Being Victimized by Scams is Solvable

countless lives with false promises and financial theft. But before we pledge to fight to abolish all scams, remember this another side to those familiar stories too, The flip side of our vulnerability too, cons is human connection and trust and all the good stuff. So how do we protect our loved ones and ourselves? Will scams be an enduring part of society forever because we refuse or are unable to learn from our mistakes Rather than admitting, Yep, I

was dumb. I fell for a scam. You say, oh no, no, Here are all of the mitigating circumstances and it probably wasn't even a scam. So I think that it takes a strong person because it's embarrassing, it's embarrassing, because embarrassing to admit it. So can scams be solved? Maria Kannakova thinks, so being victimized by a scam is actually a solvable problem.

Maria has gone from investigating the lies we tell ourselves to mastering the bluff herself by learning to play poker at a world class level and writing about that too. So I started by asking her why she's so hooked on these concepts of big and small manipulations. My first book was about Charlock, So I've kind of traveled this gamut from you know, how do you be a detective? Too? Okay, what are the what are the bad guys doing? To kind of being the bad guy myself but within a game, right, so,

so there are rules. And one of the reasons that I've that it's been such a passion of mine is that I hate to see in reality, not in a game. I hate to see people being taken advantage of, and how often that happens, and how scammers often will target the most vulnerable parts of our population, the most vulnerable people, and then we as a society target them again by blaming them and by saying, oh, well, you were just stupid you were just greedy, you were just dumb. You know,

you shouldn't have fallen for it. I wouldn't have fallen for it, and that just gets me. Yeah, well, I was going to ask you because of your long standing interest. I mean, is this personal for you in any way? Have you been scammed yourself or people close to you been victim of scams? I personally have not been scammed that I know of, but one point I always make is that you know, the best scams are ones that you're probably not aware of. So I'm sure I've been

scammed on small things. And when you're about to get on the subway, someone stops you and says, hey, you know, I'm so sorry. I lost my wallet. Do you have the fare for the subway, for the bus, for the train. I need to get back to my family. And there's so many excuses, and you can do one of two things. You can say I think you're a con artist. I'm not going to give you any money and walk on. You feel kind of shitty, You feel like a bad

person because what if they actually needed you. I've lost my wallet, I've needed help in the past, and I think we've all probably been on the other side of that, And so the trade off is, yeah, maybe you get scammed, but I'd rather take the risk of being the victim of a scammer and particular instance, and I'm sure I've been scammed that way. Well, that's interesting. I mean, I have an experience that still sticks with me from high school.

I remember in Chicago, where I was growing up, walking through Lincoln Park and there was a guy kind of ragged looking walking with a gas can, and he stopped me and told me this whole sad story about how he was trying to get back to Florida to see his family and his card run out of gas and he needed the money for gas. Now, I was probably fifteen years old or something like that, but I think I gave him ten dollars, which would have been a lot of money to me at the time, and I

felt kind of good about myself for doing that. And then a week later I was walking through the park and there was the same guy walking around with his gas can, and you know, it just it sticks with you because it's a sort of formative experience of misplaced trust. You know, the cure or can be worse than the disease, right if the cure is to be mistrustful of people and to be kind of hard shelled and not have empathy for people who seem to be in a bad

situation because they might be scamming you. That's not a good outcome either. I couldn't agree more. I actually saw that sentiment phrased in the most beautiful way by Ricky Jay, who was a lifelong student of the Khan. He was fascinated by them, and he wasn't he wasn't just a magician. He was someone who really enjoyed kind of that dark side. And he said once in an interview, he said, I wouldn't want to live in a world where we can't get conned, because that's a world where you can't believe

in anyone or anything. And I think that there's a lot of truth to that that the flip side of our vulnerability to cons is human connection and trust and all the good stuff. And so it's it's one of these things where, you know, do we want to solve all cons forever and ever? I don't actually think we do. I think we want to target it and be a little bit more specific and say, okay, you know, we can make ourselves invulnerable to online scams or two kind

of different scams of that sort. But in terms of human to human contact, I think that we're always going to have to leave a window open for vulnerability. And

that's okay, that's really interesting. I want to get into the types of scams in a minute, but first I want to ask you, just broadly speaking, if we agree on that that the solution to scams is not to go in mistrustful of everyone you meet, what is the way to avoid becoming a victim of scams by actually being smarter and a little bit more skeptical and a little bit less giving of information about ourselves. The modern day person has given up privacy in so many ways.

You know, we have public profiles on all sorts of social media where we list really portant information about ourselves. Obviously, you know you've got the big ones. You know your birthday, and every single network keeps wanting to know my birthday and keeps reminding me, don't you want people to wish you a happy birthday? And I say, you know what, I'd rather not thank you, because the people who know me and who care about me can wish me a happy birthday, and I don't need the world at large

knowing my birthday. But we also post happy things, you know, the birth of children, exactly when they were born, the date of the time, their weight, their eye color, all of these things, happy moments, sad moments, divorces, marriages, it's all out there, and this is all information that can

be used against us by con artists. I always advocate and people look at me like I have twenty heads, especially when I'm talking to you know, high school students or college students, and they just think that I'm this complete monster when I say, you know, make things private, don't ever accept friend requests from people you don't know, don't share these types of things. And it's one of these things where I'm pushing against a tide that I

think I'm going to lose. But that's kind of something really really simple that we can do to actually make ourselves less vulnerable. The other thing I would say is education actually works. So it turns out when you're looking at people's susceptibility to cons that if you teach them about specific types of cons and what the scripts are and how people get to you and what they say ahead of time before they're in that hot emotional situation, then they're not going to fall for it. So a

great example is the grandparent scam. So you get a phone call. Your grandchild has been in an accident. They're in the hospital. We need money. You can't call their parents because they were on drugs. You know, they were in Mexico. And oh my god, your grandchild really was in Mexico on vacation. Surprise, surprise, Right, social media posts you can actually use real information, and so you get scared and you wire money. This happens all the time.

But it turns out that if you actually teach people about this scam, they stop falling for it. They'll start asking verifying questions. So the old you know what I always keep coming back to is what we're taught as journalists from the very beginning. Trust but verify, Yeah, verify, verify, verify whenever you're making an important decision, whenever you're forging a new relationship, especially when there's money involved. But even if there's no money involved, verify. Don't take things at

face value when it's actually important. Yeah, but verify, no matter how scared you are. The enemy of verification is convenience, I mean, slows you down and it's all the pathwords you have to remember and the two step verification you know to log on to anything, and you know, often it's a deterrent to just getting what you want to do on the thing you want to read or the thing you want to transact online, and of cour ninety

nine point nine percent of times you'd be fine. So it's very tempting not to go through that step in the process. Absolutely, I think convenience is the enemy, and I will add to that, desire is the other enemy. That we often want to believe something is true so much that we don't want to verify it. I don't actually know the real origin of the phrase to I can help someone who might know. Well. Ronald Reagan made it famous when he was opening nuclear negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev.

And there was a Russian scholars just something I happen to know because I wrote a book about Ronald Reagan. Suzanne Massey. She was a Russian scholar who his book Ronald Reagan read, and he invited her in and she said, I want to teach you a phrase in Russian to use with Gorbachev. And I can't say it in Russian, but it's it's a Russian phrase, trust but verifying, and Reagan loved it, and so of course every time he kept repeating it and repeating it and every by the

fifth meeting with GARBAGEV. Garbachev was like, don't say that trust verify. Think again. But it is a good it's a very good lesson to apply. And you know a lot of places, right So imagine we're talking about the online environment right now. A lot of scams online happen on dating websites where you meet someone and they're not who they say there they are, and there's a lot of emotional stuff involved. And in that sense, you don't verify because of convenience. You don't verify because you want

to believe in this. You want to believe that it's wonderful and it's great, and you're meeting someone who really cares about you, and so you're willing to overlook a lot of things. And so I think that if when you put those things together, they are a potent combination towards not verifying and towards just trusting. Has there been innovation and surely that is one of the oldest categories

of scamming. Is is there any digital innovation around that, or is this simply an old form being distributed via new technology. Yeah. I think the answer to both of those things is yes, in the sense that there are only a few real cons that exist, and the bones of the story are the same, and they've been the same for centuries, and they just get kind of updated

with the time and with the place. It's funny, I think that every single time there's a new technology, one of the first movers to adapt it is the con artist. So you'd probably soon after you've had the Alexander graham bell first phone call, probably the next one was a telemarketer or some sort of a scam phone call soon on its heels. So every new technology just invites its

ease of access. The Internet is just kind of this absolute gold mine for con artists, not just because of the information we provide, but because there's such easy access to so many people and dating sites. You already have your victims pre screening themselves. They're going on there because they're lonely, they're vulnerable, they're looking for connection, they're looking

for something. One of the things that we find about the victims of con artists are it doesn't really matter how educated they are, or how old they are or any of that. But what does matter is where they are in their life in terms of are you going through a moment of transition? Are you emotionally vulnerable? And it turns out that those moments of transition and change are the times when you're most likely to get scammed. Scams play on kind of primary emotions, you know, lust, loneliness, fear,

and greed. It's interesting how many scams are openly from someone engaging in corruption inviting you to participate it or help them in their corruption. I mean, I think of that classically as the you know, the son of the Nigerian oil minister scam. You know where you get a text or an email saying this is money in a bank account and I need your help to access it and I'll share it with you. That is be a

thief with me. Indeed. Indeed, and why not that Nigerian oil minister didn't get it fairly anyway, so they have it coming. It's wonderful what we can justify when some poor person is actually the son of the Nigerian oil minister and has I imagine he has very little credibility when it when he explains who he is. But you know, I was thinking about this. Bernie Madeoff recently died, and one of the interesting subtleties of the Madeoff case is that an argument was made that many of his investors

thought he was a scammer. They just misunderstood the type of scam. They thought he was involved in insider trading, and they were beneficiaries of it, because, of course, it was very un usual, unrealistic for a stock market investor to generate consistent double digit returns. So sophisticated investors either weren't paying attention or had an inkling that something was up. They just didn't realize that they were the victims. They thought they were, that he was victimizing other people and

you know, they didn't need to know about it. Was that your understanding of what was going on there. It was my understanding of some of it, but some of it was also just people really being taken advantage of. So, yeah, there were some sophisticated adventistors with made Off, but there were also people who just gave him their life savings because they'd heard from others who they trusted that this is someone who's good at what he does, and he

ruined their lives completely. I mean, he wiped them out. And I think that it's important not to lump everyone in together, because I do think that there were people who really weren't sophisticated and who don't understand that those types of returns are crazy, and who just say, oh,

you know, it's a great opportunity. Right. It's not actually crazy in the modern world to see these sorts of sometimes insane returns, And if you're not a sophisticated investor, it's not necessarily greed in the sense of ha ha, he's taking advantage of someone on my behalf. It's the sense that I've worked really hard. These are my life savings, and I found a smart opportunity, so why not take advantage of it. Other people who are smart are doing it, so why not me. Let me invest in crypto. Look

at the returns people are getting. That seems like a really great thing to do. Let me buy some of that coin. Oh boy, I'm a millionaire. I'm glad you brought up crypto because I wanted to ask you whether that qualified as a scam, or what part of it might qualify as a scam. I mean, you have simultaneously presumably a speculative bubble, which isn't necessarily made off type scam where someone is benefiting from it. People are all participating,

and it's fueled by the greater full theory. And then there's just stupidity, you know, making investing a lot of money and things that are worthless. I saw recently a report about a Delhi and New Jersey that trades on the Penny stock exchange that has a market capitalization of one hundred and ten million dollars and had revenues last year of thirty seven thousand dollars. So, you know, I don't know if that's a scam, it's just a really

stupid investment. And then you now have to have what looks a little bit like a new phenomenon, which is especially on cryptocurrency, things that are openly stupid investments that have no value, that don't even pretend otherwise doge coin, whatever whatever it is, and people participating in them knowing it's a scam or knowing it has no value. Is that all as old as time or are there actually some new things happening here? So it's a fascinating question.

And if I knew the answer, then I would know to either drastically short crypto or to invest everything I own in it. And I don't. I don't understand the space. That's why I actually have never invested in crypto myself. It has all the markings of bubbles of your It looks like John law and he had this crazy idea.

It's the basis of markets now, where instead of having something that's backed in gold, you back it in you issue shares and you have kind of this partnership agreement and you can speculate in things then, and you can

infuse the economy with more liquidity. And he ended up basically convincing the government of France that this was going to be a great idea, and everyone invested in this great opportunity in America that was going to buy up all sorts of land and do great things, and people became million errors overnight, and then that whole bubble crashed and everyone went broke and Law went to prison. That

was that. But there's this kind of great debate. Was John Lawe kind of a brilliant economic innovator and I just didn't end up working or was he a con artist? I was surprised at how bitter the disagreement is between economists about whether John Law was a good guy or a bad guy. I feel like with crypto, you know, you have this situation where it's totally new once again, and it's also backed by seemingly nothing, and so I have no idea. I don't know if people are going

to end up in jail. I don't know if it's a con or a bubble, or if it's going to be the future. And a lot of smart people that I respect say it's the future, and a lot of smart people I respect say it's a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a scam. But well, one thing we can be fairly sure about is where you have that kind of financial hype, they're going to be scams

around it. Yes, so bitcoin may not be a scam in any conventional sense, but there are surely scammers who see people's eagerness to profit from this phenomenon and are figuring out how to scam them around cryptocurrency. So to avoid being scammed in general, we are to a significant degree resisting human nature, which is really tough. So what are the Maria Conakova takeaways? The precepts to avoid getting

in the situation where you're vulnerable to a scam. And also, you know, when you think aren't sure if something's a scam or not, to assess whether whether to misprust it, trust but verify. So the more you want something to be true, the more you need to actually ask questions, be skeptical, and know what you're going to say when

people put up a fight and get indignant. Because oftentimes these conversations are difficult to have, and so we rather avoid having them, and so we end up not having them. And so I actually think that a lot of it comes from preparation, from actually figuring out ahead of time. You know, Okay, you know I think that this I'm going to have to have this difficult conversation. This person might tell me I can't believe you don't trust me?

You know who do you think I am? They might yell at me, and this is what I'm going to say, going to say, I do trust you, I completely understand. However, you know I need you to be able to verify this. I'm sure you can understand that it's a lot of money or whatever it is, and think about it ahead of time and think through things ahead of time. The other thing I would say is to never make decisions in the heat of the moment. And that's also easier

said than done. But just think right now as you're listening to this, is it ever true that someone is going to die if you don't make a payment immediately? Is it true that the IRS is suddenly going to arrest you if you do not immediately do this or immediately do that. One of the things that scams often do is they create this feeling of immediacy, of pressure so that you act in the heat of the moment.

And the number one thing that you can do is to step back and reflect and actually have time, because time is the great and to emotion and to kind of the heat of an emotional moment, and it cools it naturally cools you off and helps you reflect and helps you figure things out. And so if you can pause and not act immediately, I think that's going to

prevent a lot of scams. And the funny thing is that these sorts of safeguards do exist in a lot of infrastructure, and we tend to ignore it and try to push through it so that we can act right away. It's like a bank, you know, if you're trying to perform a suspicious transaction will often say you know, hey, you know, pause, we don't want you to actually do this. It might be a scam and you get mad at the bank rather than say, oh, maybe they're actually doing

something that's good for me. But that's I think finding moments of reflection, I think is a really important way that we can avoid being scammed. And the final kind of psychological tool that I have that I think can be incredibly useful is if you think something might be a scam, or if you really want to believe something or kind off you are about to make a decision, think about what you would tell someone else if they were in that situation. Try to imagine that it's not

actually you. Try to imagine that it's your best friend, your brother, your neighbor, someone who isn't you, and just walk through that scenario. Is it believable? Imagine they're telling you that they have this opportunity, or that someone's calling them and telling them that this is happening. What would you tell them? What advice would you give? Would you say this is amazing, transfer money immediately, or would you say,

wait a second. Here are the questions you should be asking, Here are the red flags you should be looking out for, because we're so much better at being objective when we're talking about someone else. There's one more question I want to ask you, which is whether some societies are just more written with scams and prone to scams than others, and also whether the same society at different points of

time are more afflicted by scams. You know, when patent medicine was all the rage, where there just more scams in America than there are now, or you know, to bring it a little closer to home, when we had a kind of amazing scam or as president, is that tone set at the top and does it trickle down to scamming elsewhere as opposed to when you don't have someone like that office. Absolutely, yes, the tone is set at the top. There are societies with more scams than others.

There are times in a society where there are more scams than other times, and it's not something that's innate to the humans there, but it is something that is created by social circumstances. So if your president is a con artist, yeah, absolutely, there are going to be more scams and more cons not just because suddenly there are more scammers, but because the norms change because people who might be more law abiding in normal times suddenly feel

empowered to cross that line. So a country like Russia today, which has had such a long history, you know, as the Soviet Union, as Russia, and where people have pretty low levels of trust, one of the countries with the highest levels of scams. There's just so much to take advantage of and so much is broken. And whenever you have a society where informal organizations have to step up to provide any sort of services, that also opens up

the possibility for scams. But this idea that if scams are flourishing, people will same people will get scammed and scammed again is a little at odds with the idea that once people are scammed, they can be disillusioned and become savvier and more skeptical. I mean, we recently did an episode of True Yeah, we'll give you an example. We just did, and you can tell me why it

doesn't apply. We recently did an episode of Solvable about cults with a woman named Diane ben Scoter who was a mooney in the seventies, and I would wager that she is the least likely person to fall for a cult scam. Ever, again, because she's devoted her career to figuring out how it works. Right, So you're saying that isn't it isn't common to learn from the experience in

that way. She is actually not unique but rare in the fact that she knows she was the victim of a cult, and she, as you say, she's devoted her life to trying to figure out how it works and how to avoid something like that. Most people, when they get scammed won't admit it because they would rather lie to themselves and say, oh, it wasn't really a scam,

you know, let's make excuses. That was just a failed opportunity, It was this, it was that, And the cognitive dissonance is so high that they just go through all of these hoops of rationalization about why I'm not the type of person who normally fall for a scam, but this

was a unique circumstance. But the fact that you've rationalized so much of it away actually leaves you quite vulnerable, because rather than admitting, yep, I was dumb, I fell for a scam, you say, oh, no, no, here all of the getting circumstances, then it probably wasn't even a scam. So I think that it takes a strong person because it's embarrassing to it's embarrassing, to embarrassing to admit it. Yeah, it's it's a hit to your reputation and to our sense of self. You know, I'm not the kind of

person who falls for a scam like that. A lot of times people don't even report it because it's heartbreaking to their families and they know it, and their families had sometimes even warned them, and they did it anyway, and so they feel just they feel like they've let everyone down, and so they just they won't even admit it. Marie, you've been talking about ways that individuals can make themselves less susceptible to scamming, But what about the role for

government and institutions in protecting people against scams. I do think that there's certainly a role to be played by institutions that get used as friends for scams, and there as simple as actually using some of these same psychological tools that we've been talking about on an individual level, but ratcheting it up to an institutional level. It doesn't even have to be a bank, if you're a dating website, if you are a place where you know that scams

take place, and scammers take advantage of your infrastructure. Also, try to have some safeguards in place. Now there's some really great new AI capability to try to scan images and figure out is this a stock photo? Is this photo appearing in more than one profile. I don't actually know if a lot of websites are using that sort of capability, but it exists, and I would argue that it's on them that they should actually be trying to protect their users by doing things like that and trying

to flag proactively people who might be scammers. So yeah, absolutely, I think on all of those levels there's room to try to protect the consumer, to try to protect us. Ya Kanakova is the New York Times bestselling author of The Biggest Bluff, The Confidence Game, and Mastermind How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. To learn more about scams and how to protect yourself, check out the links in our show notes and Solvable Fans. As we mentioned recently, we

have a great news to share with you. Host Ronald Young Junior is joining our team. Some people I think are very good at being a host, but for me, it's just it's hospitality, creating that warm sense of environment. It really comes from like a genuine place inside and I think most people that talk to you will tell you that this is who I am all the time. More from Ronald coming soon. Solvable Senior Producer is Jocelyn Frank, Research in booking by Lisa Dunn. Catherine Giardo is our

managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia Loebell. Solvable is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It really helps us get the word out. You can find Pushkin Podcast wherever you listen, including on the iHeartRadio app and Apple podcast on Jacob Weisberg