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Child Safety Tips with Steve Lazarus

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“Your job description is in the name. You are a parent, not a friend.” - Steve Lazarus Share on X

Is it right for parents to be the ones to have to put limits on their children’s screen time or to monitor the content they consume? Knowing the impact of social media and kids can influence the decisions that are made. Today’s guest is Steve Lazarus. Steve is a retired FBI agent, crime fiction author, and Instagram influencer specializing in personal and child safety topics.

“At the end of the day, if kids want to engage in this, you’re not going to be able to stop them. The best thing you can do is to teach your kids at the outset about the things people could do online.” - Steve Lazarus Share on X

Show Notes:

“If you don’t know what your kids are looking at, if you don’t have some sort of parental control, if your kids are alone in their room behind closed doors on the internet for hours and hours, you’re doing it wrong.” - Steve Lazarus Share on X

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Transcript:

Steve, thank you so much for coming on the Easy Prey Podcast today.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

You’re welcome. Can you give myself and the audience a little bit of background about who you are and what you have been doing?

I’m a retired FBI agent. I spent 22 years in the FBI and 14 years before that in the Air Force. In the FBI, I spent about the first half of my career doing what we call general criminal sort of stuff—bank robbers, gang bangers, drug dealers, and what have you. I even spent about three years as the PIO or the media representative for the FBI in Atlanta.

Then about 2008, a good friend of mine came up to me and asked me if I wanted to try something different. This guy was the bombing program coordinator for the FBI Atlanta office. He asked if I had ever thought about going into EOD-type work and being a bomb technician.

To be honest, really, I’d never thought about it at all, but I saw some opportunities to go do some cool stuff overseas, to get into some skill sets that I’d never really gotten into before.

I went through a selection process and did all kinds of what we call stupid bomb tech tricks where they put you in a bomb suit, turn your back to them, they throw a penny over your shoulder, and you’ve got to go find a penny in a parking lot, which is a hell of a lot harder than it sounds in a bomb suit, crawling through culverts, school buses, and all that. I came out on the approved and accepted end of that process, then went off to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, and a few months later became a public safety bomb technician.

Without disclosing what you can’t disclose, did you ever put your skills to use?

Actually, most of our stuff, most of what the FBI does overseas is what I was doing—that’s post-blast investigation. You have a bomb going off in, let’s say, Baghdad or Kabul. Somebody’s got to go out there—in our case, it was a two-man team—bomb technicians who would go out, sift through the rubble, get down in the smoking bowl, pull the pieces of whatever it was out of there—the vehicle or the person or the bomb, the device itself—start piecing things back together, start gathering forensics, see if you can pull fingerprints, DNA and what have you off of it, and try to figure out exactly who it was who built this thing, so we can hand that off to the military in places like Afghanistan so that they can go take action on it, which is a nice way to go saying, “Go shoot them in the face.”

What are you doing these days?

Well, I retired back in 2018 and took a job working some contract work in Abu Dhabi for a company here in the United States that has a subcontract with the Emirati government. Basically, I’ve been training future members of the Emirati intelligence community for the last about four-and-a-half, almost five years.

Interesting. And you’ve earned yourself a little bit of notoriety online recently?

A little bit. All that came about because I had written a book. I was actually one of these pretty staunchly anti-social media guys. I was almost curmudgeonly about it, if I’m being honest. I didn't even have a Facebook account until, I want to say, 2021, maybe 2022. Didn’t even have a Facebook account. Then when I did get a Facebook account, literally it was see who I went to high school with, or yeah, my nieces and nephews, I could see what they were doing.

Then I wrote a book. When I wrote a book—I’m not a famous guy, and my book isn’t published with one of the big five—it was with a small, independent publishing house. The thing you find out really fast is great, you’re a published author. Now if you want to sell any of those books, you’ve got to get out there and you’ve got to hustle. One of the ways you do that is you do that through making an online presence.

I hired a social media coordinator and she got me started, taught me how to make reels and put them up on Instagram and TikTok, taught me how to brand myself, and how to build content that people were interested in. Then that content drives people to the fact that, “Oh, yeah, he also wrote a book. Let me check it out.” It’s actually worked quite well for me so far, knock on wood.

What is the content that you’ve been posting most of, based on your background?

Yeah, most of it. I started off and I literally just looked and looked and looked at what everybody else is posting. I kept seeing all these “five things I would never do”-type videos as an anesthesiologist, as a dental hygienist. “I would never chew ice,” and things like that.

I thought, “Well, I could probably put together five things I would never do as a retired FBI agent.” The very first one that I did was I said the one thing that I would never do is I would never allow my kids to have unlimited, unsupervised internet access, because a 12-year-old is nothing more than a target to an online creep who knows how to get at them and knows how to make them do things that they shouldn’t be doing.

You would think there are some things that are just universally yes or universally no. You would think that I would be met with open arms on the interweb. No, I had people telling me what a horrible person I was because I actually advocated things like no-notice inspections of your kids’ phones. I advocated the fact that, “Your kids have no privacy rights on a device that you are paying for, mom and dad.” I had people tell me, “Oh, my kids must hate me,” which by the way, they don’t. I’m pretty sure they like me. But it took off. That was the very first one.

Then I did another one and another one. I did one about romance scams. I wouldn’t fall for romance scams. And then the big one hit, and I don’t even know. I think I did this thing in five minutes sitting on my front porch in this place I was renting near here. I had just seen this thing about 23andMe getting hacked once again.

I said, “You know what? I’m going to do a reel about why I’m not going to swab my mouth and send off my DNA to one of these at-home DNA companies.” Well, it went viral and then it went super viral and it went over 10 million views on TikTok, and it went over 10 million views on Instagram.

The next thing you know, I’ve got people who I’ve never heard before calling me, asking to collaborate, asking for sound bites. Then a buddy calls me up and says, “Hey, mate”—because he’s in England—“you’re in the UK tabloids over here.”

Oh, no.

Oh, yeah. And The Daily Mirror, which is a fairly significant, fairly big tabloid, actually, The Daily Mirror, and, I think, The Sun or something like that both picked up and both were running clips out of my content, and were quoting me. It wasn’t I was part of a story. I was the story, and I was like, “Holy crap, man. Got a long way from, ‘OK, maybe I’ll have a Facebook account.’”

Quite a bit of distance from that.

It is.

Based on your FBI experience, what are the five things that you would tell parents not to do online or not let their kids do? One was don’t let your kids have a phone. What were the other four?

I think we talked about—

Unlimited access phone, sorry.

Yeah. They weren’t all about kids on the Internet. They were about different things, but since then I’ve come up with other ones. I think that the number one thing I would tell our parents is your job description is in the name. You’re a parent, you’re not a friend. Your kid’s got enough friends to encourage them to do stupid things. You don’t need to be another one of them.

I think that the number one thing I would tell our parents is your job description is in the name. You’re a parent, you’re not a friend. Your kid’s got enough friends to encourage them to do stupid things. You don’t need to be… Share on X

If you don’t know what your kid is doing—and no, I don’t mean your 17-year-old and your 18-year-old, I mean, your 12-year-old. There is a huge difference. There’s not this absolute black-and-white line that gets crossed between the 13th and the 14th birthday, but it’s a flying scale. Number one, I would say moms and dads, be moms and dads.

If you don’t know what your kids are looking at, if you don’t have some parental control app, if your kids are alone in their room behind closed doors with internet for hours and hours and hours all day long, you are wrong. You’re doing it wrong.

If you don’t know what your kids are looking at, if you don’t have some parental control app, if your kids are alone in their room behind closed doors with internet for hours and hours and hours all day long, you are wrong. You’re… Share on X

Another one that I did that I thought was very important, because we’re starting to see kids off themselves over this, was one about sextortion. I explained to moms and dads how sextortion works.

There’s a reason the car rental companies won’t rent you a car until you’re 25 years old. The brain is not developed until then. When a kid gets online, especially a horny little 13- or 14-year-old boy—and yes, they are worse than girls by far, by degrees of magnitude, they are worse than girls when it comes to being sextorted online—they think some little girl or someone roughly their age is interested in them.

They tell them to, “Send me a picture in your underwear. Send me a picture of you naked.” They do it. Next thing they know, they’ve got this thing back as well. Usually, if it’s a 14-year-old kid, they’re not trying to get money out of them, but you don’t send me more pictures or if you don’t engage in explicit sexual activity. Someone’s getting off on this on the other side of this conversation.

They’re pushing this kid to a point where young men started killing themselves over this because they don’t want to go to the police. They’re ashamed to go to their parents and tell them what it is they’ve done. They don’t have the kind of relationship with their parents where they can go and tell them, “Hey, mom, dad, I effed up, and I need your help.” That would be another one. Again, it still falls underneath that same heading. Know what your kids are doing.

Is there much that law enforcement can do and act upon with the sextortion?

Absolutely, if they can find out where it’s coming. First of all, they can intercede. They can shut it down. They can stop the behavior from happening.

The other thing is there are a lot of things people get told: “I got ripped off online. These guys got me with one of those fake Social Security scams.” Some of these things, if you don’t have three dozen victims or a couple of hundred victims, and if you don’t have losses equaling a certain amount, the Feds are just not going to get that involved in it. They just tell you to count your losses and look away.

One sexually inappropriate act or sexually explicit act with a child is enough to get the Feds involved, and they absolutely will get involved. If they can track the person down, if they’re in this country or even if they’re not in this country, if we can do something if they’re operating from, I don’t know, pick a country, Nigeria; how would I come up with that one?

The reason we have relationships—the FBI does with law enforcement entities in other countries—is to shut down things like this that are originating overseas. But sexual exploitation of children on the Internet takes one case. Doesn’t matter what the level of damage is.

If you send or receive a single sexually explicit photograph or image of a child, real or AI generated—that’s important for people to know—that is enough right there to land you, if you plead out, 10 years in jail. That’s generally where the penalties start for this kind of stuff is about 10 years for sexually and inappropriate behavior of the child online.

That's probably where it should be, if not more.

Absolutely.

What are some of the other things that people are doing online that they shouldn’t be doing?

My goodness. Obviously, the sexually explicit behavior is the worst. Sexploitation is the worst. I think the other thing that parents need to just keep an eye out for is just plain, old cyber bullying.

I talk about being moms and dads. You are the firewall for your kids. There is no firewall to keep them from the a-holes in school who are making their lives miserable by shaming them, by bullying them online, by organizing essentially electronic lynch mobs against them online.

Moms and dads have to be involved in that. There are things to look out for. If your kid is spending increasingly more and more time online, if all of a sudden, they just have these mood swings.

Kids, believe it or not, do want to be close to their parents. They do want to have some kind of a relationship with their parents. If they have just all of a sudden checked out of their relationship with their parents, if you can trace that checking out to a lot more time spent behind closed doors in their room where they’ve got a laptop or they’ve got a desktop, or obviously they’ve just got their phone, which is really all they need, then you’ve got a problem.

It was a lot easier when my kids were young. First of all, we had dial-up, so you couldn’t do crap. If I wanted to end your internet session, all I had to do was pick up the phone. But even when we got DSL, smartphones didn’t come out until 2007. My kids were graduating high school by then. We had a single family desktop computer. It was completely internet-accessible, you could use it for whatever you wanted, but it sat in the kitchen. I could walk by anytime that I wanted to.

Now, you can tell parents not to let your kids have a computer in their room, but if they’ve got a phone, they’ve got a computer in their room.

And it’s almost, if they’ve got a smartwatch, they’ve got a computer in their room.

Yeah. Watches are a little bit, I mean, obviously messaging apps and what have you, you can see are a little bit easier to use on the watches. But there are some things you really do need a keyboard, at least a phone for a mobile app, so watches are somewhat limiting. But the main thing right now is to have that relationship with your kids where they can talk to you.

But the main thing right now is to have that relationship with your kids where they can talk to you. -Steve Lazarus Share on X

I hate to say it, but if you think that they’re screwing around and doing things they ought not be doing, you’re paying for that phone. You own that phone, hand it here, we’ll take a look at it.

And I’m sure that doesn’t rub a lot of people the right way.

No.

Both kids and adults, I’m sure.

I’ve been accused of being a Nazi online. I said, “Ah, yes. The first thing they did at Auschwitz was take away all the iPhones. Of course, yeah.” Anytime you compare someone to a Nazi, I think you pretty much forfeited the right to be taken seriously. But I get that a lot, like, “Your kids must hate you.” Again, everyone’s got a choice to make. My choice would be to be a parent.

Do you see any light at the end of the tunnel, or do you find that more parents are starting to see the light, so to speak, and like, “OK, maybe I do need to limit my kids’ internet access,” or are starting younger saying, “I’m not going to give my toddler an iPad”?

These things run in cycles, don’t they? The pendulum swings all the way to one side where it’s the zombie apocalypse in terms of internet shenanigans. It’ll run to the other side where we’re talking about banning TikTok here in the United States and it starts herein. Obviously, those pendulums eventually seek equilibrium and will probably settle somewhere in the middle.

I think kids will get smarter. I think adults will get smarter. COVID certainly did not help. That did not come along at a helpful time. It was like a perfect storm of psychological stressors to be laying on people. Not only are you being sextorted, cyber bullied, or what have you, but you have to deal with that crap from inside your room because you can’t go outside your house.

I think parents will get a little bit smarter. At the end of the day, if kids want to engage in this, you’re not going to be able to stop them. The best thing you can do is to teach your kids at the outset, like, “Look, there are some really horrible human beings in this world, and here are some of the things that they will try to do to you.”

The best thing you can do is to teach your kids at the outset, like, “Look, there are some really horrible human beings in this world, and here are some of the things that they will try to do to you.” -Steve Lazarus Share on X

A lot of parents are uncomfortable having that conversation with their kids. “They’ll try to get you to send them naked pictures. They’ll try to get you to try drugs. They’ll try to get you to film yourself doing things with other people.” Just look. I hate it. It’s terrible to have to teach children to be so pessimistic, but I think in today’s world, you have to.

I know when you and I were kids, it was very much the stranger danger—what was the phrase?—then we realized, “Well gee, most kids are not being abused by strangers. For the most part, it’s family members, extended family members, people in their community.”

Now it’s going back a little bit to that stranger danger, but I think with the little bit of the, not necessarily the stranger but behavior that is inconsistent with norms, just to watch out for. But then you’ve got to explain what is normal behavior.

Absolutely. Again, there’s no perfect line that we can draw that says, “This is normal. Everything to this side is abnormal. Every side to that, everything to that side is normal.” It’s this sliding scale.

I think it was Potter Stewart who was the Supreme Court Justice who, during the famous obscenity case said, “I don’t know what obscenity is. I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” That's the standard. By the way, if there’s any Supreme Court junkies out there who’s, “No, it wasn’t Potter Stewart, it was Thurgood Marshall,” whatever it was, it was someone on the Supreme Court. But that’s the standard we’re getting back to these days.

We used to call it NKR. We have two things in law enforcement: DLR, which means don’t look right, or we would say somebody’s NKR, that means not quite right. You’ve got to think about that one for a second, but it’ll come to you. You have to have some judgment. We’re asking 14- and 15-year-old kids to have judgment.

Do you think there are resources where parents can help their kids? Is it things like parents are just having to figure out on their own, or what?

Well, I think the same internet that brings us all this misery and all this grief also offers a lot of people out there who are really doing God’s work to educate parents. You can go into TikTok and Instagram. You can put in safe parenting tips, safe internet tips.

The information highway runs both ways, so again, the same conduit that gives us child sexual predators also gives us the people who can help you combat that sort of stuff.

I guess there’s no ultimately easy way to identify who, from a consumer point, I’m going to say—if someone connects with your kid online, there really is not a whole lot of proof one way or the other who they are.

There never is. But again, God gave us spidey sense for a reason. The first question is, do you know this person? That’s the very first question. Forget kids for a second. Think of you and me. I assume you probably have a Facebook page, right?

Yup.

OK, so you get a friend request.

Nope.

The very first thing you do, the very first decision point that runs through your head is, “Do I know this person?” The very first thing. If it’s someone who you don’t know, “Well, OK, let me look.” Because it’ll say, “Well, this is who the friends who you have in common.” “No, I don’t recognize any of them either.” No, that’s a quick swipe to the left and or whatever it is. That’s a quick delete.

Some people are just out there trying to get as many Facebook followers as they possibly can, and then some people have got bot accounts set up and they’re just looking for people like you and me, so they can talk us into blowing our money on crypto scams, or they’re looking for little kids so they can talk them into sending explicit pictures of themselves.

The very first step is, “Do I know this person? Is there a reason for me to be having any online relationship with this person?” I’ll talk to the adults now, but worse than Facebook is LinkedIn.

I was about to go there.

Oh my God, the number of people who want to hook up with me on LinkedIn and who just love my profile and can’t answer two questions about it. Again, I don’t know if, for instance, it’s not even just social media platforms. I’m sure you get these texts: “Hi, how are you doing? Are we still going shopping today?”

Yup.

What they’re looking for from you is, “Who is this?” Oh dear. It’s all bots, it’s all AI, it’s all completely computer-driven, and they're trying to start a conversation because if you throw a million of these out there and 1/100th to 1% or 10 people say, “Oh, I could use a little somebody in my life. What’s that you’re selling? Crypto? Yeah. Tell me more.” Well, it didn’t cost you anything to put a million of these out there. Now, you’ve got somebody on the line who you can scam. It’s all over WhatsApp. It’s all over instant messaging. It’s all over just plain, old SMS texts.

Fortunately, I don’t get a whole lot via WhatsApp for whatever reason, but definitely see the ebbs and flows of the, “Hey, did I leave my golf clubs in your car?” Or, “Hey, I’m at the tennis court. When are you going to be here?”

It was interesting because the first one I got was like, “Huh, that’s odd. This is an odd misdirected message.” Then over the course of the next week, I got a dozen of them. I was like, “Oh, so this is a scam. I don’t know what the scam is, but this is absolutely a scam because you don’t go from one random message to 10 in such a short period of time.” The same thing with LinkedIn.

Yeah. I just swipe left and hit delete in junk. I saw something the other day. I’m a big Seinfeld fan and there’s a genius Seinfeld quotes group on Facebook that I’ll scroll through every now and then just for a little laugh of the day or something, and people will […] because it’s one of the most eminently quotable shows on TV.

Well, this guy would get these things and he would respond to them as a character. He’d go into full character, like George Costanza or somebody from Seinfeld, back and forth. It was so obvious you were talking with a bot because he would say things that were particular to that show that if you were saying it to any human being, they would say, “What the hell are you talking about?” But they would just say, “Oh, that’s so very interesting. I would love to talk to you more about it.”

Again, I think at the top of the hour, we said common sense is not common. You have to have some common sense to deal with the electronic world out there these days.

It’s unfortunate in some sense, you have to take everything with a grain of salt. Before we started recording—this will be a little late from our discussion when it goes live—we were talking about that I had seen something on TikTok about someone going around Arizona and throwing improvised explosive devices in people’s front doors in the middle of the night. Then I was like, “Well I really should look to see if that’s a real news story or not.”

Absolutely.

Just because we saw it on TikTok, even if it looks like a news story from someone who looks like they’re reputable, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a real story. “OK, there’s Channel 5 news stories about this. OK, I guess it really is happening.”

So Chip and Joanna Gaines are not getting divorced, is that what you’re telling me? They seem like such a nice couple. I don’t know.

No, they got back together, they got divorced, they got back together.

Yeah.

But all these things are click bait, trying to get our attention, to get us to go places, believe things, and sell us something. We have to have a certain amount of skepticism with anything that we see.

Yup.

I kind of laugh at there’s a bit of doom and gloom when we talk about AI, of it’s going to destroy us, it’s going to save everything. But in the meantime, we’ve got to figure out what’s AI and what’s not AI.

Another one, someone posted a picture of two Tesla cyber trucks mangled and saying, “Oh gosh, look. They’re running over and killing people.” Then the Internet sleuths came out and were like, “Well, no. It’s obviously AI because of this, this, this, this, this, and this. You’re just a very big grain of salt these days.

Absolutely.

Where can people find you on social media, and how can they find you if they want to be view 1,000,001?

It’s @steve_lazarus_books. That’s my handle on Instagram. That’s my author page on Facebook. That’s my handle on TikTok. Also stevelazarusbooks.com. You’ll see me.

What was the most recent book that you’ve written?

Actually I’m a one-time novelist right now, working on my sequel right now. I wrote a book called Call Me Sonny, which is inspired by a true event, something that actually happened in my FBI career. It’s about an FBI agent from Atlanta who gets divorced, moves to the Florida Keys, starts working as a private investigator, and then finds out that there’s a hitman out after him who was hired by a murder-for-hire ring operating on the dark web, and they’re looking to settle a score from 20 years ago.

Ah, sounds like a fun story. We’ll make sure to link to that as well on Amazon because that’s where everybody buys everything these days.

Stephen King sells 70% of his books on Amazon. If it’s good enough for Stephen King, it’s good enough for Stephen Lazarus.

It works for me, too. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast again today.

Thanks. It was fun.

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