Cura.
I'm Helen from Chezy's and I'm here with Pa, our security manager, to talk about scams. Scammers are catching lots of New Zealanders out, so we thought we'd look at the psyche of a scammer, some of the red flags that we all miss and what to do with you or someone you know get scammed. Hi, Pier, good to have you in the studio.
Well thanks for having me in.
With scammers, what is the psyche? What's the behavior behind their motivation and the behaviors that they exhibit toward unsuspecting people.
I think the psyche of a scammer is ultimately rooted in financial gain, but beneath that, there's a lot of things going on. You're depending on the type of scam and the type of person you're dealing with. Often people involved in scams are part of very large networks and very complex kind of scam infrastructure, so to speak. Very often the people you're talking about are you talking to or chatting whether or who are called cold calling you and things like that, are actually people coming from a
place of desperation. Sometimes they are victims themselves. They might be stuck in a debt track or something like that where they've got no choice but to your continue with the activity. And other times they don't actually know they're involved in a scam. As far as they're aware, they've got a legitimate outbound call center role or your sales role to refer people into the depths of a scam network.
They are just how sophisticated are these scam rings?
Incredibly sophisticated and incredibly well funded. So generally you have you're at the top level international crime syndicate, you're involved who do a lot of the planning and set up a lot of the infrastructure and provide a lot of the technology for scams to take place. And then a lot of the kind of legwork and the scam behavior that the public see is actually like outsourced across the world, particularly in third world countries where people may not have a better choice for an income.
What are the phases of being scammed right from the very beginning to the end, would you say, so.
Let's talk about the kind of initial phase of a scam. This is a phase where scammers tend to cast a very wide net. It's quite rare that they're targeting individuals. At this point. You imagine yourself going about your ordinary business. You might see a post on social media that's you're making an offer you can't refuse. You things in your
email inbox. You know they have a really strong sense of urgency about them, that you have a call to action, that you need to action then and there without thinking about it too much further. And these will inevitably have the goal of putting you in contact with a scammer who will communicate with you and bring a person deeper into the scam.
What would be the second phase of a scam.
Once you've made contact with the scammer, it's all about building trust and rapport from their side. Obviously, you're a lot of people are aware that scams happen. We see communications day in day out about how to protect ourselves from scams, and so scammers have to socially engineer their way around the kind of your internal suspicion that we maintain.
And so at that point you start seeing that kind of foot in the door pattern or the escalating yeses where they'll make really small, innocuous asks of a person and slowly ramp up those asks. So no request from a scammer feels like very much bigger than the last request, but actually after ten or so requests, you know they're asking for your much larger things. At that point, the
scam is if someone's being roped in. These scammers have kind of generated a lead, and very often they'll rely on something like triangulation where they bring in a third person, their manager or their special advisor, who not only is it an appeal to authority, but it's also putting you in a position where you're really privileged to kind of have that time with them, right and often you're in the case of things like investment scams, it's on the
basis of, oh, we're giving you this free advice for a very limited time, so you better make the most of that, or you miss out on your returns or potentially you won't get to be part of their special advice program or whatever the case may be. And it's
also at that stage an opportunity for them to triarge victims. Obviously, if in their communications of victims indicated that they have a high net worth or they have a lot of money to it, or that they could potentially spend, then they're likely to get referred to a higher performing manager to try and convert that into income. For the scam, the other things. You'll notice that that kind of second stage is very often someone will get pulled into a
group chat. There'll be lots of people in there, people talking really positively, maybe about the returns of the scam and things like that, but most of those people are going to be plants by the scammers you're to convince you give you that kind of sense of safety that
a bunch of other people are benefiting from it. Once you get into that kind of interaction with the kind of scam manager or where you're at the point where they're trying to actually execute the scam and get you to do the thing that takes them to the angle, whether that's providing bank account can't details, credentials, transferring funds, you're investing in a specific instrument. In the case of investment scam, there's generally a shift in behavior with these scammers.
You're no longer in a position where they're being nice to you and giving you all this great advice and kind of trying to rip you in this kind of almost sinister feedback loop of when when you do the things they ask, they're very very kind to you and and very praising, But when you're non compliant, they'll often be quite cruel, and that's that kind of cult like behavioral loop where you get conditioned to doing the things that make them happy, even though effectively they're a stranger
on the internet. Once a scam is kind of executed on whatever its initial goal is, very often either they go into like a cover up phase. You're maybe there was a pump and dump scam, and they go, oh, no, there wasn't a pump and dump, but you know, there's these malicious people on the market short selling our stock. We're sorry that you're falling victim to that. You know, we're going to do the best we can to make things right. Or sometimes they will just fall silent. You'll
get blocked. You the money, he's gone, they don't care about you anymore. But also sometimes they will take the turn of oh, you know, we're very sorry you lost money. We can help compensate you, and then kind of bring you back into the fold of complying with them and participating further in their scam and losing out a bit more. And though that kind of stuff we see more and more of now, where not only is it happening from the scam is someone's initially interacting with. But people are
searching online on social media. You're on Reddit, You're wherever they go for information like what can I do? How can I get my money back? And then they see ah, like join this WhatsApp group, which is a group for victims of this specific scam, you know, to get help. We're going to put together a class action lawsuit or you know, whatever they kind of framing they put around
it might be. And then immediately people get pulled back into a secondary scam of oh, we can recover your money, but it requires a fee, or we can only refund to your credit card or your wise accounts, so we need those details to refund to it, and things like that, and all along this way, they're farming information from you because your information has value, and at the same time, they're overloading you with information to the point where, oh,
this system I'm interacting with is so complex that I can't handle it by myself, and I must need these people to help me. Sinister, sinister, indeed, pey, what are some of the.
Red flags that many of us miss when it comes to scamming.
I think, like we have you know, there's been a lot of scam education over the years, right, and some of the your common red flags we talk about is that kind of sense of urgence. See, you know, if you don't engage with us now, you might miss out on your incredible returns, on a refund that you're apparently owed, you're on things like that, or you're in other cases, there's a sense of urgency around if you don't respond to us, you might be in like legal trouble and
things like that. There's nearly always a sense of secrecy, and it's kind of interesting in some of the widest bread scams now where we see things like group chats and that, because there's like this balance of scammers want to recruit more people into the scam, and you know, your friends and family maybe they want these unrealistic returns too. But on the flip side, you can't tell too many people.
There's only limited spaces. You're like, don't broadcast this too far because or or else will run out of spaces and you won't get whatever you'uring goal is here, and you're the reason they're so secretive like that, And why there's always this sense of exclusivity is purely because if you tell enough people about it, someone will tell you it's a scam, and like the reality is as well.
Between the kind of first and last stages of most scams, you're from that initial phishing, email, social media, ad impersonating someone or something like that, you're you go into the second stage, which feels really unrelated to the first part. You're for example, well, when ad impersonating a company, you might interact with that and then get routed to a group chat which claims to be from somewhere else entirely,
and that should be a red flag right there. Another really big red flag you're when you are dealing with someone claiming to be an organization is when they're asking you for information that that organization should already have about you, or even requesting things like screenshots.
What would you say people can do if they have been scammed or actually someone they know who and they're close to, who's been scammed and is obviously pretty upset with having lost whatever it might be.
So I think for individuals who feel like they've beformen victim of a scam, your first priority is if you have given over any account information and things like that, is to resecure your accounts. You change your password enable multi factor authentication and things like that, and then reach out to the organization you're in question. So, for example, if your chasy's count account was involved, we'd really like to know about it so that we can help keep
you safe. In the case of your people whose fat friends or famamily members might be scammed, it can get
really tricky really quickly. The reality of your modern scams and the kind of dark psychology that exists in that space is the longer someone is engaged with scammers, the more brainwashed in the sense they are, and the more kind of attached to the scam they become, and they developed this kind of idea of some cost where if they just engage with it more, maybe they'll get that or whatever they've lost so far back and they don't
want to lose that hope. I think the best bit in some circumstances is if you know what accounts are involved, or if it's with your bank, if it's with another platform, you're reaching out to them and fearing, hey, I think my family members being scammed, Like you're an organization, well often be able to share information you're to you, but they will be able to investigate and have a look
and help support your support that person. And of course if you are quite concerned about your someone's behavior, like the kind of them concealing what they're doing with money and things, and you think they might be engaged with a scam, the police can also support with.
That thanks peer. Three takeaways about scamming. One would be if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, so stop while you're ahead. The second thing is if you're talking to an organization that should have your information already, that's a red flag. They won't be asking you for it because, as I say, they should have had it already.
And thirdly, if you're contacted by an organization that's been you think impersonated, check with the organizations and the verified channels to see in fact if it is a scam or not.
From seven St