Western Standard - August 12, 2022


David McLellan from SocialCatFish.com


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

208.6883

Word count

2,466

Sentence count

136


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Catfishing is the practice of pretending to be someone else online to get money from unsuspecting victims. In this episode, we talk to David McClellan of Social Catfish about the dangers of catfishing and how to protect yourself online.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I am going to cut over to him right away and we'll discuss that other issue we wanted to get on to
00:00:06.000 today. So this is David McClellan of Social Catfish. And hey there, David, how are you doing?
00:00:12.940 Hey, how's it going? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
00:00:15.940 Well, I appreciate you joining us today. This is an interesting subject. It was a very interesting
00:00:20.760 release and the services you guys provide. But maybe, you know, for our viewers and listeners,
00:00:25.900 if you could kind of give in a nutshell a background on what catfishing is and how that puts
00:00:30.080 people at risk. Yeah, absolutely. So catfishing is essentially pretending to be somebody else online.
00:00:36.320 And so when we started the company eight years ago, you know, we thought it was this, you know,
00:00:40.800 thing where you had a bunch of insecure people on the Internet, you know, using other people's
00:00:44.560 pictures and, you know, a semi harmless way. And what we quickly realized is like most of the catfishing
00:00:50.200 that actually happens is are people that are actually trying to scam people out of money.
00:00:54.400 Yeah. And this can be very serious. I mean, not just, you know, scamming people out of money. I
00:00:59.500 mean, it can bankrupt them or cause a lot of social damage or I mean, the humiliation factor,
00:01:04.880 just like anybody with online ripoffs, they don't want to report or could even lead to suicide if it's
00:01:10.200 bad enough. Yeah, absolutely. We have a huge network of about a million plus people. And what we found
00:01:16.240 out is only about one in every three people report these types of scams because they're too
00:01:20.960 embarrassed. And so social catfish, what my company does, we help people find and verify
00:01:25.400 people online with a focus on online safety. So that like weird phone number that you get
00:01:29.680 that calls you if you're meeting somebody in line for the first time, or you just want to know where
00:01:35.360 your information is online to be safe, you can use a service like ours. And that's what we do.
00:01:40.560 Yeah. So your service kind of covers two fronts in a sense. I mean, there's not just
00:01:44.660 the people who have been contacted by perhaps a false identity out there,
00:01:48.520 but somebody might be using your pictures and identity and contacting others as well out there,
00:01:52.920 and you don't know it. Yeah, absolutely. You'd be shocked how often that happens.
00:01:57.080 You know, anybody who's public on the internet is, you know, a potential victim. So what happens is
00:02:03.160 these scammers, they go online, they find profiles that have a lot of pictures, they download all the
00:02:08.600 pictures or screenshot all the pictures, and then they put them on dating sites, social networks,
00:02:13.960 forums, chat rooms, basically anywhere where you can chat with people. And they use those pictures,
00:02:19.080 and they build this backstory to meet people and coerce them into giving them money.
00:02:25.000 Yeah, so it's good to have a service though, where you can verify these because I mean,
00:02:28.360 not everything on the internet's bad. I mean, I met my wife through a social media site 17 years ago,
00:02:33.880 I mean, you know, more of the primordial online meetings, and still to this day, she's putting up with
00:02:38.920 me, I mean, it was a good match, and we did all right. So I mean, you don't want to lose all the
00:02:43.000 value of being able to meet people and interact online. But with those risks out there, I guess
00:02:47.720 you want to mitigate them as much as possible. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we say this all the time
00:02:51.960 that, you know, you go to school, right, and you learn about math and science and history, you even
00:02:57.160 learn about sex and drugs, but you don't learn about online safety. And so those are things that have to
00:03:01.800 change. You know, that's why our service exists, and we do all the work that we do. But 100%, the internet's this
00:03:08.120 amazing, beautiful place that you can learn, and you can meet people and interact, especially during
00:03:13.400 COVID, we saw a lot of that. But there's, it's also still the wild, wild west and, and the internet's
00:03:19.480 still in its infancy, you know, even though it's been around for, you know, 30 plus years, it's
00:03:25.320 continually changing, we're seeing so many things change. And what we've learned is that every time
00:03:29.960 technology changes, or new platform emerges, a new rush of scams comes out. Well, then safety is
00:03:36.680 another aspect you mentioned, there's a lot of cases we read, unfortunately, more and more of
00:03:41.320 child luring that goes on. And sometimes it's been a profile of a grown person pretending to be younger,
00:03:47.000 and then luring in a younger person into, you know, eventually meeting in person or things like that,
00:03:52.040 it can be terribly dangerous. Does your service provide things for parents to be able to apply
00:03:56.040 or things like that to check? Or how does that work? So what you can do with our service is you can
00:04:01.080 go and plug information. So you can go and, and put in a picture, a phone number, a username, and
00:04:06.840 you can see anything that's attached to that that's public online, we call them footprints, you know, so
00:04:12.040 most people, you know, my name is David McClellan. And, you know, I go and I have usernames online. And, and if
00:04:19.080 you go and create a new profile online, those usernames are typically, you know, using the same username is
00:04:24.280 typically easier for me to remember. And so, and usually using similar profile pictures. And so
00:04:30.360 we use those things to validate like who people are online. So if your children are talking to somebody,
00:04:35.560 first of all, I don't let my children talk to anybody that they don't know online, you know,
00:04:39.000 that's, that's really the solution. But if, you know, if you're talking to somebody, or, you know,
00:04:44.840 somebody's talking to somebody online, you can always throw in a picture, you can put in a username,
00:04:49.800 a phone number, an email, and you can see the backstory on that and see how long it's,
00:04:53.960 it's been in existence, if it's been reported for fraud or scams, you know, if it's attached to
00:04:58.920 somebody with a different name, which raises a red flag, and we'll even give you ages if we have it.
00:05:03.720 So a lot of things you can do to just look up some basic information, do it very quickly,
00:05:07.880 and just make sure you're making the right decisions.
00:05:10.680 So with a lot of this that's going on, I mean, particularly with the rip offs, is this like
00:05:14.840 organized groups or these overseas groups, you know, call center type things, I guess you could say,
00:05:19.160 or is it often domestic people doing these impersonations?
00:05:23.000 Yeah, so it's definitely a combination of the two, we typically see most of these scams overseas.
00:05:27.880 So in places like Lagos, Nigeria, Russia, the Philippines, China. And so, you know, typically
00:05:35.640 in those countries, they're not really scared of getting caught. You know, the problem is the
00:05:41.240 jurisdiction, like our countries don't talk to each other very well, and we don't work with each other
00:05:45.400 very well. And so, you know, we tend to see a lot of scams over there, people in the US definitely get
00:05:50.600 involved, but they typically get arrested. There's people in Canada, you know, get involved, but
00:05:55.400 they're typically get arrested because we all have more jurisdiction. The people that do this in the
00:06:02.280 States tend to be people that are like become money mules. So somebody's contacted them from overseas,
00:06:10.840 said, Hey, will you do this for me? Will you help me out? They get, they become a money mule and start
00:06:15.720 money laundering. And now they get in a position where they can get in a lot of trouble.
00:06:19.960 Yeah. And looking at your site there at socialcatfish.com, I see you offer a lot of resources
00:06:25.320 as well, like just to help educate people. I mean, not just the ability to check these profiles,
00:06:30.360 but a lot of blog postings, reviewing different dating apps and things such as that. So people have
00:06:35.000 some background to start with. Yeah, we spend a lot of time doing things that, you know, we don't
00:06:40.280 necessarily get paid for. And so, but we believe it's really important to educate people and show
00:06:46.280 people what's really happening. You know, with the polling that we've done, the people we've talked to,
00:06:51.080 most people don't come out and don't report these types of scams. You know, there's a massive amount
00:06:57.000 of money that's being lost every year, hundreds of millions of dollars. And if we don't report the
00:07:01.160 stuff, we don't educate people, this is going to continue to get worse. Well, and speaking of reporting
00:07:06.520 though, so as well, once somebody, if they they've checked a profile, they found out, yes, this is
00:07:10.840 a scammer, this isn't legitimate. Are there ways that you guys will follow through at least to hope,
00:07:15.560 hopefully start wiping that profile off or flagging it for other people in the future, or at least, you
00:07:20.520 know, trying to catch these guys a bit? Yeah, so we have an internal group where we go and actually,
00:07:27.240 we have volunteers that go in the report fake profiles. As you can imagine, it's a massive task. I mean,
00:07:33.320 we delete, we report about 1500 profiles a day, you know, on various social networks. What you can
00:07:40.520 do is if you do see fake profiles on social media or dating sites or specific apps, like most of those
00:07:47.320 have reporting features or functions. And so we highly encourage you go and report those. Doesn't
00:07:52.600 mean that we'll always get taken down, but we go and highly suggest that you go and look at those and
00:07:59.000 fill those out. Yeah, I mean, it provides a service to that can give a person peace of mind. I mean,
00:08:03.800 maybe they're developing what does seem to be a promising relationship, and it can help them relax
00:08:07.320 when they've checked out the profile. Hey, this is real, I can carry on and perhaps meet somebody and
00:08:11.880 get more personal. But, you know, you can lose that inhibition, I guess, well, I shouldn't say that's the
00:08:18.680 wrong term for it, but you know, your worries about it. So it's a valuable service that way, too. It
00:08:21.880 doesn't always have to be a negative outcome. Yeah, I mean, you know, we just had somebody come to us the other day,
00:08:27.880 and they met somebody at a concert, and they really hit it off. And they came to us and said,
00:08:32.120 Hey, look, I just have a picture. Can you find this woman? And so, you know, we say, Hey, look,
00:08:37.880 what we'll do is if we can find her, we'll contact her. And if she wants to get in contact with you,
00:08:42.760 we'll, we'll, we'll essentially match me. And so we finally got we found her Facebook profile,
00:08:48.200 we messaged her, and she's like, Sure, send in my information. So, I mean,
00:08:52.920 there are definitely some good outcomes. And, and, you know, you know, not everything we do is
00:08:57.960 involving scams, sometimes just people coming to us to be proactive. But we definitely do that,
00:09:03.000 that sort of thing, too. And I appreciate where you went at first, I thought, Whoa,
00:09:06.360 these guys are facilitating stalking. Oh, no, you did check with her before having more content.
00:09:10.600 Yeah, we don't give any information out until they we get the A-OK to do so.
00:09:16.760 Right. So is it a subscription sort of service then for what you guys provide? And then you have kind of an
00:09:21.400 ongoing access? Yeah, so there are a few different plans that we have. You can run very,
00:09:26.600 very basic searches for free. It is a paid subscription to actually use the full service,
00:09:32.360 but it's unlimited searching. So for, you know, a little under like $7, you can go and you can run
00:09:40.840 unlimited searching. And then for a little under $30, you can have a monthly subscription access to all
00:09:46.760 the services. We do have a what's called an in-depth search where you can hire us and we'll do the
00:09:52.760 searching. So we use tools that that we don't use for everyday users. So things like people typically
00:10:01.320 come to us if they've been involved in like crypto scams. And so we have tools to go and and track and
00:10:07.160 trace, you know, wallet addresses for for crypto scams and other look at other types of public information.
00:10:13.080 So that one costs a little and over $300 to do. Okay, well, that's it's great to know. I mean,
00:10:19.320 as I said, you know, the internet is a big Wild West in a way. I mean, that's part of what the beauty
00:10:23.240 of the internet is. But unfortunately, there's a lot of hazards too. And then people can't necessarily
00:10:27.480 pay attention to everything. So having a service to help protect themselves and feel, you know,
00:10:32.360 safer and more comfortable is a is a really great idea. And it seems to be doing quite well out there.
00:10:37.160 Is there more information you'd like to share on how people can check out your service and get in touch with it?
00:10:42.200 Yeah, I mean, definitely go to social catfish.com. It's a great resource. We put out a YouTube video
00:10:47.800 every Wednesday. And so we have a channel called Scamfish, where we actually take people that have
00:10:54.840 been victims of online scams, and we profile exactly what happened to them, we break them down,
00:10:59.720 we do real investigations, we do 52 episodes a year. But they're really educational, because we break down
00:11:06.680 exactly how the scams work, why they worked, and all the information we found out. So you can check
00:11:11.480 us out on YouTube, too.
00:11:13.000 Well, that's excellent. That lets people know, too. I mean, this can happen to anybody, you know,
00:11:16.520 they shouldn't be ashamed. I mean, these, there's some very smart, subtle scammers out there. And if
00:11:21.640 you got nailed, it's still better to, to speak up and follow through rather than let them get away with
00:11:26.440 it. You know, you're not alone.
00:11:27.800 Yeah, absolutely.
00:11:29.320 All right. Well, thank you very much for coming on today to talk about that service,
00:11:33.400 and for putting it together. You know, the more we can see those, those kind of predatory people on
00:11:37.960 there, taken to task, and the more other people can enjoy the internet properly is all the better.
00:11:43.720 So thanks again. And maybe we'll talk again down the road.
00:11:46.440 Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
00:11:48.200 All right. Thank you.