PUHI — There’s no such thing as a free lunch in this world.
That tip came from Kauai Prosecuting Attorney Justin Kollar, who spoke at Friday’s AARP fraud prevention seminar at Kauai Community College, along with AARP fraud exert Dough Shadel.
Phishing and phone scams, catfishing (posing as someone you’re not and stealing information through social media) and the dark web; all were covered in the seminar which showed about 150 people how criminals get personal information and what they do with it.
“The most prevalent are telephone scams,” Kollar said. “If you see a number and it’s not already (programmed) in your phone, don’t answer it.”
He continued: “If it’s something important, they’ll leave a message and you can call them back when you’re comfortable with it.”
Ninety-five percent of the time, he said, phone scam artists won’t leave a message.
That’s not the only scam method out there, as community member Joan Baganz shared.
“My husband, he was my boyfriend then, he lost $14,000 because he wasn’t checking in on his USAA account,” Baganz said. “We went on 11 cruises that year. He was in love and we were traveling and he wasn’t paying attention.”
The couple discovered someone else had been dipping into the account because one day, in 2009, they got a notice it was overdrawn.
“I got every penny of it back,” she said. “It took a long time and I had to be tenacious.”
It took mountains of paperwork, endless phone calls, and conversations with CEOs of multiple credit card companies and banks for Baganz to reclaim the $14,000.
The whole affair made her more wary of scams and when she got a call from her friend Janice Bond about Friday’s fraud prevention seminar, she was on board.
Bond lost $70,000 in a scam by internationally transferring money out of the United States.
“I didn’t get it back,” Bond said.
When Shadel got on the mic, he showed the audience what happens once a criminal gets personal information and reminded everyone that we’re living in a “post-prevention” society when it comes to identity theft.
“Everyone’s info is already out there. Everyone’s info has been breached,” he said. “The question is: how do we prevent the bad guys from getting it.”
To back up his point, he reminded the audience there have been 738 data breaches since January 2017 and “a lot of that information is for sale.”
The dark web is like an underground Ebay where criminals sell this information daily, he said.
Using the analogy of the ocean, Shadel pointed to the “surface web” as what most people interact with every day — Amazon, Google and Facebook are all part of the surface web.
“Then there’s the deep web which is 1,000 times bigger than the surface web and it’s mostly research and you have to know what you’re doing to access it,” Shadel said. “And then there’s the dark web, accessed by ‘onion router’ software invented by the Navy.”
Being vigilant is one of the best ways to keep your info off the dark web and out of the hands of criminals, he said.
Monitor accounts and use a different password for each one so if someone hacks one account, they don’t have access to everything.
If you get a phone call from an unknown number, don’t respond and don’t respond to suspicious emails.
Freezing your credit is the last suggestion that Shadel had for the audience, which is about to become free thanks to a new Hawaii law.
“Credit freeze is one of the best ways to protect you against identity theft,” he said. “That means it stops anyone who has your info and wants to open a new account.”
