Imagine getting a flurry of emails and calls from angry people claiming you've stolen their money -- by promising them a job that doesn't exist. And you have no idea who they are, or why they are calling.
Work-from-home scams aren't new, but I've seen enough data points lately that I believe an alert is in order: there is a fresh epidemic of job scams. They are both more prevalent and more sophisticated, so job seekers need to be more careful than ever. Worse still, there is a fresh set of victims and targets who need to worry -- small businesses that are being impersonated.
First, some stark numbers: The Better Business Bureau reported last year that job scams had made post-Covid a resurgence, and The Identity Theft Resource Center said recently that reports of job scams were up 118% in 2023 as compared to 2022. In fact, the agency told me that just from December of last year to January of this year, reports were up 500%.
So if you are looking for work, keep your guard up. Job seekers are in a very vulnerable position. The standard advice to avoid scams sounds straight out of kindergarten -- don't talk to strangers, don't volunteer personal information, and never share any financial details with someone you don't know. But job seekers often *have* to do all those things. How else can you participate in an interview? What's worse, resumes are often public, giving criminals exactly the kinds of deep personal details that make fodder for scam cover stories -- "I see you've worked in publishing for years! You'd be perfect for this job receiving royalty payments and processing them for our overseas authors."
What's more job seekers are often in the emotional position experts often tell consumers to avoid -- they're highly agitated, and in a hurry, because they really need a paycheck. That makes them even more vulnerable.
Many job scams ultimately boil down to the same kind of crime: Persuading victims to send money using an irrevocable method, such as a wire transfer or Zelle payment. For a recent episode of The Perfect Scam, I spoke to a victim who was in the middle of a big corporate layoff, and was happy to land a new position. The firm sent her a check -- via PDF -- to deposit so she could buy a new computer and other equipment for the position. While her bank initially cleared the check, and put the money in her account, it later reversed the payment because the check was a fraud. Unforunately, in the interim, she had sent several payments for the new equipment as instructed. Before the mess was untangled, she had wired six payments of more than $20,000 to the criminals. In the end, the victim found herself unemployed and without a penny left in her checking account.
Job scams are roping in other kinds of victims, too. Ryan Staller owns a digital marketing agency in Fort Myers, Florida, called NetOne360. Recently he began receiving dozens of email inquiries about a job opening at his shop. But he had no open positions. Instead, criminals had made a copycat version of his firm and began reaching out to hundreds of job seekers. At one point, he was getting so many inquiries that he had to put a "We have no job openings" notice atop his website. But that's not all. At least two victims sent the criminals thousands of dollars, and when they realized what had happened, they blamed Staller.
"I had a woman out of Atlanta calling me, yelling at me on the phone telling me that, 'You stole my money, I want my money back.' And I was like, 'I have no idea really what you're talking about,' " he told me.
Staller didn't have any money stolen from him, but he was very worried about his company's reputation.
"My biggest thought was, is my brand here in jeopardy? And what do I need to do? How do I need to fix this going forward? Is this something I need to rebrand?" he told me.
In the end, the crush of emails faded away, and for now, things seem back to normal. Of course, he can never be certain his firm won't be impersonated again.
The only defense against this crime is awareness. This kind of impersonation scam reminds me of the episode we published about National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen not long ago -- criminals often impersonate him and create look-alike accounts to steal from victims. Nicklen isn't at risk of financial theft, but he is a victim. He and his staff are now constantly on the lookout for emails and other messages from victims so they can be warned about impersonation crimes. You should be, too. You might not think a criminal could use your company, or your social media profile, to steal from other people. But the creativity of these organized criminals cannot be underestimated.
And if you are a job seeker, never send your own money at the instructions of a potential employer. Even after you think you've been hired. For plenty more tips and other information about job scams, please consider listening to this episode of The Perfect Scam by visiting our website, or clicking the play button below.
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Angry about inflation? It's time you got to know rockets and feathers
As economists and politicians keep wringing their hands about inflation, I sure wish they would read up on asymmetric price adjustment -- a phenomenon dubbed "rockets and feathers" in this 2009 paper. Prices rise faster than they fall. Inflation always "sticks" longer than economists expect because we don't have perfect markets with perfect information. Those who set prices -- increasingly, large corporations armed with ingenious, diabolical software -- are better at "bargaining" than those who pay them, particularly during shocks that lead to inflation.
The classic example: When there's a surprise disruption to the oil supply, gas prices rise like a rocket, overnight. When that disruption is solved, prices retreat slowly, drifting lazily back down like a feather. This lets gas stations squeeze a few extra day's profits out of higher prices as consumers wonder what's going wrong.
The phenomenon is well-studied in the gasoline market. Once upon a time, stuffy economists didn't believe when Main Street victims complained about it, but they now concede "rockets and fathers" is real. It's time we looked beyond gas pumps to see rockets and feathers all over the economy. It's causing a lot of suffering for paycheck-to-paycheck consumers, and among small businesses, and we should be straight with them. Large corporations are squeezing the last bit of frothy profits out of the pandemic shock, enjoying their large advantage in market information and bargaining power for a bit longer. This is why crummy train station sandwiches now cost $10,99, even though the supply chain issues of 2020-2022 are in the rearview mirror.
Look, it's scary to raise prices. Like a house party folks aren't really sure about attending, nobody wants to commit first to an increase. Price hikes risk pushing consumers away; there *always* is a price at which buyers will cry uncle and walk away. Well, it's not a single price. It's more like a curve. If you raise prices 10% but lose only 5% of your customers, you win! Still, predicting this curve is an inexact science, and you can see why many companies don't push things too far in normal times, probably leaving a little money on the table.  (I love Tim Harford's explanation of pricing challenges in his book The Undercover Economist. Starbucks solved this problem by coming up with fancy-sounding drink sizes like Tall, Grande and Venti to satisfy multiple price points, he writes.)
The pandemic, however, provided an amazing real-world experiment in price hikes. Just how much *can* a grocery store push it and get away with it? It turns out, a lot, particularly if competition is limited.
So I think we are living in a golden age of price increases.
When I was working on my book The Barstool MBA, I interviewed a veteran NYC Irish pub owner who said to me there was no way he could get a double-digit price for a pint of Guinness -- $9,50 was it, he said. He believed this so strongly that he changed formats to open a cocktail bar where he was confident he could get $15-$20 for a martini and clear more cash. That conversation was pre-pandemic, of course. Those $10 Guinness are everywhere now. Even $11 and $12. Once you break into double-digits, why stop there?
If you fly, you've probably seen this phenomenon play out in real time. When one airline takes the bold step to increase bag fees from $35 to $50...competitors can't type on their keyboards fast enough to match the increase. And once an increase takes hold, well, it's open season on consumers.
Now wait, you might think -- competition is the antidote to the feathers part of rockets and feathers! Doesn't one gas station eventually lower its prices, proudly flip the numbers on its curbside signs, and watch drivers stream in? Yes, that's true, though studies show there's a kind of unspoken collusion among gas stations to hold off on such undercutting for a while. Nevertheless, it does eventually happen. That's the beauty of competition.
And that's the second half of our rockets and feathers problem.
Because there is a modicum of competition in airlines, airfares don't get out of hand unless you flying an underserved route. Airline consumers are very price sensitive, and have some search technology on their side, so that industry has been forced to invent other methods to turn massive profits -- Gotcha fees like exorbitant ticket change costs.  Still, there is a free market of sorts in the airline industry. But in so many other consumer markets, a monopoly or oligopoly is at play. When you buy pay TV, or cell phone service, or broadband, how many providers are available to you?
It's this dastardly combination of information advantage, monopolistic behaviors, and pandemic-led "rocket" price hikes that is causing consumers and small businesses so much pain today. I'm not saying this is the cause of all inflation. I am saying that we are living in the feather portion of the rockets and feathers pricing cycle, and it's time we stopped acting so surprised when yet another government report shows prices haven't yet returned to pre-pandemic "normal." Unfortunately, we are all lab rats in the great price hike experiment and it's not over yet.
Maybe you heard recently about a personal finance reporter, Â Charlotte Cowles, who was the victim of a scam and wrote about it for her employer, The Cut. The headline for the story was dramatic: "The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger."
In this week's episode of The Perfect Scam, I talk with a college professor who put three gold bars into a shoe box and handed it to a stranger in the back seat of a car. She was a victim of the same scam, essentially -- the price she paid was much higher, however. Not only did Linda Khandro suffer the theft of $400,00 -- all her life savings -- she had to retire from her job in order to access the retirement money that was stolen. She was left penniless, unemployed, and very traumatized. I don't in any way mean to minimize Cowles' tragedy, but at least she's young enough to recover. Linda Khandro is in her 70s. Her retirement account is now, essentially, empty. She frequents food banks now.
Linda is a special person. She is a musician, and has a vocation playing the harp for people in hospice who are on the verge of dying. It's an incredibly generous-hearted thing to do -- she helps usher strangers through that end-of-life doorway. It was clear to me when we spoke that Linda's big heart had a lot to do with why she was targeted by criminals for this four-month nightmare that landed her in financial dire straits.
Linda's story is common. A recent study suggests that honest, kind people are more likely to expect others to be equally honest -- and that makes them a popular target for criminals. Meanwhile, a Gallup poll suggests that nearly one in 10 Americans were victims of a scam within the past year. I know it's easy to hear these stories and think "It could never happen to me." That's incorrect. It happened to a personal finance journalist. It happened to a professor. It could indeed happen to you or someone you love; odds are that's already happened.
I hope you'll listen to this week's episode of The Perfect Scam -- it includes some lovely harp music, and you'll get to hear from a very lovely human being. If you aren't into podcasts, the transcript below gives you a sense of who Linda is, and why this crime is so devastating.
[00:02:03] Linda Khandro: I stumbled into harps quite by accident; it was not deliberate. But uh that about the late 1970s and it took about another 15 or so years before I played more seriously. And in playing more seriously, I also put myself through a program that helps musicians learn some basic skills for playing for people who are hospice patients, or not even hospice patients, but playing in hospitals. I've played for dialysis patients and chemo patients as well as the hospice, you know, end of life situation. I found out that the harp was really an ideal instrument for that setting, especially for somebody who may be close to dying. And it's just the way the instrument resonates in space in the room. And the sound, especially of the bass strings, has got a long duration, a long time for it to die away so to speak. And that makes it very amenable to people who are in the process of leaving life. They can follow that sound if you like.
[00:03:17] Bob: Yeah, the harp is such a special sound.
[00:03:19] Linda Khandro: It it really is, that's the thing. It is actually, I'm going to jump out here and uh, put myself on the line. Um, there's really no other instrument like it.
[00:03:29] Bob: It has a sort of ancient feel to it which I, I suspect also contributes to what you're saying, but I just want to dwell on it for a minute before, because it's quite profound that you would spend all this time to be with people who most of the time were strangers, right?
[00:03:43] Linda Khandro: Yeah.
[00:03:44] Bob: ... to help them pass with music. I mean what is that, how do you describe that experience to people?
[00:03:49] Linda Khandro: Oh, Bob, that's some, that's a long story in itself, but I'll try to make it short. It changes me. It started to change me almost the first day I walked into somebody's room for the first time every playing for somebody who was actively dying. And I had this rather bizarre experience. And you've got to, I mean I know you understand, I'm a scientist, right. But I kind of pay attention to what I feel, but my feeling on sitting behind the harp and you, you're playing a harp and you're, it's in contact with your body, so a little bit like a cello or a double bass. You know your, your core, your, your skeletal system is in contact with this vibrating wood and strings. And I had this strange sense that the woman who was dying, and I didn't know she was dying right at that moment but I found out later, she had been talking to her granddaughter until I came in and started to play -- she died five minutes later and I didn't know about it for the next 20 minutes. I was just playing. And when I was told that she was gone, and the granddaughter was there, you know, being comforted by a nurse who had come in, and the granddaughter came up and gave me this massive hug and said, "Granny died 5 minutes after you started playing." Well I almost started crying at that point, my feeling was the harp was a bridge that had provided a pathway for this woman to leave her life.
[00:05:26] Bob: Those kinds of profound experiences kept happening during the decade or so that Linda played at hospice facilities.
[00:05:35] Linda Khandro: And after that, I started having unusual experiences where I'd go to a hospice location and the caregiver would say to me, "Oh, I'm so sorry you've gone all the way here because uh, Mabel, my mother's name, just died um, 10 minutes ago and you don't need to be here." I said, "Oh I do. I do need to be here. Not for me, but for Mabel and the others around." And so I played for my half an hour and then I went home. And that happened again. So I can't look at those experiences and just dismiss them. But as a scientist, you know I'm, I'm on, I'm on a fence a little bit. But I don't need to be on that fence, I just need and want to experience what it's like to help somebody at that point in their life. If I'm in a hospital or a more public environment, the sound of the harp would go 20, 30 feet down the hallway. And then caregivers, nurses, uh orderlies and so on would find themselves leaning in the doorway in somebody's room. And I'd turn around and there were two or three people listening. And they all had the same thing to say which is, this is so relaxing. Now they might say this is so healing, but you see, I can't go there. But this is so relaxing and so tender, and we're so grateful to have this.
[Moving ahead to Linda's reaction after she realizes she's basically penniless]
[00:25:32] Linda Khandro: And, and then after about a week it slipped into grief, and then I couldn't stop crying. And I went up to the bank where these people were so concerned for me, and I walked straight in, and I said, "You were right. You were right, and I was lying to you the whole time." And to the other bank, "You were right. I was lying to you the whole..." and to the other bank.
[00:25:50] Bob: Did you actually talk to some of the, like the person who was trying to talk you out of it?
[00:25:54] Linda Khandro: Yes.
[00:25:55] Bob: What was that like?
[00:25:56] Linda Khandro: Oh, it was very hard. They were handing me boxes of Kleenex, you know, because I, I had to, I had to own up, well the, the owning up to the lying was not a problem, that was okay, I've got to do that. But watching them go through a version of my anguish was really hard, because they were doing everything they could to get information from me, and they couldn't get it.
[00:26:26] Bob: You have just had your, your life turned upside-down and $400,000 stolen from you, but you are thinking about how hard it is for the bank manager to hear this story.
[00:26:37] Linda Khandro: Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:39] Bob: Linda then goes around apologizing to everyone she lied to during the past 4½ months. And she develops a credo that still guides her now.
[00:26:51] Linda Khandro: I had to own everything. Yes, I did this, I didn't know what I was doing. I don't know these things; I don't live in this world or in that kind of a world. And I found myself having to sort of rely on a catch phrase, which I don't like catch phrases as a rule, but it works for me, and that is, you don't know what you don't know. And I really and truly did not know that this even existed in the world. Really and truly. That's the bald truth of that.
[00:27:24] Bob: You don't know what you don't know. She carries that message around and it comforts her, but the hardest part at this stage is telling her children.
[00:27:33] Linda Khandro: They were pretty frightened. I had written an email to all my family, most of whom knew that something terrible was happening but I couldn't tell them. So I had written to my brother, my sister, my, my daughters, friends, everybody that I could cram into one email. They did get the printed version right away, like that first night. But then when I talked to my oldest and my youngest at the same time, you know they, they were like me. They couldn't stop crying either. But it was very, very difficult. I know some of their finances are tied up with mine, and that means that I have hurt them by having to pull back on some commitments I had made. All three of them are using language now like, and again this is, this is hard, right, hard to say. "We will never let you be destitute, Mom." I mean how can you hear that from your children? But that's what they said and that's what they mean, so since October we've had some really good conversations, and we have a couple of platforms where we can talk in, at, in, groups to each other even when we're thousands of miles away. So they, you know, they are 100% supportive as are my friends, and I guess, I guess the support that I need so much is something that I never would have been able to ask for if the situation wasn't as dire as it is.
[00:28:54] Bob: So how is Linda now? Well she is facing a long road to recovery. The criminals did steal pretty much everything she has financially and in other ways too.
[00:29:10] Linda Khandro: I have no savings anymore, essentially. And no work. I had to start looking for work, and I tried to get unemployment insurance and worked on that for about four months, and I finally gave up on them just a few weeks ago, but I found a food bank, uh-huh, so I'm getting groceries for free every, every two weeks and other support from local entities here who support people who have run into hardships like this. And there's no such thing as pride in my life. The satisfaction that I used to have in the work that I did, or the music, or the artwork is fragmental. It comes and goes. This whole experience and these, this woman that I was talking to basically gutted everything. She took everything. Not just the money but yeah, my self-confidence, and sense of competence and sense of worth, and sense of honesty. She stripped it all away. And that's what frightens me the most in terms of other people who might not withstand that.
[00:30:11] Bob: Linda has managed to get back a couple of small teaching assignments so she has part-time work, and she's finding help in unexpected places.
[00:30:23] Linda Khandro: And I really do have an extraordinary, wonderful support system here. It's, it's a little fragmented, but I'll just give you one short example, is the second of two benefit concerts being held by musicians for me is taking place this Sunday, day after tomorrow. And I'll bring my harp, I'll do some playing, other people will bring whatever they play and sing, and these are people that I've known for a long time or they may be totally brand new people, and in the break of the two-hour event, I get up there in the middle of the room and I tell my damn story, and it won't take an hour, I won't have an hour. I have figured out how to do it in 10 minutes. But then there's a bit of Q&A so there's another 5 or 10, or see me after, or here's my email. Call me.
[00:31:13] Bob: Every person who hears you describe that you're doing this, is going to think, "My God, she's brave."
[00:31:18] Linda Khandro: No, I, I know I hear that, Bob, and thank you, and that's very, that's very generous. I have had enough pain and enough sense of abandonment and isolation in my life that this does not feel like bravery to me. This just feels like I have to still live in this world. I'm 76, right? I'm planning to go for another 30 years, right, wish me luck, right?
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Not an April Fool's joke: Montana might as well be Manhattan at this point
Housing costs are rising fastest in -- Montana, Utah, and South Carolina? That must be some kind of joke, right? Sorry, there is no punchline. Only American families, getting punched in the gut.
The economy is doing so well, why are Americans so pessimistic? I keep reading variations of this story over and over -- I'm looking at you Paul Krugman -- and it makes me feel like every day must be April Fool's Day. Only someone who is two-thirds of the way through paying for their mortgage can conclude so cavalierly that the U.S. economy is peachy, now that the price of eggs has dropped. Because most people looking for a home nowadays can't get one, and if I read Maslow correctly, the price of eggs really doesn't matter much when you can't get a home.
I've been writing about housing cost insanity for more than a decade now, much of it as part of my Restless Project series, so this isn't a political rant. A pox on both your houses, I'd say, for doing essentially nothing to address this very fundamental problem. But I saw data today from Bankrate which shows things are even worse than I imagined, and I have been imagining the worst.
The headline you might have seen from this report is that would-be homebuyers now need a six-figure salary to afford a median-priced home in 22 states and DC, thanks to a combination of rising prices and high interest rates. That's bad of course, but not so new. In 2013, I wrote a piece with the headline "For 40 million Americans, $100k income needed to buy an average home."
Here's what new: There is no longer an escape hatch in the housing crisis. Back in 2013, I wrote numerous stories about pockets of affordability around the country -- in places like Minnesota, or Montana, or Tennessee, or Pennslyvania. At least people who were willing to take risks, leave family, and strike out to the frontier had a chance. Well, forget that. By far, the most depressing and telling information in Bankrate's story is this: "The five states where the annual income needed to afford a typical home has increased the most since the beginning of 2020 include Montana (+77.7%), Utah (+70.3%), Tennessee (+70.1%), South Carolina (+67.3%), and Arizona (+65.3%)."
I know numbers can fly by so quickly they are hard to digest. So I'll try it another way. Want to buy a median-priced home in Montana now? You need to earn $131,000 as a family - up 77 percent since the pandemic, from $77,000. That's because the median home price was $507,100 in January 2024, compared to $299,300 in January 2020. That's crushing. Montana might as well be Manhattan.
One can quibble with the calculations, which are based on a maximum of 28% monthly income paid towards housing costs and a traditional 20% downpayment. As many young homebuyers know, those old guideposts are quite passe. Plenty of buyers are putting 40 or even 50 percent of their paychecks towards their mortgage and property taxes. This kind of risk-taking leads to its own problems, naturally, including a population living constantly in "precarity."
And that's why economic pessimism is hardly an April Fool's joke. But the lack of understanding and empathy about this crisis certainly is. Even those who are "benefitting" from rising home equity don't necessarily feeling good about it. Older families are trapped in high-priced homes they can't really sell because their options for moving are limited. Sure, if you move from San Francisco to North Carolina, you might do well. But otherwise, limited supply means the market is stuck in a game of freeze tag.
The only real solution? A gigantic, nationwide effort to bolster housing supply. I've written this before: to simply keep pace with population growth and historic building trends, millions of new homes would have to fall out the sky tomorrow. Perhaps 7 million. Instead, the Biden administration has proposed middling solutions that fall far, far short. And if you're waiting for a future Trump administration to propose a dramatic fix, well, I am waiting too.
This is a generation-long problem in the making, and it will take a grand solution which will take a generation to implement. We'd better start soon then. Because Americans are going to feel pessimistic about the economy until they have some hope they might be able to have a home of their own some day. To think otherwise would be foolish.
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Veterans targeted by scams need our help; be their 'battle buddy'
Imagine spending years driving a Humvee around a war zone at 5 mph, using only your eyes in a valiant attempt to spot homemade roadside bombs...risking your life minute by agonizing minute to save the lives of your fellow soldiers...only to come home and find you are targeted by criminals because of the PTSD you are suffering from.
There are roughly 16 million veterans in the US today and they all deserve our unending gratitude. And protection. We're failing at this. Our veterans are targeted by criminals in terrible and revolting ways, for reasons that are now more clear to me than ever. Precisely those traits that make the women and men of our military good at protecting our way of life make them vulnerable to criminals.
For this week's Perfect Scam episode, I spoke with Michael Haring, who served in the Iraq War and now lives about 90 minutes north of Denver, Colorado. He was forced to declare bankruptcy after a fast-talking financial scam firm manipulated him into trading in monthly disability checks for a (paltry) up-front lump sum payment. The firm that did this to Haring committed this crime for nearly nine years to what feels like a battalion of former soldiers before it was shut down by the Justice Department. Along the way, debt courts actually enabled the practice by granting default judgments to the firm, allowing them to collect disability payment-backed loans -- and ridiculous penalties -- through wage garnishments. All this happened even though the lump-sum contracts were unenforceable.
I hope you’ll listen to this week's double episode; you'll gain some understanding of the work done by US soldiers in the Middle East. We should all listen to veterans and give them a chance to share what they went through, so we can --- in some small way -- share the burden they have been asked to carry. I hope it will inspire you with an even stronger urge to protect these brave 16 million Americans.
For this episode, I also interviewed Carroll Harris, who tries to spot scams targeting veterans the the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. A 30-year Marine, he offers amazing insights into what veterans need, and how we can all help them. It begins and ends with -- they need "battle buddies." We all do. In the partial transcript below, Harris explains the battle buddy concept more, and how anyone can become a battle buddy.
It's not easy. Often, when we offer help to someone who is suffering, the offer and the help is impulsively pushed away. Well, keep trying, Harris urges all of us.
"You're going to get rejection in some cases from the person that you're reaching out to, and that rejection is ...you know it's a breakfast of champions. You've just got to soak up that rejection and continue to come back with love in your heart and help that person through it," he told me. I have to say, that had me willing to charge into battle for him.
[00:21:35] Bob: So we've talked about why veterans are a target. Can you explain to people who might not realize this, why veterans benefits are such an attractive target to criminals?
[00:21:43] Carroll Harris: Sure, so the veterans benefits that are provided by the Veterans Benefits Administration, there's a lot of nuance there, and there's cash flows associated with it. If they have physical injuries or if they are going through post-traumatic stress, uh, those cash flows and the counseling and the, the things that the veterans rate can be attractive to a criminal because they know that there's an annuity that exists. So that's why they're being targeted, because there are cash flows there that the scammers can get to and because the veterans have that sense of community and oftentimes when veterans leave the service, they, they miss that pride and belonging that, that strong sense of camaraderie that can only be developed through those difficult arduous circumstances. And that creates a vulnerability, if the veteran doesn't find a, a healthy way to do a transition and to fill that void or sometimes I refer to it as a hole in your heart. Everybody's got a hole in their, a hole in their heart, and they're filling it with different things. It can be something positive or something negative, and sometimes the veterans are struggling, and they may not have come from an advantageous background. Many of our veterans, the people that are serving, come from difficult backgrounds in their youth. So they have that as well as the, the challenges of having survived uh years of combat for some of them. And that creates a susceptibility. And that's why they need good organizations like AARP, or the American Legion where I, where I was enjoying watching the Super Bowl last night. They need these, these powerfully good social organizations, philanthropical organizations, that social fabric to fill that hole in their heart with a protective envelope. They need their battle buddies.
[00:23:34] Bob: They need their battle buddies. We all need battle buddies of course, but it's a concept that really helps veterans with that hole in their hearts, Carroll told us.
[00:23:46] Carroll Harris: And for those who haven't found that, they get, they get approached by the scammers and pretty much everybody's being targeted. The scammer catches them at the right time and the right place, they get them in, in a weak moment, they don't have a battle buddy to check, they'll make a bad financial decision. That's why we always talk about having a good battle buddy before you make any significant financial decisions. There's, I, I like to use the letters PBC. Pause, Breathe, Connect. When these scammers approach, they're going to try to create some time pressure. They do it with lots of scams. They're going to try to crunch the veteran into quickly making significant financial decisions. And that's why I encourage everyone, veterans and beyond, they need to pause, they need to take a breath, and they need to connect with a battle buddy. A trusted resource. Someone outside of the scope of what the scammer's trying to get them to do. Pause, breathe, connect before you make any significant financial decision, and that is how you can up-armor yourself.
[00:24:45] Bob: PBC. Pause, Breath, and Connect. I like that a lot.
[00:24:50] Carroll Harris: There you go. Pretty easy to remember that too, right?
[00:24:53] Bob: Yeah, sure, sure.
[00:24:55] Bob: And so Carroll really believes everyone needs 3 to 5 battle buddies in their life. They can be hard to find, but resources are available.
[00:25:07] Carroll Harris: There are many directions you could run for help. The, the big thing is to reach out and make contact with someone. You can choose who the battle buddy is, but you've got to reach out and not fall for that time pressure crunch if you, if you don't just have somebody naturally in your circle that is, you know that, that is a, a good buddy that you trust. I like to reference the 3 to 5. I believe everybody should have three to five people in their life that are their, their battle buddies, that are trusted resources that they can wash over uh challenging circumstances, they can share openly and freely with that person in a place of safety to explore the art of the possible by hey, what's the best choice when I go through this difficult crunch? So everybody should have a 3 to 5, and if they don't, they should, they should find an organization to get it. I, I'm a firm believer in the American Legion as a place where you can get that, because it's oriented on social good and in serving veterans, and you don't have to be a veteran to go over and be associated with them by the way. They have, they have veterans as well as nonveteran membership opportunities where you can serve and protect and, and help other people, and develop your own 3 to 5 so you have good battle buddies in life.
[00:26:13] Bob: And if you know a veteran, you can be that battle buddy. You can step up and help a veteran who might be at risk.
[00:26:22] Carroll Harris: We can do better as a society just like we're doing here on this podcast. We can spread the word, let them know. We can watch out for our brothers and our sisters. We can be the battle buddy.
[00:26:31] Bob: What should friends and family do if they know of a veteran and they're worried that person might be vulnerable, or might be in the middle of a crime right now? How can they be--, become a battle buddy? It's a little bit more nuanced than, than I would think a lot of people realize.
[00:26:46] Carroll Harris: Yeah, it really depends on the personality of the veteran but I, what I would suggest that you, you find the right timing and the tact to, to make an approach and to let them know you care about them and that you're concerned for them and the reasons why. That whatever, whatever scam or scheme or the reason you think they may be being manipulated. And, and to be honest and to lay it onto the table, and and to, and to advance the conversation from there. Some people, people might be responsive to it. Sometimes when the conversation happens, the veterans, uh don't believe that's the case, and it's not just veterans, it's just, it, it's Americans in general. Sometimes when you confront them, uh you know in the most loving way you can to say, "Hey, I believe you're being scammed, you're becoming separated from your funds." It, you have to fight against that for a while, because they just don't believe you that that's the case. And that requires consistent engagement, because that person's been so manipulated that they're not, you know, believing their son or their daughter or their best friend, and they're believing the scammer who calls them on the phone all the time or wherever or whatever the, the flavor of the interaction. Sometimes it's just emails on the internet, ironically, that can have a stronger bond or grip around that person's mind than their own son or daughter. So it's very tough, it's very nuanced, and it does require some energy and some engagement to break through, break that tie and to protect this person from being further manipulated.
[00:28:16] Bob: I like what you said there about, you know, ongoing conversations because so often the first one will, will fail, and, and as a person who's trying to help, you need to keep trying over time. It takes, it takes engagement over time, right?
[00:28:28] Carroll Harris: Absolutely. It takes engagement over time, it takes tenacity on the, the battle buddy or the caregiver. It takes patience. Um, you, you know, you're going to get rejection in some cases from the person that you're reaching out to, and that rejection is a cham--, you know it's a breakfast of champions. You've just got to soak up that rejection and continue to come back with love in your heart and help that person through it. (laugh)
[00:28:52] Bob: That's going on my desk tomorrow. "Rejection is the breakfast of champions. Soak it up!"