Headline: Protect Yourself: Unmasking the Latest Holiday Scams Targeting Consumers cover art

Headline: Protect Yourself: Unmasking the Latest Holiday Scams Targeting Consumers

Headline: Protect Yourself: Unmasking the Latest Holiday Scams Targeting Consumers

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 I’m Scotty, your friendly neighborhood scam nerd, so let’s jack straight into what’s hitting the headlines right now.

Holiday season means scammers are working overtime. The Hawaiʻi Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, working with the North American Securities Administrators Association, just rolled out a warning list of top threats, and it’s spicy: pig butchering romance-investment cons, deepfake impersonations, fake AI trading bots, and bogus crypto “opportunities.” Commissioner Ty Nohara says scammers are leaning hard on artificial intelligence to dress up old-school fraud with flashy tech buzzwords and fear of missing out. If someone on Telegram or WhatsApp you barely know is pitching a “can’t lose” AI or crypto play, that’s your cue to nope out.

On the AI front, ABC7 News in San Francisco is flagging a surge in cloned-voice scams where criminals grab three seconds of your voice off TikTok, Instagram, or even voicemail and spin up a perfect audio clone of you or your kid. Then they call a family member with a fake emergency and a real money demand. The pro move here: set up a family safeword now, and if any “emergency” call doesn’t have it, you hang up and call back on a known number.

Law enforcement is also dropping the hammer. In Palm Beach County, CBS12 reports that Kadesa Sayles just got 20 years in prison for a nationwide SIM-hijack scam. She tricked people, including a 75‑year‑old AT&T customer, into giving verification codes, ported their numbers to another carrier, then used that control to hit bank, email, and Apple accounts. Cops found a notebook of more than 50 victims and piles of cash. Lesson for listeners: never read a one-time code to anyone on the phone, even if the caller ID says it’s your carrier.

The Department of Justice just announced agents seized roughly $8.5 million in Tether from an investment fraud ring and separately forfeited more than $200,000 in crypto in a scam targeting elderly victims. That tells you two things: crypto is still scammer catnip, and once your coins are gone, you’re mostly hoping the feds can claw anything back.

Meanwhile, local governments are getting spoofed too. Canon City in Colorado is warning about AI-generated emails using real city logos to demand wire transfers for permits and licenses. Any time a “government agency” wants a wire, gift card, or crypto, that’s not bureaucracy, that’s a con.

To stay clean, the Federal Trade Commission keeps repeating the basics because they work: don’t give personal or financial info to anyone who contacts you first, resist pressure to act immediately, and never pay strangers with crypto, gift cards, or wire. If a link, text, or call feels off, drop it and go directly to the official website or app you already know.

Thanks for tuning in, stay paranoid in the smartest way possible, and don’t forget to subscribe. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

For more http://www.quietplease.ai

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