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.

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 vetted sources and references.

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 kfour 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 everyone to let's talk about scams.

I'm your host, Joyce Petrowski, founder and board president of Rose Resources Outreach to Safeguard the elderly.

You can find more information on our website at Roseadvocacy dot org.

On the homepage you'll see all our social media channels and if you scroll down to the bottom of the homepage, you'll find where you can sign up for our newsletters.

We have one via email and one that we send out in the mail, and the one via email.

Every Tuesday morning at nine fifteen am, Arizona time, you're going to get a tip Tuesday in your email inbox.

Now you might already know that to and that's great, but it reinforces your healthy scam prevention habits, and it reinforces scams.

So that helps you to be able to make scam prevention a habit.

So the next time you are contacted, you're going to be more apt to take that pause, step back, think scams, know what to do in order to determine if that is a legitimate contact or if it's a scam.

So today we're going to talk about a couple FBI public service announcements.

We've got another credit breach.

We're going to make you aware of and then an update for iPhones.

So I'm going to share my screen to We're going to first go into the FBI Public service announcements.

Sorry about that, and sorry that wasn't what I wanted to get to here.

It is.

So this one came out at the beginning of December.

You might have already have seen this on our social media page.

But it's about criminals using altered proof of life media to extort victims in the virtual kidnapping for ransom scams.

So criminals are taking photos, you know, they're getting them through social media predominantly, but they're looking all over the internet form and they're altering the photos and to use as proof of life, the fake proof of life photos, saying that they've kidnapped that person and they're holding them for ransom.

Now, a lot of times it'll be that they're going to contact them through text messages claiming that they've kidnapped their loved one and demand a ransom.

They'll express significant claims of violence towards the loved one if the ransom's not paid immediately, and then they criminals can send what appears to be a genuine photo or video of the victims loved ones upon but if you look at close inspection, you can often see inaccuracies when you compare to the confirmed the actual real photos of that loved one.

So here's some examples of what you might see in the altered photo which they could be photoshopping, taking away a tattoo or a scar.

They could it could be inaccurate body proportions.

So another thing here is interesting.

The FBI says that the criminals will sometimes purposefully send the photos using a timed message feature, so it limits the amount of time that you have to analyze the images.

So it's always good to do a screenshot or save the the the photo somehow save it on your device so you can go back and really inspect it.

So here's some tips to protect yourself when posting the missing information online.

Be mindful that scammers may contact you with a fake information regarding your loved one.

Avoid providing personal information to strangers while traveling.

A lot of people will put on social media that they're traveling.

You know, I'm leaving from here and I'm going to hear.

That's giving the scammer in the criminal that information to know that you're going to be in this particular place, so then they can use that for a fake kidnapping for ransom message to some of your loved ones.

You can have a codeword that you only you and your loved ones know, and you need to make sure that if you do have that code word, that your loved ones know why the code word is established and how important it is to keep it confidential.

There's that false sense of urgency which happens in the majority of scams.

They know that if they can get you in that emotional state and keep everything urgent and emotional, then you're not going to think rationally.

You're not going to stop and think.

You're not going to call your loved one to find out what's going on, which is one of the ways you can verify is to call your loved one, not using the phone, you know, not using the text message, or you know, returning the phone call that came in.

And always report it.

You know, whether you've become a victim of the scam or you've realized it and prevented yourself from being a victim.

It's always good to write everything down and then you can report it to the FBI at their IC three dot Gov.

Now there's a few.

There's one other thing that I want to tell you that you can talk to because scammers now they can They've been able to spoof caller ID for a long time, but now through different ways, they can actually spoof the phone number and make it look like it's coming from your loved one's actual phone numbers.

So we've talked about the SIM swapping scam where scammers can, through your cell phone provider, impersonate you and get them to switch the SIM out to their benefit.

So you can talk to your cell phone carrier and ask them about the ask them if they have a SIM protection or a port out pin that you can have on your account that helps prevent criminals from hijacking your phone number or spoofing you know, the calls and texts.

So that port out pins going to be an added layer of security like a multi factor authentication code, and the SIM protection is going to be there to help prevent that SIM swapping from happening.

Now, another thing that you can do is, you know a lot of times on social media, Facebook in particular, it's on Instagram and TikTok too, But I'm going to show you with Facebook how you can make your account private.

So this is my personal Facebook.

Yes you're gonna see that a friend of mine has the birth of his fifth grandchild.

But anyways, go over here to where your photo is in the top right corner.

You're going to come down to settings and privacy.

Then you're going to go to the privacy center.

And if you look here, it says settings to help control your privacy.

So let's review those settings.

Now we're going to come up here and that's manage your passwords.

Security issues end to end encrypted.

But if you come down here, you can manage your audience settings, and that is who sees the information on your Facebook.

You go into here, and again this is my personal accounts.

So these settings are going to be for me personally.

I've got a lot of them set to public because I have Roses business page attached to my personal page, and that is a public facing page.

So don't copy everything every setting that I have.

You're going to want to go in and determine what works best for you.

But seriously, can think about making your settings private so you can go into your profile information here.

I can tell you here only me, only me, friends of friends only me.

Now I've got public information down here.

Yeah, I could go in and change this all to only me or friends who can see my friends list on my profile only if you're my friend, can you see the other friends?

Who can see the people in pages I follow?

It's public because of the Rose business page being attached post and stories?

Who can see those?

So who can see my future posts?

Again?

I have it set to public because of Rose's business page and most of what I do on my personal Facebook is share posts from Rose.

Who can see my stories?

They're visible for twenty four hours on Facebook and messages.

I have it posted as friends and I'm going to switch this to public because of Rose's Facebook page.

But that's how you go in and you can switch it to custom where you can only show it to specific people or just your friends and past post who can see.

If you want to limit who can see your past post to only friends, you click limit and you can go in and do that.

Now.

You can also come down if you want to block people, or if you want to see who you have blocked, it's going to come in.

You can add somebody to your blocklist that says they won't tell them that you've blocked them.

And I have one person blocked.

I'm not going to get into it but and show you who that is.

But you can click on that and that'll show you who's on your blocked list.

Review tags before they appear in your profile.

So this is something that I have on there that I want to I have it turned on right here.

I want to review the tags before they appear on my profile.

So if someone is posting a story or doing a post and they are tagging me in that post, I want to be able to review it before I have it show up on my feed or in my stories, because maybe it's something I don't want to show a show on mine and I can always hide it, or I look at it and say no that's okay, and I say okay, post to my store, you know, my feed.

So I have that on because I just don't want I don't want anybody to be able to tag me and automatically have it show up on my page.

I'm going to review it first, so that's done.

So that's all you can do there.

You can go into these other privacy topics, more privacy resources, all of that.

You know, you scroll down here.

You can find out if you do ads your information and permissions are here.

Privacy profile, privacy settings for Facebook and for Instagram.

You can find those at the bottom.

So that's how you can go in and check out your privacy settings for and I'm going to stop.

Actually no, I'm going to go back to the PSAs here.

So please go in, especially to your Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or really any social media that you have out there, and make a determination do you really need to have all of this visible to the public.

Scammers will find all this information and they'll use it to their advantage.

Change as much as possible, if not all of it to private, or if you're going to change it to only allowing your friends to view.

Be very careful.

When you get a friend request from somebody, ask yourself, do I already have that person as a friend.

One way you can check is to go in and look at your friend's list and you can search and search for that person's name, and if they already show up, then that means somebody's cloned their account.

And no, you're not going to accept that friend request, but you are going to let your friend know that, hey, I got a friend request from you, so someone's cloned your account.

You could also take that profile and report it as well.

Say this friend request doesn't show up in your current list of friends, well then you need to ask yourself do I know this person right?

Do you have a lot of mutual context?

You can go in your mutual friends.

You can go in and see who the mutual friends are and make a determination based on that.

You know, add that to your factors to determine if you want to accept this person as a friend.

Go in and look at their their page, you know, is it even if you show even if there's a few friends in common, go in and look at that person's page and see if it makes sense.

Is it a new profile, is it they only have a few posts, you know, just different things like that that don't seem right.

And just really do your research before you accept someone as a friend that you don't know.

The next public service announcement was just issued.

Looks like about eleven days ago, So this was this is an update to one that was released just six months ago in May.

So scammers are still impersonating senior US officials in malicious messaging campaigns.

So they've got activity dating back to twenty and twenty three where scammers have impersonated senior US state government, White House cabinet level officials as well as members of Congress to target individuals, including the officials family members, in personal acquaintances.

So if you happen to get a message claiming to be from a Kerrent or former senior US official, don't assume it's automatically authentic.

And we'll look at some different recommendations.

So here's an example as to how it works.

So the actor impersonates a high ranking official and they use an encrypted application.

So Signal is an encrypted messaging app, and I know Signal's been in the news at different points through over the last year, but WhatsApp is encrypted as well.

There's a lot of different encrypted messaging apps out there.

But the scammers when they impersonate these high ranking officials, they'll ask about US policy, They'll request copies of personal documents, They'll want to note appointment to companies leadership.

They'll propose a meeting with high ranking officials.

They'll request a wire transfer.

This is a big year coming up in twenty six for election, and so are they going to impersonate them saying that they're asking for a donation to their election campaign?

And they need it immediately in order to do something, so wire transfer it.

They'll discuss current events, all to make it seem more realistic, and they've actually they're using AI artificial intelligence generated voice messages.

They'll do it through text messaging.

They'll do it through voicemails they claim to come from that senior US official.

Establish a report.

The actors contact the individual and briefly engage on a topic the victim is versed on, with the request to move communication to a secondary encrypted mobile messaging app.

Once communication is established on that encrypted messaging app, actors continue to engage the victim in a number of ways.

So they'll discuss the topic current events, by lotter relations, asking about a trade or security policy.

They'll propose scheduling a meeting, or maybe you're being considered for a nomination to a company's board of directors.

They've also requested victims to take certain actions, such as provide an authentication code that allows the actors to sync their device with the victims contact list.

Supply personally identifiable information and copies of sensitive personal documents, maybe a passport, maybe a birth date, a social security number, could be medical information.

Wire funds under false pretenses It's not always to an overseas financial institution.

It could be one here in the United States with the goal of getting it overseas, request the victim to introduce them to a known associate.

Maybe they're using you to try to get to someone else.

But in most cases the FBI has seen it come through like a text message such as Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp.

Those are all encrypted, they're all legitimate encrypted apps, but again scammers are using them to their advantage.

So here's one they've redacted personal information.

But you know, just a message like that.

So here's some recommendations.

You know, verify the identity of the person calling you or sending you a text or voice message before responding, do the research for the originating number the organization, Find the person or the organization's legitimate number, and call them and say, hey, are you or so and so trying to message me about whatever the subject matter is.

That's how you're going to verify that authenticity.

Carefully examine the email addresses or the contact information, including phone numbers, even if the phone number that they're using is legitimate because they said they can spoof phone numbers.

Now you still want to call the legitimate phone number for whatever organization or person.

Don't return the phone call that came to you, or click on the phone number and the text message.

You know you'll be able to contact them, you know, maybe through an official website or the official phone number and verify what's going on.

You know, they do the AI generated voice cloning.

So yes, oh my gosh, it sounds like the President of the United States, so it must be him.

No, his voice is all over the place.

They can take clips of it.

They can make his voice say whatever they want, So don't believe it just because the voice sounds like the person they're purporting to be.

The artificial intelligence generated contact has advanced so much it's often difficult to identify.

You can always, you know, if you believe it's a scam and you're not sure, you could always contact your local FBI or your local law enforcement, the Federal Trade Commission, you know, ask them for help.

So again, you know, be careful with sharing personal information online or over the phone.

Don't send money, gift cards, crypto or other assets to people that you've just met online or over the phone.

Not clicking on links and emails or text messages.

It's very hard not to do when you're on a phone on a mobile phone, because sometimes just scrolling you've accidentally clicked on something, which is again why you should always have strong antivirus anti malware on your mobile device.

You have to treat it as a mobile computer.

Don't just automatically download information that's on a communication that you didn't initiate.

And set up two factor authentication on all the accounts that will allow it.

Now they're going to use social scammers are going to use social engineering to get you to disclosure your code.

And we've talked about this before.

They're going to pretend to be the bank.

We've determined fraud on your account, and we need to verify it you that we're talking to, So we're going to provide a code and you need to read it back to us to verify you.

Well, that's they're using that because they've gotten to the point they already know your log in and they know they need this code to get into your account.

And it says where do you want the code sent?

It shows the last four digits of your phone number or the last part of your email address, and they already know your email address and your phone numbers, so they click on it, they send it to you, you get it, you turn around and give it to them.

They're in your account.

They're changing all of your passwords, your logins, turning off the two factor authentifica, all that type of stuff, and they're going to drain your accounts.

So be very very careful that creating that secret word or phrase.

It's a good idea as well.

It doesn't replace multi factor authentification with the different accounts, but a secret worder phrase that you have with your family members.

Please just make sure whoever has that in the family that they understand the need to keep it confidential and why it is there, and it is only used in order to verify identities and give examples as to what could happen, because you don't want someone in your family thinking, oh, well, that's never going to happen, that's far fetched, and thinking and then it doesn't really you know, it's not really that confidential, and blah blah blah.

You know, let them know that these things happen to everybody, and scams are easy to fall victim too, and this is exactly why we need to keep this confidential.

So that's it.

On the PSAs from the FBI I'm going to stop sharing now and the next scam that we're going to talk about, and you again might have seen this on our social media.

It's about it's specifically with iPhones, but they could also use it for Android phones as well.

This article that I'm reading from talks about an iPhone scam because the person that wrote in had an iPhone and it almost tricked this person into sending their phone back.

And they do it a lot this time of year because a lot of people get new or upgraded cell phones for Christmas for the holidays, and so they know they have a lot bigger pool of people that they could trick into sending the phones back.

So this in the article, this is what someone had wrote in.

It said, someone called me and told me they sent the wrong iPhone.

They said they were from the company, a specific company, which was the company the person had received the iPhone, the new iPhone from, but they sent him the wrong iPhone and needed to replace it.

So this person was to rip off the label on the box, tape it up, and set it on his front porch steps and FedEx was going to pick it up and they'd put a label on it and just for his trouble, they would send him one hundred dollars gift card.

But what got this this gentleman to start questioning things was the person on the other end of the phone was just too anxious.

They called him again at seven am to make sure that they would follow his instructions.

Right after that, they picked up the box on the steps, called the cell phone company, who confirmed it was a scam.

There's no such things as refurbished I seventeen phones because they're brand new.

So he this person ended up calling the scammer back.

We don't suggest to do that, this is just what they did, and had a few choice words and hung up.

But even since then, the scammers continue to call for the same thing.

So just because you realize it's a scam, and the scammer knows that you've realized it, they're going to continue to call because they got you to a certain point and they think if they can just be more convincing and get you into a deeper emotional state, they're going to convince you to do this.

So we went through basically how it works is they focus on people who have recently bought a new iPhone.

Now again, this could work with Android phones as well.

The information often comes from data broker sites, leaked purchase data, or marketing lists that are sold online.

Then the scammers can spoof the carrier's phone number so the call seems legitimate.

They sound confident there's a shipping mistake.

They insist the phone.

The phone must be returned right away.

They reinforce urgency.

The carriers already scheduled.

You just need to take the label off the box, tape up the box with the phone in it, leave it outside.

It'll get picked up and you know, FedEx, you whoever it is that they use as a carrier.

And again this is nothing against the carriers, because you know they're the scammer's creating the label with the carriers.

So the carriers are thinking that this is a legitimate pickup.

But they they sorry, I got sidetracked there.

The device is gone, so the scammer either resells it or strips it for parts.

By the time you realize something's wrong, recovery is unlikely.

So flip over and see what it says here.

So here's some red flags with this.

You get that unsolicited call.

That's the first thing we talk about in our Anatomy of a scam is that contact method and this one happens to be a phone call and you need to return your new iPhone, and they pressure you to act fast because they don't want you to take time to think about what's going on, because if you took paused and you took time to think about it, you're going to think, well, wait a minute, did I even request to have my iPhone returned?

Was there an issue with it?

Did I make a request?

And you'll go, no, I didn't, and then you're going to know it's a scam.

So they're going to be urgent about it, and they're going to want you to act fast so you don't think about what's going on.

Instructing you to leave it sitting outside for a carrier to pick up with no label on it.

That's just not how it works.

And they're going to give you a gift card for your cooperation doesn't work that way either, and they continue with follow up calls, you know, just to make sure that you're still emotional, you're still acting fast and all that.

So, so if you are going to do a legitimate return for a product, you're going to get a return shipping label.

It either would have already come in your delivery in case you needed to return it, you just have to fill it out and maybe activate it, you know, I don't know.

Other times you could go on your online account and say I need to return this, do what you need to do there, and then they email you a shipping a return shipping label.

You know, every company is different on how they do their returns, and so don't just leave a package out waiting, you know, with no return label on it.

The urgency anything that's urgent, especially like returns.

You know, if you've initiated the return, they're going to tell you you've got once you once the return has been approved, you've got x amount of days to return it.

It needs to be received by this date in our office in order to process it and give you your refund or your replace, whatever it is.

They're going to give you time to do it.

Installing, you know, strong antivirus again, you know we're going to continue to talk about that.

You should have strong antivirus anti malware on all of your devices and devices includes your mobile phone because they are mobile computers.

And save any messages or called details because then you can report this information whether you've fallen victim to it or not.

You can report the information to law enforcement because you're not the only one that has fallen victim or almost fallen victim to this type of scan.

And the more information law enforcement has, the more pieces of the puzzle that they can put together and find the people that are doing this and share your share your experience with other people.

We love to have people come on the show as guests and share their experiences.

Whether you have fallen victim to a scam or not, sharing your experience is very powerful and it helps other people know what's going on.

If you have an experience and you want to share it with us on this show, just reach out to us.

Info at Roseadvocacy dot org.

Again, it's info at Roseadvocacy dot org.

There's a new data breach that was just published yesterday.

It affects social security numbers of five point eight million consumers.

So there's a company called seven hundred Credit and this company the records are related to customers of auto dealerships because auto dealerships that some auto dealerships use seven hundred Credit services and so it would be that information that got breached and they while seven hundred Credit has not published an exhaustive list of every data field involved.

The company has confirmed that sole security numbers have been were one of the US highly sensitive personal information that was exposed, which again raises your risk of identity theft and financial fraud.

So again we're going to reiterate strong anti virus and antimoware on all of your devices, including your mobile phones.

If you're still reusing passwords, you might want to switch to a password manager.

It is subscription based.

We don't have a recommendation for a specific one.

You can just go on and google the best password Managers for twenty twenty five, or we're right around the corner is twenty twenty six the best Password Managers for twenty twenty six.

There's a lot of legitimate tech companies that have gone through and on a regular basis they evaluate password managers, antivirus software, credit monitoring companies, and they give you a list of their top rated ones, their pros and cons, the subscriptions, and sometimes they might even have discount codes.

But when you are googling, if you're going to Google that or whatever you are going to google, just know that when you look under the heading of and I'm going to share my screen again and show you guys here.

So like, I'm going to go on and I'm going to Google best Password Manager twenty twenty five.

Okay, you see here where cyber News comes up, but right here underneath the title, it says sponsored.

Now, a lot of legitimate companies will have sponsored ads.

They can buy ads on Google.

Nonprofits can do it too, and it's legitimate.

But scammers can do it also, And so don't just click on the first one you come to.

If you're like, Okay, I recognize cyber News and that is a legitimate company and I know their website.

Will then just go directly to Cybernews's website and search on their website for the best password Managers of twenty twenty five.

You'll get their article, or just keep scrolling down.

Okay, sponsored again, I'm going to keep going down copilot.

That's the artificial intelligence.

Wired is, to my knowledge, a legitimate company.

If you already use them and you know their website, go directly there again you come down here.

Now, these are not sponsored.

And I actually use Tom's Guide as a reference for some certain things, and so I know that it's Tom's Guide dot com.

But again, if you want to If you know that that's the actual website that you're looking at, then you know you can click on it.

But the better thing to do is you know the actual website, well, then let's make a let's go in and go Tom's Guide dot com and go in here and go directly to the Tom's Guide instead of clicking on that link.

Because if you saw it had a US after it and I don't know, but I know this is Tom's Guide, so and then you can go in here and you can use the search bar to search for whatever article it was you were looking for.

So that's that's a better way to search there.

The other thing you could do is a lot of companies now are have the option of using a past key instead of a password, and a past key is biometric information.

A lot of times, like when I log into Amazon, it'll ask me do I want to set up a pass key?

You can set it up and I do.

Use a password manager and it will allow me to have the past key in my Amazon account file in my password manager.

It's biometric information, the facial scan, a fingerprint, you know, something like that, and those are security experts have said those are a lot more safer than passwords, because every year they do they do a survey and the majority of us reuse passwords, and a lot of people still use password one, two three, which is just like giving people the keys to your house and your car and saying, come in and do whatever you want, whatever you want.

But if you're going to reuse a password, you have to ask yourself, if I'm going to reuse this password, what damage can be done?

If someone figures it out on the first account I used it, They're going to plug it in to all these other accounts.

They have a software system that's going to do that, and now they're going to have access to those accounts other accounts that you've reused the password on.

So you've got to ask yourself that question.

You could sign up for credit monitoring services.

Again, those are subscription based.

You can do the same research that we talked about with the password managers.

You could put a credit freeze on You have to go through all three credit reporting agencies Experience, TransUnion, and Equifax.

Quickest way to do it is to set up an online account with them and you can go in and freeze it and it just stays frozen.

And that is probably one of the best preventative measures for identity theft, because when someone goes to take a loan out in your name, whoever they're taking the loanout with, is going to run a credit check on your name and sold security number, and if your credit's frozen at all three of the agencies, it's going to come back that we can't give you any information on their credit because it's frozen.

So and then you'll get a letter from that company saying we're not we can't issue you credit.

You need to unfreeze your credit and then come back and talk to us.

That's happened to my husband many times over the last twenty years, and we're like great, because we didn't ask for that credit, so his information's been out there a long time.

Some people don't want to freeze their credit for a variety of different reasons.

So if you're not going to freeze your credit, then monitor your credit reports on a regular basis so that way you can find any fraudulent credit quickly and start the process of identity theft and get that off of your account.

What other things are on here?

There are personal data removal companies.

They are subscription based.

Just understand that, Yeah, you can sign up for him.

It's great to have them.

They will constantly scan, you know, continuously scan the web for your personal information because yes, they can have it all taken off as of this point in time, but give it twenty four hours and there might be some of your information might pop back up.

So they're going to have to continually do it to continually get get this your information off off of the Internet.

The last thing I want to talk about today is Apple has a new security update with UH and I'm not going to go into detail on what it is that was compromised.

There's a lot of code and stuff involved, but the the the vulnerabilities that were tracked have been exploited in real, real world world attacks, and it says they were limited to specific targeted individuals.

It doesn't say who the specific targeted or if it was like a specific category of people so or specific industry or something like that.

So basically, Apple's release patches, they've released the updates across their supported operating system, so it's across all of their devices, the iOS, the iPad os, the mac os, Safari, watch os, tvOS, vision os, all of it.

So if you have updates that haven't been installed.

Please go in and install those updates on all of your devices that are Apple and that includes any maybe home devices that you have that might be Apple as well.

And you can set up your accounts to automatically do these updates on a regular basis.

Look into setting that up as well so you can install those your They can be installed as soon as soon as the updates come out and are made available.

Let's see that is it on that one.

So just to summarize, make sure you do all of your software updates.

Set your devices to do those automatic updates so you don't have to worry that you might forget that you want to go in and do it.

If if you don't want to set up for automatic updates, put it.

Put it.

Put a reminder on your phone once a week or however often you want, if you want to look at it every day, every other day, twice a week, once a week however often, put a reminder on your phone and then go in to all of your devices, and that includes your home devices as well, anything Apple related, but you can do it for Android as well.

You can do it for all of your devices that are connected to the internet to go in and do these updates because yes, they might have some new features out for you, but they also are going to have patches for security flaws that they have found after the previous updates were put out.

And don't forget.

No matter what type of contact you get, always make sure that you take a pause, You step back, You think about the situation.

You verify the situation before you can even begin to believe that it it's true.

And go into your social media accounts and look at your privacy settings and change as much as possible, if not all, of it to private so it limits who can see your information.

And don't just automatically accept friend request.

Look and see if they're already your friends, then you know that their account's been cloned.

If they're not already your friend, you know, look at the look at the the friend requests, look at the accounts profile, see what's on there?

Are they posting doesn't make sense?

Do you have a lot of mutual friends?

Who are the mutual friends?

Do your research and find out what's going on before you just automatically accept those friend requests.

I am still working on getting a guest.

Hopefully i'll have them next week for to share their scam experience.

So until then, remember you can go on our website at Rosadvocacy dot org.

All the social media channels are there.

Please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

We are more than halfway there to one hundred subscribers.

We want to get to one hundred because it opens up some more things on our account, so please subscribe to our YouTube channels.

We also have a Let's Talk about scams dot com website you can go on.

You can find all of our prior episodes on both that website and our YouTube channel.

Follow us on social media and scroll down to the bottom of the page and sign up for our emailed newsletter and or our mailed newsletter.

This is information to keep you informed about scams and how to protect yourself and help you develop the healthy skepticism and the healthy scam prevention habits.

It needs to be a habit so when you are contacted, because you will be contacted, you're going to be more app to stop and pause and think about what's going on on and verify the situation.

So until next week, everybody, have a wonderful, happy, safe New Year's and I'll see you guys next Tuesday.

Thank you.

Well, that's all the knowledge.

For this episode, tune in every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio at KFOURHD 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.