Beau Friedlander:
Adam! I was kind of curious about this text you sent earlier. Was it Daniel LaRusso?
Adam Levin:
Well, here’s what happened. I got one of those LinkedIn, do you want to be my connection? Except ignored notices and it was from Daniel LaRusso at Miyagi Studios.
Speaker 3:
Hey you. The maintenance man
Adam Levin:
Referenced Miyagi Studios twice and each one was spelled differently. Oh, interesting. And I’m looking at Miyagi and I’m going, oh, wait a minute.
Speaker 3:
I, no offense Mr. Miyagi, but I don’t think you understand my problem Mr. Miyagi.
Speaker 4:
Understand problem. Perfect.
Adam Levin:
I remember I saw Karate Kid wasn’t the lead character, Daniel LaRusso. And so of course I do what I always do when I come across anything that reminds me of a movie that I liked. I went immediately to Wikipedia and lo and behold, there it was.
Beau Friedlander:
Adam, come on. How many millions of times have we quoted Mr. Miyagi?
Adam Levin:
Often? Often.
Beau Friedlander:
Best way to not get punched is…
Adam Levin:
Not be there. So Travis, so what do they call that? What we just that notice that I got
Travis Taylor:
Profile padding.
Beau Friedlander:
Adam, you act like you don’t know, but you’re the one who wrote the article about profile padding. We know what it is. He’s doing the Socratic thing. It’s when somebody like you, Adam, no kidding, Travis, how do you describe it?
Adam Levin:
Profile it. And Travis always helps me with people, so thank you. Yeah,
Beau Friedlander:
Travis, the covid Patty. Let’s
Adam Levin:
Talk about, we haven’t heard enough from you and we want to hear more from you.
Beau Friedlander:
Let’s see what you’ve learned, Travis. Sure.
Travis Taylor:
So profile padding is something where someone will set up a fake or dubious account on social media and then just try to connect to as many people as possible.
Beau Friedlander:
What do you mean dubious? You just, you’re pretty sure Daniel LaRusso is not really
Travis Taylor:
A person. Well, you can make someone up completely, or you can just take someone’s picture and take someone that knows name from an old account or something like that. But the whole thing with this though, is that LinkedIn is the perfect platform for it because people tend to accept invitations from people that don’t know. So if you have someone on say, Facebook or even Instagram, they’re trying to connect to you. That’s one thing you can say, I don’t know this person and I don’t want to share my personal information. But one of the whole points of a employment based site like LinkedIn is to make new connections to see if that might help you get another job or a business opportunity or something like that. So if someone’s going to create one of these fake accounts, that just gives them a lot more credibility. If you were to take a look at it and just say like, oh, I also, 50 other people that I’m connected to also know this Daniel LaRusso,
Beau Friedlander:
But Adam sweep the leg. Adam, I liked that when you wrote this thing, what I thought was interesting was that didn’t it come about because you were getting all these requests to be on weird boards to play the role of a director or something, a director.
Adam Levin:
I was so excited. I was going, oh, somebody recognized the fact that I once did something in business. I’m so excited they want me to be on a board. Except that I noticed that the same pitch that I got when I Googled it showed up for five other people.
Beau Friedlander:
But it’s so easy to hit that accept button when someone tries to connect with you on LinkedIn that it’s like, I’ve done it a bunch and I don’t look to see who they are. I’m like, especially
Travis Taylor:
If they have other connections that,
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, second degree, that whole, the way they have it set up is a little perilous because they say it’s a first degree, second degree or third degree connection.
Adam Levin:
And you can either get first degree, second degree, or third degree burned depending upon how you respond. You knew that was coming, so welcome to What the heck, A show about hackers, scammers, and the people they go after. I’m Adam Levin, defender of the defenseless author of Swiped founder of Cyber Scout Cybert.
Beau Friedlander:
And I’m Beau Friedlander. I am a cyber snoot. No, what am I? No, I am a cyber mech. Yeah, that’s it. Cybermen.
Travis Taylor:
And I’m Travis Taylor, resident tech guy, and more cyber terrier than Terry, I suppose.
Adam Levin:
So I want to introduce our guest who is fabulous. I love the way she writes, and I have a lot of fun when we do interviews together and we’ve done many, many interviews together. Kristine Solomon is a writer and she writes among other publications, she writes for yahoo.com and really is very passionate about identity theft, cyber incidents and privacy. And it’s just been a very, very impressive advocate for products and services that she believes in. It’s a great pleasure to have you on the show. So hi Kristine.
Kristine Solomon:
Hi Adam. Thank you. Thanks for such a sweet intro and for having me.
Adam Levin:
Kristine has a lot of flexibility. She’s a freelance writer and she’s lived and worked in many parts of the world, but instead of me telling your story, it’s much more fun to hear you tell your story. So why don’t you tell us where you are now, where you’ve been, and where you’re from.
Kristine Solomon:
Okay. Well, I’m from New York City, born and raised, and I actually am full-time on the Yahoo Life team right now. So I was freelance for a long time, but I’m part of that amazing team now. But I do get to work wherever I want and I take full advantage of that. And right now I’m in Mexico where I’ve spent much of the last year, and it’s lovely here and warm and people are amazing. And I get to, as long as I have my laptop, I am ready to do all my writing and editing work. And it’s been a pleasure to create this really great column with Adam. We did a lot of really great pieces where we were able to help our audience at Yahoo Life understand how not to be scammed or the best practices for avoiding scams. And I do feel very passionate about protecting our readers and serving them with the best content experiences they can have. So Adam’s been a great part of that and very appreciative.
Beau Friedlander:
So are you talking about Adam Levin?
Kristine Solomon:
Sorry. Yeah, that guy.
Adam Levin:
Oh, you mean Adam Levine, that guy.
Kristine Solomon:
Okay. I don’t only write about cybersecurity, I write about a lot of other much more girly things too, like beauty and fashion and shopping style. That’s
Beau Friedlander:
The strangest thing you’ve ever written about.
Kristine Solomon:
Oh my gosh. People ask me that question all the time. I used to do more news writing. I won’t say for which outlet, but I would sometimes have to interview people who I would make a scene in public places and I would have to contact them and interview them about what got them so upset and made them maybe trash a McDonald’s.
Beau Friedlander:
Was that your specialty? If somebody did something nuts, they’d be like, oh, let’s get Kristine to talk to ’em.
Kristine Solomon:
Yeah, they pretty much knew that I can talk to anybody about anything. That’s actually something I pride myself on, that I can interview anybody pretty much about any topic, but I prefer to interview people who have better stories to tell or something a lot more interesting going on than having public meltdowns.
Beau Friedlander:
So you’re not missing the air rage beat right now?
Kristine Solomon:
No, not at all. Not at all. I’m very, very happy with what I write about now.
Beau Friedlander:
Gotcha.
Adam Levin:
And what you write about is appears in on many different platforms within the Yahoo family because you’re all over the place in Yahoo, which it’s fun, it’s exciting, and it’s great. And your stuff is great. I mean, the writing is superb. Thank you. So anyway, I know that you’ve had sort of an interesting experience which brought you to us. So let’s start. What happened?
Kristine Solomon:
Yeah. Well, something happened that was so embarrassing, especially considering how many times you and I talked about cyber scams and we talked about the things that lead to them, like vulnerabilities and being caught off guard or being desperate or whatever the case may be. So I know all the best practices. However, I fell into a trap anyway recently and you were the first person I contacted because I was freaking out. So basically what happened was I was visiting New York City, and usually I live overseas and in New York, as I’m sure everyone knows, it’s very expensive. I don’t have a residence there at the moment. So I was looking for a short-term residence, and it is very hard to find that in the us. So after searching many different avenues, I ended up out of desperation. I’m not sure if I should say the site. Can I say the site that I got scammed on? Yeah, sure. Well, it was the infamous Craigslist.
So basically I made my way to Craigslist where there were ads for short-term leases. And I came upon one from what seems like a nurse. The ad had to do with a nurse who said she was being sent on emergency assignment for COVID-19 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And she was looking to sublet out her apartment in midtown Manhattan as quickly as possible. She was willing to take a rent reduction on it just to get the place filled. And it sounded like the perfect thing for me. I answered the ad. I told her I was interested in one month, and the thing was when she responded to me, it sounded very legit. She responded and told me that she was concerned about getting the other dates filled in if I was only staying for a month, so could I please confirm my dates? And she was asking me if I would be able to pay a month upfront and a security deposit. And so when I responded to her and told her I was definitely interested, she then sent me a long and intricate email about all the ins and outs of the apartment, how the laundry works, where the linens are stashed, how the building works, how to get the key to the building, how important it’s going to be for me
Speaker 7:
To have the paperwork.
Kristine Solomon:
So it all seemed to check out so far. She also sent me, and this was a little weird, a copy of her passport, which will come into play later because when we out, that’s
Beau Friedlander:
Super weird.
Kristine Solomon:
Yeah, she wanted to show me she was legitimate. And what I found out, just to skip ahead for a second, was that not only was I and anyone else answering this ad, a victim of the scam, but also this was a real person, and they knew her real name and they had her passport and they were sending it to people to prove that she was a real person.
Beau Friedlander:
Wait, so the person, well, we are getting ahead of it. I feel we are
Kristine Solomon:
Getting ahead.
Beau Friedlander:
We’re getting ahead. That seems like a super interesting plot point, but so whoever you were talking to was, I mean, we know already that part of the reveal, which is it wasn’t the person that you thought it was,
Kristine Solomon:
Right? Well, so we had an exchange, and after they sent me that long and intricate email about the apartment, it seemed very legit. And her story seemed legit because of Covid. It made sense to me that a nurse would be sent out an emergency assignment. So she sent me the form to fill out, and I was pretty desperate at this point. I needed to move into a place right away. This was going to still be expensive, but was within my budget. It was only going to be for a month. And she was asking for key data, my name, my address, my phone number, my date of birth, my email address, and then she was asking for my bank account number. Now, this is obviously the part that would raise an eyebrow, but in the past as a, I’m not always a writer. Sometimes I’m an editor and I’ll take on content assignments where I have to pay out freelancers. And many times they give me their bank account numbers and we do a bank transfer. So it didn’t raise a huge red flag for me in that moment, and
Beau Friedlander:
It wouldn’t for me either.
Kristine Solomon:
Makes sense. That makes me feel better. Thank you.
Adam Levin:
But it’s one thing if you were a freelancer and you give someone your bank account number even though you shouldn’t immediately, that’s because they’re going to pay you. Did you feel it a little bit weird, especially since you were going to be sending a security deposit as well as the month rent, that it would be strange as to why she was asking you for your banking details as opposed to making her banking details available for you?
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, ouch. Ouch. Adam. You could be a little gentler about
Adam Levin:
It. No, it just, and I’m one of those people I’ve blur things out, what I’m trying to say, because again, this is our shame-free zone, right? Yeah,
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah,
Adam Levin:
Yeah. And we’ve talked about this a lot, and just for everyone as a signpost here to really think about the fact that there was something within this sea of information that you were being provided, there was this very strange thing where the information flow was reversed from what it should have been.
Beau Friedlander:
It’s fascinating. But Adam, I didn’t catch that either, Adam. I did not catch it.
Kristine Solomon:
Thank you, Bob.
Beau Friedlander:
Travis, did you get that?
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, I kind of caught that one.
Beau Friedlander:
I hate that you always catch it, but
Adam Levin:
It’s so rare when I catch something that it’s almost a moment to be cherished. You’ve brought something out in me, Kristine, you’ve done God’s work here.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, so is that it? I mean, what else? So now she asked you for your information.
Kristine Solomon:
Yeah, yeah. So she asked me for my information. Now an important aspect of this is also in New York, apartments are at such a premium that when you get something and you get what seems like a deal like this, you want to jump on it really fast. Anyone
Beau Friedlander:
Who’s why, because you’ll lose it.
Kristine Solomon:
Yeah. Anyone who shopped for apartments legitimately in New York knows that you have to show up with all your paperwork ready and ready to apply on the spot, or there’s somebody else
Adam Levin:
That’s going to
Kristine Solomon:
Take the apartment from you.
Beau Friedlander:
But Adam, that means that everybody in the New York real estate rental market is prime for being scammed.
Adam Levin:
No, because in New York, as those of us who have been New Yorkers or still are New Yorkers, it’s all about instant gratification and huge demand and limited supply. And that really goes back for years other than at recently during the pandemic, but that’s ended. New York is now on its way back. There was a period of time where people were throwing apartments, begging people to rent them from them, but not anymore. Not in the past few months. It’s changed radically at the time that you were looking for something.
Travis Taylor:
Well, it’s the sort of thing too, where if you’re dealing with that level of desperation, especially if you’ve tried to apply for 15 apartments and by the 16th, you’re going to be a lot less cautious, I’m sure.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, because you’re just trying to get your hooks in. Yeah,
Travis Taylor:
Exactly. Yeah,
Kristine Solomon:
Yeah, exactly. You’re right, you’re right. That had a big part to do with it too, because my search was so exhaustive and I was exhausted. And so when I finally found something that seemed like a deal, and the story was so unique and believable that I was like, well, I better pounce on this because somebody else is going to take it.
Adam Levin:
And how could you not believe a nurse? Come on.
Kristine Solomon:
I mean, how low can you go taking, stealing the identity of a nurse during Covid? It’s like,
So yeah. So I did fill out this form and I sent it to her, and I immediately contacted one of my best friends who lives in New York, and I wanted to tell her how excited I was that I was going to be staying there for a month. And we could see each other for a while, but my friend is a total skeptic. She’s a real New York cynic, and it’s so great to have a friend like that because I’m a little bit more on the naive side. And as soon as I told her the whole deal, she said, send me this person. Send me your communication with this person right now. And I had to forward all the emails to her, and we both found her on Instagram. And the way we figured out that it was a scam immediately was because the voice of the emails did not match the voice of her Instagram captions.
She was much more eloquent in her captions than the person writing the emails. It was a different writing style. So that immediately set off a red flag for us. And the interesting thing was they were really targeting this woman because she was in Milwaukee. She was relocated to Milwaukee, judging by her Instagram, and she posted a lot about being a nurse. She seemed like a wonderful woman. And so the first thing I did immediately was I called my bank and I put a stop on any charges, and we actually opened up on the spot, an entirely new account, and just immediately funneled my money into that new account. So that was the first thing we did, and I was really lucky that they were able to do that for me. So immediately, good move. Thank you. After that, we actually, before I did that, I actually did try to email her.
This is an important part of the story that I left out before I moved the bank account. I tried emailing this person and saying, I’m having some suspicions. Do you think we can talk on the phone? Because I realized that a few of the key mistakes I made were not talking to her on the phone, not asking what the name of the building was or the address. I just knew the location, even though I had many pictures of the unit. And the other thing was, and this is the most embarrassing part, you guys are really going to roast me for this one, is the form itself, even though it looked like a very legitimate application form, it did not have a company’s a leasing company’s name on it. It just was a generic header
Beau Friedlander:
That happens in New York City. That happens in New York City.
Adam Levin:
No, people just will print anything and use it. I mean, legitimately, no,
Beau Friedlander:
I rented for 10 years from someone. I never even had a lease. It was just a handshake. I mean, new York’s a weird
Adam Levin:
Place the way I didn’t even know who they were. They had a strange accent.
Beau Friedlander:
I didn’t pay either. I must’ve been squatting. Anyway,
Kristine Solomon:
By the way, that’s how my very first New York apartment was like that. It was just a private house, and there was no lease. And it was a family that let us live on their second floor. We were right out of college, and when they were ready to sell the house, we also just got kicked right out.
Beau Friedlander:
So you think that was something that you should have seen, but should have would’ve, could haves in identity theft and information related scams and any kind of scam. If the scammer’s good, there’s no coulda, woulda should have.
Kristine Solomon:
Well, not if you ask my friend who was able to sniff this out immediately, she pointed out all the things I missed.
Beau Friedlander:
We all have
Adam Levin:
That. Is she a lawyer by any chance, your friend?
Kristine Solomon:
No, but I think she missed her calling. She really could be an investigator of some kind.
Travis Taylor:
Did she let you crash on her couch for a month at least, or,
Kristine Solomon:
Yeah. Oh, I fully stayed in her apartment before. Nice. Yeah, she’s a great friend.
Adam Levin:
Excellent.
Kristine Solomon:
I ended up staying in her apartment later, but yes.
Adam Levin:
But this is also interesting from the standpoint of the other victim in this, which was the nurse, is that in her case, she was sharing a lot of information as people tend to do on Instagram. So anyone that was looking at her, focusing on her and thinking about, oh, this would be a wonderful catfish, as it were, is saying, wow, I know where she is, what she does, why she’s there. And this is the problem that a lot of people have is in this new world, our private journal has become Instagram,
Beau Friedlander:
So it’s over. She overshared, she overshared,
Travis Taylor:
And if she’s a nurse during Covid, she’s going to be distracted.
Beau Friedlander:
I mean, I don’t mean to shame her because it’s really not a shameful thing, but we all do it in social media. We compromise ourselves in various ways. But there was enough information in this case, obviously, for the scammer to figure out where her apartment in the city was and to offer it for rent, knowing that she wasn’t there. It sounds like it. Or was there no apartment at all, Kristine?
Kristine Solomon:
Well, they sent me a lot of pictures of an apartment, and when I looked up the location of where they were saying the building was on the map that’s provided by Craigslist, I was able to pinpoint the address, and that was an actual apartment building. I ended up calling the apartment building and writing to the nurse on Instagram. And both of them said that they had gotten tons of messages and they don’t know what to do. Because the thing about Craigslist is there are no humans that you can contact. You can basically just flag the post, but there’s no one to contact to say, can you please take this post down? It’s bogus and dangerous, so it’ll just stay up.
Beau Friedlander:
But was there an apartment? Was it her apartment or No, there was no apartment.
Kristine Solomon:
So there she was not renting an apartment. So she basically, I felt bad because she was pretty angry when she wrote back to me and she was basically saying, so many people are contacting me. It’s getting exhausting. I’m not renting out my apartment. They stole my identity.
Beau Friedlander:
But her apartment was in that building. Kristine?
Kristine Solomon:
Well, I don’t know. I think that what happened was, because I could tell from her Instagram that she did used to live in New York. So clearly the scammers were able, like you were saying, to construct a story about her life. So she did live in New York. What I was getting, she now lives in Wisconsin, so I don’t know if that was actually her apartment. They clearly got their hands on her passport. So what I’m thinking happened was, because look, I also send pictures of my passports to people. That’s what you have to do when you rent an Airbnb in another country. So that does happen. And so what I’m thinking happened was they got their hands on her passport or they could have photoshopped it. That’s possible too. But they had all of her information there, and then they were able to construct this story because like you said, she revealed so much of her life story on Instagram, and she was a nurse during Covid. So she was a perfect candidate. And as a person who is also good at research, I could also look at her Instagram and have crafted a story of her life just by looking at it.
So you’re right, we were both victims of this and anyone else who answered that ad and the building, by the way, who were also sick of getting phone calls,
Adam Levin:
I can imagine it’s terrible to be a mark, whether you’re real estate or you’re a human, it’s, it’s no fun for the people who were managing the building or the victim. So
Beau Friedlander:
What was the upshot of this, Kristine? Did you lose any money or did you stop this train before it got off the rails?
Kristine Solomon:
No, thankfully I was able to stop it all. Like I said, the first thing I did was call my bank, and I immediately took all my money out of that account. We shut it down and we opened a new one on the spot. And I was shocked that they did not ever try to, according to the bank, nobody ever tried to make a transaction into that account. So I was so surprised that they had my bank account number and didn’t do anything about it, because that seems like exactly what they were looking for. So what’s the point of putting all that effort in?
Beau Friedlander:
I have a theory
Adam Levin:
Ready.
Beau Friedlander:
They do this to a lot of people and they collect this information and they use it much later so that they have your file, and when you last gave up your bank account number, but in six months, you don’t remember when you did it. And then they do a little charge. Maybe they buy something for 30 bucks and they’re gone. And it doesn’t cost them much to get that information. Email, email, email, email, cut, paste, cut, paste.
Adam Levin:
A lot of people wouldn’t have reacted as quickly as you reacted. Some people get nervous about it and go, well, I’m checking my bank account. I don’t see anything. And they’re looking at it right after it happens, and then they forget about it. And with a lot of people, they don’t necessarily pay attention to small debits that may occur in their bank account. They should, but it’s sort of some of these little charges kind of disappear under the big charges and they go, oh, well, maybe it was a bank charge, or maybe I did something. I just can’t remember. And again, all you need is a little amount of money from a whole bunch of people and you’ve made a bunch of money.
Kristine Solomon:
That’s such a good point too. Yeah,
Beau Friedlander:
That’s my theory anyway, and I think that’s just because the ways that I have gotten got, the most recent times I’ve been scammed has been information that I’ve given to somebody in the last year, and I keep track of what I do, so I can see when there was a JetBlue charge on my debit card, I was like, there’s only one way that could have happened. And then I just tell the investigators at the bank. So go ahead. Anyone listening, I’m a perfect target for sure get caught. I keep track of where my information is.
Travis Taylor:
One of the other things here that we’ve seen several times is how scammers like to daisy chain their scams. They can compromise one account. They can, if they get one person’s passport, they can use that to scam dozens of people on Craigslist. And then from there, if they get that information from you, they can leverage that into a new scam altogether. It’s sort of skipping a rock across a lake that they
Beau Friedlander:
Can just wait. So you’re saying that they would scam, just to clarify for me, you’re saying that Kristine then could be used to scam other people,
Travis Taylor:
But if they have enough information, especially if you send a lot of personally identifiable information, which you need to when you’re trying to rent an apartment, that if the nurse that they were using ended up not really being a viable source for a scam anymore, they can just say, okay, who else do we have that we can use here to also convince other people?
Beau Friedlander:
Oh my God, Adam. Adam, Kristine is in Mexico. Sorry. Listen, if you’re listening and you’re thinking, oh my gosh, she’s in Mexico, I got another one. Yeah, I mean, that is kind of what happens. Oh boy. No, no, no. Well, you’re safe. I just be careful.
Adam Levin:
Let me ask you another question. You don’t have to answer the question, but just reflect upon it. Are you on Instagram? And if you are on Instagram, have you been Instagramming people? And that’s
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, Adam. Oh, Adam. Well, I Adam’s on his hobby horse.
Kristine Solomon:
I will say this. I am on Instagram. I don’t have my last name. You can’t find me by my first and last name on Instagram. And I am also set to private.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay. What’s your handle? Nope. Sorry.
Kristine Solomon:
I’m not that naive.
Adam Levin:
Listen, my wife is an instant Instagram denizen, and every morning I wake up with trepidation. At least I never have to ask her what she’s doing. I just look on Instagram and I know,
Beau Friedlander:
But me neither.
Adam Levin:
That’s true Bow and I,
Kristine Solomon:
That’s so surprising to me.
Adam Levin:
We follow her adventures. But again, that which is this wonderful vehicle for bringing people together can also bring the wrong people into people’s lives. And you’re doing the right thing by not having your last name on there and
Kristine Solomon:
Things like that. Yeah, thank you. I mean, I’ll tell you that I actually did make my online footprint more private in the past year. So I did the same thing with Instagram. I’m sorry, with Facebook, if you’re not my friend, you can barely see anything. However, if you’re my friend, you can, because there was an incident that happened when you have your name online, when you have your name as a byline and you write about topics, people sometimes will find you and look you up. Usually they will look you up. And if you wrote anything that even mean, the stuff I write is pretty innocuous. I write about fashion mostly and lifestyle topics. I don’t really write about politics or anything like that, but people will get their feathers ruffled and they will find you and harass you. And that happens
Beau Friedlander:
To say what? Like, oh, Kate Moss didn’t do that, or what do they do? It’s
Adam Levin:
Like hands my design,
Kristine Solomon:
People will find something to, it’s usually about politics, I will say. And so say for instance, if I wrote about a dress worn by a politician’s wife, say for instance, that’s enough for them. And that’s exactly what happened to me. And I was targeted by someone. I was actually, luckily, my own sleuthing skills are so good that I was able to identify the person who was harassing me. And once I confronted her with her own personal information, she started backtracking. But the point is that she, including her home address that’s acting, I
Beau Friedlander:
See. Doxed her
Kristine Solomon:
To herself. Yes, yes. But after that happened, I contacted the security department where I work, and they gave me a very detailed list of how to make myself vanish online. And I didn’t do all of it. I actually did not get through the entire checklist I should have, but I did take a lot of steps to reduce my online footprint because of that. So what I’m trying to do is make it harder for someone to construct a story based on my life, and I really don’t share that much on social media anymore.
Beau Friedlander:
Give us the greatest hits of what are some good things, not to expose Yahoo Company Secrets, but what are some of the greatest hits of becoming invisible?
Kristine Solomon:
Well, in addition to making your social media profiles private,
Speaker 8:
Step one,
Kristine Solomon:
I’m sure I’m not telling you something you don’t already know, but you can opt out of all of those online white pages, like people directories. You can Google someone’s name, and now suddenly I know their address, their phone number. I can see the properties they own. If I belong to some kind of service, if I pay a fee, I can see financial history, if they’ve had any liens against them, bankruptcies, I can see links to all of their social media channels all across the board. So much personal information is in those people directories, but you can opt out of them.
Beau Friedlander:
And that’s true, Kristine. And also, if you happen to have a hobby like running and you belong to a running club or you sign up for races, anything like that, any civic group nowadays, when you sign up and you’re a participant, you can say, I do not wish to be identified as a participant. Step two, set your participation as private, and then nobody gets to know how fast you ran the 5K or how many pies you ate at the pie eating contest or whatever. That can be set to private.
Travis Taylor:
How long did it take you overall to opt out of the white pages? I think some people think it’s this hugely complicated process, but really
Kristine Solomon:
It’s not uncomplicated because you have to contact each of them directly and put in a request to be removed. And I got tired going through the list and never finished it, but I need to, so it’s not like, I wouldn’t call it complicated. I would call it labor intensive because you have to do each one individually, but definitely worth it because it’s just so easy to find out every detail now just by Googling someone’s name. And that’s pretty scary.
Travis Taylor:
And if there’s 10 of those sites and you opt out of nine of them, they still have a way of finding you if you’re still on one. Yeah,
Beau Friedlander:
Well, which is why it’s an object lesson and ego free self Googling where it’s not about seeing how you look online, it’s seeing what’s available online.
Kristine Solomon:
Yeah.
Adam Levin:
Oh, Beau,I’m feeling bad now, actually. See, in my case, the existence of Adam Levine has not been great for me professionally, but boy, in my personal life, it is saved me.
Speaker 8:
Sorry.
Beau Friedlander:
I mean, but there’s so many tricks too, Adam. As you know, Beau is a nickname, and we don’t say what my real name is, but it is a nickname, and I’m super hard to find because of that. People can figure it out. But there’s different ways in which you can make yourself scarce or confusing. And if you can make yourself confusing, you make yourself a harder target. And one thing I’m pretty sure of after all these years of looking at identity thieves and scammers of different kinds is they’re pretty lazy. So if you’re kind of hard to hit, they’re going to move on to somebody who’s easier, don’t you think, Adam?
Adam Levin:
Absolutely. I mean, do you want to hit the house where the dog is there, or do you want to hit the house where there’s nobody there? And that’s really what it’s about. The harder you make yourself as a target, the more, unless you are either a superstar or connected to people or businesses that these folks want to get to, if you put up resistance, you’re going to be less interesting
Travis Taylor:
Unless you go into Craigslist.
Kristine Solomon:
Right? Yeah. But I will introduce a counterpoint to that step four. So when I started making myself invisible, and you and I have talked about how you should really hide things like the birth of a new baby, the baby’s name, where the baby was born, or where you were married, whatever it is. But the thing is that when I started making myself private and I started going extreme on social media, I took off my date of birth at the advice of the security expert at my company who’s wonderful. And then what happened was, this is so silly, but I think it’s a good point. When my birthday rolled around, I was like, oh, let me go on Facebook and see who’s wished me a happy birthday. And no one had
Adam Levin:
Wish happy birthday.
Kristine Solomon:
And then I thought, oh, if you never post the great things that happened, you never get what all used to in this modern world, which is mass validation. And so that’s so hard for people to give up. I think I really do imagine now in this modern world where we’re so used to going on Facebook or Instagram or whatever to brag about our accomplishments or milestones and have our communities congratulate us, you’d be opting out of all of that as well. So if you have a thick enough skin, then you can do that.
Beau Friedlander:
I think this has been awesome, and thank you so much. I will say that, Kristine, if it’s any help, I, years ago, because Adam was making fun of my oversharing, I made it impossible to see what my birthday is. And with the exception of one particularly, no offense, tone deaf, older relative, nobody wishes me happy birthday on Facebook. It’s not available. That’s just, they think it’s your birthday, and they say, happy birthday on there. But otherwise, I’ve gotten really psyched about the people who text me, who are actually in my life all the time on my birthday. And I mean, it’s sort of cool when you heard from 10 people in a day, that’s actually kind of a lot, and for people who remember and you didn’t broadcast it, and it’s just there. And yeah, I think that’s something to be said for the interior validation, but
Kristine Solomon:
Whatever, quality over quantity,
Beau Friedlander:
Quality, yeah, I suppose depends on your family. But yeah.
Kristine Solomon:
Beau,before we go, I did want to say that I did think of a better answer to your question. It was your question right about the weirdest thing I’d ever written about.
Beau Friedlander:
Yes, it was a hundred percent. So what was the weirdest thing you ever wrote about? What was it?
Kristine Solomon:
Okay. Well, I wrote many, many weird things, but one specific one came up that was so funny. It was a woman who was, she was having her maybe 90th birthday or something like that, or hundredth birthday. It was up there, and she had always had, I guess you want to call it a fantasy about being bad, being arrested and taken to jail, being in handcuffs and put in a cop car. So the local police department indulged her, and they filmed the whole thing. They showed up at her door under arrest, they put her in cuffs, they put her in the car, they took her away. Awesome. She was loving every minute of it. Awesome. Yeah,
Adam Levin:
That’s a great story. The flip side of that story is somebody was a victim of identity theft, and in the car with their kids, they’re pulled over for a busted taillight, and suddenly there are two police officers at either side of the car with guns drawn, telling them to get out of the car, get on the ground, and they cuffed him way to keep
Beau Friedlander:
It light
Adam Levin:
At ’em. There you go. My thing, Kristine and I always talk about identities, theft related things, and that’s another one. But Kristine, listen, you have been such a great guest. Your story is thank you, as usual, it’s charming. You’ve been awesome, and we really, really appreciate you sharing with us because again, unless we all can talk about this, other people are going to be victimized. So everything that we can give them as a milestone, a signpost, a guideline is very helpful. And thank you for doing what you do in writing, but with us today.
Kristine Solomon:
Oh, thank you. Thank you for all the kind words and for minimal judgment. On my own lapse of personal judgments, I was happy to tell my story.
Adam Levin:
It’s called Being Human,
Speaker 4:
Just to remember a lesson, not just clarity only lesson for whole life.
Beau Friedlander:
What the heck with Adam Levin is a production of Loud Tree Media.
Adam Levin:
It’s produced by Andrew Steven, the man with two first
Travis Taylor:
Names. You can find us online@loreemedia.com and on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at Adam K.
