Adam Levin:
Hey Travis, do you ever get one of those emails from a Nigerian prince promising you a huge inheritance?
Travis Taylor:
I have. Nigeria seems to have a shocking number of deposed princes.
Beau Friedlander:
So it turns out they’re now mostly working out of South Africa. And today we’re going to talk to a Secret Service agent who’s going to talk about how they’re working, what they’re doing, and what it means for you.
Adam Levin:
And with that, welcome to what the heck, A True Cybercrime podcast. I’m Adam Levin.
Beau Friedlander:
I’m Beau Friedlander.
Travis Taylor:
And I’m Travis Taylor.
Adam Levin:
Mark, welcome to what the hack. Now you work for the Secret Service in Digital Forensics out of South Africa. Correct?
Mark:
I’m currently located in South Africa and from our base every year we cover 23 countries on the African continent.
Adam Levin:
And when we say digital forensics, we’re talking about gathering data from electronic devices?
Mark:
That’s correct.
Adam Levin:
What got you into digital forensics?
Mark:
When I was younger, I joined the Army and right after the army, a few friends of mine are actually in the forensic Aternity in other disciplines, and over the weekends I sat with them and we went through evidence for criminal cases and that’s basically what jogged my passion for the industry. I’m also personally a massive advocate for digital forensics because I usually say that if I can testify on the electronic devices, then you don’t have to testify because everything will be there.
Travis Taylor:
So you work for the US Department of Homeland Security and specifically the Secret Service, but you’re based in South Africa. Is it common for the secret service to station agents overseas?
Mark:
It is. We’ve got numerous international offices which fall under the international program division. We have offices all over Europe, across South America, Africa, and also in Asia.
Travis Taylor:
So for the, I mean with most people I guess in the US they just think of the guys that are protecting the president. So what’s the mission?
Mark:
We basically have a deal mission. So of course, yes, protecting the president and his family and also other dignitaries. But then of course we have our investigation side and our investigation side focuses on protecting the financial systems of the us. But as we know, that dollar touches everything so indirectly it touches the financial systems on a global level. So that’s basically our main focus is financial and cyber crimes. And we’ve got these task teams within the US mainly between financials and cyber investigations. And for the past few years we’ve realized that the do actually go hand in hand.
Adam Levin:
So is that your beat with the secret service?
Mark:
My daily caseload and top responsibilities to conduct digital forensic investigations. I also project manage criminal cases, so that goes from the initial intelligence stage right into look at money laundering, fraud or whatever charges. We are looking at consulting with the prosecutors, assisting them to guide the investigation, to assist in drafting the charge sheet for prosecution and then ultimately also to apprehend these subjects that’s responsible for conducting the modus operandi and then also supporting the bail application afterwards and seeing the case through right to prosecution.
Travis Taylor:
I’ve heard that a lot of the scams that used to be run out of Nigeria and Ghana primarily have moved to South Africa. Why is that?
Mark:
South Africa has a great infrastructure. The food is cheap, the food is really good, housing is very good, and of course our internet speed are very fast. So it’s an ideal infrastructure to commit these crimes from. They initially start off in those countries and then use South Africa as a stepping stone to get into Europe, Canada as well as the us and you might find that they actually apply for new passports, new identities, and through unfortunately corruption, they do get those. Then we do find them in those countries that they apply for bank accounts using exactly those identities. But we have seen an influx of Aternity members into South Africa that has basically nested themselves into the communities and set up shop.
Beau Friedlander:
So Mark, we are in the United States experiencing a record number of sextortion crimes. There’s also romance scams, but from a profiling point of view, are sextortion crimes committed by groups or individuals? And this matters for where we’re going in this conversation.
Mark:
From my personal view and experience, it’s committed by individuals. You might find that they might work in small groups, two to three people, but that is not considered a aternity. If you want to start talking about fraternities, you look at for example, the confraternities that started back in the 1970s, like Black Axe, the Buccaneers, the ELOs, the pirates who’s got a global presence.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay, so these confraternities, these brotherhoods are sort of euphemisms for crime rings, whatever we call ’em. What’s their focus? Romance scams, money laundering, email scams. Actually I’m going to ask you what is it? All of the above. One, two,
Mark:
Ultimately all these crimes come down to a element of social engineering, but when you look at this extortion cases, I would say it’s smaller groups, long ranges, or it might be two to three people working together.
Adam Levin:
So mere perspective, what’s the difference between a sextortion scam and a romance scam?
Mark:
Romance scam is long-term. You will find that some of those victims, if I can call it that, will have a virtual relationship for six months up until three years very easily with extortion you usually find is not very long. Usually the perpetrators that’s doing these extortion scams can’t speak proper English. They might be using go Google translate, but the narrative is way shorter than with a romance scam. And the reason why I say that I have analyzed evidence from both sides. If you look at the romance scam site, you will find that there’s text documents on the computers that will have a dialogue or narrative, for example, for the morning, one for the afternoon, and then one for the evening, and they’re basically copied based and modified that a little bit extortion. On the other side, you just have to intrigue the potential victim with pictures initially, short narrative, and then you need to basically social engineer and get that person to send you pictures of themselves so you can exploit that.
Beau Friedlander:
Thank you, mark, for once again on this show, telling our listeners how to commit crimes. I appreciate it. No, it’s impossible to talk about these things without talking about the mechanics of them and because if people better understand the mechanics of them, they’re less likely to fall for them.
Adam Levin:
So it might be obvious. But when it comes to sex extortion scams and romance scams who are more the target men or women,
Mark:
I do see with the extortion scams that it’s young males more than compared to young females that actually fall for that. In terms of romance games, it can be any age, any gender. But there I do mostly see elderly people basically anywhere from 55 plus right through to 87 years old. If you work with these victims, one-on-one, and if you take their victim statements and you’re asking for impact statements for court purposes, of course you realize that these people were only looking for love, they’re lonely, they need someone to speak to. And if by the time that you find them they’ve lost a lot of money, they inheritance or they lost their retirement funding, some of them actually lose their businesses in their homes. That’s where you realize how deep in they are and speak to these people and actually to convince them and say, Hey, listen, but you fell for romance, scam is sometimes very difficult. They go through phases of grieving, realizing that it’s not real, and then of course getting very angry and disappointed because they fell for it. Also, knowing that they lost all this money, I’ve seen victims losing anything from 200,000 to $1.8 million.
Beau Friedlander:
Mark, to follow up on that, part of your job description is financial crimes and digital forensics. Are you ever able to claw that money back in your role with the Secret Service?
Mark:
We do do asset forfeitures. We have had numerous successes, but we only have success if the banks actually alert us to the money flowing and they themselves picking up that something is wrong. So that’s usually how we get involved. And then I will circle back to the potential victim and ask them, why did you send the money? They’ve actually had really good successes and we’ve sent back millions of dollars to those victims, but in general that is not the case.
Travis Taylor:
So where does the money for these scams go?
Mark:
It’s mainly to support the lavish lifestyle and to build up the next aid for the retirement. Specific countries are being used like Mexico, Turkey, Hong Kong, because the financial systems is so effective in Hong Kong, you can send Forex and within eight hours you can clear it and send it on to the next bank account. So these scammers know that international, if I can call it a money laundering network within these fraternities, they trust each other. They are called fraternity members, and those channels are in place. These guys will organize bank accounts within hours nowadays. So if they know the proceeds of crime is coming, they will very quickly get on their WhatsApp groups or any other telegram groups and organize these bank accounts to make sure that the process of crime flows to where it needs to go. But ultimately what we are seeing is do finance and their lifestyles, especially if you start doing observations on these groups and you actually see what they spend the money on, buying houses for cash, renting it out, buying high end vehicles, sending their kids to private schools, and a percentage of those funds actually end up in bank accounts in Nigeria, which is then ultimately used for the retirement one day they all eventually go back.
Beau Friedlander:
So I’m just hearing the African continents version of the Sopranos. Basically it’s just a bunch of mobsters who are getting rich and enjoying themselves and have tons of cash and nice cars and are living the life at the expense of victims they have no empathy for. Does it sound about right?
Mark:
It is about correct. And again, that’s why it gets complicated.
Beau Friedlander:
So Mark, you are recently on the National Geographic Program Trafficking. It featured a group that has been around a long time.
Speaker 5:
Organizations like Black Axe commit crimes across Borders precisely because it turns these cases into a multi-jurisdictional mess, one that requires international cooperation to catch and convict the perpetrators.
Beau Friedlander:
Can you tell us about Black Axe?
Mark:
So Black Axe basically started back in the 1970s in the universities in Nigeria, specifically the province of Benin, not the country, the province. And initially those unities had a specific, but they steered off from that goal and then spread on a global level and they started doing, of course, internet crimes, cyber crimes called what You Will.
Speaker 6:
The Black Axe is synonymous with crime. It’s spread around the world. They’ve claimed to have as many as 30,000 members globally.
Mark:
And if you look at the group itself, they have a hierarchy, they have their own constitution, they have bylaws, they have job roles and responsibilities. You cannot, for example, be a leader of a zone as they call it. If you haven’t been a member for 15 years, there’s basically induction period of five days. It’s very violent. But also, of course, the reason why these guys, they don’t leave the conference without either getting murdered or yeah, you just don’t leave the of confraternity. If you’re part of it, you’re part of it for the rest of your life. You have to be of course Nigerian. And then after the induction you get a second name. So your real name is actually known as a jue name
Beau Friedlander:
Jew, JEW.
Mark:
They spell it differently. It’s not Jew like in Jewish, it’s a slang word used by them within the cter to refer to your real name, your birth name.
Adam Levin:
Since we’re on the subject of words like Jew, whether it’s spelled or pronounced differently in America, MAGA means a very specific thing, but that has a different meaning in Black Axe too,
Mark:
Right? So maga is a slang word used by the unity to refer to victims. And when we speak about jue name, it’s actually spelled JUE
Beau Friedlander:
And maga is, it’s not related to the Make America great again, like dumb American thing. But anyway, so Black Axe sounds a lot like what is referred to popularly as the mafia.
Mark:
You do find elements of violence and of course then the nefarious acts like either cyber crime, drug trafficking, human trafficking, I will call it whatever this group is actually responsible for or how they can gain money or act out these criminal acts and obtain funds for it. If you look at the mafias within Italy, Black Axe actually works with the Cosa Nostra. They work together. It’s been proven. We’ve seen the social links directly between the different Black Axe unities on a global level where the zone, for example in South Africa has direct contact with the zone in North America in Canada, Germany, Italy, France within the uk. And all those places are actually being split up into different zones. And within those zones you get sub zones. If you refer to a zone that will be a country and that zone must have a chairman or a leader who again must be a member for 15 years before you can be elected into that position. We’ve identified these guys operating at 38 countries already, and the Interpol actually classified them as the biggest organized crime group in the world.
Beau Friedlander:
There’s a specific thing that is a very specific subset of the crimes committed by these cartels in various African nations, but increasingly out of South Africa because as you pointed out, the infrastructure there is conducive to doing these kinds of crimes. What’s a blind mule?
Mark:
Blind Mule is an unwitting mule. It’s a mule that is obtained through the group, again through social engineering, usually romance scams of course, or investment scams. And this mule is then basically groomed being instructed to fly to another country to meet their lover. Their flights will be paid for, the accommodation will be paid for, pocket money will be given. And when they arrive in that country, someone meets them and say, well, we’re sorry but your lover went off to another country with the emergency meeting, but he left this bag. Can you please take this with you and we can buy your next fight for you to Italy or to France or Canada, and you need to take that bag with you and meet that person in that country. Of course they will be fine, is that they are actually keeping bags with drugs and unfortunately these people are arrested in foreign countries, usually elderly people now being seen as drug traffickers, which is not the case. That is not what they sign up for.
Speaker 5:
So I got a message on Instagram a little over a year ago from somebody saying that her dad was a victim of a scam and explaining everything that happened and asking if there was anything I could do to help
Adam Levin:
On the National Geographic show traffic. The host was contacted by a woman whose father was one of these blind mules, which is eventually what led Mariana Van Zeller to you to try to help the daughter and her father.
Mark:
Yes.
Speaker 5:
So Nicole, tell me what happened to your dad.
Speaker 7:
Should I start way back at the beginning? Okay, so after my
Speaker 5:
Mom died, Nicole tells me her father Rodney was a down on his luck out of work truck driver when he started receiving a series of emails. It seemed to be an unbelievable stroke of good fortune. The previously unknown relative in Italy had left Rodney an inheritance of $10.5 million.
Travis Taylor:
Tell us about the Rodney Balder scam in Mozambique.
Mark:
So basically what happened is this American citizen fell for a scam. Diving into the investigation and looking at the facts, we actually realized that this group was sitting in Johannesburg putting off the scam. And within the Aternity we find that there’s two groups. The one side is responsible for the drug trafficking and the other side for the cyber crime element. So let’s call them the unit for the cybercrime element then spoke or communicated with the victim and pretended to be a family member.
Beau Friedlander:
So as I understand it, there was an email from these criminals that claimed that there was a distant family member, I think in Italy and they had tried to reach out to everybody in that guy’s extended family and failed. And it turned out this person receiving the email was being informed that he was the next in line for a huge inheritance.
Mark:
Yeah.
Travis Taylor:
And so Rodney Baldus was apparently in some pretty serious financial distress.
Mark:
He fell for this investment scam and then they handed him over unknowingly to the drug trafficking side.
Adam Levin:
If he agreed to travel to Maputo Mozambique, everything would be paid for. He’d sign some documents, he’d then take them to Europe to claim his 10.5 million.
Beau Friedlander:
I know, can you imagine $10.5 million? It’s bonkers.
Mark:
They met him in mobi, gave him a back with Darwin ultimately to be arrested there and prosecuted for I believe 16 or 17 years. He’s not the only victim who fell for this and was prosecuted for drug trafficking. These numerous others also fell for exactly the same scam and were also prosecuted and now sitting in Mozambique jails
Adam Levin:
And one was about 10 years younger than he was and the other was 10 years older.
Beau Friedlander:
So one of the takeaways here is that you got to be vigilant with your elder parents because no matter how much you think their compass meant us and they get what’s going on, they may not, and you got to ask questions just, you know how they say you never call, we’ll call
Adam Levin:
For Rodney. This was the answer to his prayers. This was a solution for his economic problems or so it seemed He didn’t realize he’d become an unwitting blind mule in a multinational drug operation.
Mark:
Exactly.
Travis Taylor:
Whenever something’s free, you’re usually going to be the product of the patsy and this is no different.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, I mean it’s not a drug smuggling story, it’s human trafficking.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, and it’s heartbreaking too. I mean this guy was separated from his daughter
Adam Levin:
And he may spend the rest of his life in jail.
Beau Friedlander:
You mentioned earlier that Black Axe had known connections to Cosa Nostra and in this story in Mozambique, the older man who is now in prison there was bringing a large amount of heroin. It was actually international news to Italy. Was that an example of the CosaNostra link or, because I understand that a lot of heroin does find its way from Afghanistan down through the continent of Africa and up to Europe,
Mark:
Which we call the southern root. Well, it’s widely known as the southern root where poppy seeds are being harvested in Afghanistan. It finds its way down to D alarm in Tanzania as well as Mozambique. And then from there on it’s being pushed either into South Africa and further distributed to first world countries or directly from Mozambique distributed to other countries. I cannot say for a fact that with this specific victim that it was actually heading to Italy to be handed over to the RA Nora. But what I can confirm is that the Black Axe that’s operating in Italy working hand in hand with the ra Nora are known for x human trafficking and drug trafficking and not per se for cyber crimes. We do see in the other zones, like for example in France, in Germany, in the uk, in Canada, South Africa, Malaysia, that those black act zones are responsible for cyber enabled or cyber crimes in general.
Beau Friedlander:
One of the things that I find very striking about organized crime in Nigeria and Angola and South Africa and Mozambique and all the places where it happens is the way in which cyber crime specifically has been leveraged. Can you talk about that?
Mark:
Correct. For example, the multiply mills that initially fall for investment scam and then end up being arrested for drug trafficking, but what we see in general is that romance scam victims are being used to launder proceeds of crime on international level. And I’m not talking about a hundred hundred and thousands of dollars, I’m talking about millions of dollars. And these victims are also handed off
Within the confraternity. One person for example, will conduct the communication with the victim, at least start the narrative, almost like a phishing scam if I can call it that. That’s why they have those narratives within text files. They copy paste that and they send it to numerous victims to initially open up that dialogue. After they’ve done that, then it only starts becoming a personalized message from the suspects to this potential victim. And then of course it spills over from just email communication to a telephonic conversations. Whoever’s in contact with the RAM gang victim, they will for example, tell them that they’re stuck somewhere in some country, some taxes need to be paid or there’s inheritance coming through. It’s going to be a large sum of money, and then they give them instructions. You need to either open up a new bank account under this name a register that’s LLC, or you have to cash this check into another bank account to break the financial link. And for us, that makes it very difficult. So we find that the romance scam victims are actually being set up to orchestrate this massive international money laundering network without them knowing that they are actually receiving proceeds of crime or other Roma scam victims that are sending their funds to them. I’ve seen romance gang victims from three different states within the us not one knowing about the other, but all three of them are assisting to LA each other’s money out of America, across the border and into bank accounts on an international level.
Travis Taylor:
So when it comes to the cybercrime elements of groups like Black Axe, how sophisticated tech savvy are they actually, are they using really cutting edge techniques or is it just a bunch of guys behind keyboards?
Mark:
I would say 95% of the suspects we’ve arrested have gone to or attended some form of information technology courses either at colleges or universities. We do find that if they actually move to South Africa, one of the first things they do is they apply to the universities and specifically to study information technology. So the majority of them are really good with computers. Yes, they are tech savvy, they know how to set up email servers, they know how to set up a domain and host a website. They know how to do mass spamming. They know how to replicate a online banking profile website to actually send that to the victims and say, Hey, here’s my username and credentials, log into this bank, this is my bank account, and please transfer some money because I’m logging in from a country where my IP is not being recognized and I’m actually being blocked for moving my own funds. Those suspects are actually in control of that website. So when the victim logs in and they want to add a beneficiary, they can seize this victim logging in when they’re logging in from what IP address and so forth. And then suddenly a new email address pretending to be from a specific bank or contact be sent to this victim stating that I’m from the legal team from this specific bank, you now need part of attorney, you have to pay $20,000. And then again, the victim pays $20,000 and he just goes on and on and on.
Adam Levin:
Mark, at the risk of helping the bad guys, I’d like to drill down a little bit on specifics because my hope is to help everybody else do scammers have multiple nearly identical social media profiles so that if one gets shut down, they have other targets in development.
Mark:
Yes, that is the case. What I see from analyzing the electronic evidence, I find numerous social media profiles. It might be Facebook, it can be Instagram, it can be of course dating websites, and you will find that they have multiple of those accounts. And then usually I find the usernames and passwords also, which of course we can’t log into because that’s a different legal process, but we do see the forensic artifacts showing that to us. So we find multiple user identities being created. But for the listeners, if you want to confirm if it is actually a fake profile, take the picture and run it through a website called TinEyes.com.
Beau Friedlander:
PimEyes? I take a sneaky picture of someone at the supermarket and then find out who they are, which it can be used for. And I’m surprised it’s available online because in my opinion, it should be illegal for regular people to be able to use this tool, but it’s there. When I check people out on PimEyes, it’s not always clear. I have checked out scammers on there. It’s not always clear who they are or where they are because you can’t tell from the amount of information they give you. And this is a very technical question, but does pim, I tell you that if you pay the fee,
Mark:
So I think we’re talking about two different websites because I’m looking at TinEye and
Travis Taylor:
That’s TinEye, which is T-I-N-E-Y e.com. Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, and I’m looking at PimEyes.
Mark:
So basically it’s a reverse lookup of photographs and pictures and it’ll show you immediately if that picture was used on any other website or you might even find that that picture is linked already to some scam website where people are saying, Hey, this picture was being used to defraud or potential victims.
Travis Taylor:
So for the social media profiles that these guys are using, are they from compromised social media accounts that belong to actual people or do they tend to just be complete fabrications?
Mark:
I wouldn’t say fabrications. I mean, we are now venturing into artificial intelligence, and of course we have seen that the suspects are using that to their benefit, but it can be pictures from social media websites that they do copy, they can do searches, and it can just be on normal websites where they find these pictures. And they also themselves go through their own open source intelligence process to confirm if those pictures have been used on other sites or has been flagged being used for romance scams or extortion, for example. They do their own homework. It’s quite interesting when I go through the electronic devices when these subjects are arrested, if I run the specific pictures from their computers, it doesn’t have a big footprint on the internet that tells me that they do know those pictures haven’t been used before or it’s not normally circulated and being used in general on the internet. So that’s quite interesting. And then of course from OnlyFans, we do see that they do copy pictures from OnlyFans because it’s a subscriber site. Correct. So you can’t just obtain those pictures by going to certain profiles and just saving images. You actually have to be a subscriber. We also see that they are using those pictures, which again is not normally circulated on the internet, so it’s better for them to use those pictures if they actually want to have success.
Beau Friedlander:
And I guess, and that’s what’s so hard because when you’re reporting one account, you’re not really getting much done because it shuts down, there’s 10 more to go.
Adam Levin:
Is there a way through the law enforcement angle that you think that we can get to other governments to better protect our people who are falling victims to these romance scams and blind mule scams?
Mark:
So law enforcement on the international level is actually working together. And then also from middle of last year, we requested Interpol to assist us to get specific countries to work with us to start focusing on specific organized growing groups on a global level. If they operating on a global level, then we need to start doing that. So Interpol assisted us and we got together with 18 other different countries and we started talking about what we are seeing and they shared with what they are seeing. Of course, we need to make sure that we cover our legal angles and we can’t double and venture into intelligence because intelligence can’t be used in a court of law that will be seen as hearsay evidence. But unfortunately, if you look on an international level, these processes are sometimes quite slow. For example, if a country is asking for specific information around a Gmail box, imagine that country having to go through all their diplomatic channels, that paperwork eventually ending up in the US with the correct departments and then ending up after being authenticated with the Department of Justice, and then only can they start doing their subpoena process, whereas a law enforcement officer within the US write a subpoena, get it signed off, and they serve it on the service provider.
So just to give you an idea of timelines that we are looking at, but I can also give a very good example of where three US victims were defrauded the funds in up with a Aternity member in South Africa where they purchased two houses and a Ford Mustang, and these two houses were bought in one of the upmarket areas, actually one of the most expensive per square meters areas on the African continent. And he bought this all with proceeds of crime from the time we started that investigation until he was prosecuted as a first time offender for 15 years, took us seven months, which I think is really fast. If you think this is crossing not just countries, but different continents.
Travis Taylor:
We’ve talked about how law enforcement can help with the process of identifying these guys, but one thing I’m wondering here is what can social media companies do, if anything, to prevent this sort of crime on their platforms?
Mark:
Well, let me first start off by saying that we actually have a lot of initiatives where the public and private sector work together, where law enforcement work together with these companies by either creating awareness or informing them of what we are seeing, and they need to stop putting counter measures in place. But unfortunately, I also do see for the past two years that a lot of these tech companies have started retrenching the personnel that’s actually responsible for those portfolios, for these positions where those social media companies initially appointed these people to be the Hazels for law enforcement. And what about banks? I do see a lot of awareness being created by the banking sector because in the end of the day, it’s not the bank losing money, it’s their customers. But I do see that a lot of banks, not just in the US but on a global level, are putting initiatives in place, are creating awareness around that are warning their customers of how these specific scams play out and how they are being conducted. I’m all about creating awareness. I’ve been saying this for years. I’m a massive advocate for it. Why be reactive and actually have to chase down criminals if you can prevent normal citizens out there to actually know exactly what they need to look for and actually to prevent them from losing their hard earned money?
Beau Friedlander:
Hallelujah. So Jews can say hallelujah too.
Mark, in the beginning of the interview, you said that you were having an unstable connection to the internet and you mentioned that you were going to get your family to stop using services, and one of them was TikTok. So a lot of people have specifically pointed to TikTok and said things like TikTok has given China a conduit into every home where it’s being used. Now you’re in law enforcement, you are a digital forensics person. You know how these things work. Does it trouble you that TikTok could use every single account as a tool for listening and spying?
Mark:
To be honest, Beau, that’s way above my pay grade.
Beau Friedlander:
Fair enough.
Mark:
But I would like to mention the fact that if you look at any application that you can install on your mobile phone, doesn’t matter if it’s the Android platform or the Apple platform, although there’s vetting in place for those applications, and it goes through a process of being approved to be allowed in the Play store, for example, for users to download and use. If you actually look at the permissions of that specific application, you will find that it’s do ask you to have access to your microphone, to your contacts, to other storage areas within your mobile phone, which of course will have sensitive information. But I would definitely recommend having a look at what these specific applications actually do get access to and what you allow the application to be able to do on your mobile phone.
Travis Taylor:
Hallelujah.
Beau Friedlander:
Alright, guys, enough with the hallelujahs, we’re in Lent. You’re not supposed to say it.
Travis Taylor:
Forgive me.
Beau Friedlander:
You’re forgiven. It’s C, it’s Christian thing.
Adam Levin:
Anyway, Mark, we can’t thank you enough for the time you’ve spent with us, the wisdom you’ve shared. Thank you, Adam. Thanks so much.
Beau Friedlander:
And now it’s time for our Tin Foil Swan,
Adam Levin:
Our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. Hey, Beau, were you the one that wrote this review of me online? What?
Beau Friedlander:
Your Wikipedia page?
Adam Levin:
No, Glassdoor.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, I mean there’s a lot I could say, but no, I didn’t.
Adam Levin:
Travis, have you ever written a review on Glassdoor?
Travis Taylor:
I plead the fifth.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay, maybe we should say what it is. Glassdoor is a crowdsource site where people talk smack about work life at companies, and sometimes they’re dragooned into raving about them.
Adam Levin:
Glassdoor just started adding real names to user profiles without permission. By the way, there’s no review about me on Glassdoor.
Travis Taylor:
They don’t actually show your name publicly, but in the event of a breach,
Beau Friedlander:
Well, you know Adam’s mantra. The question is not if a company will be breached, but when
Adam Levin:
It raises a more important issue, namely, if you post online it’s possible, maybe probable that it can be traced back to you
Beau Friedlander:
Having been doxxed before. I can tell you that’s no picnic.
Travis Taylor:
And if Glassdoor can use publicly available information to tie your identity to your account, you have to assume that just about anyone can do the same
Beau Friedlander:
On the bright side. Maybe everyone gets a trophy generation will stop sloughing their own shortcomings off on their bosses
Travis Taylor:
Spoken like a truly functional boss.
Adam Levin:
But when you sign up for a service with the expectation of anonymity, and then the company changes his mind, it’s an object lesson. Companies can and will change their privacy and data policies whenever they want to
Travis Taylor:
And even when they don’t, anything you’re sharing is leaving a trail of breadcrumbs back to you
Beau Friedlander:
A hundred percent. One of the biggest myths on the internet is that your data can be anonymized.
Adam Levin:
Sad but true. Be careful what you post and be careful where you post.
Travis Taylor:
And that’s our tinfoil swan. What the heck with Adam Levin is a production of Loud Tree Media. You can find us online at adamlevin.com and on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at Adam k Levin.
