Ah, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the ever present fear of death and pale anxiety. Pain that is like never leaves, that's just always there in the heart of every single person and drives us to most of the terrible crimes that we commit as a species. What are you doing, Sarah?
What else?
I'm here and I'm scared.
Yeah, we're all.
So.
I keep and raised goats, and one of my goats gave birth this year, so I've been milking her. You can milk a goat for about a year after they give birth, you know, something like that. It kind of depends a little bit.
Is it also birth control for the goat?
I don't know enough about goats biology to tell you that, Sarah, but.
I appreciate you're accepting that. That's above your pay grade. Yeah, that's well above my pay grade. I've just figured out milking. So I got this this little little lady goat. She's a Nigerian dwarf. She's small, She's about the size of like a small dog. Nothing bad has ever happened to this animal. She has never been been threatened, she's never been attacked, she's never been like harmed. All that people
have ever done for her. All that I've ever done for her is go is bring her food and other things that she likes. And all that the milking processes is her receiving treats while she's milked. And still if I move the wrong way around her, if I like, you know, like I have to be there's very specific ways that I move when she's in there, because if I move the wrong way, she will freak out and
run away. Right, And that's because she is descended from a long line of prey animals that had to always be ready to be attacked and to try to run away from danger.
Right.
It's the same reason why you know, people had a whole fun thing on the internet the other cup a few years ago about like if you put like a cucumber or something out slightly outside of a cat's field of vision, they'll freak out because their instincts tell them this is a snake. And we all know this about animals. I'm not like.
People love to scare their people love.
To scare their cats to make them feel like, you know, they're and it It's interesting to me because like currently in right wing media, there's this huge thing with like biological reality, and you know, we're going against these deeply programmed things when people are allowed to be transgender or like biologically men are meant to fight in a felanx with a spear and like you're you know, this is why you need to pay ten thousand dollars to have
a man yell at you. Well, you do push ups, otherwise you're not connected to your your like ancestral masculinity. You got to eat raw meat, you know whatever, kind of fucking nonsense. And everyone's fine with like or all of these people are fine with the idea that, like, you know, my ancestral men were hunters and fighters, so I need to do hunting and fighting stuff in order to be like truly happy. But nobody likes the nobody
likes being told. Nobody's willing to accept that, like, well, your ancestors were constantly at threat from various kinds of animals, and so there is always fear in your heart and nothing, nothing will ever make that go away, Like you just have to learn how to deal with it and cope with it. Because we grew up in a world that was deeply, deeply dangerous in ways that like it is not anymore, and that's just will always be with you.
And none of these people want to accept that. They want to take the parts of like ancient humanity that are like standing with a shield and a spear or trying to hunt a fucking gazelle, but they don't want to accept that, like the actual thing that will never leave us because of our ancestors is fear.
I don't want to.
Be too dramatic, but I feel like I'm having a breakthrough right now because I feel like I have been treating like my life and also the therapy that I've been doing as an approach to like, well, I feel really fearful and anxious a lot, and that's a failing on my part, or like not a moral failing, but like that's something that's wrong with me that has to do with my personal history, and it's a problem, and I, you know, and I to be clear, like I do think that I need to deal with that, and we
all need to learn how to manage fear in our own ways and also to trust it at times, but seeing it is something that's just part of the organisms we are, instead of this idea of like an invading presence that shouldn't be there like it's just right. It's like it's natural for us to be afraid. That's what we're how what we are?
Yeah, what I'd like people at home to do. You know, the next time the fear hits you, right and you find yourself wondering why am I so afraid? Instead of burrowing into like whatever you said in your like going on Twitter and you know, doom scrolling or any of that stuff, get on the Internet and look up a picture of the skull of a cave bear. Cave bears don't exist anymore, but they're much larger than all of the all present day bears. They're small compared to cave bears.
They were like the elephants of bears, and they used to murder the shit out of us. And look at the skull of a cave bear and realize, like, that's why I'm scared right now. It's because many, many years ago, my ancestors had to constantly be worried about this fucking thing charging out of whatever cave and murdering their entire family. And so now I'm sitting at home, in my air conditioned house where there are no cave bears, and I'm scared like, just look at a picture of a cave bear.
That's why you're scared.
It's also just to bring it into horror movies, as I must, like, it's fascinating how so many horror movies because the House without a Cave Bear makes me think of Barbarian and that so many horror movies are about the idea and horror stories before that are about the idea of something that wants to kill rye. You coming out of the past, yeah, because of you know, traumas or misdeeds of the pastor just from the past in some way, because we act like the present is all
about our thriving and having fun and being wholesome. But really when we're focusing on that, understand on some level, like modernity itself is sort of a denial of death.
I think, yeah, yeah, I mean that's like with all of these like Silicon Valley dudes who just like were born at the right time to get incredibly lucky gambling on you know, fucking tech companies and suddenly made a billion dollars or whatever. Like none of them can get over the fact that they're always scared to despite all their money and their bodyguards, and so they they can coct these, you know, insane things to like I'm going to live forever if I do this, or you know,
it's this, it's this. It's all this denial of the reality and inevitability of death, and also this denial that like fundamentally we're descended from like little bitty dudes and ladies who there were bigger things around that ate them, and so we were scared of those things.
Like it's only it's it's so recently in human existence that we've not getting eaten all the time.
Yeah, we were constantly getting eaten by shit. We were scared little guys, and so were our cats, you know, like just like that's the same reason, like what you got, you get like a duck. Why is my dog anxious all the time? Well, it's because it's descended from like little guys who had to be worried all the time.
We all are. It's fine anyway, Sarah. On the seventy ninth or whatever anniversary of the day the classic Michael Bay movie Pearl Harbor was inspired, a woman named Katie Sorensen, thirty years old, visited a Michael's craft store in Pedaluma, California with her four year old son and one year old daughter. Now, Pedaluma is basically a suburb of San Francisco. This is relevant to the tech industry stuff we were talking about. The median household income is over one hundred
thousand dollars a year. This is a wealthy suburb. And the crime rate in Pedaluma is about one point four times below the national average, so fairly safe place. But despite how safe and affluent the suburb she lives in is, Katie Sorensen was scared. And Katie Sorenson was also a small time influencer on Instagram. She's like a mommy influencer.
Right now her shit has been thoroughly scrubbed from the Internet because of what happened next, But based on context clues, I think it's fairly safe to say that none of her frequent updates prior to December seventh got that much traction. She was, in other words, like a failing momfluencer who was desperate to find something that would bring followers to her account. And here is the post that she made in an attempt to do that.
This week. My children were the targets of attempted kidnap, which is such a weird thing to even vocalize, but it happened, and I want to share that story with you in an effort to raise awareness as to what signs to look for and to just encourage parents to be more aware of their surroundings and what is going on around them.
I think right now we are so distracted by.
Everything that's going on in the world that we are kind of have our guards up so much about masks and wanting to keep our children safe that way, that we're forgetting the most important way to keep them safe, and that is with us and to not have them take in. So I'm going to share a story an effort to raise that awareness, but it's I'm not ready.
I this is hard for me. I'm not ready to share this story, but I know it's important and I would rather be uncomfortable, an awkward and get the message out sooner than wait until I feel composed.
Okay, that's probably enough, Sophie. So you can see here both if you think back to the chain letters we were talking about, right, if you think back to that murderer in the backseat chain letter we read, you can see the same structural harm hallmarks here. Right, there's the claim that like parents are not someone like the person that this is meant for. You're not paying enough at take to a danger that you're not aware of, but it's present. Right, you need to be more aware of
this danger. You need to be more aware of the threat that your kids are always facing. Right, there's this. It's framed in this like here are suggestion, like I'm telling you this so that you can avoid the stangers, that you can protect yourself and your loved ones. And from there on, like from the point that you know, we stopped that video, the story that she was giving continued, and I'm going to read a summary of what she
said in this. In another video from a local Sonoma paper, The Press Democrat, she described being followed by an unknown man and woman at the Petaluma Michael's craft store on North mcdowe Boulevard from the time she arrived in the parking lot with her children until they returned to her car. In the parking lot, she said the couple approached her as she was putting one of her children in a car seat, and what she suspected was an attempt to
grab the stroller. A separate man who spotted Sorensen and recognized she was in danger, stepped into help, she said in the videos. Meanwhile, she said the pair drove off and like, first off, if you are taking your kid to a Michael's craft store, the worst thing that is going to happen to you that day is being in a Michael's Craft store. Right, they are not going to get kidnapped. O, They're unpleasant. I would prefer to be
kidnapped being in a Michael's craft store. You know, you meet better people getting kidnapped than you do to have.
Michael's Craft store due to you, I don't know nothing Michael's Craft store.
Yes, actually I have. The last guy I needed. I needed styrofoam cones. And if you need if you need a cone in a shape that's made out of styrophoe or something made out of styrofoam, like, that's that's where you go, is a Michaelson.
I've had many pleasant experiences at Michael's Craft store, just saying, and was never kidnapped.
No I I I I only go I roll to the Michaels like I'm heading to like downtown Fallujah in two thousand and five. You know you've got to be ready at a Michael's. That's where shit goes down. It's their locker. Yeah, like like rolling into a Michael's and that in that hurt locker body armor. This will stop them from taking me, yeah.
And also any glitter from getting on here.
That's right, that's right. So Sorensen, in addition to posting these videos, the first of which almost immediately gets to like two million views, which was had never happened to her account before, she makes a kidnapping report to the Petaluma police, right, so they deemed this a suspicious person's case.
So her her video goes viral, she makes her report to the police, she publishes a second video, and here's there's a number of dumb things that that Sorensen does, But the stupidest miss error that she makes in this grift is in her second video, she brags that there are like in order to market it, she says there are details in the video that she didn't give the cops, which is like saying, in your viral video, I made a false police report. You know, don't do that as
a as a up. If you're going to commit this crime, don't make that mistake. So that said, her marketing is good. These videos get about four and a half million views combined together. But it's a bad idea from a not getting arrested standpoint, because while if you don't make a police report, you can get away with this kind of thing any amount of time. Right, if you're just like posting videos saying my kids were nearly kidnapped, here's what
to avoid, that's fine. Once you make a police report, you have created a situation in which you might get in trouble. And Sorensen probably still would have been okay. But in addition to making a police report, she made the further mistake of accusing specific people who had names of having been the wanna be pedophile child abductors. Right, so the specific people that she made allegations against were another couple that was just at Michael's that day, Eddie
and Sadie Martinez. Again, like she sees like a Hispanic couple in the store, she decides, and she claims in her videos that she heard them describing her children on the phone with a third party, So she thinks they're like spotters talking back to the kidnapping base about like these kids they can steal, and.
Just talk about this operation like the last Yeah, we're running on three year old white kids.
Grab her? Yeah, yeah we got oh we need it, We need another like uh this this one's like blonde. She's got a jumper on. Do we need another jumper kid? Yeah, Like, go ahead and get her. So she she not only does she give these people's identifications, she like describes them to the police, but she takes pictures of them in the store and she posts it on her Instagram.
Oh huh.
So now the Martinez is find out about this because these postco viral, and her son comes up to Sadie Martinez and is like, hey, mom, somebody claims that you were part of a kidnapping gang and Michael's you might want to you might want to be aware of this.
I also love how like, okay, so you're in this elite kidnapping gang. I love it. You're like, where should we go to pick up kids without being noticed? Yeah, Michael's craft Michaels cruise around a store and a mini mall with eight thousand cameras in it.
That's also the least if you were to tell me this is a kidnapping gang that specifically abducts like sixty four year old women, Right, I'd be like, well, yeah, that's a Michael's. That's that's definitely where you're gonna abduct, like where you go for that, Yeah, or guys who are weirdly into model trains, Yeah, you're gonna get a lot of that stuff out a Michael's. But like, kids don't go to Michael's. Children do not like Michaels. It's not the it's it's the place to get like kind
of vaguely unsettling Christmas decorations. That's what I go to Michael's for.
Right, you know kidnappers love yeah, kidnappers, So maybe they're there on an errand.
Anyway, And again, the martinez Is are the kind of people who go to to a Michael's. Right, they're like a middle aged couple shopping for whatever kind of decorations together. But this lady decides like, nope, they're part of a kidnapping gang. That's the only reason why you know a couple would be at a Michael's craft store is to steal my children shop is to steal my white children. Now this this happens.
Nobody wants white children. They're terrible, No, no, horrible.
You can't see.
Them anything anymore without them having an incident.
They all got they all got allergies, you know, which is because they're not actually abiding by the primal principles and eating nothing but raw liver exactly.
Otherwise you'll never got big and strong like Thank you, man who was not on steroids.
Thank you. Look, this is why I am getting in to the to the liver influencer business. Uh. And I'm specifically selling freeze dried polar bear liver now, Sarah, A lot of doctors, the same guys in the pharma industrial complex, will tell you that even a single bite of polar bear liver will kill you because of how concentrated the vitamins are. It's basically poison, that's what doctor say. But you know, if we've learned one thing from the pandemic,
it's that you can't trust doctors. So I'm going to start selling polar bear liver.
I think the grenades are going to be more ethical. But you know, yeah, forget forget about the Franklin expedition, yeah orch ever when they all died from doing that, yeah in the future.
Look, they died because they didn't have a grenade launcher. If you have a grenade launcher and you eat the polar bear liver, then you're fine. Then all the ever fear of death will leave you.
Yeah, And that's you know, small price to pay. It's what five ninety nine a month for your uh, your liver club.
It's like three hundred and forty seven dollars a week. What it is not, Sarah, The Feds do not like you taking this many livers from this many polar bears. It has made a lot of problems for me. But I do it for you listeners.
You know, the cost covers legal fees.
Yeah. Yeah, So Sorensen makes this post and accuses the Martinez being petophy kidnappers. Right in the middle of that period. You remember a couple of years back where there were a bunch of viral stories of like white people calling the cops on people who are not white for bullshit reasons. Right, There's that lady who threatened that black bird watcher in Central Park. There was there was a lady who called nine one one on like a black family and Oakland
cooking barbecue in the park. You know, these are kind of like again in that like Karen sort of viral story theme which is almost as reliable a traffic getter as a kidnapping stories. So as soon as the Martinez is like came forward and you are like this fucking mommy blogger like or mommy influencer or whatever like accused us of being a pedophile gang, the virality that had been really good for Sorenson's follower a count initially kind
of came back to bite her in the ass. So the Pedaluma police made a timely update being like, you know, there are inconsistencies between the police report she filed and the story she did on Instagram. Sorensen compounded her mistakes by doubling down and was like, I want to see these people prosecute you did a'll testify in court that they were trying to steal my kids. The Michaels people, you know, the cops talk to them and Michaels is like,
we didn't see anything problematic appen. There's no evidence of anything happening. So this all ends in Sorenson getting charged in twenty twenty one with three misdemeanor counts a false report of a crime. She was convicted on one count and sentenced earlier this year, Just a couple of weeks ago, to twelve months of what's called informal probation, which restricts her from using social media and requires a four hour
implicit bias training. She's going to still to that definitely, Like, look, I yeah, hard to argue with the fact that, like this lady being off social media is good for her, right, she should not be on the internet. None of us really should, that.
Really should, but especially not hers.
Especially not her.
But wow, I mean, you know, I don't think harsher punishment fixes anything for anybody. It's a question of who gets too much rather than who gets too little. But yeah, it is, I mean that is, and that's a remarkably light sentence for fucking up someone.
Yeah, I have that.
I shall say that.
She's probably gonna spend I think, like thirty days in jail and then she's got like a work release program, so you know, it's not I don't know, like what I would say is like the proper penalty here or whatever. I'm not angry that it's like too harsh, I'll say that much.
Right.
So, while this has been celebrated online, you know, as soon as this this lady got convicted, you know, people were obviously like, look, this dumb racist committed fraud, and they paid the price. Despite the fact that like, that's kind of how the story has gotten, you know, remembered. Now, Sorenson had a pretty good reason to think that this would work out for her, because, again, fake kidnapping stories are one of the most reliable kinds of viral content
in multiple forms of social media. In twenty nineteen, Snope started receiving inquiries about a Facebook meme that warned of a sex trafficking plot in Florence, Kentucky. Variations of this meme tended to show a photo of a red rose stuck to a car door with text like this, There have been recent incidents in northern Kentucky about sex traffickers leaving roses on victims cars. The roses have a chemical on them to make you pass out so they can
grab you. One incident happened in a Walmart parking lot in Florence, Kentucky. Please be careful, ladies.
First of all, there's a lot worse happening in a Walmart parking lot. Oh God, all humanity. Yeah, but it's a I'm glad to hear it's not Southern Kentucky, just northern Kentucky.
There you get, yeah, very Kentucky. Well, you know, the specific poison that you can put on a rose only grows in northern Kentucky, so it's hard to get down. Oh well so yeah, yeah, I don't like.
If I were going to start a sex trafficking ring, I would go for a population center. I would be worried about starting from scratch. Yeah, but I'm not an expert, so.
Yeah, no, no, we I mean we do talk frequently about like what we would do where were a sex trafficking rain But I think we can all agree Florence, Kentucky is where it was, where you start.
That's this is like, you know, Michelle remembers the book that started the Satanic panic, is like there are two centers worldwide, centers for organized Satanism and they are I think Geneva, Switzerland and Victoria, b C.
And it's like, yep, yeah, of course why.
Did they Was it for the climate? Do they get whether it's nice in the woods?
Yeah all right, yeah, watching.
So.
Comments on one example of this meme, which was shared about six and a half thousand times on Facebook, range from readers pointing out that it's an obvious fake to crying about how to prave the world has become and talking about how they always bring a gun with them everywhere. Snop's quickly found that the photo for the initial version of the meme was a fake. It was pulled from an unrelated blog post. It was just like someone, I don't know, you know, people put roses and cardors or whatever.
It's like a here's your Valentine's Day, you know thing, honey or whatever like that's I.
Think, sorry, I hope you see this when you finish your shift at Derby's.
Yeah, they're like something like that. So what that means, though, is because the original photo had nothing to do with a kidnapping conspiracy, there was intent behind the fake. Right. We can debate as to whether or not maybe Sorensen was like someone who just was unreasonably paranoid or whatever, although I think she was probably making a conscious fake. But this was definitely a conscious fake. This is not somebody panicking because their brain got poisoned by viral media
or whatever. This is someone choosing to knowingly spread a false kidnapping story. And I'm going to read another quote from that Snopes article, the twenty nineteen Rose Hoax was not the first sex trafficking scared to emerge from Kentucky in recent years. In late twenty seventeen, some social media users in the Louisville and Florence area in the north state claimed you have been approached or harassed in public.
Those purported incidents were quickly linked without evidence, to human trafficking, and the local branch of a controversial church was forced to defend its member against allegations of sex tracks. And this is this is a little where it gets weird because a big part of why Kentucky is key to that or is center to so many of these memes is that there's a church in northern Kentucky called the World Mission Society of God. It is absolutely a cult.
It's one of those weird Seventh Day Adventist cults that was founded in South Korea by a guy who declared himself Jesus Christ. You know, it's one of those things. There's a couple of those, right, and they have been It's definitely one of those things where like they've been accused of like brainwashing and abuse of psychological control tactics,
but they don't take people off the street. What's happening here is that like this cult is in is local people know it's shady, and when folks come up to them to prostolytize, they think that they're about to be like kidnapped, and so that's part of where all this comes from. They haven't accused of human trafficking and a bunch of places, but they've never been convicted of anything. Police have cleared them. I don't have any desire to defend this cult, but I don't think what they're doing
is like pulling people off the street. I think it's what cults do, right, it's normal cult staff.
All right, maybe our most successful cult scientology, Like you don't have to grab people, you just let them wander into your center downtown and that you traffic them.
Yeah, it's like a tunnel spider or the snakes that were the ancestor of the cucumbers that scare our cats. That's I think that works. Yeah, that's moil it's fine. So in this case, in the case of these specific conspiracy theories, the police in Kentucky where have been like reasonably good about being like there's no evidence behind this.
But as a general rule, law enforcement is usually part of the hype cycle of these sort of like fake kidnapping rumors than they are part of washing the hype cycle. In twenty nineteen, Facebook memes started spreading in College Station, Texas about a kidnapping plot that involved zip tying a victim's windshield wipers together and then abducting the inevitably female victim while she struggles to take them off. One version of the meme ends with this very chain lettery call
to action. I've made this post public and would love it if you'd share it with your friends and family. Please be aware of your surroundings and drive somewhere safe with a lot of people around before trying to remove them if this happens to you. And the College station police started getting queries once this post went viral, and so they took to Twitter and they posted on Twitter, did you see the post about zip ties and human trafficking.
We don't know whether traffickers are doing this or if it's a distraction technique used by a would be thief. Either way, always be aware of your surroundings and hashtags see something, say something, so they immediately like buy into this and spread this absolute nonsense. And then roughly a week later after people get angry at them post an update saying to be clear, zip ties we're described to officers as having been found in a college station mall
parking lot. However, it is extremely unlikely this tactic would be related to human tres trafficking. Hashtag verify facts before sharing alarming posts. That's not how hashtags were College Station Police Department. But also you are the ones who didn't verify shit before sharing.
It, so so weird past self three hours ago?
Do better, don't have done. It's also like, well, why else would people be zip tying Whinshill weaberon. I don't know, kids are fucking with people. Look, I may have at a certain point when I was drunk and younger, stolen a bike lock and locked the gates of an apartment complex, you know, for no reason other than I was a drunk little asshole. You know, maybe I did that. Uh.
Sometimes never allowed for the existence of drunk little assholes. And it's a major plot.
Yes, yeah, like and it's again it's it's this Okham's razors sort of thing. What is what is the is the simplest likeliest explanation Cuman trafficking gangs are carrying out a complicated plot or some asshole did a thing.
By feel like some asshole?
Is it?
You know ninety eight percent of the time, and then the other two percent it's pretty much the government.
Yeah, it's either an asshole or the government.
Right.
Speaking of the government, you know who governs my life.
Sarah starting my phoneus picked that moment to vibrate.
Like wow, wow. Well, while while Sarah checks her phone, you should check out these advertisements. Wow, those products, My god. Have you ever seen a service like that? Not me, Sarah, I have to, like the college station police say, if I'm going to do the see something say something thing here, because you knocked over your recorder and then bent down to get it without checking to see if a kidnapping gang was any they might have knocked your recorder off the desk so that they could get you.
I mean, the thing is, there's been a kidnapper under my bed for three weeks now, but I mean he's just passed out under there. I think he just needed a place to relax and it's fun. Yeah, I thank you again.
By the way, hashtag kidnappers need shelter too. I don't know I'm doing there.
So it is like, yeah, the kidnapper is a great way to see any person in your field of vision who you don't want to see as a fellow human being.
So yeah, yeah, they're kidnappers, they're pedophiles, they're a rape gang or whatever. Yeah, it's I mean, that's part of how this thing can be utilized by fascists. Right. Fundamentally, fascism's power comes from the fact that we're all anxious and scared all the time. And if you can convince people that you can take that anxiety away by hurting a specific group, then you can do a lot of things. You can get away with quite a bit, it turns.
Out, and you can all wear snazzy little outfits because apparently what men want is to wear snazzy little outfits, but it doesn't occur to them to just do something harmless like drill team.
Yeah, and unfortunately, I feel like we were trying, Like for a while, there was the idea that like, what if we let men dress up in snazzy little outfits and pretend to be you know, soldiers, are fascists, will that make them less you know, likely to do real world harm? And no, apparently not.
Yeah, we tried it.
We tried it. We tried it, folks, No sorry.
So.
Another frequent spreader of bullshit kidnapping stories are local radio stations, which often find themselves desperate for content that they can read life on air to hopefully keep people tuning in, and also who often like run little seo websites that exist to pull in views based on keywords and shit in order to get advertising money. Our employers come into this story in a little bit.
So.
One example of this comes from February twenty twenty one, when a local Omaha radio station KFAB posted an article on their website titled if you find a water bottle on your car drive away, you might be in danger now.
Wotius ruined Jessica's water bottle?
Yeah yeah, So the title there is a pretty perfect blend of both seo friendly click you know, click getting titling and old school chain letter tactics.
Right.
The article warned readers that unspecified abductors were leaving water bottles on cars to mark their targets. This is a tactic used by traffickers and kidnappers to get you to exit your vehicle and take whatever is on top of the car off. If you have this happen and something is on the hood of your car when you come back to it, leave it there, drive away. It'll fall off on its own. It's also like.
And I say this in exasperation frequently, but has no one seen Henry a portrait of a serial killer. You just got to follow somebody home. You don't have to do the water bottle trick. Henry is not wasting his money on water bottles.
Yeah, that gets expensive and it's bad for the ocean. We support here at Coolzone ethical kidnapping. Right, if you're going to run a kidnapping gang, I'm abducting people from target parking lots, please don't waste water bottles or use recycled water bottles. Right, those boxes of water. You can put a box of water on top of somebody's car, steal them, traffic them, you know, sell them to Algeria. Right, you know that's fine, that's it.
Can't box water do Yeah, that's.
Why when when when we sell enslaved suburban white people here at cool Zone Media, each one of them comes with a guarantee that no plastic water bottles will be used in the abduction. Right, all all all of those, it's all those like cans of liquid death that's what we do. You know, we have we have a sponsorship with the Liquid Death people for our kidnapping gangs.
It's so hard to ethink we kidnap these days. It's great to know people are still doing.
Yeah. Yeah, it's worth it. It's worth it, Sarah. You know the extra it costs us a little more. It does cut down on profits a little bit. But I feel like, you know, that's our responsibility is a member of the community. You know, we want to give back.
Just kidnapping to make money. You're kidnapping because you love it.
It's the love of the game, right. It makes me so sad that there's all these nickel and diming kidnappers out there. Right, you're in the best industry in the world. Baby, you know, enjoy it.
See, that's all there is to it.
Yeahah, so again, I probably don't need to tell you there's zero evidence that kidnappers are using water bottles to trick people up.
Like if you if someone has already entered their car and you need them to exit it again to take off a water bottle, it seems like you've had ample opportunity to kidnap them already. Like if you need to kidnap that if.
It makes fun at them, and I probably don't need to tell you that there's zero evidence for this. Snope snotes that the origin for this find of the story was a TikTok video posted by quote a woman who said she had a random encounter with a stranger acting oddly around her car in them all parking lot and later found a water bottle on the hood of her car and posited, based on nothing that these two things were somehow related.
Let me tell you something. I had a weird interaction in a parking lot last night at Winko. And you know what that was. It's because I was at Winco and people at Winco are having a time and we're all getting through it. And I mean, parking lots are one of the rare spaces where people from different walks of life or exact interact, and you can, yeah, you can see that in these reactions.
That's why so many that's why it's all parking lots, and that's why, like affluent people have to use the same parking lots as everyone else, and they often resent that deeply, and you know, they're probably a lot of them are the same kind of people who believe that, like the existence of homeless folks is like a constant threat to their life, right, Like it's the greatest threat in the world is that they are homeless people somewhere, or that you know, if the more high density, low
income housing is created in their town, it'll like ruin you know, their their life or whatever. Like it's it's this. It's the same reason why rich people hate the TSA with a special passion that they don't reserve for like regular cops. It's because they can't avoid the TSA unless they're super super bitch. But like normal, rich people have to go through the same TSA that the rest of
us do, and they hate it. Yeah, anyway, it's whatever, I like, I it's I think a lot of this probably is the result of people who don't normally go out in the world in a situation where they don't have total control, like you know, and they encounter someone who is either having a mental health crisis or just is a kind of person they wouldn't socialize with normally, and they this this sets off that part in their brain that like corresponds to the part of the brain
that gets set off in a cat that sees a cucumber, right, and they and they feel like I'm in danger. Now, I'm in danger because something like unfamiliar has occurred. And then the pattern making parts of our brain like put together in the rest of it, right, Like, Oh, I found a water bottle on my car, and thirty minutes earlier I saw a person who was like talking to themselves, and so this must be evidence of an international kidnapping gay and so who would.
Put a water bottle on my car but someone having a mental health episode who clearly is therefore in the perfect position to run a kidnapping ring.
Yeah, it's yeah, it's great.
So and it's like, I mean, think of when little kids meet somebody new, yeah, and that they feel unsure and they are freaked out, and then they need a second to warm up, and then they take it and they don't develop a conspiracy theory about that person, which I think is really charming of them.
What I love, Sarah, what makes me really happy and feel good about the future, is thinking about how many of the people who make these little conspiracy theories based on anodyne shit then repeat those conspiracy theories to their children and say, you must be worried at all times, there's always there's kidnapping gangs everywhere. Mommy saved you from kidnappers today by noticing the water bottle and then pulling
her glock out in the parking lot. You know, like, it's great, it's cool that that happens.
Great for the kids. It's known to shit to be great for the kids. My god, yeah, yeah.
It's dope. So what we are seeing here in that story I just related is evidence of the kind of food chain that these fake crime kidnapping panic stories exist in. So the story is cooked up initially by a mix of people who are just a little out of their minds or by actual bad actors wanting to spread conspiracy theories and paranoia and stuff on Facebook or TikTok. Oftentimes it's people who like are spreading stuff they know is
not true because they know we'll get them followers. And then the laziest actors in our media ecosystem, the people putting together these shitty little seo grabbing articles for like local news sites and shit, take this viral story, churn out a quick article with no fact checking, and that helps the story spread even for the right and it makes it seem like it's a real thing, because now look that's a news station that's covering this thing. There
must be an epidemic. I found one example of one of these articles on Distractify, which exists making taking shit that went viral on the Internet and turning it into very low quality content. The article seems to have been inspired by a TikTok video posted by a woman named Aaron Dawn, who recorded a four minute video about coming back from a shopping trip and finding a sheet of paper on her car door. She claims was soaked in a chemical that injured her. Now, Aaron provides no photographic No,
she may, we'll get to that. But like, she provided no evidence that this had happened at all. But she did film a recreation of finding the paper on her car, where like, she put a piece of paper on her car and filmed herself finding it.
You're a Robert Stack. This is not unsolved, mister.
Yeah, it's so everyone gets to be Robert Stack. Now that's what TikTok has given us. God, so she rates over this recreation that she films. When I saw it, I just picked it up with my fingernails and I tossed it out. I didn't touch the napkin, but guess what, I still opened the door with my fingertips. I asked my husband, did you put a napkin in my door? And he was like no, So immediately I started looking
for hand sanitizer. Now she experienced no real symptoms because poisons like this are so difficult to make an apply that they functionally don't exist. Right, it could someone make a poison that you could like put on a napkin and it could impact, yes, But it's like that's like the CIA, right, like random kidd like were like Putin or Putin and like here's the thing, like Putin has done it a few times, right, but like it didn't work fair, Like the wrong people got got a lot
of the time. Like if you look up, we've covered like the fucking Sidney Gottlieb. I think he was the CIA's poisoner in chief, and like they were bad at it, like they kept trying to make these poisons and like usually it would not work fair. That's why Fidel Castro was still alive. None of this stuff works very well. It certainly does not work reliably enough to be abducting people from target parking lots as like a casual deal. So he is on what is her name, Aaron Dawn.
Yeah, they're like, let's use like really top narc stuff on Aaron.
Now. It's one of those. It does remind me a little bit about like right after nine to eleven happened to kids in my middle school, where like al Qaeda is gonna get our school next, and it's like, I don't know, man, I don't think. I don't think Osama
bin Laden is aware of Plano, Texas. Like we're probably good actually, but it is like, you know, I think that it it like after nine to eleven, people believe that kind of shit because they've just seen an insane thing happen on television, right, And I think part of why folks are more primed to believe stuff like this is they you know, they're on the news and they hear like, oh, all of these cops you know, had seizures because they were near a fentanel thing, and like
that's bullshit, that's not real. But like a lot of the cops who are having these reactions, like a lot of them are lying, but a lot of them are just people like they bought it right, Like they're having a hysterical reaction because they are also dumb little monkeys who are scared all the time, and someone gave them a focus for it, right, And Aaron, whether she's a con artist or a dumb little monkey, claims that she had horrible reactions as a result of this poison that
her handwet numbs. She had her husband take there. And it's really interesting because like her husband, she had her call nine one one, and she specifically says that they called then one because they weren't in their normal area and didn't know where the nearest er was, which I also feel like says a lot about them, where like we're always thinking about where the nearest er is, you know,
but we left our normal area. You know, don't ever leave your normal area because then you won't know where that like when you get poisoned by kidnappers's.
Very like terry or lie. Yeah, I just like to be in my area and it's like okay, but yeah, that means that your fears when you're outside your area aren't necessarily about what's really happening.
Yes, she claims that the doctors at the hospital diagnosed her with acute poisoning from an unknown substance. Karen, it's interesting. I'm mainly interested in this because of the way that this gets covered by Distractify who they dress their their article about Aaron's bullshit, and like I would say, it's like the panoply of journalism, right, they put journalism's clothes on this story, but it's not really journalism. Here's how
the article opens. According to the ACLU, there are anywhere from fourteen thou five hundred to seventeen thousand, five hundred people trafficked in the United States each and every year. In twenty nineteen, California reported the highest number of cases in the country, with fifteen hundred and seven people trafficked in the state alone. A staggering thirty two percent of people who are trafficked were purportedly done so by an
inanimate partner of theirs. However, there have been a growing number of kidnapping stories attempts circulating on social media that are tied to trafficking. See like, hey, you want to know what all those most of those human trafficking cases are and like, fucking Californian whatever, it's not suburban moms
getting abducted in parking lots. It's the people who pick your fucking fruit, right, Like, it's it's that that is super common and obviously is a huge problem, but it's not the kind of problem that you can make Aaron Dawn care about, right because she she wants to go on social media. Grapes, Yeah, grapes. So again, it's also like, let's start with you know, a huge the biggest chunk of people who are traffic are done by a lot are trafficked by an intimate partner. Like that's how trafficking
actually occurs. However, we've seen a lot of stories on social media, so like, that's literally like all that there is to this this claim. Anyway. The article then brings up the tragic case of Eliza Fletcher, who was an actual young woman who was abducted and murdered while jogging not all that long ago, and again, shit happens, right, Tragic stores like this do occur, but not often. There's three hundred and eighty million people in this country or whatever, right, Like,
it's very sad about what happened to Eliza Fletcher. Probably not something you should take general like information about your life on like.
And also that it's a some asshole crime.
Yeah, it's like definitely a problem, definitely bad, not evidence that you are in danger, you know, And it's yeah, it's frustrating because like the reasonable way to respond to Eliza Fletchers, like, yeah, you should try to, like, you know, be aware of your surroundings and stuff, because shit does happen. You should generally, you know, keep keep an eye out, you know, don't lose yourself completely, and you know, whatever
you're doing, you know, have some situational awareness. But that always gets turned into like be frightened at all times when you really it's like, you know, look both ways before crossing the street, you know, but.
I don't and assume the absolute worst about everybody, like not just the worst within the context of the situation, but the worst thing a person could possibly do.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like so that twenty eighteen story of a shirt on a car being used to market is repeated in the article as evidence that these things are a quote common ploy of traffickers. And that's an example of kind of the article, you know, form of spreading this disinformation. Another good example of like how this shit spreads is this twenty twenty one TikTok video posted by a user named mimes there.
So I went to church on Sunday for about an hour and I came back out and there was melted cheese.
On my car.
So I called my friend and her mom to come help me scrape it off. And as soon as they came, this white van with like stickers and they were wearing masks smoking, pulled out of a parking space that was two spots away from me, and they went to the other parking lot across the street where they could watch us clean off the cheese. And here's a.
Picture of the cheese.
So this is the cheese like halfway scraped off two pieces. It would literally took an hour for me to scrape all this off. I personally had no idea that they were using this as a tactic to take people now. And if I hadn't called my friend that I could have easily been taken within the hour that it took me to take off the cheese. And this happened at my church, So I can't even imagine where they're trying to use it.
An hour to scrape off the cheese. It is a slice of crafted America.
So drive home, Drive home, honey. The cheese.
Also, it was it was, it was like a craft slice like it's like a sie I don't know how that could take that long.
There's multiple humans, but go on, people live in a universe without little brothers.
No, obviously we all saw the numbers on that video. It's been shared thousands and thousands in towns, the huge It's very it went super viral. It is. There's a lot going on there, like the fact that she's like, these people in a white van were wearing masks and smoking? Were they doing both of those things? Mims? Really, how does one do that?
Maybe there were some lefties having a cigarette.
You never know, Yeah, it was Antifa. The fact that it happens in her like, right, I think it's again, I don't know. These things are kind of an even mix between people who are just looking for conspiracies everywhere because the Internet has so thoroughly damaged them and people who are lying to get virality and followers. I don't know which one, Mims. Is The fact that she says it's in a church parking lot, like even at church,
you're not safe, right, Like everywhere's dangerous. You know they're coming after Christians, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Oh, definitely not safe. I also wonder to what extent this is about, like having an experience that you don't understand the logic of, like there's cheese on your car if this actually happened or something like that, and being trained to see any object in this case as a threat and then being like and then leaning into it when you want and maybe like elaborating and embroidering, because there's like this huge incentive both to go with your fear and then to like tell this ridiculous story about
it because it'll, you know, because not only is it altruistic, but it's going to get you attention and followers.
Yep, yep, and uh yeah, that's that's cool. So I look into Mims because I'm trying to figure out which one is she. Is she someone who's who's just terminally pilled, or is she somebody who's you know, run a running a con Her oldest video is from the start of the pandemic. She's in a car looking at a friend who's sitting in the car next to her. Pretty normal snapshot of the loneliness that came from that period of time. Right.
There are videos where she does like her makeup, or she dances, or she lifts weights, but all of those on her account get between a couple of hundred and at most two or three thousand views. She has one video of herself in kind of like form fitting athletic wear hugging a friend dressed similarly with texts that says when you hear big titties are out displayed. That's got twenty two thousand views. It is her second most popular video.
Several of her videos are just like athletes try dancing, you know, stuff like that where she's with a friend and they're like doing dances or whatever. Normal TikTok, I would say, normal shit. That looks like attempts to go viral on TikTok. Right, this looks like the account of someone who's trying out stuff to be an online influencer. Right, I'm going to try doing the makeup, see if that works. I'm going to try doing dancing videos or workout and
see if like that goes viral for me. And none of that stuff really took off, Like I said, her biggest other video is that like when you hear big titties are out? Video at twenty two thousand views. This if you find a slice of cheese on your car video has four hundred and forty six thousand videos and I Suspect views, and I Suspect is responsible for most
of her four thousand or so followers. Mims's post was duly picked up by the bottom feeders of the Internet, in this case our corporate overlord's at iHeartRadio, who posted an article titled if you find a slice of cheese on your car, you might be in danger. There's no attempt to even provide journalistic context on this one, just the line. It might sound silly, but a TikTok user named Mimi is very serious about her experience. Great great,
great work, guys. Now, all of this would be easy to ignore as just more harmless disinformation if it weren't for shit like Phoebe copis murdering Daniel Garcia right like that, that's the grounding. This is all like seems like silliest
Internet bullshit, but like this affects people. It causes them to think they are in danger, and they take steps to defend themselves, and that sometimes leads to people getting It's the same as those like stories of like folks shooting at people who back into their driveway to like turn their car around. Right, people die from this shit.
And I guarantee you sometimes it's Fox, sometimes it's TikTok, sometimes face, but it's all this shit that's everywhere, right, So you know, stuff like this have part of what's going to spread cases like this, and what's going to spread like is the fact that stories like this are everywhere because they're a profitable industry, right, this is a
business spreading this shit. I found this video on TikTok while I was doing my research for that article that's going to be on my substack Chatterzone that's got six point nine million views, and it's just a collection of everything we've talked about, like, watch this thing nice.
If you see this, run. If you see money in your windshield, you need to run away fast. They're trying to get you to get out of your car and grab the money. If you see this, you need to get in your car some other way. This is a sign that this is probably laced with something. People's hands have gone numb, they have passed out. It is a trick. Do not touch this.
If you see this. They have labeled this. This is what they're labeling.
They're saying, this is a woman who is alone, that someone has been watching you. They see you're alone. They think you're vulnerable. You need to go home, and you need to cut this off. This is meant to pause you so that someone from underneath the car can cut your achilles heel and so that you're distracted, gives them enough time. Something that looks the most innocent. But you're gonna notice this one. It's gonna be placed here after you're already.
In your car.
Your goal is to get you out of your car. You just want to check your surroundings, okay, because there's so many different ways.
For you don't want to get out of your car and be texting.
You don't want to go to your car before.
This has so many views, it's been shared so widely. It's just again it's it's let's make people scared and then sell them weapons using affiliate links on my TikTok.
Six point nine million views. It's literally everything from the Snopes, Like I think this this was definitely made by someone who went through all of those Snopes collections of like different of like you know, zip tie on the door, piece of cheese, you know, fucking napkin stuck it, and they just made a video to scare people collecting all that shit they x the disinformation debunking stuff as a source. Like that's what this lady did. I hate, I hate this person.
It's god. Yeah, it's very crafty. I'll say that she's crafty like ice is cold.
Yeah, she's crafty, crafty like ice is cold. And you know who else is crafty? The sponsors of our show, who definitely don't have anything to do with that article we talked about earlier. We're gonna get in trouble for that one, Sophie. Nah, all right, well we are back anyway.
So it's cool. And in addition to causing you know, we've talked about how all of these kind of paranoid, paranoid conspiracy theories about kidnapping, in addition to causing like you know, brain damage to some people, this stuff provides cover for other kinds of scammers. And this brings me to a particular new kind of con that's been enabled by modern AI tools. This is fun, Sarah, You're gonna like this. You ever heard of fake kidnapping scams or virtual kidnappings?
Ooh?
I think as like a phishing strategy.
Yeah, the idea has existed for a while. I found a twenty fourteen warning from the San Antonio FBI Press Office, and I'm going to read that to you. Now, this is how it existed. This other stuff worked prior to AI. Right. Over the past several years, San Antonio FBI, along with many state and local enforcement law enforcement partners, received reports from the public regarding extortion schemes, often referred to as
virtual kidnappings. These schemes typically involve an individual or criminal organization who contacts a victim via telephone and demands payment for the return of a kidnapped family member or friend, while no actual kidnapping has taken place. The callers often use co conspirators to convince their victims of the legitimacy of the threat. For example, a caller might attempt to convince a victim that his daughter was kidnapped by having a young female scream for help in the background during
the call. Now, that's like not an easy con to pull off in the pre AI era, Like not only do you have to have like multiple people, but like, I don't know, let me talk to them, right, I'm not going to give money to a kidnapper if I can't hear from the person kidnapped. You know, but AI
has made that possible. Particularly, the thing that's made it possible is both the existence of various AI tools that can let you kind of like clone or fake a voice, and the fact that basically every young person is posting videos on TikTok that have their voice all the time, right like, so there is It provides you with the ability to mimic, particularly people's kids, with pretty reasonable accuracy. And that's what we've started to see. And I'm gonna
post for you another TikTok video, this one not spreading disinformation. Well, kit, well here, I'm just gonna play.
This thing new scam alert. I usually don't fall for scams, but they got me listen to this. So I got a call from mom mom last night around seven pm. The call came in, It showed her number, it showed her name. How I have it stored in my phone? I answered, Hey, Mom, what's up? And I heard my mom's voice like kind of fading away, like someone was taking the phone away from her, and I heard like weeks.
This guy then gets on the phone and he goes, hey, I have your mom, and if you don't send me money, I'm gonna kill this bitch, and I was.
Uh, okay, who is this?
Like what is going on now? Mind you, My mom works in home health, so her job is to go to patients' homes and do self assessments. So in my head, I'm like, it's happened, like a patient has taken her hostage and this is for real. And the guy on the phone, him and his girlfriend or whoever she was, were such good actors, so he's like yelling at me and really pressuring me to get this money sent back.
So like, first off, I wanted to clip put this because it is an example of a viral TikTok posts that's not spreading disinformation. This is a real thing. I have no reason to believe this. Woe's not telling the truth.
And there is evidence from good like reputable journalism that fake kidnapping scams like this have become more common because with these kind of tools, you can fake someone's voice, you know, and all you needed is a second to say honey, help me or whatever, and then a person gets on and you do the you do the con from there, right, and like you know this lady, I think did find out what was happening, But like you can see, like It's interesting because, like she says, well,
you know, my mom's job is going into people's houses. She's the home healthcare worker. So I've always, in the back of my mind been worried that something might happen to her. Right, So it's both this, I've always everyone's always anxious because we're we're stupid monkeys. And also, you know, we all have things that we you know, fears that are are con cognizant. Right if you have like a loved one who's got a long commute or whatever, you worry about him dying in a car crash or something.
In this case, you know this this this like woman gets like these people target her for whatever reason, And like, yeah, that's tough because like, you're not stupid. If you hear your loved one's voice and someone say send me money, I have dumb or gullible for falling for that. That's an insane thing to have to be worried about, right that,
Like someone can fake your mom's voice. That's nuts. That's like like again, it's and it's but it's also I do think the climate of all of these fake stories makes decent people more likely to fall for stuff like this, because they're already prime to believe there's kidnapping gangs everywhere, right.
And because everywhere you look there's something you've never heard of happening, So in a sense, why not this other thing.
This is why my general response to anyone who calls me is go ahead kill them. I don't care. I say that no matter why they call it.
That's actually how you answer the phone.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm like, hey, Robert, and you're like, go ahead kill them.
Fucking cut their throat. I don't give a shit.
I'm like, a, is the episode good? Can I publish it?
Death?
Yeah?
So anyway, I think, Sophie, but I don't want to do that.
Like, again, you don't need to be worried about kidnapping, but you should, as we're going to talk about, you should be worried about getting scammed because it's scams are more common than they've ever been, and they are more tailored towards individual people because of the kind of tools that exist. The first of these scams have started hitting victims,
as I've stated. In April of this year, in Arizona, family received a phone call from their fifteen year old daughter, who sounded distraught and handed the phone over to a man who told them, you call the police, you call anybody. I'm gonna pop her so full of drugs. I'm going to have my way with her, and I'm going to drop her off in Mexico. And you see, again, it's all the shit we've been talking about since Phoebe Copus.
Right.
There's kidnapping gangs. There's drugs that people have that will knock folks out. You know, probably a little bit of fentanyl, conspiracy shit mix some of that. There's Mexico, right, you bring up Mexico that scares people. Yeah, yeah, Like all of these it's all all there now. Thankfully in this case, this the girl who like got her voice cloned for this scam, Her mom was like at a public place, so she gets the call and she freaks out like
you do when you think your daughter's been kidnapped. Very reasonable time to freak out. But other people around her they call nine one one and like have the presence of mind to call her husband and be like, is your daughter around and he's like, yeah, she's at home. They're like okay, ma'am, you're we're good. Like something else that's happening here, you know. But you know it that
illustrates how advanced these scams have become. The mom in this case later told local news it was completely her voice, it was her inflection, it was the way she would have cried. I never doubted for one second it was her. That's the freaky part that really got me to my core. Yeah, which, like, yeah, that would be very frightening, right, very most people. Now you've been you're aware that this is a thing. It's kind of like, you know, kidnappers in a fuck or
it's kind of like hijackers in a plane with box cutters. Right, that's a real threat when it's never happened before. Now, if anyone tried to like take over a plane with box cutters, everyone the plane's going to beat them to death with luggage, right, Like it's yeah, yeah exactly. But you know, when you're not aware that this is a scam, of course, it is fucking horrifying, harrowing, And that brings
us to the Hidden Bastard for this week's episode. I know it's taken several hours to get to this point, Sarah, I'm sorry.
We're already a thousand years old. It's getting a little older.
Exactly exactly we are. We are ancients, as old as the trees. I am. I am an int you know, I remember? Yeah anyway, whatever, So yeah, obviously, like Phoebe Copis did a horrible thing, But the part of why she did that horrible thing was that she had been kind of this ever present ecosystem of you are in danger,
you are at risk, people are attacking you. Like most people aren't going to murder someone, you know, even if they buy into that stuff, but a certain number of people will murder people as a result of this kind of shit, right, And I think one of the things that feeds into that ever present feeling that you're at risk, that you're under attack, you have to defend yourself is that all of us are under attack at all times through every single form of communication that we own. The
attack is not kidnapping gangs, it's not human traffickers. But like, look at how many emails you've gotten today and comb through your spam filter, see how many of them are attempts for people to fish you or to like how many text messages or phone calls did you get today that are from scam? Likely? You know, how many like pieces of things like shit did you get in the mail.
Like I got to call this morning from a lovely British robot who wanted to sell me how health insurance?
Exactly? That is an attack, right, That's not an attack like a kidnapping. It's not something, but it is. That is someone trying to harm you, right, like Sarah, someone tried to hurt you today through the phone. You know, someone is trying to hurt all of us every day through our phones and various other methods of communication.
And what did we learn? How is Sarah supposed to answer the phone from now on?
Kill the hostage, Kill the hostage.
That's right, we all really Sarah, all of this. We could all learn a lot from the movie Speed right, put a bullet in that hostage's kneecap, do what Keanu would do.
It's only Jeff Daniels.
Oh yeah, it was Jeff Daniels. Huh. I like him. So I feel like the fact that we are all constantly being attacked by con artists, you know, even if the vast majority of those attacks fail, even if the vast majority those are obvious and laughable, contributes to the mindset that makes people more likely to believe this kind
of kidnapping shit, Right, we're paranoid. There's reason to be paranoid, but it's not there's nothing fun in being like Well, because of a variety of different kinds of deregulation and just plain old failures to foresee any need for regulation, every method of communication we have has been infested by con artists and scammers to a degree that has never been present in human history before, and that contributes to
a mindset where people don't trust anybody else. Right, instead of saying that, like we want to believe, it's just sexier to believe that you're like the center of a taken story, right, thanks, Yeah.
And instead of being attacked by one thousand tiny scammers every week who are trying to make a little bit of money. It's it's like a fabulous espionage kidnapping ring.
Yeah, that's much sexier, and it's but I do want to kind of I want to spend a little bit of time here at the end talking about how bad this has gotten in numbers, because I think this is something everyone's sort of aware that we're all getting approached by scammers more often, But like, there's this isn't just a thing that you think because it happens to you
might be more common, this is objectively happening. Phishing scams hit a historic high in Q four of twenty twenty two, with four point seven million reported attacks, which is a one hundred and fifty percent increase since twenty nineteen. A research right up I found from a research firm Compaatech noted quote October twenty twenty two saw more than one hundred thousand unique email subject lines, the largest number ever recorded.
This shows that hackers are more likely than ever to tailor their approach rather than using the same template for every victim. This is one of these things that like the increasing development of these AI tools has allowed, is it makes it easier to kind of instead of like going for the lowest common denominator, actually tailoring stuff for individuals. Right, Like, you can't do a fake kidnapping scam where you're cloning
somebody's mom's voice without like target that person. You're not like randomly going after that, right It's because it's it takes some effort to clone a voice like that. You have to know something about the person. And this is what we're seeing across the board, not only a growth in the number of scams targeting Americans, but smarter and more personalized scams. It remains true that about ninety five percent of all cybersecurity issues are the result of human error.
But I think that statistic is actually the way it is framed is problematic because when you say ninety five percent of cybersecurity issues the result of human error, what I think most people hear is that like, oh, a dummy clicked a link they shouldn't have clicked. What a dummy? No, no, no, it's a human error. If you wire someone money because you believe your mom has been kidnapped, that doesn't mean it's not understandable if you're not aware of the con right. See.
And the fact that people feel like if I fall for something, if I get conned, I did something dumb, means they don't report when they're victimized a lot because they think people will make fun of them. This is an actual problem, right, This is a societal level problem that people feel this way when they are victimized. Z Scalers Threat Labs twenty twenty three phishing report warned that chat, GPT, and other AI tools can also be used to create
fake login pages for users who have no coding knowledge. Themselves. They can use these fake login pages in order to like fake that it's someone's bank or whatever, and they can insert malware through that, they can get you know, there's a wide variety of ways they can fuck with people through that. And eventually these same AI tools will be utilized effectively and like, you know, software that is meant to protect people from this, but it's just not
good at that yet. There's too many false positives, Like when you're scanning email, you know, using AI tools and whatnot to try to determine which ones are fishing attempts. And like if a quarter of your emails are getting like deleted by an AI because it mistakenly thinks that they're you know, that causes a problem for you just can't It's It's what I'm saying here is that I'm not trying to fear monger about the technology in general.
What I'm saying is that new technology tends to be more profitable for attackers before it becomes useful for defending people in this situation, and so that's part of the problem. The primary victims of this new wave of scams are the elderly. The FBI Internet Crime Report last year claimed that Americans over age sixty lost and estimated one point seven billion dollars to fraud, the highest number ever reported
for any age group, and an increase. You want to guess how much this amount has increased over the last three years. So okay, well, no, not quite that high, but it is an increase of eighty four percent since twenty twenty one.
Still so much.
Yeah, that it's huge. It's like so much more common now. I found an article, a very good article in The Advocate that gives some texture to the kinds of scams that are increasingly hitting the elderly. Matthews, fifty two of Baton Rouge told victims he could make investments on their behalf, assured them that they could make high rates of return, and threatened to injure them if they did not make payments,
according to his guilty plea. In a similar case in April, Muhammad Alam fifty pleaded guilty to computer fraud scheme that targeted elderly victims in the US, including Louisiana, and took in about three hundred and forty thousand fraudulent profits. Alam and other members of the scheme tricked victims into thinking their computers needed support, then offered to fix them for
a fee. After the victims paid, Alum would seek access to their bank accounts under the guys that they were entitled to a discount and manipulate account balances, so the victims thought that they owed money to the computer company. So adults age sixty and older are not only likely er to be scammed, they are the least likely to report being victimized to the authorities. They don't want to
call the police. Again. This is like when these people, when victims are interviewed, the number one reason they give for not reporting that they've been victimized is they think they will be blamed or mocked for falling for a Khan. Kathy Stokes, director of fraud Prevention for the AARP, told the Advocate this, well, you gave someone of that information, so there's nothing we can do. Fundamentally, we've got to change that. People are losing what amounts to generational wealth
these days. Like we're not just talking about nickel and diming people. We are talking about taking someone's retirement savings, you know, taking money that they would have passed on to their kids. Like we are talking about like people people's lives are being destroyed by this stuff. And there's again they don't even feel like they can report having huge amounts of money stolen from them because they'll be mocked for like being a dumb old person who fell
for a scam. That's like somebody building a fake website to trap them and shit. A lot of the time. Sometimes yeah, people are greedy or whatever and they get trapped that way. But like phone scams are close to an all time high, phishing scams and text message scams
are hitting people at the highest levels ever. And add into this the fact that social media has like spent years goading people to read and report and share paranoid conspiracy theories, it shouldn't be surprising that by most measurements, social trust in American society is at its lowest level in living memory. In the early nineteen seventies, when Chaine letters about backseat slashers went from mailbox to mailbox, about half of Americans reported to the American National Election Survey
that they believed most people could be trusted. Today, less than a third of Americans respond the same way. A recent poll found that social trust is lowest for Americans over sixty five, which is understandable when you realize how much of them are being bombarded by attempts to steal their fucking savings. And it's like, I don't know, Like that's that's kind of what I've got so far. I don't I don't know what to do about this because like I kind of low key think this is one
of the biggest problems in the country. This is like, you know, when you talk about people being worried that you know of civil violence of like you know we're going to have like like this feeds into that to a huge degree. Like look up those stories of people shooting folks and their driveway. They're not young, right, They're old. And I don't please don't take this as me being like it's understandable that they murdered a young woman in
their driveway. It's like no, But when you bombarded people both with conspiracy theories about how they're in danger and you're also constantly trying to them every hour of every day, some of them will lose their minds and a lot of them will have guns. You know, like it's that's a problem, we should deal with it.
Yes, yeah, and you know, and you make some good points, but I really think there's a bigger problem in this country, and it's that someone puts on a car.
Someone well, you know, like like I always say, you say this often in your podcast, You're wrong about If you see cheese on your car, pull out a glock and just open fire, empty it into.
You see she's on your car, Just yeah, jump the man off the bomb honestly, just level the city or and it's time to start over.
This is why I always say, never go any public place without a six thousand pound ammodium nitrate bomb, you know, just in case you'd rather need it.
Do say that often better to have.
It and not need it than need it and not have it, you know. That's why I always tow a rider truck behind my car, always ready, you know, in case I have to detonate a parking lot to protect my I don't know, Sarah, what do we do here? How do we fix this?
Oh?
Gosh? I mean, I think that a lot of this problem, as far as I can tell, as people replacing their actual life with the Internet in various other forms of media, you know, the epidemic of loneliness among Americans and especially Americans over sixty. I really think that part of the answer is for us to actually talk to each other more, which is slightly ironic for me to be saying, because we are doing this over zoom. But hey, I'm looking you in the face. Yeah, that's the right thing.
And I'll see you in like an hour and a half in person. Yeah.
And we're gonna eat popcorn together, even popcorn together, eat cheese together, not alone.
Don't put it on somebody's car if.
You see a water on your car again. Hand grenade, you know, keep one of those German stick grenades in your belt at all time so you can just hurl it at your vehicle if you see a trash bag nearby that scares you.
Yeaheah.
I mean.
The point is that if you kill absolutely everyone, you will be safe. This is why game of all this.
Yeah, well that's why you know. I'm glad that we finally have a movie coming out about my personal hero, Robert Oppenheimer. I think the real tragedy of Oppenheimer is that we stopped at like twelve or thirteen thousand nuclear weapons, right, we need one for every person on every if everyone has a nuke, Like, look at how peaceful relations between the US and the Soviet Union State because of all the nukes. If we each have a nuke, right, everything's fine.
Yes, peace through proliferation, just like Ronnie said, Just like Ronnie said.
Anyway, Sarah got anything to plug?
I have a podcast called You Wrong About It's also very much about Bastards. If if you like this show, I'm not going to tell you that you will like my show. You could like my show, but I don't know. I won't tell you what to do, but that's my show. I have a feelings podcast about movies called You Are Good and I want to plug. The Lloyd Center Ice Rink in Portland, Oregon. There is talk of it being demolished. Don't let it happen. Go skating with your friends.
Protect the Lloyd Center Ice Rink. But again, if you're in that parking lot, you know.
All bets are off.
You better roll in with an armored vehicle. Good stuff, all right. That's the episode.
Bye Bye.
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