Chris Parker from WhatIsMyIPAddress.com and the Easy Prey Podcast visits Fraud Busting. Victims of fraud reach out to him frequently to help locate people who have scammed them. You’ll be intrigued at his stories. And he’ll give us tips on what scams are hot right now and how to avoid being a victim yourself when he reveals the secret in deciding if you’ve got a scam on your hands or not.
Traci Brown: Chris, thank you so much for coming onto Fraud Busting! It’s an honor to have you.
Chris Parker: Thank you so much for having me on.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea. You’re a fascinating guy. I think you know a lot about web security and what goes on behind the scenes, so as such, the things that I’ve been able to find out about you online are limited because you are super secret. Why don’t you tell everybody what you do, and then we’ll go from there.
Chris Parker: Sounds good. I run this little tech website called WhatIsMyIPAddress.com. I’ve been running in for just over 20 years now. It draws, I think, this month, it’s September, we’re looking at about 7 million people coming to the site.
Traci Brown: Oh my gosh.
Chris Parker: It’s a pretty big audience. It’s taken a long time to build, and it’s been a really fun ride. Originally, it started out with just really technical IP address stuff and if you weren’t a network engineer it really wasn’t that helpful of a site. It’s gotten a lot more user friendly over the years. Probably about 10 years ago I started to get contacted by people who were the victims of online romance scams and other types of fraud that were all online, so I started building up a lot of content about how to identify scams and trying to help people. Unfortunately, after the fact it has been quite difficult to help people. The idea was to help people, educate people, create awareness of scams on the front end, and hopefully people will become less likely to be a victim.
Traci Brown: Oh, wow. Okay. What kind of scams are you working with? You said romance scams, but what else is out there that seems to be coming across your desk frequently?
Chris Parker: I think the two things that I’ve seen, like right now, one of these is personally, I’m starting to see a lot of SMS scams.
Traci Brown: Text message.
Chris Parker: Getting a text message and it claims to be from FedEx or the U.S. Postal Service and whoever is running this scam, it appears that they’ve gotten a hold of some database that ties names to telephone numbers because the text messages specifically mention my name in them, so it creates that sense of authenticity because if it’s just a random text message, how would they know my name? But if they’ve got one of those databases, they know my name. I’ve also seen them using a username that I’ve used a couple of places. They’ve obviously linked a couple of data sources together to make it seem more trustworthy. Then it’s, “Hey, this is the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, or whatever. We attempted to deliver a package to you, and no one was there to sign for it. We’d like to get it out to you, so go ahead and click on this link.” I never click on the link, but it’s definitely not usps.gov. It’s not fedex.com. It’s not ups.com. It’s xyz52.info/gobbledygook. That’s a huge red flag right there. The assumption is either that they are trying to get credentials. They are trying to send you to a malware site to infect your phone to scam you from there. I’ve definitely seen that. Because we have a couple of hurricanes going on, there is likely to be natural disaster scams where people are calling saying, “Hey, we are this charity to help with recovery. Can you send us money?” Those are probably the two really big things that will be happening.
Traci Brown: Wow. You’ve kind of appointed yourself as an advocate. Is it mostly your blog? I know you have a podcast, The Easy Prey Podcast, which is fantastic. You have some pretty deep thinkers on there, I think, as far as how scams are created in all different kinds of ways. What else are you doing to help people out?
Chris Parker: Primarily it is the podcast. The podcast has come out of my experience of running a website and having that built-in audience. How can I reach out to these people? How can I help create awareness? How can I help people from becoming victims? Because a little bit of the notoriety of the website, I’ve been able to get some great guests on the show, like yourself.
Traci Brown: Yes, we did that a couple weeks ago. It was fun!
Chris Parker: Yea. It has really helped me to connect with people that I probably would never have connected with. I’ve been able to talk to a world-famous expert in narcissism to figure out how to protect yourself from people with narcissistic personalities. It’s been really neat. It’s not just scams, but it’s a lot wider than that.
Traci Brown: Oh, right. What’s the number one thing you’ve learned off your podcast? The surprising info that a guest had, and you didn’t see it coming?
Chris Parker: I had talked with a woman who is a professor, and she teaches about the psychology of scams. That’s been really neat. The one piece behind that, that I hadn’t seen on my own and hadn’t put together, is that there is a similarity to the fraud triangle. With the fraud triangle you’ve got the opportunity, the pressure, and the rationalization, and there is a similar triangle in scams, particularly online scams. There is one element that I hadn’t necessarily thought of before. There’s the emotional hook, that’s fear, greed, curiosity, compassion, something like that, that puts us in a triggered state. There’s the urgency of hey, you’ve got to do this now, which moves us to action. The missing piece that I hadn’t thought of on my own is authority, that we have this innate human, we are designed to trust to authority. If that person comes across as any level of an authority figure, there’s always this built-in trust. It could just be they work for the power company, they are a police officer, they are in military, and not just, hey, we’re the government and we have authority, but even like personal authority type of places, and that builds that trust which makes us more likely to fall for the scam.
Traci Brown: Oh yea. You know, I’m a hypnotist. That is called a prestige suggestion. We are just more likely to do something from someone that we think has, like you said, some authority there. Okay. Let’s jump into the really interesting stuff. What’s the craziest fraud story that you’ve come across or someone has come to you for help with?
Chris Parker: Okay. A couple of years ago a woman from Thailand reached out to me. I’ll kind of go through the story chronologically as opposed to backwards with me unraveling it.
Traci Brown: Okay.
Chris Parker: She was online on Facebook, like the rest of us. At some point along the line she had been introduced or met a U.S. military serviceman. He introduced her to a couple of his other friends in the military, another man and a woman, and they were all currently deployed in Syria. She goes on and builds this relationship and gets to know them over the course of six or seven months, a fairly long timeframe. It does not seem unusual, and so it doesn’t seem unusual. At one point they say, hey, we’re so excited, we get to go on leave, and we’re going to go to England for our leave. We love to play the lottery, but because we’re military servicemen we’re not allowed to participate or win lotteries while we’re on active duty.
Traci Brown: Is that true?
Chris Parker: Probably not, but it sounds plausible. They come up with a reason. Well, because they don’t want foreign interference or influence. I’m sure there’s some rationale to convince someone of why that’s the case.
Traci Brown: Okay, okay.
Chris Parker: Because we don’t want U.S. servicemen to be corrupted by money and leave. I don’t know.
Traci Brown: Right, right.
Chris Parker: There was some plausible reason why that’s the case. So, could we use your name as the person who’s playing the lottery? Like, sure, why not? Go ahead and use my name. Lo and behold, they come back to her. Guess what? The ticket that we used with your name, we won the UK Lotto. It’s like a $10 million prize. But because we did it in your name, you need to do all the paperwork in order to get the money so that we can all share it. We’ll give you a piece of it because we’re all friends. We’ll put you in touch with the bank, and they’ll tell us how to do all this. A representative of the bank reaches out to her and says, hey, you’re in Thailand. We have these extra rules that you have to go through. There are some documentation fees that we need from you. She pays the documentation fees. The bank comes back. Oh, here’s this one more fee. She pays that feet. These fees just keep getting bigger and bigger. Well, there’s this transfer fee. It’s $10 million but you can pay it now and we’ll just immediately refund it back to you when you get the money. She ends up getting a second mortgage on her house and dumps all of her entire life savings, because hey, she’s going to get this $10 million and she’s going to get the fees back right away. She does that. The bank disappears and her friends disappear. So, she’s reaching out to me saying, I’m worried for my friends. They suddenly disappeared. Can you help me try to find them? I think I might have been scammed, but I’m worried about my friends, that they might have been killed in Syria or arrested for this Lotto thing.
Traci Brown: Oh my goodness.
Chris Parker: I was just like, no, ma’am. They scammed you. It was a total scam. She started sending me screenshots of the conversations that she was having with these people. You would see this very slow grooming of the relationship. It’s interesting because in most cases, these things usually progress really, really fast, days or weeks at most before someone, hey, my kid’s sick, can you give me some money? But this one, they worked on her for like six months before they ever asked her for any money. Again, if you look at what we were talking about before, they had built the trust, they had the authority, the urgency, the emotion, all that was built into the scam. I was going back and looking at my conversation with her. She ended up losing her home and being kicked out, basically totally destitute and lost everything. Again, she was like, can you help make sure these people are okay? That was what she was more concerned about than the money. I was like, oh my gosh, I feel so bad that she is out of house and home and money. She’s just all by herself.
Traci Brown: Wow, and she just still didn’t get it?
Chris Parker: She was saying that she understood that she was scammed, but she kept coming back to, well, I just want to make sure my friends are okay. To me, it’s like, I don’t think she really understood that this whole thing was a scam. I think she kind of thinks that the Lotto thing was a scam or maybe the bank scammed her, but it wasn’t her friends.
Traci Brown: Wow. Is there even a Lotto in England?
Chris Parker: I have no idea.
Traci Brown: I have never heard of a Lotto over there. I’ve never looked into a Lotto over there either. Wow.
Chris Parker: But, you see things. Bill Gates is giving away $1 million to some random email address. You think that would be on the news at some point, but you know, if you’re in a different country, you wouldn’t know what does or doesn’t exist in some other country.
Traci Brown: Right, right. Oh my gosh, okay. What do people need to know? What can we take from this? Because me and you, we sit here and we’re like, oh my gosh, seriously? Like how long does this have to go before you get it? But what’s the mindset and what can people do to check themselves almost?
Chris Parker: I think part of it is having that awareness of that scam triangle, to notice when you’re being emotionally triggered, to notice when someone is, hey, you’ve got to do this right now, and kind of seeing those things. If we take a step back and pause and look at things objectively, I think it’s easier to see that these things are happening. But I think if you’re looking for like tips, like never send money to anyone you haven’t met in person. If someone says, hey, my kid needs help, oh gosh, if it’s a friend of a friend, and you know that friend in person, sure, but just never, never send money to people you’ve never met in person.
Traci Brown: Yea, and you know what else I’m hearing from other experts that I’m interviewing is if they won’t FaceTime with you, then that’s a huge one right there.
Chris Parker: That’s even getting more complicated. I was talking with Jeffrey Hayzlett.
Traci Brown: Oh yea, a good guy.
Chris Parker: A great guy. His likeness has been used in a bunch of scams. He’s got that late 50s, early 60s, silver in the hair, good looking guy.
Traci Brown: A good looking guy, I’ll tell you that.
Chris Parker: He’s a friendly looking, authoritative looking guy, and he’s done a lot of videos over the years for television appearances and whatnot. What he found is that the scammers were taking his video, making it look choppy, and starting to cut out the audio so you’re can’t match the audio. The audio doesn’t quite match the video and so they get on a video chat with someone and play this bad video. Then the person will stop the video and say, oh gosh, I’m in the airport right now and the wifi here sucks. You’ve now created this reason why the proof of life, the video, the interaction, even that you can’t necessarily trust. Then you’ve got deepfake and all that kind of stuff.
Traci Brown: Oh yea. That deepfake video, I’ve got to tell you, because I’m a body language expert, and I have looked at some of that and wow. It is good. It is really good, which I think has a lot of. . . like that is terrifying to me, politically, personally, wow. That can really cause a problem.
Chris Parker: But I think for like most scammers, they don’t have access to that type of material. They don’t really have the access to be able to create deepfakes I think that it would make sense for small scams. I think that the proof of life video is totally valid, like do it, but if there are video connectivity problems and they stop the video, that should be a huge red flag. Like, okay, that’s nice, but this doesn’t count.
Traci Brown: Right. Yea, exactly. Who else has reached out to you? That’s amazing right there. Do you hear from people every day, like once a week? How does this really . . . ?
Chris Parker: It varies. It goes from times where I’m getting a couple a day to maybe it will go a couple of weeks without hearing it. Often it’s . . . usually it’s like smaller scams. Hey, I tried to buy this thing online, and sent my money and I never got the product. Can you help me find the person who . . . ? Yea, we can try, but unlikely that without a court order, without getting a lawyer involved, you’re not really going to get very far. A lot of people that . . . I think my ex has created this fake email account and they’re harassing me or threatening me from these fake email accounts. I want to try to find out, is it really my ex? Again, these days it’s getting more and more difficult to figure these things out. It used to be that when you sent an email to someone, your IP address, your internet connection at your home or on your phone was included in that message. This is for good and bad reasons. Google in particular, they no longer include that information in the email.
Traci Brown: Oh, really?
Chris Parker: For privacy reasons, and rightly so. I don’t want to be broadcasting where I am, what internet connection I’m using every time I send an email and then the recipient can see that. I can make a privacy argument of why it shouldn’t be in there, but on the flip side for proving who the person is, I kind of want it there. It’s a challenge. I want it to be there for the sake of trying to find bad people, but for privacy purposes I don’t want people knowing my IP address. I don’t want them to DDoS me or dox me or use that against me.
Traci Brown: Wow. Have you ever been able to solve any of these cases that come in?
Chris Parker: Unfortunately, I think the vast majority of them are not solvable without a lawyer. Once you start talking to the person, if they’re out $400 or $500, the cost of a lawyer is going to be thousands of dollars.
Traci Brown: Thousands, yea.
Chris Parker: A lot of these scams are run overseas, so now you need an overseas lawyer. It just gets cascadingly more complicated. The unfortunate thing is the vast majority of these things go unsolved unless there is a huge ring and the FBI or some national INTERPOL agency gets involved.
Traci Brown: Wow. Has the FBI ever called you for help?
Chris Parker: No.
Traci Brown: No. (Laughing).
Chris Parker: And for good reason, it’s not like I have special access to information that they don’t have access to. There are databases that show locations for IP addresses and so that might be accurate down to a neighborhood. If you visited my website, I might be able to, and I knew it was you because I got you to click on this particular link on my website that only you clicked on, I might be able to say, well you were in this neighborhood – I’m going to make this up – in Idaho. But I don’t necessarily know your exact address based on that.
Traci Brown: Wow.
Chris Parker: Those IP address to location databases are a little fuzzy. In some cases, they can be dead on accurate. I’ve had people say, hey, I went onto your website and I’m totally freaked out because it pinpointed down to my kitchen window. Then other people are like, hey, it’s like 30 miles off. Can you make it more accurate for me? I’m like, do you really want it to be more accurate?
Traci Brown: Right. Oh, wow, I never thought about that, like the pros and cons of the IP address. I have so many questions going through my mind. With the IP address, you’re saying it can be really pinpointed or very far away. You were on this early. What are some of the reasons that people would want to go to your site, like to know their IP address? What’s the big attraction there?
Chris Parker: There are probably two big attractions. One, right now with so many people working from home, they need to be able to access corporate resources. Sometimes the corporate firewalls, they want to know our employees’ IP addresses because we just want to limit them of getting in on the network or we want to know who your internet service provider is so we just allow those. We don’t want to allow someone from Bangladesh or China in trying to use your credentials. We only want you to come in. I think that’s one of the reasons why, so people can deal with their technology departments. The other one is people are trying to, it’s kind of almost the flip side, they’re using what’s called a virtual private network, a VPN service, because they want to remain more anonymous. They don’t want people to know where they are. Maybe they are in California, and they want the internet to think they are in New York, so they route their internet traffic through a VPN service that has a point of presence in New York. They’re coming to the website to confirm. Okay, does WhatIsMyIPAddress.com think I’m somewhere that I’m not? Okay, that’s what I want.
Traci Brown: Wow. So, they want to lie?
Chris Parker: Yes, yes. It’s not always necessarily lying for nefarious purposes. A lot of times it’s just subterfuge.
Traci Brown: (Laughing).
Chris Parker: I just want people to know that I’m in southern California because I value my privacy, or it’s I’m traveling overseas and I want to access my U.S. Netflix account, but Netflix doesn’t allow access to the U.S. content from outside the U.S., now I need to use a serve in the U.S.
Traci Brown: Well yea. I had to do that because I was on TV in Australia, and I couldn’t see it. I could see it when I used my VPN that I set for Australia.
Chris Parker: A lot of cases, actually that is a very common use case. I just need to be able to access content that is restricted by country. There is nothing nefarious about that. You weren’t doing something wrong that you had to lie to see your Australian content. It was just because you weren’t there.
Traci Brown: Yea, yea. Wow. Now, can people spoof their IP addresses?
Chris Parker: I think people use that phrase wrong.
Traci Brown: Okay.
Chris Parker: You can spoof it in a sense by using a VPN, so people think you’re using a different IP address. Your home internet connection still has that same IP address. You’re not really spoofing it. There is a way to craft internet traffic that looks like it’s coming from on location. But in terms of if you want to get on the internet, you need the data to come back to your computer. If you visit a website and you’re spoofing that IP address, the data is going to go back to somebody else’s computer, not yours. That’s actually how a Denial of Service attacks work. They send a request to a website saying, this is my IP address and then the website sends the response back to the other machine, so you get thousands of requests from all over the internet telling it to send a response back to one machine and that takes it off the internet.
Traci Brown: Oh, wow. Yea, that’s how you can data dump someone’s site.
Chris Parker: Um-hum.
Traci Brown: How do you keep all this straight? Honestly, you’ve been doing this for 20 years, but my head is just spinning a little bit. I’m like, oh my gosh. Is it just innate? You just get it, or are you going to trainings? Are you the industry leader? Tell me about that.
Chris Parker: I am by no means the industry leader. I’m not a hacker. A lot of people spend 18 hours a day living and breathing this stuff. I think part of it is I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I’m a tech guy. I think that way. It’s one of those things. If you’re constantly reading about a subject, you’re just aware of what’s going on, just like you’re aware of what’s going on in your industry because you’re living and breathing your industry.
Traci Brown: Yea, you’ve got to know it. What are you doing to protect yourself? Can you divulge some of your own tips?
Chris Parker: Sure, yea. For me, I guess there is a little bit of a difference. Some things that I do intentionally, I would tell people never answer phone calls that you’re not expecting. Like on my work line, I never answer phone calls that I’m not expecting. On my cell phone I occasionally do because I’m curious of what the scam is. Occasionally I’ll pick up and talk to the person and try to figure out what the scam is just so I know what’s going on, but in general I wouldn’t pick up my phone otherwise. If you don’t know who the caller is, it’s a scam.
Traci Brown: That’s interesting. I do a lot of keynotes and so I feel like I work really hard to get people that I don’t know to call me.
Chris Parker: A very different situation. That’s the trick thing. The advice is not necessarily one size fits all. If I tell my friend, never take a phone call from people that you don’t know, who doesn’t have people they don’t know calling them? Then that’s really good advice. For you, that’s bad advice because you’re losing business and you’re losing opportunity. That person may not even leave a voicemail. Who knows? I think, anytime money is involved, I always double check everything. If I get an email saying that there was a fraudulent transaction on my credit card, I don’t click on it, I’m not going to click on it, I’m going to assume it’s real, but not trust it. Assume that the information in the email is true, but not trust the fact that the email actually came from my bank. Okay, let me grab my credit card. Call the number on the back of the credit card. Hey, I got an email saying that there is a fraudulent transaction. Was there a fraudulent transaction? It’s either yes, there was – okay, great – or, no, it wasn’t. Okay, let me just delete the email. Not a lot you can do about it.
Traci Brown: Just never trust. I think that’s the big lesson here. I had no idea how much IP addresses were part of this whole thing. Are you suggesting people do VPN all the time or when traveling? I do it when I’m traveling because I don’t want to get on other people’s wifi. What’s the rule?
Chris Parker: I would avoid some of the hype from the VPN companies. They will tell you oh gosh, you need to use a VPN 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I think they’re overselling some of their security aspects a bit, but I think what you do is right, and that’s what I do. Anytime I’m traveling and I’m on somebody else’s wifi – look, I don’t trust my sushi place to know how to secure their wifi, I trust them to make good sushi – so if I’m jumping on their wifi, I know that this is not their expertise. I’m going to make sure I use a VPN to make sure my traffic is secure and make sure that my devices are secure. Definitely when I travel, I’m aware of these things. I try to avoid – this is probably a little bit of the paranoia in me – I try to avoid accessing sensitive information when I’m traveling. Even if I’m on a VPN, I don’t know who’s looking over my back or whatever.
Traci Brown: I don’t do banking on the road. I have a separate computer I travel with, and all it has is PowerPoint in it basically.
Chris Parker: I think for someone doing what you do, that’s exactly the right thing. If you’re at conferences and presentations, like keeping that separate from your personal banking. One, if you lose the laptop while you’re traveling, you don’t want to – gosh, I’ve got to change all my personal passwords now.
Traci Brown: Exactly.
Chris Parker: You’ve done the right thing in that you’ve risk mitigated. You’ve limited your losses if you lose that laptop.
Traci Brown: Yea. Wow.
Chris Parker: I do the same thing.
Traci Brown: Yea, yea. Any other stories popping into your mind of people that have gotten into touch with you?
Chris Parker: I often see and hear of people, they got a phone call from someone claiming to be their utility company, and hey, here’s the scam triangle. The technician is on his way out to your house right now. I want help you. I want to get this resolved so your power doesn’t get shut off because if he flips a switch to turn off your power, there’s this process we have to go to to turn it back on, and that takes hours or days, even if you pay the bill, you might be without power for a couple of days, and then all the food in your fridge is going to go bad. Gosh, it’s summer. The air conditioning is not going to work. I don’t want anything like that to happen to you. Let’s just get the bill taken care of right now. Oh, gosh, you’ve triggered emotion. You’ve triggered the urgency. You’ve triggered the authority. Then somebody’s like, they baffle me that they go down this weird route of like, well, in order to do it right now, we need you to pay in Amazon gift cards.
Traci Brown: That should raise a red flag, but people do it.
Chris Parker: That right there is a huge red flag. Anytime someone wants you to pay in an untraceable method, that’s Western Union, gift cards . . .
Traci Brown: Bitcoin.
Chris Parker: Prepaid credit cards, cryptocurrency. Anytime someone is trying to get you to pay with something other than your credit card or your bank account, that should be a massive red flag. I was talking with someone else who specializes in tech support scams. He said these companies are – err, these scam organizations, they’re run like professional call centers. They record their calls for quality assurance so that they can train their scammers to be better scammers. If you’re not hitting your revenue goals, you get put on an improvement program . . .
Traci Brown: Really?
Chris Parker: And you get fired if you don’t meet your goals. They teach the people how to coach the banks and Western Union and 7Eleven’s have kind of gotten smart. They’ve trained their employees. If someone comes in and asks for $1,000 in gift cards, you need to ask them, did someone tell you to come here? Why are you buying so many gift cards? There is this process that a lot of these agencies go through to ask, to try to prevent the fraud, why are you doing this? The scammers coach the victims on how to respond to those questions. It’ll be, oh, no, no, no, I’m just getting a gift card for my niece or my nephew. To me, someone’s coaching you on how to lie, that should be a red flag.
Traci Brown: Yea. I talked to someone.
Chris Parker: This is crazy.
Traci Brown: I talked to someone who was working at Western Union in a Walmart, and she had to turn people away a lot because of just what we’re talking about. It’s more than what you think. It is a lot that this happens because people just get caught up in the triangle, just like what you’re saying.
Chris Parker: I actually do have a good story about that. I was going to send some money to a relative overseas.
Traci Brown: Okay.
Chris Parker: That I know. I know this person. I’ve met them in person. International wire transfers can be a little tricky. The place where I was banking didn’t have the type of account to support international transfers, so I had set up an account at another bank specifically for the purpose of being able to do an international wire.
Traci Brown: That’s what Jeffrey Hayzlett would tell you to do.
Chris Parker: Yep. What I also did was get a credit/debit card from them as well, and this is the card that we’re going to use when we travel. That way if the card gets compromised, we have it siloed. It’s entirely independent from the rest of our finances. This is our international banking account, very prestigious there.
Traci Brown: It is. Pretty fancy.
Chris Parker: I set up the wire transfer and fired it off. This is all looks good. A day later, I get a phone call from the bank. The person from the bank, they give me the third degree. It’s like, hey, we noticed that you just set up a bank account and you’re wiring out a fairly large amount of money. Why are you doing that? It’s a gift for a family member, for whatever the reason was.
Traci Brown: But it doesn’t sound good.
Chris Parker: They’re like, so, have you met this person in person? I’m like, yea, they’re my in-laws. How do you know whoever sent you the bank account was actually the in-laws? Did you get an email from them asking you to send them money? How did this whole arrangement come out? In the back of my mind, I’m like going, bank, this is awesome. You’re really trying to protect me. But in the moment, I’m like, this is really annoying.
Traci Brown: Yea, yea.
Chris Parker: But it was really cool that they were really looking out for me as a consumer to make sure that I wasn’t falling victim for a scam, but she was really thorough. She probably had 10 or 15 questions that she went through. How do you know this person? Have you met them in person? How did you get the banking details from them? Are you really sure? I’m like, yes, I know this person. I talked to them.
Traci Brown: Wow.
Chris Parker: This was totally planned out. Some banks are really doing their due diligence to help prevent this, but your friend who works for Western Union, I’m sure it happens all the time.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea, yea. Wow. I’ll tell you what, Chris, you have been just a gem to have on the show. Your website is WhatIsMyIPAddress.com.
Chris Parker: WhatIsMyIPAddress.com. Yes.
Traci Brown: Yep, yep. You can go there. People can go there. Find out your IP address and see. If you don’t know where you are, then maybe you can them get found. Then tell us just quick about your podcast, where people can find it.
Chris Parker: Yep. It’s called The Easy Prey Podcast. You can find it at EasyPrey.com and everywhere you listen to your favorite podcast. It’s really designed to bring awareness to all the different ways that we’re manipulated, that we’re targeted, that we’re scammed, so it’s not just technology. It’s a whole variety.
Traci Brown: Yea. A lot of cool interviews there. Make sure you find Chris on The Easy Prey Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Chris, thank you so much for coming on.
Chris Parker: Thank you for having me on, Traci.