SPEAKER_01: 0:00

This is the Empowering Healthy Business Podcast, and I'm your host, Cal Wilder. Each episode, we'll dive into topics important to folks who want to run businesses that are both nicely profitable, sustainable, and scalable, and who want to achieve balance in their lives and realize their potential inside and outside of work. The show is sponsored by SmartBolks, provider of bookkeeping and accounting for businesses. Let's get started. So today is our 50th episode in Empowering Healthy Business, and I didn't intend to necessarily have another episode on fraud since just a few episodes ago on number 47 we had Kurt Moore on to discuss real estate title fraud and squatter wrist. But after I got introduced to today's guest and talked to him a little bit, I said, I gotta have him on now. So when I first got connected to Jason, we started talking about bank fraud as he spent much of his career working in the banking industry managing fraud risks. But then somehow crypto came up, and that became a very interesting conversation. And I definitely want to share that with you. Crypto is kind of all the rage these days. People claim to make a killing on their investments, but yet we've also had some major bankruptcies, and people are losing their life savings at the same time, and it's just ravaged by fraud as well. So I want to welcome Jason. Thank you for joining us, Jason.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25

Hey, Kyle, honor to be here, particularly on your 50th uh episode. So uh I'll do my best to live up to the hype. Thank you. So it's Jason Costain joining us from England, right? That's right, yeah. Although I do uh work internationally, so um my banking career has been based in the UK, but a lot of things that's been happening in the UK for the past decade are now playing out across the world. So the UK has been quite a leading um, you know, I guess regulatory regime for how banks are meant to deal and with and protect scam victims. Um so that's something we sh we'll cover later. But part of that challenge has been as a bank being responsible for protecting customers and potentially on the hook for refunding them in a lot of cases in the UK, unlike other regimes. Um, that means banks have really invested in scam defence and things like crypto investments and other types of scams have been front and centre for six, seven, eight years. And as a result of that tension, the need to refund people, the financial incentives there for the British banking industry to actually do something about this. So, as much as refunds have been criticised, why should we refund scam victims? They're all idiots, aren't they? Is often the refrain I hear, and they're not all idiots. Um, when the banks are on hook for doing something more, you start to see some serious investments and real brain power put against the problem, and that's what I'll talk through today uh in our conversation.

SPEAKER_01: 2:50

Great. And now in your career, you've worked with a number of banks, you know, large financial institutions in different areas of fraud and risk management, right?

SPEAKER_00: 3:00

Yeah, that's right. I mean, 25 years started off working on credit fraud, credit card fraud, and then application fraud, uh, which is you know criminals applying for products and identity theft and stuff, got involved in mortgage fraud prevention, um, payments fraud prevention, all types of anything you do with a retail bank account, particularly all the different types of fraud attack, I would have dealt with over the last 25 years or so.

SPEAKER_01: 3:25

So you've seen a lot with a front row seat to it. Let's start with uh crypto though, like maybe crypto one-on-one, the basics for people, and then we'll get into like the scams and the risks involved. But uh, you know, maybe we'll start with like what what is a cryptocurrency? Like, how is it supposed to work?

SPEAKER_00: 3:44

Well, I mean, so my disclaimer right from the start is I I I don't hold crypto, and I've got some quite um clear opinions on what I think of cryptocurrency. So uh I I'll I'll I'll suppose I'll I'll I'll tell you how I talk to you how I think it works, because obviously we've spent a bit of time looking at it. But in the words of the UK Financial Conduct Authority and many other regulators around the world, the advice to uh potential crypto investors is be prepared to lose all of your money. So regulators don't often talk in such stark tones, but you've got the financial conduct authority of of the UK, um, which is at the heart of the global banking industry. London is a significant player in global banking and uh commerce and trade. Um you've got the regulator saying, be prepared to lose all of your money. So, you know, crypto for me is is blighted with uh fraud and uh scams, and we'll talk about that in a second. But really, so cryptocurrency, I mean even if you look at the the background to it, so there's a mysterious figure called Satoshi who supposedly invented this kind of uh this this digital currency, I don't know, 20 odd years ago. Uh nobody knows who he is. Um but this digital currency that exists. Oh he's like the fo he's the founder of Bitcoin, basically, right? Supposedly, if you if you want to read the history, supposedly this mysterious figure came up with this um technically advanced way of creating a unique digital token and and the blockchain. So this blockchain is you know secure, supposedly, and each token that gets minted in Bitcoin, um, which was one of the ri the original sort of crypto token. Um there's there's only a finite number of crypto bitcoins that can be minted. So you know that at the point that point will be reached at some point in the next decade. But basically, cryptocurrency tokens can be mined, but it's just a kind of mathematical process using computing power to create a token that's unique, and that token enters the blockchain and gets validated by other kind of trusted sort of token mining kind of uh crypto um uh sort of entities, and what you then have is a supply of tokens which has a finite number, so you can't just print and print for it forever, and then there's a kind of once you've minted one, and if I own a you know a Bitcoin, then you know it's it's a unique token that can be traded securely, and there's a public blockchain, so you can supposedly see where it went and who owns it once you've sold it. Uh, and you know, you can't duplicate these things, and because of the finite supply, the idea is the more people want them, the more the value will go up.

SPEAKER_01: 6:23

So what we see is so it's so it's supposedly a transparent currency with a finite amount, so kind of like the gold standard in the old days. There's only so much gold in the world, you can keep looking for it and mining it, but at a certain point you've already gotten most of the gold out of the ground. And at a certain point you've already mined most of the Bitcoin. You can keep mining it, but the returns get pretty diminishing. So there's kind of a finite supply, and it's supposedly very transparent, right? Those are like the pros of it, right?

SPEAKER_00: 6:51

That that's that's the pros, and I think the you know, the the PR of the crypto industry, and unfortunately, it is it is really there's a lot of hype behind it, and when you look at a lot of the the sort of the this the fans of crypto, a lot of very similar languages being used, and a lot of hype is being used, and you look at it and think how much of this is being produced by the same uh few parties who have an interest in pumping the price of a particular cryptocurrency. Um, but yeah, the the the the the sort of the the the kind of crypto um PR has been you know this is a replacement for banking the banking industry. People can pay between each other, we don't need banks, and you know, banks charge us a lot of money and it takes ages to move a payment internationally.

SPEAKER_01: 7:34

And the libertarians among us like the idea of a currency that's independent of government control and the tendency governments have to inflate the currency to be able to support you know budget deficits by just printing more money to talk simplistically. So there's some people philosophically like the idea of crypto because it's independent of government control. And then governments don't like it so much in general because it is independent of government control.

SPEAKER_00: 8:00

Yeah, and and you know, I crypto think first really came to the government's attention when when I mean I this is going to this is a UK example, but I spoke to one police officer who dealt with their fraud and they and criminal criminality generally, and they they said, you know, pretty much every uh criminal they arrest these days that's involved in has organized crime links. And this is going back 10 years. Pretty much every criminal they arrested had cryptocurrency wallets. So it's it's unfortunately gone hand in hand with organised crime, with laundering money, and you know, the controls from the libertarians would be well, you know, I want to be able to buy and sell crypto, I don't want people to know who I am, and this is the perfect currency, but actually, unfortunately, it's the perfect currency if you're a money launderer or you're an organised criminal, and it was the chosen currency of you know, certain dark markets where you could buy guns and drugs and you know hire people for tasks like assassination, uh and it was the chosen payment method. So it unfortunately has come with a lot of uh tainted um history. And and the other main market was uh uh a Korean sort of supplier of video for child pornography. So when you bought child porn back in the very early days of cryptocurrency, you paid for it in crypto because it was supposedly anonymous. So early adopters of crypto um you know were people using it to buy things off uh the dark net, dark web, and it would be either illegal goods and well, it would be legal goods and services, possibly linked to you know extreme, uh extreme content. So it's not had a great history, uh, but even you know, the the the early law enforcement players who got involved, some of the FBI who who uh investigators who were investigating the the um child pornography supply, um some of those investigators actually stole cryptocurrency themselves and and sold it. Uh and they thought it was not traceable. But a company called Um Chainalysis created some software that could look at the public blockchain and find out who owned the crypto, where it had gone to. So, you know, that that it's a fascinating book written about the the origins of chain analysis. I can't remember the name, but I'll send you the call. Okay. That tells you that the origin of crypto, the origin of law enforcement interest, that the the kind of dark arts involved, and you know, it's a really good start of starting place for where all this came from.

SPEAKER_01: 10:23

Yeah, so like you, I've I've avoided personally investing in crypto because it just seemed like a black box with a lot of risks, and I didn't want to be the greatest fool and lose money because I didn't understand the market I was investing in. Um but let's just talk about kind of the basics. So say you have British pounds or US dollars or whatever, and you want to buy crypto. So you open up a wallet at some company that's kind of like a bank, but not regulated like a bank is, and you have a wallet and you trade US dollars or British pounds for Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency, and then it's in your wallet, and then you're subject to the vagaries of the market, the value of the currency going up or down, and certain vendors will accept it as payment for goods and services. And I think that you know the universe of people accepting crypto as payment keeps expanding over time, but really, you know, you've got to be able to eventually trade your crypto for something of tangible value. And then if you want to get liquid and get back into pounds or US dollars, you can then exchange your cryptocurrency for pounds of US dollars, and that all sounds well and good, right? Um and we can talk about all the problems and risks and scams that go on, but like in a nutshell, that's pretty much how it's supposed to work, right?

SPEAKER_00: 11:42

Yeah, supposedly. But I've I'm yet to find anywhere that if I can buy anything useful with crypto, I'm sure people listen to this who who have it might have a different answer. But you know, Elon Musk once was saying you can buy a Tesla with crypto, but quickly found from a regulatory perspective, you know, you can't prove where that money's coming from. You don't really want anonymous suppliers of cash and being an off-ramp for cryptocurrency given where it might be from. So he quickly found out he couldn't actually do that. So, yeah, people say you can spend crypto, but you f it would be hard pressed to find uh where that is. So, yeah, in terms of how it works, so if you wanted so the worst thing you can do if you're interested in cryptocurrency is to Google uh investment in crypto because there's a high likelihood, even now, that one of the top search results on, say, Google might be a website that's offering you cryptocurrency investments advice, uh, and that will be a fraudster's website. So we've seen I've seen countless victims, and you're talking hundreds of millions of pounds lost from who've gone online one day and thought, I want to invest in crypto. They find a website that looks really appealing, they put the name and the phone number in, and within a day or two, they're getting a phone call from a cryptocurrency trader, as they're called. And these crypto traders will uh tell them that you know they how to do it, how to open an account with a wallet provider, how to move money, and effectively the victim is duped into either investing in a crypto uh currency wallet that just doesn't exist or investing in a cryptocurrency wallet that actually is under the control of the criminal, even though it might be in then in the victim's name. So the criminals are very good at getting the victims to download remote access software, very good at asking the victims to send you know passports and driver's licenses as ID methods. So it all sounds very official. You're opening an account with this cryptocurrency trader investing firm. But what they're doing is they're using your credentials to open an account with a cryptocurrency wallet, and ultimately they have control of the wallet, not you. So when you send your fiat currency, as they call it, so you know, a sterling or a dollar payments, you get that into the wallet that you is your in your name, even, because it's been opened with your ID documents, but you don't control it, and very quickly you see the money disappear. But also, what the cryptocurrency traders are very good at is they've got software that mimics market movement. So they'll say, Here's the value of your wallet today, and then next morning your wallet value's gone up, you now you've doubled your money. Do you want to invest more? So victims very quickly start to invest more and more money.

SPEAKER_01: 14:13

So you're actually faking you know stock charts, like cryptocurrency. Completely faking charts.

SPEAKER_00: 14:19

Completely faking stock charts. And you know, you you then it's uh the problems arise when you want to take some money out. And I've I've even seen it where the crypto firms will say, get a victim to introduce a few hundred pounds as a start, and then it might be a few thousand pounds after a few days, and then the the victim will say, Well, okay, I you know, I want some money back, so the the the criminals will send them maybe a hundred pounds, they'll convince them that it's take take some take some profit. And of course, the victim's just getting a hundred pounds back of the money they've sent. So the criminal's not giving them anything, but that's a bit of a trade by their crypto that crypto uh scammers to almost prove to the victim that yes, you can get your money out, and then once people get that small payment back, they'll invest more and more money. But of course, down the line, it all vanishes, the trader disappears too, and you got you can't find your your your crypto, and you can't it's very difficult to trace it as well because uh there's actually things called crypto tumblers, which are services you can you can find where you can put your crypto in and um you'll get the same or similar value back out, but it's been washed and laundered, so it's called a tumbler service on the on the sort of crypto web. So there's even you know services in the crypto universe which are designed for laundering uh payments to so you can make it very difficult to trace. So and that's that's a seemingly legitimate activity in in the crypto crypto verse, as I'd call it.

SPEAKER_01: 15:48

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the scams, then we'll talk about kind of the volatility risk, even if it's not purely fraudulent, there's a lot of volatility risk um as well to think about. But as far as the scams, um you just described a six choice and where you're kind of duped into investing through this completely fake business that's effectively kind of a Ponzi scheme that eventually collapses. Um then there are the pump and dump schemes, right? So how do those work?

SPEAKER_00: 16:20

Well, I mean, it's it's it's a brilliant. I mean, I'm sure a lot of your listeners will have seen the Wolf of Wall Street and the Penny Shares, and you know, Leo DiCaprio phoning somebody up who might be interested in investing in um stock and he's pumping Aerodine. I think Aerodyne Aeronautics it is, some Midwest firm, and the the the the you know Scorsese's clip is you know, Leo DiCaprio on the phone, and then it goes to a shot a shed in in the Midwest of the US that says Aerodine Aeronautical on it, and you're thinking, yeah, this this guy's only going to invest$5,000 in penny shares in a business that's basically worth very little. And you know, they just then try and sell more and more investors' shares in this scheme. But you know, the people who are promoting that actually own the some Aerodine stock themselves, and it's a pump and dump scheme. So, you know, in driving up the price by getting more and more investors involved, the the criminals sell their um their early investments, and then people are left with shares that are worthless because the demand collapses and and everybody realizes this company is is worthless. So it's it's it can be pump and dump, and I think there will be future questions asked. You know, to give you an example, you know, the the a few days before I think Donald Trump was inaugurated, there was a cryptocurrency token uh was created by uh Trump, and you know, the value of that was phenomenal on the day it um entered the market, but within a couple of days it crashed. So the earlier and the early investors made a lot of money, potentially billions of dollars, and those who bought it at a peak probably lost pretty much all the money. So you've got right there, you know, it plays out. Be prepared to lose all of your money, and that's a very high-profile example of you know a highly sought-after token that's intrinsically worth nothing, because cryptocurrency is intrinsically worth nothing unless people want to buy it from you. So, you know, it's it's unfortunately open to massive market manipulation, and that's where I've when I've looked at the the kind of language being used about how the cryptocurrency market's gonna move and what might affect um the market, and now's a good time to buy, and here's why you should buy now. A lot of the language you use is very similar. So I'm reading this stuff thinking, who's pumping all this stuff out? So unfortunately, it is open to massive market manipulation. So, you know, you've got to look at all those risks and think, right, there's a risk of fraud, there's the risk of massive market manipulation. Um, and that's before, you know, if you have managed to get your money into a genuine cryptocurrency exchange, so you've you've sent$5,000 to a legitimate crypto firm, let's say Coinbase, for example, who I think NASDAQ listed, um, and authorised by the US authorities to a degree, you might have£5,000 in your wallet, you might want to buy$5,000 worth of Bitcoin. But you've got to hope that um Coinbase is still around tomorrow if you're holding your currency in what's called the hot wallet, so the wallet on the crypto that the the Coinbase um server. So we've seen examples, and Sam uh Bank McFried was one where um you know currency exchanges, crypto exchanges have been hacked and cryptocurrency stolen. You've seen cryptocurrency exchanges where the owners have stolen the money. Um, so you know, you've got the risk, the triple risk of pump and dump schemes, scams, and then a genuine crypto exchange actually collapsing for one reason or another.

SPEAKER_01: 20:02

Right, because you have you have this crypto, you either have to stick it in a virtual exchange somewhere and take these risks, we'll gonna talk more about, or you can like get like a USB card or something physically and hold it or something. But what if you lose your USB card, then you've lost all your money, right?

SPEAKER_00: 20:17

So Oh, yeah, that's it. So you've got like the hot wallet is held with the exchange, the cold wallet is on your USB stick, but you better hope you don't lose that. There's a famous case in the UK in the last few years of a guy who's got a computer uh hard drive allegedly went to landfill with uh maybe I don't know, it was several hundred million dollars worth of crypto on it, allegedly, and he's been trying to get this landfill site that's that's got hundreds of thousands of tons of waste in it, um, dug up to find his hard drive. And I don't think he's succeeded, but he nearly had investors at one point. And you just look at that and think, yeah, you definitely don't want to lose your wallet. But the cold wallet is something you've got, and it's probably well, it's highly secure, as secure as you can be. And but then you've got to get that back into a crypto exchange to then trade it with with other people to sell it. Um, you know, so it actually is crypto right now as a means of moving money, and it's quite slow, it's quite risky, and uh it's quite expensive. So as yet it hasn't sort of delivered on the the early promise of this you know kind of payment mechanism that's uh utilitarian and libertarianism and all those things. And you're seeing crypto firms now coming into alignment with um regulatory authorities. So a lot of the crypto firms out there are now applying for registration with different um regimes, whether it's the UK FCA or the US authorities, and when they do that, they have to subject themselves to money laundering regulations and ID people properly when they open accounts. And you know, if you're going to stop crime and stop laundering and stop misuse by the Russian states and North Korea, these are things you have to do. So we either want in a world where we prolif proliferate um you know uh nuclear weapons and child pornography, or we don't, and you know, bringing the cryptocurrency exchanges under a bit more regulation is not a bad thing to stop crime, uh, libertarianism or not.

SPEAKER_01: 22:09

And so we've all heard of Bitcoin, but there are like literally hundreds, if not thousands, of different currency out there, right? Right. And so and they're incredibly volatile. Like we might look at the exchange rate between the US dollar and the British pound or the euro or whatever, and it it might move, you know, a quarter of a percent in a day or something, and that's like a big move in current established currency exchange rates. But give me a sense of the magnitude for how volatile these crypto instruments are.

SPEAKER_00: 22:40

Well, I mean, like I said with the the the the the jump currency, I mean that literally you want to look at you can Google that and you can see I think it went, I don't know maybe double digit dollars and then it went to cents. So you're talking about a huge loss over a few days.

SPEAKER_01: 22:55

Double digit percentage moves over the course of a few days. It's uh sometimes value pretty much destroyed, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 23:02

So and even Bitcoin, you know, you used to be able to supposedly buy a pizza for a Bitcoin, so maybe worth a few cents or dot$12, and now you know you was trading it, I think approaching$130,000 for a Bitcoin, maybe$90,000 now. But even those fluctuations are quite big. So I think unfortunately, the appeal to the common man and woman is I could make a lot of money from this, but then the downsize is you could lose a lot of money, and you know, it in terms of a smart bet, who's really got the knowledge to know where it's going to go? And actually, when it's subject to significant market manipulation, which it appears it might be, or it definitely is with some of the smaller currencies, you know, it could move 10-20% over a couple of days, and that's 10 to 20% of your life savings vanished, you know, even more. So, and that's before you get into crypto derivatives and that kind of stuff. So it it's it's highly fraught, and and I I I do raise my eyebrows when people say they're a cryptocurrency investor, because I just think it sounds a little bit more like gambling to me. And you know, people I've got a couple of friends who are investors in crypto and they they kind of talk to me about stuff. And I've worked in financial services for 30 years, and within a matter of seconds, I'm thinking I don't quite understand what you're saying. And when I drill into their understanding of what they're saying, they they talk in buzzwords, but they don't seem to really understand it either. So I just think you're just reading a lot of um uh stuff online and piling your money in and hoping it goes up.

SPEAKER_01: 24:37

Yeah. So even if putting aside you know straight fraud risk, uh, this level of volatility introduces another kind of risk that's probably underappreciated, which is the uh, you know, the solvency and stability of the um firm that offers the wallets. Like if we think in terms of a traditional bank, um you you know, you think of a bank as being relatively conservative, they take customer deposits, they lend it out in mortgages and other kinds of loans. Um but they they end up more heavily leveraged than people may appreciate. Like bank, you know, banks are routinely leveraged for every$1 of equity, they they may have$15 or even$20 of assets. They might be leveraged$15 or$20 to$1. But if they do uh a reasonable job of maxing the duration of their assets against their liabilities, if you know home interest rates change, their you know, the value of the mortgages they hold makes it go up or down, but at the same time, the value of the customer um loans they made may go up or down. And it, you know, banks do go under from time to time, or government might issue a bailout if it's extreme enough, like we saw in 2008-2009 and with some banks. But you know, uh, even though they're so highly leveraged, the underlying volatility of their assets and liabilities is pretty low unless they're dealing with super risky assets or or they mismatch the duration of their assets and liabilities. Um banks generally don't go out of business even though they're so highly leveraged. But with these crypto wallet providers, you know, if they're not regulated to the same extent banks are, like you said, they're less transparent, but if they are leveraged 15 to 1, that means they only have 7% of their assets are represented by equity. And if crypto goes up or down 10, 20, 30, 40 percent from week to week, they could very easily wipe out all of their equity. And now you've got a bankrupt company owning, controlling your assets, right?

SPEAKER_00: 26:46

Yeah, and I and I don't know, I don't understand the kind of uh the liquidity rules for crypto firms. But what when you in the UK, and I think it's the same in the US, the the governments uh has something called in the UK has something called a financial services compensation scheme. So I am as a UK citizen, I'm guaranteed the government will cover my deposits with any instant any bank in the UK um up to the value of£90,000 if it the bank goes under. So I could uh I if I've got a million pounds, I could have accounts with 12 different banks and you know evenly split it across those.

SPEAKER_01: 27:19

Yeah, we have something similar in the US, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 27:22

I don't think there's anything similar that exists for crypto. They're meant to keep funds in escrow or have some kind of insurance to cover it, but ultimately the example of FTX is the one I was thinking about before with um um Benjamin Freed and SPF as he was known. No, they they was taking consumers crypto uh currency, uh their customers, and they were investing it in risky things. And when it came to it, there was then a big call on those funds, there was rumors about that kind of thing happening, and they they had a liquidity liquidity crisis. Um, and you know, hey, that this it's going to unwind in this talk of people might get some of the money back, but you know, that's not I don't think that's happened yet. I don't know where that's up to, but this is several years later. Um yeah, this whether or not it's liquidity risk, you've got a host of cryptocurrency exchanges that are all in a fairly hostile global environment now where you've got um hacking and nation states sponsoring very talented um groups in North Korea and Russia who would love to take um value out of you know a you know a US-based cryptocurrency uh exchange. And you know, that those exchanges have got a hard job on the hands um to defend against cyber attacks. So you better hope that the crypto exchange that you use has got good enough defenses to hold that kind of thing off. Um so it's fraught with uh risk, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_01: 28:52

And FTX was in the headlines, and there appears to have been some uh charitably call it mismanagement, less charitably call it just fraud um with FTX. But we also had in the last few years, we had Celsius Network, Voyager Digital, BlockFi, and Mount Gox. Like, this is not an isolated situation with FTX. Like these um these current these wallet providers, like some of them go out of business every year.

SPEAKER_00: 29:20

Yeah, that's it's funny. I mean, you might look back in 20 years and say there's this infra infancy of the industry, it was growing pains, and you know, look at it now, it's mature and all this stuff. But the the more mature it gets now, the more it's maturing, the more it's coming into line with standard banking um services. You know, it's coming under regulation, and the owners are wanting to be they want to uh take value out of their businesses they've invested in, so they want to list on the stock market, and if you do, then you're gonna have to subject yourself to regulation, get approval. So perhaps do all the things that crypto wasn't meant to do in the very early days of you know that libertarianism stuff that you mentioned, Cal. So, you know, you're seeing um a lot of Crypto firms trying to legitimise, a lot of regulators trying to embrace it, and it's going to be several years before it matures. Um, we might look back on you know the current day and previous years as the wild west of crypto, but look what emerged. So for me, I'm I'm I'm kind of gonna wait and see. I'm not gonna be investing anytime soon. And the final thing I'd say on it probably is you know, non-fungible tokens. So NFTs, uh so there was a big bubble in NFTs a couple of years back, and you could have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a unique digital artwork, and it's ultimately it's just a digital artwork, it's it's it's a set of pixels that's unique, and you might and it might have been produced by a you know a renowned artist, um, but ultimately those are being trade, they can be produced for pennies, and they're being traded at thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of value. And there was a big surge in demand and prices for those things, and you look at it now, there's very little being traded. Uh there's a lot of artworks that just aren't worth what they um were, and you think, well, you know, that was just a bubble, and intrinsically it's worth nothing. So you if you step back a bit and say, okay, well, that was NFTs, that was artwork, but it's on the same technology as cryptocurrency tokens, you know, what's the difference? It's just about whilst there's demand there and it's a store of value, then you know, it it's it's useful. But what if it all goes pop like NFTs appear to have? You know, so for me, uh as long as people still want um Bitcoin, that's great. But it over time, let's see what emerges. So it'd be fascinating to see where it goes in the next decade.

SPEAKER_01: 31:44

Yeah, it seems to me like the keys are you know finding figuring out a way to safely warehouse your Bitcoin. Um, like the hot wallets have all the risks associated with the wallet provider bank. And then the cold wallets have the risk of just lose it or your house burned down or you lose your USB token and like you've lost all your money, right? So the the cold wallets are tough. You gotta figure out how to store them and probably insure them in a certain point, like gold bars. Um right. Um, and then you have to be able to exchange your crypto for goods and services that you use on a day-to-day basis, right? And until there's a way to probably store and preserve the currency and then trade it for something you need, it just feels like a very speculative, more of a gambling situation than an actual currency with intrinsic value.

SPEAKER_00: 32:36

Yeah, yeah. And you know, hey, the if the payment system goes down, which it might do, you know, for a couple of days for who knows what reason these days, but you know, AWS went out offline in the UK, Amazon Web Services for a few hours this week, and uh people lost internet access and uh couldn't log on to bank accounts and things. So, you know, there's vulnerabilities in the increasingly global systems we have for payments and cloud computing, where you know we might find the payment system go offline um for a little while. And if you can't use your card to pay for your groceries, what are you gonna pay with? And it's not gonna be crypto, it's probably gonna be cash. So, you know, my my my uh my advice and and something I've been uh telling my friends for a little while is just hold a little hold you don't have to hold up thousands, but just hold a few hundred dollars or pounds worth of currency, you know, sterling or pounds, and just in the event that you can't use your debit or credit card one day to pay for gas or uh food. And that that so I think it's it's reasonable to expect an outage of payment systems, and I think hold retreat into cash is not a bad thing. So if you think about what I'm saying, I'm saying, you know, online banking uh it might be slightly vulnerable, um, particularly in the current climate. Um hold retreat to cash, hold a little bit of cash. Governments are giving this advice now. Governments, so you know, Scandinavian governments have given this advice to their citizens hold some cash, hold some, have a radio uh with battery operated, have some food. We're not talking about survivalists, we're just talking about be prepared for a little bit of inconvenience. They're not saying hold crypto because you'd be able to buy your groceries with that.

SPEAKER_01: 34:52

Okay, so we've had a very interesting discussion on crypto. Let's talk more broadly in terms of you know more basic banking fraud and financial fraud, especially as it relates to businesses and and business owners. Um, I can share a story at some point here about a unique kind of fraud I discovered a couple weeks ago that somebody tried to perpetrate on me. But um, you know, what are when we think about bank fraud, especially in the context of businesses, um, what are some of the most common um ways people try to commit the fraud?

SPEAKER_00: 35:28

That's a good question. I mean, that the I think that probably one of the biggest frauds you see perpetrated against businesses is sort of in what's called invoice redirection, uh, and also something called CEO impersonation. But really invoice redirection would be say, you know, you you you you you pay a supplier, you've been paying them for years, and you regularly do business and buy goods and services off this supplier, their invoice comes in every month. Um, that's all fine. Um, but criminals have figured that out and they will impersonate one of your suppliers, they'll write to you or email you and tell you that they've changed their bank details. So, you know, I've I've seen this happen time and time again in frauds against businesses, and usually that a letter comes in from a uh a supplier uh to the finance team and it says we've changed our bank details, somebody quite junior in the in in your business will key that on your online banking account, maybe, um, and change the bank details because it's just seen as an admin task. And then a few days later, when the real uh you know um risky thing's happening, which is the the CEO of the firm is paying this month's invoice, which could be you know fifty thousand dollars for um you know the the the invoice for goods and services, um that person's thinking, okay, is it do I know the who this is going to? Yes, I do, because it's my regular supplier. Am I expecting this amount? Yes, I am. Does it correspond with the invoice? Yes, it does. So I'll send that payment. But what not they're not really seeing is that the underlying bank account and sort code or you know the routing number in the US has has been changed by someone potentially quite junior in your firm. So this invoice redirection fraud costs businesses hundreds of millions of uh dollars each year, and you know, you're only as good as your process that you have for change of bank details. So, you know, and and when you are approving a payment as a business owner or a or a senior payment approver, you've got to start looking beyond the account number name to the account numbers and the route and numbers behind it, because you know, i i in the in I think it's in the US it's pretty similar. In the UK, we've taken steps to stop this now, but it used to be possible where you know, the account number and sort code or the the the root and number of a bank account. Uh, you know, it might have a name, so Jason Costain, my bank account number is this, but actually in the payee's name on the pay, the in the old days before something called confirmation of payee in the UK, which is a technical solution to this, you know, I could have put Mickey Mouse in the pay's name for a payment to Jason Costain's account, and it would still have gone through to my account because it's all about the account number and sour code, it's not about the name of the account. So criminals have misused this over time. You know, they'll put the the real supplier's name in the payee field, but they'll have a totally different account number and sour code in the beneficiary data fields, and the receiving bank won't check and do anything with that anomaly. And neither will the sending bank. So in the UK, now there's steps to introduce, well, steps taken to do that. So confirmation of pay is it payee has existed since 2019. It was introduced for the first time, I think, globally for domestic payment systems by a Scandinavian bank, uh Scandinavian country a couple of years before, I think it was the Netherlands, and it's only really international payments under in Swift, where you know an account name and number discrepancy might get picked up, but you know, the chances are if you're sending a domestic payment in the US, you might be able to send it with a name mismatch and it would still go through. So checking the numbers is the important thing, and locking down the process for change of bank details is a very important thing. The most junior person in the firm should not be doing that.

SPEAKER_01: 39:10

So it surely comes down to hopefully eventually technology can help alert and you know support change management in a more secure way. But really, it sounds like it comes down to standard operating procedures, SOPs. So if a if a vendor bank account change letter or email arrives, like what do you do with it, right? It's not just yeah, we need to somehow in we need to validate that before we make the change in our system.

SPEAKER_00: 39:36

Yeah. And and the criminals will expect you to validate it. So don't phone the number that's on the email, you know, don't phone the number that's on the letter. Independently verify and phone. And and actually, the worst ones of these we've seen is where the the supplier's email has been hacked and they'll generate an email, a genuine email from the supplier to you to says our bank details have changed. So even if you're acting on what appears to be a genuine email from the email address of your supplier, do not rule out they've been hacked. So it unfortunately the best thing to do is just to pick up the phone, speak to someone you know, and verify. Um, but there's there's multiple ways where this is made plausible. The criminals are expecting it to be challenged, so you've got to be one step ahead of them and think beyond just phoning back the number on the uh on the email.

SPEAKER_01: 40:24

Yeah, right. And it used to be with the, you know, if you knew a little bit about how to open up and expand the email header, you could cact most of these phishing scams because they were not coming from the right domain name. They had the name listed um as the sender person's name. But if you looked at the uh header with the URL that the email actually came through, you could pretty quickly identify it was not from who it was supposed to be. But if they've compromised the vendor's email system, then yeah, it could look like it came from just the right person at that vendor, and you wouldn't know by by looking at the email header.

SPEAKER_00: 41:00

Great point. Absolutely. And it's the same, unfortunately, it can be the same with phone numbers. You know, it's pretty easy to to um pay for uh uh uh impersonate a phone number as well these days, uh still, unfortunately. So you get an incoming call, you could be saying, Look, I'm I'm phoning from you I'm phoning from your uh local police department, you can look up the number and check, look at your phone, go online. You know, criminals do that all the time. So again, they're looking for ways to um get ahead of the the traditional sort of verific scepticism and verification process that you or I might have, you know, which might be, you know, I'll I'll just click on the email header, what if it comes from the genuine firm and they've been hacked to your point? Uh you know, Carl, I'll just look at the phone number, oh, it's the one the bank used. Well, maybe the bank's number's being impersonated. So the security is only as good as the you know the the security of your supplier or the security of a telco. And actually, you don't want to rely on that. You want the security to be good as good as your staff training and your own awareness of how these scams work.

SPEAKER_01: 42:04

Let's talk about the CEO impersonation um scam. I'll share a story. Like you would think even in an accounting firm, we'd be a little more uh internally uh astute about this. But I'll tell you a story. Maybe 10 years ago, we had a relatively junior accountant, and I got a phone call from him one morning. He had pulled over to the side of the road to call me back because he had gotten an email that looked like it came from me asking him to wire some money somewhere. Um I won't go into all the details for confidentiality, but um I mean this is an accountant smart guy. He kind of he got he fell forward enough to call me. Um obviously it was not legit, but um, I mean they can become pr even more elaborate these days. Like, what do you what are you seeing with CEO impersonations?

SPEAKER_00: 42:59

Well, I mean, I I guess just a step back. I mean, it's it's frightening, isn't it? But I I I'd I'd say that uh just cut any folks listening to this who run their own business where you've got employees who that might make that call or might be potentially duped. So, you know, that the the scam would be um say the boss WhatsApps me and I work in finance and just says, Look, I need a couple of thousand dollars sent into this address. You know, a lot of this is down to culture. So if your firm is quite often discussing business matters by what WhatsApp, for example, and um will you know the boss might request a payment be made by WhatsApp? Uh, and you know, people in that group might uh act on that, then you've set a culture that really is gonna is one about, you know, um, I guess um, you know, people will follow your instructions. You need to have staff who are going to be a little bit sceptical and think, okay, why is the boss WhatsApping me to make a payment? He never does this. We've had this chart, the boss said he's never gonna WhatsApp me about a payment to always phone him, don't worry about phoning me. You know, so if you if you have that culture of relying on WhatsApps and emails to do stuff, then you know you're probably a little bit more at risk of CEO impersonation. So and and these days, you know, you you might get quite a plausible, uh targeted uh attack. Um, you know, so there's no there isn't known um use of AI to impersonate voices and video uh these days, and it's been used famously in some you know quite famous romance fraud cases where people were impersonating Brad Pitt or you know a government official. But if you think about that, it takes quite a lot of effort to do an actually um a simple WhatsApp um to one of your team that says, Hey Michael, um traveling today, I've lost my phone, I'm using this number. Uh it's it's it's you know, um somebody's kindly lent me the phone or to my new mobile. Can you send me a couple of thousand dollars to this address because uh to my bank because I need to you know get some money out and to pay for hotels and stuff? You know, you you you want your staff to say, uh no, I'm gonna phone you. You don't want them to say, okay, how much do you need? Where do you need it send? Yes, boss, no boss. So I think you know, it it's still succeeding even with quite rudimentary approaches. So you just need to have the conversation with your team, you need to think about your culture, and I would think about having some kind of challenge process that says either phone me or you know, what's the what's the word that we've agreed we would use in these situations? So, you know, and it's only going to get more sophisticated, so you might as well start doing this properly now, because you know, on the day that somebody gets a a reasonably lifelike voice impersonation of you as your boss, then you better hope your staff are uh are familiar with this scam and with with AI and how it works. But it people are falling for it now, even without the use of AI. So criminals won't be aren't using it that much because you don't need to invest in AI and spend all that time. We can just send what's that message and chances are it'll get replied to.

SPEAKER_01: 46:00

Yeah, I mean we try to encourage clients to just have one accounts payable process so we can reduce the number of variables and you know, you know, you know, WhatsApp and text messaging is not how we process accounts payable, and it shouldn't be. Um just like limit the number of variables and then try to manage the variables that you do have. But just try to, like you said, culture is important. So like when it comes to dispersing money, you know, have a standard process. Don't deviate it unless absolutely necessary, but have that culture of skepticism when deviation requests come up, right?

SPEAKER_00: 46:39

Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 46:42

Yeah. And then uh another kind of fraud relates to payroll fraud with uh fake employees, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 46:50

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's it's it's crazy really to think about it. But you know, if somebody is whose job it is is to create payroll and you know, for a new employee, well, when was the last time a business owner checked how many people they were paying?

SPEAKER_01: 47:05

And maybe if it's a really small business and everybody knows each other, it may be a little bit harder to pull that off. Maybe it's a little easier to do it more of a mid-sized business where you see some name and you have no idea if they're a real employee or not.

SPEAKER_00: 47:18

Yeah, I mean, and but and this is the problem, growing pains with businesses, a process that might have worked quite well when you knew everybody, um, you know, first name terms, when you start to get a little bit bigger or you've placed a lot of trust in one person, then you get these kind of uh problems. I mean, I was I was uh thinking of a case the other day that scene, and it was it was early days in my career and it still happens, but um, you know, I I one firm we worked at, they um we did a simple extract of what's the account, the account numbers and sort codes or the routing numbers for the bank accounts of our staff that we pay salary to, and then we just put it in Excel, and then we got another extract of the account numbers and sort codes or router numbers of the the the the account details of our suppliers, and we just used XL to dedupe the one list from the other and found that one of our suppliers had the same bank account number as one of our members of staff, and they sure as had you know sure as eggs or eggs had been raising false invoices and paying themselves, and you think, well, that's really done. Why would they not open a fake bank account and try and cover the tracks? But you find with in these situations that somebody, you know, in your firm was fined for several years and then they just had a problem, marital breakdown, gambling problem, ill health, whatever it is. Um, and one day they weren't going to be able to make their mortgage payments, and they were desperate for cash and just thought, I'll just take some money from the firm and I'll pay back tomorrow when I get paid. And you know, they might do that once, and it's a necessity for them, and nobody spots it, and they just they don't cover the tracks because it's desperation, and then nobody spots it this month. Well, maybe I won't pay it back, and then I'll do it next month, and then it becomes a regular thing, and you don't want to be one of those companies where you've you've missed something so obvious, and it's been going on for a couple of years, and when you add up, it's a$300,000 problem, you know. So, but sadly you see that a lot, and and this is how it happens. It seems really simple, but it's usually you know driven through some kind of desperation, and um, you know, you if you know your staff well to know their personal circumstances and you know how they're getting on, it's much better to try and help them out you know in in times of distress than it is sort of uh not know them well enough because you don't know them that well and this happens, you know, it might just be misfortune that leads into misbehave. And that's before you get to the people who are actually setting out to defraud you from day one. So, you know, a genuine employee can turn out to be a fraudster.

SPEAKER_01: 49:52

Yeah. Now, when we were chatting earlier, you mentioned some telltale signs um that you could look out for if you want to be a little bit more paranoid as a business owner for internal threats. You know, what are what are some of those telltale signs that maybe you just keep in the back of your mind if you happen to notice something like that?

SPEAKER_00: 50:11

Yeah, I mean it's just classic sign, like like I've mentioned, you know, if you if you think about um financial what how people get into financial difficulty, it might be marital breakdown, it might be a gambling habit, it might be um you know, ill health, it might be um a drink problem. But though usually some of those issues come hand in hand with financial difficulty, so it's just worth having your antennae up for those things. And like I say, having an open dialogue with your staff helps. Um but then you look at some of the behaviour, you know, if if people are driving around in expensive cars, then you know that's something to think about. One of our one of the teams in a bank I worked at, um we had a a member of staff who was linked in in the end, they were linked to an organised crime sort of investigation, and uh a potential partner of theirs was a drug dealer, and it turned out that they were driving a cabriolet car and they were going out at lunchtime to pay the parking meter when the rest of the staff couldn't have afforded to do that, and they lived in a in a in a small house. So their lifestyle didn't match up with the their actual income and the job they had. So, and it should have been obvious, but you know, nobody queried it, and you know, a couple of years went by, and then we found out you know their their partner had been arrested for uh you know as part of an organised invest a criminal investigation into organised crime and drug dealing. So, yeah, those those warning signs are there, and and you know, if you're in doubt, then there's probably something you should look at. And I said, I mean, so it's worth doing those annual checks to your staff to get them to say, you know, there's been no change in the circumstances, they've not been arrested or charged with anything, you know. They're you could do you can get credit bureau data on people perhaps and you could ask their permission to do that, but you know, it depends how onerous you want to get. But there's several things you can do just to check up on folks, and um, but like I say, just knowing them and understanding where they're at in the life stage is probably a good place to start.

SPEAKER_01: 52:09

And you mentioned a couple other things I if I'm remembering right, that's kind of stuck in my head. Like somebody who's involved in the payments process who never takes a holiday, yeah, like makes themselves invaluable, so they have to be involved in all the payments, and you're happy, like they're diligent, they don't take holidays, so it's easy just to trust them because it's easy, right?

SPEAKER_00: 52:32

Yeah, and you're most your most loyal member of staff who just bends over backwards and is available all weekend and holidays and everything, might turn out to be somebody you've just placed too much trust in. So, yeah, not taking holidays is is a surefire signal of something wrong. That's why some companies have a policy that you must take at least in the UK, say at least two weeks annual leave in one go. You know, so it makes that that then means that things are likely to surface. I saw one firm where there was an employee in a in the accounts payable department and he was off sick and he not been uh had many days' holiday for several years, it seemed. Um when he was off sick, he was not in for a few weeks. Somebody opened his drawer and there was there was I don't know, something like 50 million pounds worth of unpaid uh invoices. This is a you know, this is from a company that's got multi-million pound turnover. Um, and this guy, there was no fraud. I think he just lost um I don't know, his personal crisis maybe. He just couldn't cope with his job, he just put the invoices in the drawer and and misreported a position, and then it created a massive kind of financial um sort of black hole in the firm. So that was just cheerly somebody who couldn't cope, and the only reason we found out the issue when we did was because he was off sick. So, you know, having policies like um you know compulsory annual leave uh is not a bad thing too.

SPEAKER_01: 53:57

Yeah, here's another uh here's another pointer, I guess, for business owners. Uh, because one of the other probably the uh the biggest area of fraud that I've come across, at least in the last 15 years or so of dealing with um, you know, prospective clients at SmartBooks is if they have an internal bookkeeper or someone who pays bills and runs QuickBooks, they'll put one vendor name in QuickBooks, but the check will actually be written to somebody else. So they'll put one vendor name in QuickBooks and the credit card payment will actually go to another name. And you're not going to catch that unless you either look at the bank and credit card statement to see who's actually getting paid. It's just part of your monthly due diligence, or eventually some vendor, you know, or customer comes to you and says, Hey, I'm loaded, I'm owed money by you, and you look in QuickBooks and uh it looks like you paid them, but in reality the money went to somebody else.

SPEAKER_00: 54:51

I mean, yeah, and that's where you've got to think, okay, how what's my control processes that uh might allow or prevent that from happening? And you know, for example, I've known firms that would if they've got a supplier chasing for an overdue invoice, who handles that? Because you want it to be somebody different than the person who's meant to pay the invoices. Uh, because if if if you wanted to commit not the perfect crime but cover your tracks, you do you've just done said cow, which is redirect uh payments to to somewhere else. You know, the genuine supplier is not going to be paid. You know, if you're the person who then deals with that like you know late invoice chasing situation, you could easily just uh you know ignore that, you know, bullshit the the the the the supplier several months before things get to a point where it comes to the attention of seniors in the firm. So, yeah, different processes for you know handling of late uh payments, um secure processes for handling payment of bank details change, don't place it in the hands of one person. Uh they're all things you can do um to try and get in the way of this stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 55:59

I'm gonna mention one other thing that may be relevant to especially kind of business owners and senior managers who get regularly solicited to go back to uh university for continuing education because this happened to me. I I always get like every week I get solicited by some university to go back to some professional or continuing or executive education program, and I just ignore them because I'm I'm not going back to school at this point in my life, I don't think. But um, I got a letter in the mail that looked a lot like an acceptance letter to a university a couple weeks ago. I'm like, this is kind of weird. It looks kind of like a real acceptance letter, but it's got to be part of some marketing gimmick. And I'd just gotten back from a business trip, but I was trying to dig out. I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I just set it aside thinking there was nothing really to worry about. And then I happened to get an email the next day from a diligent registrar at my old high school. I'm 49 years old, so it's been a long time since I've been to high school and applied to colleges. But um I got an email from my registrar at my high school asking if I'd requested uh a transcript to be sent out last week. Um and she said she sent it out. Um, but then a few days later, she got a request for another former student to the same university. And this is a university where people from my high school almost would never go. So it raised a red flag with her. Why'd she get two in short order requests for transcripts to this obscure place that nobody really goes from my hometown? So she reached out to me. So sure enough, um somebody had applied to two universities in my name and then applied for federal financial aid with the U.S. federal government, um, and had an application pending there, which I had to chase down. And if I hadn't done anything, and if that registrar hadn't been smart and picked up that red flag, somebody could have uh taken out student loans in my name, taken the cash, never went to school, and then the government would come and look into me to repay the loans, which was I hadn't been aware of that particular scam before, but something to be aware of if you uh get start getting acceptance letters in the mail.

SPEAKER_00: 58:07

Yep. What a genius crime, right? Because that's not gonna show up for several years, is it?

SPEAKER_01: 58:12

Yeah, because you go to school for a few years, you don't have to repay it right away.

SPEAKER_00: 58:17

So I mean, yeah, I I I uh but you've got to admire the people who've come up with that. But yeah, again, probably quite a loose process for um applying for one of those loans. And like you say, you if you're not careful and you just ignore stuff, then you could unfortunately find your own identity being uh stolen. I mean, I was one of the things that struck me, I'm I'm fascinated in in identity and and how these things happen, but just a story from my own um life. You know, when I when when my first daughter was born, we came out of the hospital with a slip of paper, and it was like a receipt, you know, like a an old school receipt in a shop with cash with a note of cash register with a bell on it, and it just said, you know, um baby female, uh I think a parent's name and the date it was born. And um I don't even think we needed to know the baby's name, we just got a slip of paper, so we then took that to the registry office because you're supposed to register the birth, and uh we just produced the slip of paper, and uh they just wrote it in a book, and then a few days later we got a birth certificate, and I just thought, wow, we've just created an identity, and it was basically a scrap of paper that a midwife issued that was handwritten, and there was no verification of that. And we could have gone around a dozen different registry offices and registered this, you know, use the same scrap of paper, probably. But you know, you you that's just an example of that quite often the the I the identity uh processes that that we all rely on ultimately have a very weak uh point and it's the point of enrolment. Um so you know, you you you've got to be uh quite skeptical when you see um you know people producing documentation. You've got to be quite careful when you you know of your own identity and how it can be misused and any signs that you know that might be happening is important to look at. So, you know, keeping a track of your voter's role uh your credit bureau data and any changes, any applications, it's all stuff you need to keep your eye on.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:12

Yeah, so Jason, I feel like we should probably wrap this up shortly. It's probably getting late in the UK where you are, but um, why don't you tell us a little about you know what uh what you're up to these days, what kind of work you're doing to help people, if somebody's got a problem or concern or a question, whether it's business or personal. Related to financial or identity fraud? How do they reach out to you? How do you work with people, etc.?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:37

Yeah, sure. So I can be contacted on LinkedIn. So it's just Jason Costain. And ultimately, I'm passionate about fraud and fraud prevention. And a lot of the work I've been doing in recent years has just been advising different banks and organisations in different countries actually how to get ahead of fraud and scams. But I've also helped a couple of victims of scams get their money back as well, which is just something I've done, you know, not for profit, just because I've felt really sorry for them. So friends with friends or people in different countries, even. And you know, so if if people are really struggling, they can reach out to me and I'll point them in the right direction, but pro bono. But if there's anyone wants any sort of advice for their business or or bank, then you know they can find me on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:28

And that's uh Jason Costain, C-O-S-T-A-I-N, right? Follow him on LinkedIn. He publishes occasionally on you know these kinds of topics. Um, we all work so hard to try to drive profitable businesses and you know make money, but then protecting that money once we make it is also very important. And in a world that's you know increasingly sophisticated with these different fraud schemes, um it's kind of incumbent upon us to be aware and what's out there, know people, follow people like Jason, uh stay abreast of different developments and have that healthy attitude of skepticism whenever it involves money going out of your accounts or the use of your identity.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:20

Yeah, and I'd I'd still say on my on my thanks, Carol. On my uh LinkedIn, you can find a link to my uh website, so I won't I won't uh read it out here, but on the website there's a blog and you you can read some stuff that just tells you how the latest issues affecting you know scam victims and UK banks in terms of fraud. And I think what's what's useful to see is the UK is very open, uh the banks are at least around their own fraud losses and what the issues are. So when you start to look at some of the stuff I've blogged about, you'll see just how different the performance of banks is when it comes to fraud prevention and protecting their customers. So if you're concerned that your bank, your own bank, isn't up to the task, come to my LinkedIn page and look at my website and you'll see some quite eye-opening stats in terms of which banks are getting it right and wrong. And that's not for you to choose one of those banks, it's just to be aware that sometimes the best scam defense is your bank as much as you. Uh, and you know, you want to be with a bank that looks after you. So there's some telltale signs uh when they are and aren't doing that, and you can read about it in my blog.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:23

Well, great. We'll get that link in the show notes for listeners as well. But uh, thank you so much for your time and sharing all this information. I can tell this is a real passion of yours, and uh it was an incredibly valuable uh uh learning experience for me to be talking with you, Jason. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:40

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:41

So this has been another exciting episode of the Empowering Healthy Business Podcast. Until next time. Another episode in the books. Thank you so much for tuning in. For show notes and more, visit empowering healthy business.com. If you would like to have a one-on-one discussion with me or possibly engage smart books to help with your business, you can reach me at Cal C A L at Empowering Healthy Business dot com or message me on LinkedIn where I am easy to find. Until next time, this is Empowering Healthy Business, the podcast for business owners, signing off.