People who think they’re too smart or savvy to get scammed are the perfect target for social engineering scammers. Today’s guest is Jordan Harbinger. Jordan is a lawyer, speaker, entrepreneur, and educator. In addition to hosting the amazingly popular Jordan Harbinger Show, he is a consultant for law enforcement, military, and consulting companies, a member of the New York State BAR Association, and the Northern California chapter of The Society of Professional Journalists.
“Manipulating someone who has a big ego or is narcissistic is one of the easiest triggers and makes social engineering easy.” - Jordan Harbinger Share on XShow Notes:
- [0:47] – Jordan introduces himself and describes his popular podcast that has been active for 14 years.
- [1:35] – In the early 90s, as a middle schooler, Jordan discovered his interest in hacking and social engineering.
- [3:50] – As time went on, Jordan began messing around with cell phones he found.
- [6:17] – What really got Jordan interested in social engineering was listening in illegally on other peoples’ phone calls for hours.
- [8:14] – In these phone calls, he listened to “real drama.”
- [9:16] – Because of this, 13 year old Jordan realized that people are complex systems but can certainly still be reprogrammed.
- [10:20] – Jordan shares a story of someone he listened to when tapping into phone calls and what he learned from it as a teen.
- [14:47] – Manipulating someone who has a big ego or is narcissistic is one of the easiest triggers for social engineering.
- [17:23] – The easiest people to manipulate are the ones who think they are too smart to get caught up in a scam.
- [18:50] – As a teen, Jordan was always shocked at some of the things he tried that worked.
- [21:16] – Imagine what older and more technically savvy adults could do if Jordan as a 13 year old could figure out so much.
- [24:02] – Jordan and Chris reflect on how unsafe and naive society was in the 90s.
- [27:40] – Getting scammed is one of the worst feelings ever.
- [29:14] – Social engineering scams are very sophisticated these days.
- [31:40] – You can still trust people, but you have to be careful. If you don’t trust anyone at all, you’ll be miserable.
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Transcript:
Jordan, thank you so much for coming on the Easy Prey Podcast today.
Thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it.
It will be a blast. Can you give the audience a little bit of background about who you are? I know there are probably about 40 million people who know who you are but let's talk about it anyway.
Yeah, sure. I'm the host of The Jordan Harbinger Show, a very creative title if I do say so myself. I interview amazing people and make their wisdom available to everyone, which sounds like every other podcast, and probably there's some truth to that. I've been doing it for 14 years, so I’d like to think that the work we put in shows. We get about 11 million downloads a month. It's one of the most popular shows in the world, which is a result of my team being awesome and having awesome guests.
That's cool. I'll be there in about 14 years then.
Sure, you go.
Let's talk about social engineering. I know you have some experience in this, particularly when you were younger.
You're going to have to cut me off at some point here because I do tend to go on about this, but when I was a kid, I got super bored, as a lot of hacker-wannabe punk kids did. This was probably '93. I got a computer and it came with a modem. I was like, “Oh, I can go online.” I started finding bulletin board systems and things like that.
There were pirated games on there and all that nonsense.
I skipped school every day pretty much after that. I was like, “There's the internet, there's Internet Relay Chat.” I'm talking with people in Israel, and I'm talking with people in other countries. These are all university students or professionals. It's IRC. It's not 13-year-olds, but anybody can talk to anybody at that point.
I'm talking with people and I'm going and finding these hacker channels and these phones. We call it freaking channels. I was like, “This is really interesting stuff. There's no one in my school that's as smart as any of these people.”
I'm learning all this complicated stuff. WiFi comes out a few years later, and I'm like, “Wow” or whatever it was. I'm learning all of these interesting ways that people are messing with systems, and I started to get super interested in this, but I wasn't super technically inclined.
Remember, I'm in middle school at this point. I can figure out some things, but what really appealed to me was social engineering, because even though I wasn't able to afford a cell phone in the beginning, disassembling it, and all that stuff. I love doing that stuff later on. I could always go to a payphone on my bike and I didn't raise a whole lot of suspicion. A kid on a payphone with his BMX bike propped up next to the side of a drugstore? Whatever.
I would stay there for hours, mess with the phone system, dial numbers in, and try to figure out different systems. I'd find numbers where you would dial and then you'd get another dial tone. You could just dial another number. I was calling Japan and all this stuff using these—I forget what those are called—these sort of dial-out extension things from companies.
I was messing with PBX mailboxes because the default passwords were always the same for these companies and I would delete voicemails—just stupid prank crap that probably infuriated a lot of the people using it. I would get a voicemail box and I'd tell all my friends, “Hey, if you want to call me, you can leave a message. I have a voicemail.” They're like, “Wow.”
Eventually, I started to mess with cell phones and things like that. I'd go dumpster diving, get a cellphone. It was basically in working condition, but the battery had leaks. I'd get some muriatic acid, clean off the contacts, get another battery for $50, and start messing with the cell phone. Reprogram it using a cable I made from schematics that were drawn in ASCII, which is like text symbols.
I'd go to Radio Shack and I'd be soldering things. My parents are like, “What are you doing?” “I'm making a cable to reprogram this cell phone that I found in the garbage.” And they were like, “OK, whatever.” They didn't understand. I had an alignment handset that I had borrowed from a truck. Again, I'm 13, 14. I'm not super proud of it now, but I learned a lot from these experiences, so it was worth it, in my opinion. I'm sure the lineman who lost it was pissed.
Those are not cheap in the day.
They're not. They're like $600. I remember because I called the company who made it and I said, “Hey, I'm a lineman and I want to learn more about this device. I don't have a manual. Can you mail me one?” They were like, “Sure.” They mailed me the user manual. They mailed me a catalog as well of these devices. They were like $600-$900 in the ‘90s. I'm like, “This is a phone with alligator clips, what the hell?” But where else are you going to get it?
Heavy-duty alligator clips.
They were heavy duty. I made a hex wrench out of I don’t even know what. I would open up those green boxes on the side of the road, and I would plug my alligator clip alignments handset into that. I connected an FM transmitter to some of those contacts so I could listen on the radio to people's phone calls, which is funny because looking back, obviously, anybody could listen to those phone calls on the radio at that point.
I made these really cheap $13—whatever it was at the time—FM radio transmitters that didn't go very far. I would sit there nearby with the box closed so that I wasn't sitting there with an open green box on the side of the road.
That wouldn't be suspicious at all with a BMX bike laying up against it.
Yeah, it looks a little bit bad, and I did get caught doing that. I was like, “Oh, this was open.” And the cop would be like, “Well, I don't think that's supposed to be the case. The guy's probably working on it. Don’t touch it. It looks electrical.” I'd be like, “OK.” Then I'd wait until he left it and I'd go back, grab my handset, and run because, of course, I was the one that opened it. It was my handset sitting there on speakerphone or whatever.
I did a lot of that kind of nonsense, but what really then got me even more into social engineering was, yes, the freaking stuff required a lot of social engineering, getting people to connect calls. The cell phone hacking stuff required me to use social engineering because I would call and get serial numbers to reprogram the phone or to dumpster dive stuff and have to talk your way out of it. “I lost something here. My ball went in here.” They're like, “I don't think so, kid.” That kind of thing.
My interest in people started to come when I was listening to a lot of these phone calls, because I would listen for six hours. My parents would be gone. They think I'm home watching TV. I'd be listening to the neighbors making phone calls. I heard a lot, a lot, a lot of phone calls, and some were really interesting because I started to remember like, “Oh, 10 line pairs down is this guy on the corner who's getting divorced.”
I would switch line pairs, almost like switching channels on the TV, except most of them are static because you get a dial tone, dial tone, dials tone, dial tone, and then some people on the phone. I'm like, “Oh, well, that's interesting. Let's listen to that.” Completely illegal, obviously, but the lineman's handset has a mute button on it. There's a reason for that.
I would just listen for hours and hours and hours, and I would hear a lot of phone conversations. Eventually, I learned how to reprogram cell phones. I'd been listening to conversations on those a lot. I was addicted to wiretapping, I think, at age 13, 14. When you're that age, you don't have adults talking to you like you're an adult. If you live in a functional family, like a good family, I don't want to be like a value judgment on this, but most of the time, when you grow up with normal, well-adjusted parents, they're not talking to you. You're not seeing adult situations in real life. You're not hearing adult situations in real life. There are exceptions to this.
For me, this was like, “They don't know I'm there, so they are being very uncensored.” I was like, “Wow, guys talk like that, women talk like that. Men who are married to somebody talk like that. The families talk like this.” It was a real drama—guy getting divorced, a guy talking to his mistress on the phone, guy talking to his ex-wife on the phone, guy talking to his mother on the phone.
When you’re a child, everyone else is like an NPC in your world. You don’t think adults are real people with real problems.-Jordan Harbinger Share on XI saw that this one person had 10 different sides to him, which made sense because I thought I did as a child. But when you're a child, everyone else is like an NPC in your world. You don't think adults are real people with real problems. You're like, “These are just people that feed me, yell at me, and drive me around.”
Tell me to do my homework.
Yeah, that's it. There's not a lot of, “I wonder if that person feels insecure like me.” There's none of that because you're 13, 14 years old. There's no universe outside of you at that point, especially for a guy who's maybe a little bit of a late bloomer. Me seeing that or hearing that firsthand was a real eye-opener for me. That was a real awakening where I was thinking, “Oh my gosh, everyone has the same switches in their brain, behavior, misbehavior, insecurities, problems.”
People are way more complicated than I thought. That was interesting to me because as I saw computer systems as a system and phone systems as a system, I was like, “People are a system too.” Now, as an adult, definitely, the most complex system that exists is the brain and human psychology—the psyche.
But still programmable in a sense.
Still programmable, and certainly has a lot of bugs that can be exploited and things like that.
What were some of the lessons that you learned from listening in on people?
Some of the things that I just mentioned, which is everyone has bugs, everyone has insecurities, and everyone has blindspots , I think, was one of the major things that I was really conscious of at first. Because this guy who was getting divorced, for example, he would call his soon-to-be ex or his ex and he'd be like, “F you, this and that.” I'm like, “Yikes, this is bitter.”
Then he would call his mom and he'd be crying about that. I'm like, “Why are you acting like the victim, man? You just cussed out your baby mama. You're the […]. She was being nice-ish.” Then he would call a sister and be like, “I just don't know why; give me advice.” Then I'm like, “Advice? How about don't treat people like that?”
I'm like, “If this guy talks like he does to his mom or his sister, if he talked that way to his wife, I bet they would be fine, but instead he's like, ‘I'm Mr. Macho guy. I’ve got a Corvette.’” I'm like, “What are you doing?” I just thought he was such a […].
Then he would talk to his friends and he'd be like, “Yeah, F her, that […].” I'm like, “OK, so you're just. like, a dumb bro who can't open up to your friends. You have miserable relationships. You're whining to your mom because you’re, like, a mama's boy who's 45 years old. Your sister's probably been trying to give you advice for decades; you won't listen to a word she says.”
I just remember thinking, “Does this guy know how dumb he seems right now or not?” I saw a lot of that from a lot of different people. “What are you doing at work? Why are you screwing this up?” It can't be that hard. Of course, there's a lot going on that you don't understand at age 14. I also did understand enough to be this guy's ego. He is his own worst enemy, 100%.
I remember learning that and taking that lesson with me throughout even college, not that I was perfect with it. Certainly, like every guy, I had my insecure moments throughout college, especially. I remember thinking, “Never become like that guy because you're not fooling anyone at all.” It takes a lot of time to get over that kind of stuff, I think. The sooner you do it, the better. This guy was paying the price because he was losing his kids and lost his wife. I just thought, “This is a guy who has made so many mistakes that I'm not sure he can recover,” if that makes sense. And that was sad.
That was like a warning for me to grow up, but grow up is not quite the right word. It was a warning for me to pay attention to consciously develop myself in a way where I could avoid some of those pitfalls. Of course, no system like that is perfect, but I got a sneak preview. It was like looking in the future at a guy that, when he was my age, never got told the right things by his mother or sister, or didn't listen.
I remember this guy was the guy who would speed through the neighborhood in his Corvette. No one thought he was cool then, and certainly, now that I'm his age, now at age 41, that guy's kind of a pathetic character knowing what I knew. Even before I knew that this is the guy who runs past kids at 50 in a 25, and honks at us when we're coming home from school. He's a prick. Now he's reaping what he has sown. I was like, “Note to self: Never do this.” I got a lot of notes like that from the illegal eavesdropping that I did.
You learned self-awareness at an early age through other people's being vulnerable in front of you, so to speak.
Yeah, it was interesting to see that because it was just a really good case study of what happens when you're kind of an a-hole to people. You can't escape it, and your insecurities will sink you. I didn't really know what insecurities were back then, but it was clear that something was driving his behavior and it wasn't working for him, and he just couldn't stop.
Do you think that leads to a kind of easier social engineering of people if you know that they're super ego-driven, that is just like, “Let me just feed this to get what I want”?
Of course. Manipulating somebody who has a big ego or is narcissistic—that’s one of the easiest triggers that there is, and you see it all the time. When I worked on Wall Street as an attorney, how did we end up with the 2008 recession? Greed. People thinking it's different because it's wishful thinking. All these guys think that they're super smart and that it won't happen to them. This is so obvious.
When you try and get one over on somebody who is narcissistic or has an ego problem, it's the easiest possible sort of social engineering 101. It's like killing someone with flattery and then getting them to do something for you.
Children learn it especially—this is going to sound sexist, but I don't mean it as such. But young, attractive women learn this almost subconsciously. Not that they're manipulative or anything. I'm trying to be really careful here. It's thrown at them all the time, and ethical women will not do this very much, of course, but it becomes so easy to do this to men because men are such easy marks for this kind of thing.
Guys can do it too with other men. You can flatter your narcissistic boss to no end. I see it in younger children mostly when it comes to dating scenarios, I guess you would say, like teenagers. It's the most obvious thing. Getting a teenage boy to do something is probably the easiest way to do that. Just kill them with flattery. It's so simple. It's scary.
It doesn't take much social engineering to manipulate teenage boys.
No.
We are very manipulatable. Is that a word?
Manipulable. You see that in a lot of teenage men and women, but I notice it more because I was the young man who was witnessing this in high school. I was like, “You know she's just playing you, right? Come on, dude.” It was really obvious. I'm sure it goes the other way. That wasn't my focus at that point.
Then looking at it when I started to teach dating skills and stuff like that as I got older, I was like, “Oh, my gosh. The crux of this whole thing is insecurity and ego.” What's that show, The Real Hustle? You remember that show? It was a British show where they would, like, con people. The guy's name is R. Paul Wilson.
I'm vaguely familiar with it.
They would go and make bets with people at bars, or they would go and do these scams, and film the whole thing. The tagline at the end of the show was something like, “If you think you'd never fall for any of this, you're just the type of person I want to meet.” He was a magician, so he's just exposing these things, but he was an expert with scams.
That's what con men are thinking, because the easiest people to manipulate are the ones that think they're too smart to get caught up in this stuff. You have to be really careful. The second you think you're too smart to get scammed is when you are most vulnerable to getting scammed, most likely.
Yeah. I see that a lot whether it's network security or scams. Once you think you're safe, that's when you're really vulnerable.
Yeah. “We don't need two-factor authentication. My people know not to use a stupid password. They would never give their password to somebody over the phone.” That kind of thing.
They would never put it on a Post-it on their monitor.
Yeah, exactly. “Nobody who comes here and sees that is somebody who doesn't have their own account in our system anyway.” “What about the cleaning staff?” “Oh, yeah. They're here after I leave.” It's that kind of thing. To your point, you do need some systems in place. I remember a lot of the social engineering stuff that I did, especially as a kid, I couldn't believe that it worked.
I just thought, “What? Are you kidding me? This is the system?” One of the things that I did was, I used to order pizzas to school, for example. I would just call, and I eventually got in trouble for this, obviously. I should say, I confessed to doing this because it was becoming a major problem at the school. I would call and be like, “Hey, I want this pizza with this, this, and this.” They'd be like, “What's your credit card number?”
Remember, this is the '90s. I would just make up a number or generate a number that would work in the machine. Sorry, not the machine. They would write it down and the reason is there was no machine. They would write it down on the pad and then they’d try to run it.
The imprint thing.
Yeah, you'd write the card number in a form. The manager would type them all in at the end of the day, or whatever it was. They would authorize and some wouldn't. Then you would call that person and be like, “Your card didn't work. Can I get the number from you?”
I just remember later on after I stopped being a little […], I worked at a movie theater and people would buy tickets over the phone from us. The way they would do this is, of course, they would give us their credit card number. I would write it in this pad that made three copies of their name, their phone number, their address, and their card number, expiration date, and whatever else I needed.
We'd print off the tickets, and at the end of the day, the manager would type everything into some machine they had in the office, like a credit card auth machine, whatever it was, and then run the funds. It was like, if anybody working here wants to get 100 credit card numbers a week with full docs, all they have to do is work at a box office. This is a box office with few people buying things over the phone.
Imagine if you worked someplace where everybody bought something through the phone. You're talking about thousands of people. This is the most insecure thing, and where does this paper go? It's like, “There are three copies of this. Then all I need to do, if I want to buy something over the phone, is call and be Cheryl Tiegs, 412-7….” Maybe not Cheryl Tiegs—‘80s reference.
This is not hard. There's no security. There's no real-time authentication—nothing. That was so obvious that that was a problem. No one ever bothered to solve it. Part of it is maybe not everyone's a criminal piece of crap, but enough people are.
I figured out how to do that at ages 13, 14, and ordered pizza. Imagine what actual 20-plus-year-old, 30-plus-year-old criminals were able to do back then. I'm sure there were multi-million credit card scammers out there at some point. There had to be because it was too easy.
Maybe we grew up in more naive times where you just didn't consider security. Why would anyone give me a fake credit card number? That's wrong.
I think it was more likely they just didn't know how the system worked.
Yeah.
They were like, “At the end of the day, all these numbers go.” I call authorized.net or whatever it was back then. Probably not that, but you call MasterCard and you read numbers off to the person. I think that's what it was. I don't even think there was a machine. I think you called an 800 number, sat there for an hour, and read off—for three hours—read off all the numbers, then they would type them into their computer and then credit your account.
I really think it was something like that. If there was a denied transaction, it's like, “Oh, do you have contact information?” “Yes, there's a phone number on here.” “Well, on Monday, why don't you give them a call and see if you can get another card.” That person is 15 states away at that point.
To me, it just baffles me that I look back at it and, yeah, that was the way it was. How could we have ever been so naive about that?
Yeah, it's shocking. I was a punk. I was 13, 14. To me, there were no real consequences. Who cares if you get a pizza? But as an adult, I look back and I'm like, “How were people not buying laptops?” And they were because I remember being in the chat channels, and guys would be like, “Yo, I just bought a laptop off this card. It's still valid if someone else wants to give it a shot.” They would just dump it in the channel.
I remember back in the late '90s, I worked for—it’s called a mail order catalog. Nobody knows what that is. If you wanted computers, you had to call someone. You had to get them cataloged in the mail. “I want item number A5138114.” We had this credit card fraud going on where someone kept placing orders, but they were always shipping them to the same city, like this little small community.
This announcement went out in the company and it's, “Don't take any orders shipping to this community.” It's just like, “Go along with it, but send it over to the fraud department,” because they were just using stolen credit card numbers to buy computers, and it was always shipping to the neighbor's doorstep. “OK, I'll run over and grab it, shipping here, shipping there around town.”
Wow. They never caught that person?
The company that I worked for lost tens of thousands of dollars to shipping computer equipment on this one particular scam. It couldn't have been just our company that they were going after.
Of course not. The guy probably sat there all day doing that, and then would go out on his bike or a car. He just finds a house that's under construction, or something like that, or vacant, and ship there. A drop house was pretty easy to find.
I grew up near Detroit. So there were a lot of guys in our BBS group, or whatever, and then were like, “Yo, this house is abandoned now, man; you can ship there.” “Hey, this is my grandma's house. The package will be inside. I'll go grab it. I'll drive it up to you.” Whatever. “Pay me $50.” There were all kinds of stuff like that back in the day.
Nobody worked from home.
No.
Everyone's house was unattended for 12 hours a day in those days.
Yeah. I never had the guts to do any sort of thing like that because that was obviously stealing. The pizza thing, I was like, “Yeah, it's $13.” And then I would go back and feel bad about it. I did it a couple of times. Then the one time I got caught, I had to pay for it. I should say, I admitted that I wasn't paying for it. The idea that our systems are more secure now is sort of a joke because all it means is that there are more complex ways to do the exact same thing.
Humans are always going to be the weakest link. No amount of tech, no amount of security, is ever going to really solve someone pretending to be somebody else.
Right, yeah. Whenever there's a gap in a system. Another thing that I remember doing is I remember ordering books with money orders because I didn't have a card. So I'd send a money order, Western Union, or whatever it was. You could do it at the drugstore. Then the books would arrive, but I would cancel the transaction if I didn't like the book because, before, I remember getting ripped off and they'd be like, “No refunds, kid. F you.”
I would cancel the transaction and be like, “This sucks.” They'd be like, “What? No refunds.” Then they'd find out like a week later that they weren't getting their money, and they'd be like, “Oh, can we have the book back?” I'd be like, “No, you can’t.” “We're going to send the police to your house.” “Go ahead. You don't know where my house is. I had to send it somewhere else.”
I remember feeling powerful doing that. Again, remember, I'm 13, 14 years old. People are probably like, “This guy's in […].” I remember feeling powerful back then, but I also felt like I was really in the right because I was only screwing over people that were basically trying to screw me over because I was a kid.
Yup. I remember that.
It's a nice feeling.
I remember one of those. I'm going to date myself—an Amiga 2000, or whatever it was. I had upgraded the computer and I have the extra memory chip that I was going to sell. Someone bought it, COD, and like, “It's defective. It doesn't work. I'm going to send it back. Back to you COD.” You're out the money.
I was 14, 15 years old and like, “Oh, well, maybe something happened in the mail.” Whatever. The guy sent me back something totally different. Of course, I had paid COD to get it. I was trying to be, like, the nice guy. I said, “Yeah, OK, I guess it went wrong.” I get it back and it’s, like, a broken watch. I'm like, “Oh, dude, he got my chip and he got my money.” I'm like, “What? That sucks.”
Yeah. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, I'm always crusading against scammers, multi-level marketing, any sort of fraud, because getting scammed is one of the worst feelings ever. When I was a kid and getting scammed, you remember the first time somebody steals from you as a kid or scams you. You're like, “Oh my gosh. There are bad people out there that have no scruples.” Which is ironic because I was also doing kind of the same thing. But doing it to companies is far different than screwing over…
Name this faceless.
Especially when you're 14. You’re like, Who cares if the drugstore lost $13 on a pizza, or the pizza place lost $13?” Now, I'm like, “That's a small business owner. That was a terrible thing to do.” But when you're a kid and someone screws you out of $30, you're like, “That was all of my Christmas money. You POS, I am going to destroy you.”
I would get a vendetta against some of these places, and I would order $300 worth of books with a money order, then not pay them, and cancel it, get my money back, and be like, “These are my books now, […].” It was like Robin Hood without giving anything. What do you call it? It was like Robin Hood-ish, but nobody got anything as a result. The books just sat in my damn garage, but I was like, “I stung the scammer.” It felt so good.
That is hilarious. I know we are wrapping up on time here. I'm appreciative of your time. Any parting wisdom of what people should watch out for in terms of being targeted for social engineering?
This is tough. Social engineering scams are really more advanced these days. There's something that happened to my dad. The printer wasn't working, he googled HP printer support. They had a phone number. It was a fake scam site that Google just can't police it or wouldn't police it.
Called them, they had them install something. My dad's not a dumb guy, he's not senile, but he didn't know what's going on. He thought he's talking to Hewlett Packard. When people call you and ask you for anything, always call them back. Always call them back on a number that you don't get from them.
If you do get a number from them, google it and make sure it's the real number that's on the company website. AmEx is not like, “Don't call this number.” End of that call. There's a lot of it. You'll find out if they're using that number to scam people. It's hard to give advice because the people that are listening to podcasts like this, they're like, “Yeah, I'm not going to pay my fake IRS bill in iTunes gift cards or the FBI is going to deport my mom to China.” They know.
So, unfortunately, social engineering really is effective mostly on the people that aren't paying attention to it. I don't think I have great advice for people that are listening to a show like Easy Prey. The advice is for somebody who thinks they're too smart to fall for a scam. My dad was like, “I'm not going to get scammed, I'm a savvy guy.” “OK, well, here you are.”
The advice is always just standard. Make sure you're using a password generator, save your passwords in something like 1Password. Don't use this, reuse the same password. This is just boring stuff that is effective because the sexy stuff either doesn't exist or doesn't matter if your password is your cat's name and then the number one at the end. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of advice I can give.
Don't answer security questions with real answers. When they ask you what your high school mascot is, it was not the guy at the Orange County hillbillies, it's whatever.
Fakenamegenerator.com, baby. That's the best way to do it. Get your fake information, save that fake information differently for each account in 1Password, or whatever it is. Your security questions are always different, everything is always different. That's the way to do it. Turn on the old two-factor authentication. Come on.
And don't trust anybody.
Yeah, that too.
Particularly, me or Jordan.
I don't know, man. I still trust a lot of people. You don't want to live in a society where everyone is out to scam you or so you think, because one, it's not really true anyway. By not trusting anyone, you're going to be miserable. You're not going to be able to function well. You're not going to be healthy emotionally.
I routinely send money to strangers over the internet for services and I don't get screwed. I'm sure once in a blue moon, it happens. Of course, they vanish after I send them $100 or something. I'm like, “Oh, whatever. The cost of doing business.” But the last thing I'm going to do is treat everybody like they're a potential criminal because it's a miserable way to live.
I think that's a good way to finish.
It is. It's the right way.
Don't be miserable.
Don't be a miserable SOB.
Jordan, thank you so much for coming on The Easy Prey Podcast today.
Yeah, man. Thanks for having me on.
Thank you!
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