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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 at 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.

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 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 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 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?

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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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I tell people all the time.

We have trusts, we have wills, 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, 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 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 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.

Thank you very much.

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.