make the decision.

Okay, I'm going to use Zel, Well, I'm going to then I'm going to lock it down.

I'm going to put all.

The security measures in place with Zel and with my bank, because if somebody were to be able to get in to my Zell, they're going to have access to that bank account that it's attached to.

And if you've got multiple bank accounts all under the same profile, now they can go in and they can access those other bank accounts.

So I've had I've had people tell me that yes, they're going to continue to use Zell, which is fine.

They've got it locked down, they've got it secure.

But what they've done is they have set up a totally separate bank account and that is the only account that is attached to their zel so if and they only keep a small amount of money in it.

So if a scammer was able to get into their bank account through zell, they only have access to a very small amount of money in that one account.

That want acount is not tied to any of their other accounts.

It's not on the same profile, so the scammer wouldn't be able to see or access any of those other accounts.

Venmo, my understanding, is a product of PayPal and you know those If you're familiar with PayPal that you can have your credit cards on there, you can have your bank accounts on there.

I would highly suggest on PayPal, and I don't remember off the top of my head, if you can have just a credit card listed in PayPal, you might want to check into that and see about doing it.

And if you can not attach your bank account to PayPal and just have a credit card, you have so much more recourse with fraudulent charges on a credit card than you do your debit card or your bank account, So just be careful with those and have all the security measures put in place with Venmo and and PayPal.

Scammers also like gift cards.

They don't need you to actually send them the gift card.

They're going to want you to take a picture of the back of it after you've scratched off the or you've exposed the codes, or they're going to just ask you to give them the codes.

That's all they need and then they have access to the amount of money that's on that gift card.

Now, something interesting about gift cards, and I talked about this in a previous radio show recently over the holidays.

I was at a grocery store.

It was it fries, and I noticed I was looking specifically for an Amazon gift card and they had a different way, a different holder for the Visa Master cards.

The Amazon gift cards wasn't all of the gift cards.

A lot of the restaurant ones, those still had the regular you just pull them off, But this one for Amazon and for the Visa Master cards, you actually had to pulled down.

And it actually the little cardboard covering that is around the hook where the gift card goes in, you have to pull it down and it breaks that that cardboard.

At the top there.

So if you're going in and you're buying gift cards and you happen to you want to you want to buy one, and you happen to see one just laying there.

If it's that cardboard is ripped at the top, don't because that means somebody has pulled it off and you don't know what they've done.

You don't know if they've scanned it and they're just waiting for someone to activate it.

Go in and pull one off yourself so you know that no one has taken that off and done anything with it.

Hopefully we're going to see that on all of the gift cards that they're going to have those types of holders, you know, over the coming months.

That would be fantastic.

It also be fantastic if these stores that sell gift cards would have them back behind customer service.

They keep all the cigarettes back there and all that, so have the gift cards back there.

And yes, it's going to take a little bit more time because you've got to go to customer service and ask them for the gift card and then activate it.

But it's going to be more of a deterrent for somebody to come in and try and scan information off those gift cards.

Cryptocurrency, that's a big one.

Scammers love cryptocurrency.

I don't know if you guys have seen the cryptocurrency ATM machines that are out there there.

You know, I looked it up recently and I want to say it said there was like just over maybe seven hundred of them in the state of Arizona.

There was over there were thousands of them throughout the United States.

There's a few states that didn't have any, but the majority of the states had at least one cryptocurrency ATM machine.

But Arizona has a lot of them, and scammers know exactly where they're You can just look it up online and it'll, you know, tell you where these cryptocurrency ATM machines are at.

And once the you know, the scammer might have you go to your bank and they have they're anticipating the questions the bank teller is going to ask, and so they have all the answers.

They're on the phone with you, and you know they're gonna they're gonna prompt you before you go in, but they're going to listen for those questions and they're going to tell you what to say.

They have the answers to those questions, and they've thought about them, and you get the money and they're going to direct you to a cryptocurrency ATM and you put their account number in that they give you and feed the machine with the cash and it's gone.

It's in their crypto wallet and they're going to convert it to cash and they're going to take it.

So there was not sure if you realized there was a new law put into effect in Arizona regarding the cryptocurrency Kiosk machines.

It went into effect at the end of September.

You can look it up just you know, search crypto new Cryptocurrency Kiosk law in Arizona and you'll find information on it.

There are specific things that need to have been done, and if you meet those requirements, there is a possibility that you could get a refund of the money that you lost in the scam.

There's also daily limits that new users of these machines can maxi amount they can put in and I believe it's after ten days from your first use of the machine.

You then become a reoccurring customer and those daily limits go up.

But the machine is going to you know, when you're done, it spits out a receipt.

Keep that receipt because if in thirty days that you've found that that was a scam, and you follow and you meet all of the requirements, one of which is you need to report it to law enforcement and or the attorney general.

And I believe you also need to report it to the owner of the machine, the owner operator of the machine, but you're going to get a report from law enforcement or the attorney general wherever you report it.

Your receipt is your proof that you put a certain amount of money into that machine, and the receipt is supposed to have the account number of where you're sending the money.

And so then your report that you get from the attorney general or law enforcement is your proof that you were scammed.

But you have to meet all the requirements it's within thirty days, and then you could get a refund.

I'm hoping in the next couple months we're going to be able to have a guest on the show that actually has successfully gotten a refund from being a victim of a scam using these cryptocurrency ATM machines.

So we can go into more detail on that urgency here is in the middle the majority of the scams.

It's urgent from the contact down to getting the money.

Now, there are a few scams and there could be different ones in the future as well, that they don't request money from the get go, like the romance scam or a pig butchering scam.

They're trying to establish a relationship, especially with the romance scam.

They want to get you into that absolute trust.

Once they feel they have you there, then the requests start coming for money and it's urgent that they need the money and they get the money.

The time it takes for you to be in that absolute trust with them varies.

It could take a day, it could take a week, a month, and they're invested because they know once they get you there and you only believe what they say and you're not believing your family and your friends and you're not talking to them about all of this, that they have a better chance of draining your money.

So that's the anatomy of a scam.

We go over this in our presentations, and then another page from our uh our Identity, Theft and Cyber Safety resource packet that we give out to everybody.

It's a thirty page resource packet we give out to everybody at our presentations, and we go through it with them and answer questions.

This is one of the pages and it has some tips.

So pause and assess your emotions is the first one.

Pausing is the most important thing there.

Slow down, pause and think about the situation.

Now, the scammers, if you engage with them, they're going to get you.

Try to get you into that emotional state really quickly so you don't have time to stop and pause and think about the situation.

The second one, have somebody that you trust that you can talk to, because if you stop and pause and think about the situation and you're just not sure, you talk to somebody you're trusted person.

A lot of times by you saying the situation out loud, your brain then flips over into its rational state hearing you explain this, and then all of a sudden you go, Okay, yep, I get it.

It's a scam.

I figured it out.

Other times you're still in that emotional state.

You need your trusted person to be asking you questions, getting you into your rational state so you can understand that this is a scam, and then always verify before you trust.

Back in the eighties, Ronald Reagan coined that phrase trust but verify.

We could do that back then.

We can't do that in today's world.

We have to flip it around.

We have to verify before we trust.

And I'm going to go through and I'm going to show you a few examples of verifying.

But you know, one of them in particular is like the grandparents scam.

You get to call your grandchild's in trouble or some family members in trouble.

You have their phone number.

You call them.

Don't let them on the phone say I changed my number.

Call me at this number.

You have their number, call them on that number and verify what's going on with them.

The next one that old adage, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

If something in your gut is telling you that this doesn't make sense, the hair on the back of your neck is cowing up, anything like that, listen to it.

That old adage still works.

Protect your personal information.

This is big.

You know when we talk in our presentations about how your information gets out there, and we talk about the hacks and the breaches, and you can't control those hacks in the breaches, but what you can control is the information you give to these companies and make sure you understand why the company needs certain information.

If you don't think they need it, ask the question, okay, and make sure you understand why they need it, because it's your personal information and you want to protect it.

Be cautious with payments.

We talked about that just a little bit ago.

You know, legitimate companies aren't going to ask you to pay with credit cards with cryptocurrency.

Some of them, you know a lot of them, I should say now today takes payment apps because it's convenient.

And some companies you know, will accept wire transfers because if you're an example of that would be if you're buying or selling property, right you work through a title company and they want you to wire the money.

But again you need to verify because at some point the title company would have given you the information as to where you need to wire the money.

But right before you wire it, you're going to get a hold of that title company using their verified phone numbers, and you're going to verify that that still is the accurate wiring information.

The last one, this is really really important.

All of these are important, but this is just as important.

Having a trusted tech support person.

Now you're probably familiar with the geek squads that are in Best Buy.

Those geek squad people are tech support people.

It's basically somebody that if you have an issue with your device, you're going to talk to and they can fix it.

They can get viruses off your device.

Malware.

They can help you find good, strong antivirus software that works really well with whatever device you have.

They can help you with other types of software as well.

They can show you how to do different things.

But a lot of times they can they navigate these problems by remoting into your device.

Now you have to give them.

You have to approve that.

There you'll get a little notice in it.

You have to approve them to get into your device.

But that's why you need to trust them.

It's because when they go in and do what they say they're going to do, and they say, okay, everything's fixed.

I'm going to end this session and get out of your computer.

You want to make sure you trust that person that they are ending the session and they are out of your computer, that they are not sitting around in the background watching what you're doing, which is what happens a lot when you have a virus malware or you get those pop ups saying there's a virus and you need to call us right away.

Your computer's been locked.

You know, they're going to go through and act like a trusted tech support person, but they're really hanging out in the background, you know, or they're able to you know, they get you to open up your bank account, and they've I've talked to people that have said I was putting five hundred dollars in there, and all of a sudden, these extra zeros showed up and I wasn't pressing the zero.

So somehow the scammer had control of their computer and before they did the payment, they added some extra zeros on it, and you know, then of course it was like, oh my gosh, you put too many zeros in there.

I'm going to get in trouble.

You know, all of this stuff that's on the refund one.

You know right that they're going to refund you five hundred dollars, but oh my god, it end up being five thousand, and I'm going to get in trouble.

I'm going to get fired, and you need to send the money back, blah blah blah all of that.

So have a trusted tech support person.

If you don't know one, talk to your family and friends, and find out who they use and that they trust them and that they're a good referral, because you don't want to wait until the time that you need this person, because you might be then panicking and you might just google and take the first person and you haven't really vetted that person or that company to know that they are legitimate and not a scammer impersonating a tech support company or a tech support person.

So have them have them in your back pocket so when that time comes, you not going to panic.

You're going to know exactly who you're going to call to get everything fixed on it.

So I'm going to go in and.

Just show you I talked about that verifying before you trust.

So we're going to go in here to I talked about the grandparents scam and calling your grandkids you have their verified phone number.

But remember in the last probably year year and a half, we were getting all of those texts saying that you owe toll fees, and a lot of time, you know, not a lot of times, but sometimes it would say something about it might have said Arizona right, and you're like, oh my gosh, maybe I went through a toll road and I just don't remember so I'm going to pay the bill, right but if you want to verify, and I should have done this before, so hopefully this is going to come up correctly.

But you know, type in toll roads in Arizona, it's going to come up right there.

Arizona has no toll roads, bridges, or tunnels.

All highways and state routes are completely free to use.

That's your verification right there.

But let's say they have a different state.

Let's say they use Pennsylvania.

So you type in you could type in how to pay my toll in Pennsylvania, So it's going to come up here.

To pay tolls, you have several options.

You could have an easy pass already.

You know a lot of these toll booths aren't manned anymore, so you have easy pass that automatically it scans your easy pass each time you go through.

You don't have the easy Pass, you can go toll by plate.

You'll receive a bill in the mail for the tolls you incur.

And I've had this happen before.

If you are renting a vehicle and let's say you happen to be in Pennsylvania and you're going through the toll the toll roads.

This has happened to me.

The plate on the vehicle is through the rental car company, so the toll's gonna then be sent to the rental car company, but then they will put it on your account and send you a bill for the toll to pay the toll, and it says you could have a mobile app.

You can download the Toll by Plate app to manage your payments, view transactions, check your balance, all of that stuff.

But here, if you want to make an online payment, it says visit the Pennsylvania Turnpike website to make payments directly for toll invoices.

You go to put the invoice number in there.

If it's a scam, it's going to come up and say there's no such invoice.

But instead of clicking on those links.

You know, we've talked about Amazon, and I'm going to stop sharing my screen here now, but you know we've we get scammers love to impersonate Amazon.

It's a big company.

A lot of people have Amazon accounts, whether they use them or not.

So maybe you know you have an Amazon account but you don't ever use it, so you get this email saying something's wrong with your account.

You need to go or you need to go in and pay for this order that's in there so it can be processed.

But you're like, I don't use my Amazon accounts, so this has to be a scam.

But if you want to log into it, thinking maybe someone else got in to your Amazon account, you could log in the way you normally would and check things out.

And that's the same if you do use your Amazon account, log into your Amazon account the way you normally would check things out.

You can do that with any company that you have an online account with, or you can find the verified phone number and call the company and ask them the question.

You know, there was a lot of stuff going on with you failed to show up for jury duty and you owe this penalty and stuff.

Well, you can look up the verified phone number and call the courthouse and talk to them to verify what's going on.

You know, but you would you would have gotten a jury summons in the mail.

That you would have had to have.

You would have had to engage with too.

Some people, for whatever reason, have you know, for valid reasons, can get out of the jury duty and you might have to write to them or fill out a form online.

However, it works to see if you can get dismissed.

But you know, you have to think about and ask yourself these questions.

Well, did I ever get a jury summons in the mail that I was supposed to go to court?

You think you might have and you've forgotten it?

You know, again, call the courthouse in that district with a verified phone number, not a phone number that's on any communication.

You just got find the verified phone number and call them and ask them the question, you know, the the jury duty thing.

The courthouses are.

Going to let you explain why you missed jury duty before they're going to just give you a penalty for it.

Because what happens if you got in an accident and you couldn't get there, or you were sick and you were in the hospital.

Right, there's valid reasons why you might have missed jury duty.

So always stop, ask yourself the questions, think about it, give yourself twenty four hours.

You know, I heard this phrase a long time ago.

Sleep on it, right, Sleep on it and think about it the next day.

Now the scammers are going to want to keep contacting you and all of this stuff.

I talked to a lady yesterday and hopefully she's going to be on as a guest soon.

But you know, she had actually engaged with a scammer, and it was during the conversation something just didn't feel right, didn't sit right with her, and so she got off the phone with them.

But she had arranged and said, you know, call me back, I have a dentist appointment.

Called me back at this time.

And sure enough they called, but she didn't answer the phone again.

She knew it was a scam.

But you don't even have to go through all that.

Just hang up on them, don't worry about it.

Just hang up on them, don't worry about being nice to them.

But somewhere in that she was able to figure out that this just didn't feel right, didn't sit right with her, and so she avoided falling victim to that scam.

You need to listen to your gut and what it's telling you.

So that's all I have for today.

The next five weeks, I believe you're going to see Brian Watson.

He's going to be back on here doing this show.

He's going to have some great information for you.

But in the meantime, don't forget to click subscribe to our YouTube channel.

We are up over fifty subscribers.

Now we're trying to get to that one hundred, over one hundred subscribers, so subscribe to our YouTube channel.

You're going to get notified ahead of time of what these shows are going to be about.

You can find all of our past episodes on there, and you can get on our website at Rosadvocacy dot org and find all of our social media channels and go down to the bottom of the homepage and you can sign up for our emailed newsletter and or our mailed newsletter.

Lots of valuable information, but it's a reminder about your scam prevention habits, so the next time you are contacted, you're going to be more apt to stop and pause and think about the situation.

First, Happy New Year everyone, and take care and I will see you mid February.

Thanks.

Well, that's all the knowledge for this episode.

Juni in every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio at kfourahd 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