1346: David Maimon | Going Undercover in the Fraud Underworld

1346: David Maimon | Going Undercover in the Fraud Underworld

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional Russian chess grandmaster, four-star general, rocket scientist, or real-life pirate.

Apparently, they still exist. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more, that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, we're talking to Dr. David Maimon, criminologist, fraud expert, and a guy known as the undercover professor, which sounds a little bit like a [00:01:00] CBS procedural where the professor actually has a burner phone and a Telegram login.

David doesn't just study fraud from some safe little academic perch while sipping bad campus coffee. He goes undercover in the digital sewer system where identity thieves, document forgers, money launderers, AI scammers, and synthetic identity goblins all hang out, compare notes, and apparently run crime like it's a SaaS startup with worse ethics and better margins.

The dark web is what we're talking about, of course, and this is the scary part. Fraud is no longer one guy in a hoodie hacking the mainframe or whatever. It's a whole industry, a supply chain, fraud as a service. Someone steals the data, somebody builds the fake identity, somebody opens the account, someone launders the money, somebody on LinkedIn is probably calling it entrepreneurship.

We'll talk about fake businesses in California, Medicare fraud using stolen identities, AI-generated faces and documents, voice clones, deepfakes, tax scams, and why the bad guys are organized while the rest of us are still using our dog's name and birthday as a password. So if you've ever thought, "I'm too smart to get scammed,"

David Maimon: [00:02:00] congratulations.

That sentence is basically a scammer's favorite aphrodisiac. Here we go with Dr. David Maimon.

Jordan Harbinger: I don't even know where to begin with this interview because we're looking at the dark web right now, which we'll get into l- on the show, and I'm looking at all kinds of stuff that I've seen bits of, but the last time I used the dark web was probably Silk Road days, and that was just curiosity.

I was like, "Oh, what's Tor?" And my friend's like, "Oh, let's use Tor and look at Silk Road." And there were, like, hitman ads that were fake, as it turns out, from the FBI honeypots. There was people selling heroin in little bricks or whatever, selling coke, mushrooms, LSD. How old is Silk Road, like 20 years?

David Maimon: Yeah, I mean, we're looking at, at 2011 sometime.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so I was out of law school, and I was already working as a lawyer, but I was curious about this stuff, and I was in this tangentially cybersecurity, doing social engineering talks at Def Con and stuff around, probably around that time. So I was interested in it, but I didn't buy anything. What I should've done is kept a bunch of Bitcoin.

Anybody who was on the Silk Road and has their 30 bucks [00:03:00] from 2011 Bitcoin is now a millionaire, but whatever. Tell us who you are, because when you pitched me, I was like, "A fraud professor? That's a pretty cool thing to study." I didn't know... It makes sense people study fraud, but usually those people are criminals.

David Maimon: Yeah, you're 100% correct. And so some of us should be on the good side, right, and try to understand it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

David Maimon: Because, and if you follow some of the stats we have out there, it's really staggering at this point. We lose so much money to fraud.

Jordan Harbinger: 12.5 billion was the total fraud

David Maimon: loss? Yeah, I think, I think it's last year it was at 12.5 billion.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Jordan Harbinger: This is, like, what they've reported and calculated as

David Maimon: fraud? This is what people reported, right? I mean, we're not talking about fraud losses that the banks have or not. Really? This is

Jordan Harbinger: just people. Oh my God, this is consumer fraud?

David Maimon: Consumers fraud, right? Oh my God.

These are just individuals and who most of the reports are associated with investment scams and online romance fraud. So folks who try to build rapport with someone online and then- Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: we've covered this. The, "Oh, I'm in an accident and bl- I need $100 because my purse got stolen from [00:04:00] the crash site, and I can't get my medication, and I'm in surgery in Indonesia, but I'm really an architect from Great Britain who's highly ed-" And you get these people who should know better, but it's such a slow drip that they get conned.

David Maimon: So you have the scam compounds out there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah I mean- I won't say we broke the story, but the journalist who broke the story who came on our show and talked about how they went to the scam compounds- Yeah ... in, there's, like, a city that's basically a, it's just a scam city, and it's got compounds that are prisons, and these people get conned into fake jobs.

It's called Kings Lions- King Gwalor,

David Maimon: yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's Kings Lions Casino, and then during the pandemic they couldn't do gambling anymore, so they turned it into a scam compound, and then they realized it was more profitable to just be an international scam company than it was to be a casino in the middle of the jungle.

So

David Maimon: like- 100%. What I do is something very similar to the journalist who was on the show. I try to spend as much time as possible with fraudsters out there online.

Jordan Harbinger: Online, right?

David Maimon: Offline as well.

Jordan Harbinger: Really?

David Maimon: You know, we're getting into more and more offline simply because we see a lot of it happening right now, and there's physical [00:05:00] representation of the fraud.

Like, we work a really cool story right now, which I can't really break at this point, but there's physical representation of the fraud, synthetic and stolen identities in the heart of Burbank

Jordan Harbinger: So Burbank, California.

David Maimon: Burbank, California, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Basically LA/Hollywood. That's the airport I fly into when I go there,

David Maimon: Burbank.

Yes. So yeah, I spend a lot of time with these fraudsters online trying to understand what is it that they do, download the information that they put out there to my computer, simply try to make sense out of the online fraud ecosystem, and I've been doing this for, like, 10 years almost, running experiments, collecting data, and it's a fascinating ecosystem to be in.

Jordan Harbinger: The more I research fraud and talk to people like you, the more I realize it is an ecosystem. Oh, yeah. It is a system. It's not a bunch of isolated crimes. The tiny frauds are isolated crimes, somebody passing a check they printed at CVS or whatever, and bring it to a bank and getting 50 bucks from a bank teller that feels sorry for somebody, and then they get jumped for check kiting or whatever the heck it's called.

Right. But when the gangs that are doing this, like the stuff you just showed me on the dark web, which we'll talk [00:06:00] about in a moment or in a few minutes, and maybe even try to show some on camera, that's industrial fraud. 24 years ago, I was in Ukraine. I hate to pick on Ukraine because they're being invaded right now, but I was in Ukraine, and I remember meeting up with gangsters and fraudsters there because I was interested in that stuff for various reasons.

I'll say as a journalist because I want to save my reputation. But, but, uh, there was so much credit carding, and I remember seeing guys being like, "Oh yeah, credit card fraud is our big thing right now." And I was thinking, like, "Okay, they steal a number from a restaurant or something, and then they go out and they buy stuff with it in town."

No. These guys had stacks of plastic cards that didn't have numbers or names pressed into them yet. You know how your card, it's pressed in there with a machine? They had the blanks. And I was like- Oh yeah, I guess these must exist, right? The companies have these and I'm thinking, where did you get a bunch of Visa blanks with holograms?

They're not fake. These are real. They had holograms, everything, and they had some machine, I guess back at their gangster HQ, where they could say like, "Oh, you're Jordan Harbinger. Okay, here's the number we're going to generate for [00:07:00] you that we stole from this other guy who's not you." And they press it in there, and you could just go around, and this is before the internet reconciled all the charges in real time, right?

So you just go around with that for maybe months or even years until the card expired because by the time they reconcile the charge and it doesn't work, it doesn't matter anymore. That was crazy state-of-the-art back then, right? We're

David Maimon: beyond that point at this

Jordan Harbinger: point.

David Maimon: It certainly

Jordan Harbinger: looks like it from the dark web, man.

David Maimon: It's the dark net. It's, uh, Telegram, but it's also Facebook. It's also Instagram. It's also TikTok. It's all over the place- Really ... at this point. It's really all over the place. We have supply chains of all types of illicit commodities folks are essentially using social media to support.

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense.

AI deepfakes and identity fraud and stuff like that. So all right, so you're, like, the undercover professor. Yeah. That's your, one of your nicknames, because you don't just research fraud, you're infiltrating the organization, so- Yeah ... how does that work? Because I assume, are you pretending to be someone else, or are you like, "Hey, I'm a fraud researcher.

Do you want to stroke your ego and talk about how smart you are for a few-" I,

David Maimon: I don't want to say that I'm pretending to be someone else. [00:08:00] I just have my aliases.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Isn't that what pretending to be someone else is?

David Maimon: You have your aliases, right, and you have sock puppets. Those sock puppets essentially allow you to connect to all those platforms that the criminals spend a lot of time in.

Jordan Harbinger: If you're meeting someone in person, you tell them who you are or not?

David Maimon: It totally depends on the goal of the m- of the mission, right? A lot of the stuff that I'm doing out there is just for me to understand what's going on out there. Obviously, not everything that I do can go on print because- I need to have ethic review committee sort of look at all my studies and there's a issue of human rights and subject sort of rights

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, exposing criminals is legal, so

David Maimon: But you can't really do that, right?

I mean, you can't really do that as a professor. You can't really do that conducting academic research, right? And to be honest, I'm not trying to expose criminals at this point. I'm just trying to understand what is it that they do. I'm trying to understand the modus operandi and simply make sure that we're all aware of it in order to protect and prevent.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you're not a law enforcement-

David Maimon: I'm [00:09:00] not, and it's, uh, really important to emphasize it because, you know, even the criminals think I'm trying to get them arrested, and I'm not. All I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make sure that we are aware of what they do in order for us to prevent and, and- Yeah

mitigate.

Jordan Harbinger: My friend Mariana Van Zeller does a show, Trafficked, where she meets with cartel hit men. They love to talk about what they do. I don't know what it is. Human nature.

David Maimon: Yeah, I mean, so when we infiltrate those groups, we started doing this seven years ago. There weren't too many people who were doing that.

It was just the beginning of Telegram and criminals using Telegram for all kind of purposes. We got lucky in that sense because, uh, we have very old aliases that are part of those groups for long period of time. We don't need any vetting. We're just there. So we are seeing what these guys are putting out there because we are part of the group.

We don't have to really talk to anyone. We don't really have to sort of post or purchase or do anything. It's just there and you see what is it. It's like a, think about it like an Instagram or TikTok.

Jordan Harbinger: You know what internet relay chat is, remember that?

David Maimon: Yeah, yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: of course. So like IRC, I'd be sitting in #phreak, which is like a phone hacking thing, and I would just [00:10:00] be in there for literally years.

And occasionally I would say like, "Hey, does anybody know how you take an NEC 300 cellphone and just wipe it? I can't find the instruction manual." And somebody would be like, "Hold these buttons down." And that would be like the only thing I said for four months.

David Maimon: That, that's, so that's exactly what we're trying to do.

I'm not engaging too much with folks on those platforms simply because I don't want to get in trouble, right? And, uh, I don't want them to flag because, yeah, you need to use specific jargon when you're over there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

David Maimon: Get what you need.

Jordan Harbinger: Hello, fellow kids.

David Maimon: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I would like to make some crimes.

David Maimon: And I have some really cool stories about that.

I actually have one of my students in the past, he was tasked with finding something for us out there. All we asked him to do is just try and infiltrate and find more and more and more channels. Simply be patient, wait for these guys to talk about it. He went in, starting talking to people, like, I mean, "I'm looking for that."

So they realized quickly that this guy is either a police officer or a researcher and, or he just blocked him. So you need to know what you're doing when you're there, right? I mean, so that's essentially what we, we spend a lot of time with thousands of channels like that. I remember those relays. What [00:11:00] we're seeing on Telegram right now is mind-boggling with respect to people exposing their modus operandi on any type of fraud you can imagine.

Mail theft. I flagged that issue in 2021 simply because the criminals were posting so many checks out there and were talking about this modus operandi and how to do it.

Jordan Harbinger: Telegram, for people who don't know, by the way, I should have said this earlier, it's basically WhatsApp, but it was a Russian app, which is now coincidentally, I believe, banned in Russia because they can't look at all the messages.

Right. I've got friends that live in Russia and Belarus, and they say things like, "Oh, this app doesn't work for us anymore." And I'm like, "Oh, because that means the government can't look at it." And then I'm thinking, okay, so the app that you're talking to me on right now, no problem, which means they can look at it probably.

So not that there's anything on there I don't want anybody to see, but it is a little disconcerting when, "Oh, we don't want you to use this." It's like, oh, but this one's fine? I thought this was also end-to-end encrypted. Yeah. So what's the deal?

David Maimon: So there's a lot going on, right? We know that once they arrested Durov, the CEO, we started to see- Of Telegram.

Yeah. So we started to see less activity in terms [00:12:00] of criminals using it, but there's still a lot going on. But- The point I'm trying to make is that the criminals really like to talk about what they do. We're talking about a supply chain, and we're talking about them having access to a lot of checks and bank accounts and identities they need to sell in order to make money, and so that's why they're using it.

Jordan Harbinger: Is it advertising? Like, are they saying, "Look at this- It is ... stack of checks that you could buy from me"? Yeah.

David Maimon: It is advertising. It's bragging. It's making sure that they get a reputation in the ecosystem for what they do. It's all of the above.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. I'm on the fence about talking about all these things so specifically, but here's the thing.

We're not creating criminals, and we're not going to teach people how to do things, but I will say some of the sites, just so people who are curious can go look, there was one that was called The Lid Depot. I don't really understand what that means, but they were selling fake license plates for cars, fake registrations I think, all kinds of fake car documents Where are businesses like this located?

Are they overseas or are they in the US operating and they just don't get caught?

David Maimon: So the business you just mentioned is located [00:13:00] here in the United States, right? I'm not really sure whether it's New Jersey or Miami. We- we're trying to figure out.

Jordan Harbinger: If you made me guess, those would have been- ... one of the top-

David Maimon: Right

Jordan Harbinger: or the two of the top ones.

David Maimon: Yeah. But yeah, I mean, this operation is, is homemade, right? I mean, uh, you hear folks speaking and talking to each other on the videos they post out there and realize th- these are Americans. There's a lot going on on the Russian side, on the Chinese side, on North Korean sides as well, but- North

Jordan Harbinger: Korea?

David Maimon: We see a lot of identities that the North Korean are taking right now, and them using AI in order to manufacture fake driver licenses and then get positions here in the United States.

Jordan Harbinger: So this I've seen. This is, it's funny because this is a little off topic, but I've seen, there's a video that someone sent me.

There was a guy who was doing an interview, a job interview. Yeah. And the person who said he was Chinese, but he turned out to be North Korean, he stole the whole code base, and then he just vanished. And so now North Korea's going to sell that to the competition or start a competing company in China with the code base of this startup.

And the test, I don't know if you saw this, the test was, they were like, "All right. Well, I just want to make sure you're not North Korean like the last guy. Say, 'Kim Jong Un is a fat pig.'" Yeah, right. And the guy goes, "What?" [00:14:00] And he's like, "Say, 'Kim Jong Un is a fat pig,' and you got the job." And the guy was like, "Oh, ha ha ha ha."

And he's like, "No, do it." And the guy just goes, "Kim Jong Un, uh," and they're like, "What? Couldn't hear you. Do it louder." And he just disconnects. And they were like, "Okay, I guess that guy was North

David Maimon: Korean." North Korean. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, with the deep fakes and the AIs that are going on right now, I mean, there are also tests of trying to break the image.

They tell it to wave. Oh, yeah. Or to wave three fingers. That doesn't work anymore, right? I mean, because, uh, you know, some of the things that we're doing right now, we actually are able to swap faces quite easily and wave fingers, driver licenses, whatever you want in front of the, the images.

Jordan Harbinger: Somebody did send me that.

They go, "All right. I just want to make sure of one thing. Can you wave in front of your face?" And the guy wouldn't do it, wouldn't do it, waved up here, waved over here. They're like, "Do it in front of your face." Does it down here, and they're like, "Wave in front of your face or we're hanging up." And he just was like, he just goes, "" and then hangs up.

I'm like, look, I was like, "Wow." I mean- But now

David Maimon: you can wave your hand in front of a face and the picture will stay. It's unbelievable. I mean- So

Jordan Harbinger: why, why deep fake? Because you're trying to pretend to be a completely [00:15:00] fake person?

David Maimon: Either you're stealing someone's identity or you're building a completely new persona out there, and you want to use it in the context of job applications, open new bank accounts, take loans.

There's so many Things that you can do with an identity. Think about it. We use our identities for pretty much everything nowadays, so

Jordan Harbinger: For the job interview thing, it's always strange. I mean, these guys are committed when they're getting a job in a company and they're going to work there for several months, long enough to get access to the code base, and then steal the code base.

I mean, that could take years of infiltrating.

David Maimon: So it's not only the code base, they're actually getting paid for that, and that helps-

Jordan Harbinger: Right, the regime ...

David Maimon: the regime. I don't know if you had a chance to look through some of the indictments out there, but there are at least two, and you see how much money these guys make.

30 employees each make $100,000 a, a year. That's a lot of money for the regime to support their goals. So that's what we're seeing at this point.

Jordan Harbinger: If you basically have an enslaved population, which North Korea does, you can either have that guy as a taxi driver making single-digit dollars per day, not generating any foreign [00:16:00] revenue, currency revenue, or you can have them working abroad remotely and making tens of thousands of dollars a year, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, depending on their skill set.

Yeah.

David Maimon: And they're very talented. At the end of the day, many of the operations we are familiar with, they were using stolen identities, stolen American identities, people from here in California. I mean, we've seen a lot of California driver licenses being used in that sense. We're seeing them manufacturing completely fabricated identities and getting a job.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. When you get an email like, "Hey, you'll never guess. There's this Asian dude named Jordan Harbinger coding into my company. We just hired him."

David Maimon: In one of the cases we looked closely into, they were actually using a female name, and they had a male person taking the position for her. Uh, mind-boggling to see that.

Jordan Harbinger: No one knows Jordan Harbinger's a guy unless you know who I am. Yeah, I could be anybody. Happens all the time. I'll be, like, sitting somewhere in a seating arrangement and I go, "I think they might have thought that I was a woman," because it'll be like- Right ... all of the men are on the left side of the room, and it's me and a hundred women on the right

David Maimon: side.

It doesn't happen with David, though.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it doesn't... Yeah,

David Maimon: yeah, not

Jordan Harbinger: very often. It's [00:17:00] got to be really hard to take down a business like The Lid Depot selling these fake plates. Their website's not registered anywhere. It's on the dark web, and they mail something to you, so you'd really have to triangulate them sending the packages out or something.

Yeah, and

David Maimon: even that is complicated. We know that they will not send it from the post office close to the facility. They will drive 100 mile, and they will send it from there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, they ship once a month when the dude drives down to his house in Florida.

David Maimon: It's a real challenge for law enforcement, and this is something that we're dealing with right now.

Jordan Harbinger: This kind of stuff, fake plates, fake passports, this is the kind of stuff in a movie where someone's like, "Hey, Tom, I need a fake passport," and they go to the vacuum cleaner store, and the guy gives them a fake identity, like Breaking Bad, but this is real.

David Maimon: This is real life. We're seeing thousands of those documents being used on a daily basis, right?

So it's, it's really scary, to be honest.

Jordan Harbinger: Look, if you're signing up for credit cards and stuff, that's one thing, but getting a fake passport, you're a real serious criminal if you need a fake passport. You're fleeing bail. You're fleeing parole. You've done something [00:18:00] really bad where you need to leave the country, and you're not allowed to.

I mean, that's serious. You've done something r- really wrong.

David Maimon: It depends, because you can use the passports to onboard as well with a bank.

Jordan Harbinger: That's true. Isn't it just easier to get a fake driver's license- It is ... than a fake US passport?

David Maimon: It is, and it costs less, but folks are still trying to get the passport as well.

Jordan Harbinger: How much, a fake passport, how much is it going to- It,

David Maimon: it depends on what you're looking at. I mean, if you want to have the picture, do you want to have the actual document? I mean- I

Jordan Harbinger: want the real document in my hand so that I could maybe use it to cross a

David Maimon: border. It depends where you're getting the passport from.

You can get a passport for between 500 to $1,500, right? I mean, it's not that bad.

Jordan Harbinger: That is way cheaper than I thought.

David Maimon: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Are you kidding?

David Maimon: These are the prices that we're seeing on some of the markets out there.

Jordan Harbinger: So a really good fake US passport is $1,500? 15, yeah,

David Maimon: between 500 to $1,500. It really depends on the vendor.

It depends on the quality. It depends on where you're getting it from. The Chinese are amazing, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Sure, but holy cow, I really thought there'd be a zero on the end of those

David Maimon: numbers. No, no, not at all.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my goodness. Can you get [00:19:00] passports from other countries? Like, can I get, like, a, I don't know, Luxembourg-

David Maimon: You could, for sure.

I mean- ...

Jordan Harbinger: passport ...

David Maimon: I've been doing this for a long period of time. I talk about eras in some of my work. We started with the dark net, where there were markets out there where you have the Silk Road, as you mentioned, and essentially, the criminals were selling everything on those markets, like drugs and weapons and identities and passport and whatever.

But then after a few years, folks realized that law enforcement take down those markets, and so what they will need to do is they will just open their own shops. And so they started opening shops for passports, right? I don't know if I have it on this computer, but we actually have a lot of screenshots of those shops selling passports for all countries out there.

If I remember, back then, it was 800 euros because it was, I think, a European actor selling passports to any country that you can imagine, right? I mean, there was, like, a menu, and you could have just pick your passport, and then get it delivered right to your home.

Jordan Harbinger: We'll be right back after a quick word from the only people in today's episode not actively selling your Social Security number in a [00:20:00] Telegram group. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell and AMD.

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Jordan Harbinger: It would be kind of cool to have a novelty fake North Korean passport or diplomatic passport. I assume that it's a felony for me to even have a foreign country's fake passport for any purpose at all if it looks even remotely real.

David Maimon: I'm not sure about that. I mean, I'm sure that you're not allowed to use it.

Jordan Harbinger: Of course you're not allowed to use it. I don't know. It's too expensive to be a joke, but there is a world in which I want five passports that'll have [00:23:00] my face on them- Okay ... and then hide them around the house, and my wife finds them, and she's like, "Who are you?"

David Maimon: Make an, yeah, an interesting conversation-

Jordan Harbinger: That's right.

David Maimon: Yeah ... right around the table.

Jordan Harbinger: That would've been ... Oh, God. When I was dating, I would've loved to have had something like that. They're in a drawer and I'm like, "Hey, can you go grab a knife from the..." And then she's like, "Oh my God, he's a spy." But- I would definitely done

David Maimon: that ... you can have it with driver licenses.

You can have it with so many driver licenses, and the driver licenses that you get from China right now are like $200. It's nothing, man, and the quality is impeccable. Forget about the driver licenses we used in order to get into a bar when we were 16. No. They have the holograms on there. They have the watermark on them.

It's unbelievable. They're printed on the right card. It's just unbelievable.

Jordan Harbinger: I've got to look up the statute of limitations, but I'm going to assume that it's been up for a while. In the '90s, I used to make these fake driver's licenses because what I would do is I would go and get all of the expired licenses that I could, my own, my parents' old licenses, and it was Michigan, so they had this raised- laminate and it was hard and it said Michigan, it had the state seal on it.

What you could do [00:24:00] is on the back you could just cut it really slightly with a super sharp razor, pull the original license out. No one had Photoshop, no one had photo printers. So I had Photoshop and a photo printer, and I would just make an exact replica, change the birthdays and slide it back into the laminate, and then I would heat it up really, really hot, and the laminate would just sort of stick to the photo thing with this little cut in it that if you bent it, it would crack open, but nobody's going to do that to your license.

And so I remember showing it to my friend's dad who was a judge, and he was like, "Hang on." So he called his buddy over who was, like, the chief of police and he goes, "Check this out." And he was like, "Where did you get this?" And I go, "Probably shouldn't tell you this, but I made it." And he's like, "I'm taking this home.

Don't ever do that again." And I was like, "Okay." I w- didn't tell him I had made 20 already for my buddies.

David Maimon: So, so why did you do that? I'm curious.

Jordan Harbinger: Why? Just to see if I could do it. I didn't even use it for anything. My friends went and bought beer with it once. For me, all of this stuff is, "Can I do it?" Not, "Then I want to use it for something illegal."

I [00:25:00] shouldn't say I never used it. I think I went to Canada once and bought beer with it because I wasn't old enough to look 21, but I was old enough to look 19, which is the drinking age there. So I'd go to, like, Windsor and buy beer and be like, "It worked." It was, like, a dumb kid doing something. So I'm lucky because I definitely could have gotten arrested and they would've been like, "Oh, you're getting hit with a felony because you just manufactured 20 of these and now somebody went out there and did something real bad with it."

And so it was a dumb, idiotic kid thing to do, but I just wanted the challenge.

David Maimon: It was so easy to do it in the past, still easy to do it nowadays with all the tools you have, with the AIs, with the Photoshop you mentioned, and there are some other tools that are out there. If you engage and you have the balls to do that, then, uh, you can make a lot of money.

And so that's what we're seeing out there, and then the supply chain out there on Telegram, on the dark net, supports you selling and marketing your skills. Like, you know how to make those driver licenses. I need to open a new bank account because I want to deposit a stolen check. So let's do business. And so those skills now are very sought after, and there's an ecosystem which [00:26:00] will allow you to advertise your skill and make money out of it.

Unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of kids doing that, a lot of kids wanting to do that because I don't know if you've seen, you're seeing on Instagram and TikTok, a lot of folks are spreading. You know what spreading is? No. I mean, they spread money on their arms. So they take 100 bills, like stacks of 100 bills, and then they spread them all over their arms or their foot or whatever, right?

And everybody wants to do that. They don't really know that you can buy the fake notes. You know, and you shouldn't buy fake notes and use them, but they want to make money, and so they want in the ecosystem. They want to be able to get those driver licenses and open bank accounts and deposit those checks and engage in first-party fraud, which is essentially returning something to the store and get reimbursed for that.

It's just sad, right?

Jordan Harbinger: That's pathetic. I'm actually really glad that none of this stuff really existed in the sort of easy-to-access industrial form that it did in the '90s because I would've been super interested in that. I was cloning cell phones. You know what that is? I don't know if they do that anymore.

I don't know why you'd bother.

David Maimon: Well, you swap SIMs. That's what you do right now.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I [00:27:00] mean, this was, you had to program an analog phone with somebody else's serial number and phone number, and you had to get that by diving into a dumpster at a cell phone store, and then you could program the phone and make free phone calls.

You could also change the phones into test mode and listen to people's phone calls and stuff like that. That was cool. That was a technological challenge I really enjoyed. I would've been really interested in this, but it's probably really difficult, especially for a young person to go, "Cool, I just made a bunch of fake checks.

I should test one. Oh, it worked. Well, I'm done with that." That's what I did with my license, right? But if you just got $1,000 from a bank, why would I not get $100,000 from a bunch of banks?

David Maimon: 100%, and then unfortunately, folks are not really aware of the potential repercussions of

Jordan Harbinger: their activity. I would never think, "Oh, I'm going to get arrested and thrown in actual jail."

I would've been like, "Oh, I'll just give the money back."

David Maimon: How about the banks not banking you anymore and you not being able to get... That's a, you know, consequence. I

Jordan Harbinger: never thought about that. They, so banks b- yeah, I guess it makes sense. Banks ban people for life?

David Maimon: If they see that you engage in first-party fraud, they don't want to do business with you.

Jordan Harbinger: You know, I never thought about that.

David Maimon: Now, you have a lot of banks in this country for sure. I don't think they [00:28:00] share information, so banks will not tell the other banks that this guy was engaged. You're taking potential responsibility, right, of folks not wanting to work with you.

Jordan Harbinger: God, what do you do if you're 17 or 18 and you do that and then you're 38 and you're like, "Hey, I've been a lawyer for 12 years.

Can I get a bank account?" Do they change their mind at all? Is this like too bad, pal?

David Maimon: That's a great question, right? I mean, I don't, I don't know the answer for that, but you don't want to be in that position. Folks needs to understand the consequence of their behavior. We were all kids, but I don't think many of us were involved in fraud.

I think that we're seeing more and more kids now wanting in, in the fraud ecosystem because it's easy money. It's really easy money.

Jordan Harbinger: It's easy money. Man, I would imagine some of the stuff that companies you know are working on, if they're using AI to create fraud, they're going to use AI to crack down on it and, I would imagine.

David Maimon: But the question is whether that is the answer, right? Whether you need to fight fire with more fire.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I don't

David Maimon: know. May- maybe not, right?

Jordan Harbinger: We'll see. Tell me about Medicare fraud. This is identity theft at its core, right? They're just pretending to be a, a person eligible for Medicare.

David Maimon: Well, it depends, right?

I [00:29:00] mean, so Medicare is really interesting because you can create fake companies And then start taking folks' identities, stealing identities, or even sort of work with people and then, uh, essentially charge the government with services you never really provided. So this is essentially what Medicare fraud is.

Medicare, Medicaid.

Jordan Harbinger: Is this what happens when there's a couple older people in my family and they'll say, "I got a bill for this thing," and we're like, "Oh, did she just forget she had that procedure because she's 89?"

David Maimon: Unfortunately, yeah, we see a lot of it as we actually see people selling victims' identities along with their Medicaid and Medicare numbers for those companies to charge them.

A- and I had a conversation with someone over that offering to sell Medicaid numbers for folks who live in Florida, for f- Floridians, for $10 an identity. So you get the Social Security number, date of birth, address, and the Medicaid number for $10. And if you buy in bulk, you can get a really good price.

They're willing to give you $7 an identity. So you take all those identities, and then you essentially charge them, right? I mean, you, you charge the government with providing services to them, sending [00:30:00] medical equipment to these individuals. Obviously, it never happened, and so that's where you start to see a lot of the victims complaining about getting all those bills, right, and all those unfamiliar charges on their statement.

That is essentially what Medicare... And I can tell you that I travel around the country, try to find those facilities, and often case, a couple of months ago, I was in Marina del Rey.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, in Ca- in LA, basically.

David Maimon: So there was supposed to be, like, a facility, and we know for sure they're charged the government the last five years or so.

I went there. There was nothing there. There was just a building. There was a FedEx Office. I went into the FedEx Office, asked, "Are you familiar with this company?" And they said no. And you would expect a company that charges $17 million to the government should get some mail, right, from FedEx, right, that is right across the street.

Nobody knew what I was talking about. Went into the leasing office. Nobody really even wanted to answer, right? Of course, there's no-- This is a residential building. There's no medical sort of facility here. So $17 million for a non-existent business in Marina del [00:31:00] Rey, and this is just one business. Traveling across the country, Florida, Ohio, uh, we try to track those businesses, and I don't want to get in trouble, right, but for doing this with the bad guys.

So much Medicare fraud in this, in this country. It's just a shame.

Jordan Harbinger: And so they're making a lot of money doing this because this is $17 million, one fake business. Why not have 20 fake businesses?

David Maimon: That's right, and that's what, that's what they're doing. Yeah, that's essentially what they're doing. I hope now there will be more scrutiny.

I know that there's more scrutiny right now on Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Hopefully, that will continue, and we'll be able to flag more of it, and we'll be able to prevent more of it because at the end of the day, this is our money.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

David Maimon: Taxpayers' money. That's the thing. It needs to go to real people, not real businesses and not completely bogus organizations.

Jordan Harbinger: What's the scale of this? Tens of billions?

David Maimon: We're talking about billions of dollars,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah, for sure. So you could do something with that money. You could do a lot of things

David Maimon: with that money. Oh, my gosh,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah. And they get this information I assume the Medicaid, the Social Security, this is data breach stuff, right?

This is when, "Oh, such and such company got hacked," and you go, "I don't use Equifax." Yes, you [00:32:00] do, and your info is in there. And oh, they lost how many identities? 350,000. Oh, okay. Well, what are the odds that's me? That's a lot, but it's not a lot, right? Okay, whatever. No, that's 350,000 fake Medicare patients that they can use to feed this business for a decade from now.

David Maimon: So you definitely have the data coming from data breaches, but if you look at some of the scams going on right now, they're trying to collect those numbers and those identities with regular scams. So I will send you a postcard to your, uh, home, and I will let you know that something happened with your Medicaid service, you need to enroll from scratch, and then I will send you to a website or send you a text to sort of enroll, and then you will provide me all the information.

So it's not only a data breach- That

Jordan Harbinger: would totally work on me if I got a postcard. I feel like I would fall for that.

David Maimon: And we have a lot of examples for that. Postcards coming from Medicare or Medicaid, where you have to go to a specific website or talk to a specific person to provide our information in order to make sure that you're still eligible for benefits.

You immediately call. You want to make sure that you're still eligible. You give away all your information, and now- Feel like I've got to text my parents right now

And now [00:33:00] someone has all your information.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm literally looking for my phone to text my parents right now. "Hey, don't do anything like..." Luckily, my dad's always like, "Hey, can you help me do this?

I've got to go to this website and do this thing." And there have been a couple of times where we're like, "That does not sound like something you need to do." My dad's gotten scammed before. The printer stopped working, which is a old person's worst nightmare, because they, they had no idea how to hook this thing back up, especially if it's wireless.

David Maimon: I don't know how to, uh, bring it back up either. I guess I'm old. He, maybe.

Jordan Harbinger: So he Googles HP printer support, and the first result in Google was a scam. It was an ad bought by a company. He calls them. They're like, "You need to install this thing, TeamViewer, on your computer." He does it. Then he's like, "What are you doing?"

And the guy's like, "Oh, I'm looking for printer drivers." And my dad ripped the cord of the computer out of the wall, because he finally was like, "Wait a minute." And then he took the computer to Apple, who basically locked it down because he, they're like, "We're going to get rid of TeamViewer and all this remote access stuff that they had you set up."

But I had to change my bank passwords, and he had to change his bank passwords because it's like the [00:34:00] guy was probably looking for a note file where you keep your passwords or something like that to steal your money. And my dad was like, "I just don't understand how the first result in Google was a scam."

And I'm like, "That's because Google doesn't give a crap if an advertiser is a scam company. They just don't. They don't police this."

David Maimon: It's all around us, and the fraudsters are clever. They're nimble. They adjust quickly, and they take advantage of vulnerabilities and opportunities, and it's all over the place.

That's why I think it's extremely important to study fraud and expose those fraudulent activities that these guys are involved in.

Jordan Harbinger: It's tough to fight it, right? Because my dad goes, "All right. Next time I talk to a person who has that accent on the phone, I'm going to know it's a scam." And I'm like, "Dad, you can't say that every person with a Filipino or Indian accent on the support line is a scammer because that's every single person on every single support line at every company in America."

David Maimon: But once you instill this suspicion in people- Now he's suspicious of a lot of things. Yeah ... now it's so you can ask questions. Once people are more vigilant about that, they look around and look for the signals, and then they [00:35:00] will disconnect, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Now he just asks us, "Is this how you do that?" And I'm like, "That is good."

David Maimon: And that's amazing.

Jordan Harbinger: How often do these guys get caught doing this fake businesses or the Medicare fraud? Because it's just got to be so hard to police this kind of thing.

David Maimon: Part of the problem, right? The probability of detection and punishment is so damn low, and the criminals know that, and they continue to do it.

That's part of the problem, unfortunately.

Jordan Harbinger: I feel bad for the scam victims. I mean, obviously we're losing tax dollars, but I really feel bad for the people whose identities get stolen. There was a segment you were on that I watched where, I don't know, it was like a Dutch guy who lives in the Netherlands, and he, I think he went to college here or something in the United States, and it screwed up his credit score.

He flew back here to try to straighten things out because otherwise he can never come back here without getting probably arrested for whatever happened. So he has to come back, maybe retain a lawyer, go straighten things out with banks, and he's like, "This is not something I wanted to spend money and time and mental health doing, but I want to be able to visit people in the United States at some point in my life and not have a criminal [00:36:00] record or whatever.

David Maimon: But think about our kids. You know, I, I have like a 19 years old, and if someone takes her Social Security number and starts using it, she will not know till she's, what, 25?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, she's going to try to buy a car and they're going to be like, "What about the last five cars you defaulted on?"

David Maimon: Think about the consequences for her, right?

Or, and, and so we hear of many kids like my daughter whom their identity being stolen and being used in the context of bust out operations, meaning- What's

Jordan Harbinger: that?

David Maimon: So bust out is when you have someone's identity, you open a bank account, then you apply for credit, and then you accumulate more and more credit until you get to the maximum credit, and then you simply run away with $100,000.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

David Maimon: Once you do that, someone will have to pay the bill, usually the banks, but they will first reach out to the real people and ask them, "Is this you? Why aren't you paying the loan you just took from us?" And that obviously will have an impact on their credit score, and it's a big deal, right? And it takes years for these guys to recover from this event.

So we're talking about formerly legal immigrants, we're talking about adolescents and youth, we're talking about children. Think about it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:00] Yeah.

David Maimon: New- newborn.

Jordan Harbinger: You've got to lock your kid's credit with the credit bureaus, right?

David Maimon: As soon as they get born. That's what we're seeing right now because one of the things that I'm seeing on the dark net is infants' Social Security numbers being offered for sale.

Walk yourself through that process, man. Infants. So you have-

Jordan Harbinger: But it's a good one because if you don't want to be discovered for a decade and change, buy a baby's credit sentiment.

David Maimon: 100%. It's a dormant identity. You sit on it, and I have some really cool story to tell about this. It's still very early stages and we investigate, but we know of criminals using those babies' identities for a long period of time.

It's mind-boggling how much money you can steal. You can build a whole life around those identities, and nobody will know, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Former show guest Jack Barsky, he's a former Soviet spy, and one of the ways that he pretended to be an American was he just found a dead kid's identity. I think the KGB did it for him, but he found a dead kid's identity and got documents and basically became the adult version of this baby that died around the time that he was actually born.

So it was approximately the same [00:38:00] age, and he just said, "Yeah." I mean, and, and the baby was Jack Barsky. The guy's real name is, he's got a German name. He just became this fake dead bo- And he still uses that name, which is a little creepy actually, now that I think

David Maimon: about it. Right. Unfortunately, folks are definitely using those babies' identities, and they live their whole life with those identities.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Wow. Every time I cover stuff like this, whether it's fraud or rampant organized shoplifting, somebody in the comments inevitably says, "Who cares? It's a big company. The bank eventually pays for it. You're mildly inconvenienced. The corporations don't care about us. Why should we care about them?" I would love for you to respond to these idiots.

David Maimon: Yeah. Eventually, we will pay the bill, right? I mean, because it doesn't really matter if we're dealing with the banks or a retailer, if they're losing money, they don't want to lose all this money. They will roll the expenses on us. So we definitely want to make sure that they're not losing money in order for us not to lose money.

Jordan Harbinger: People complain about the prices going up. Yeah, when you have thousands of dollars in fraud every single day, they just raise the price on the goods that honest people pay for so that they can stay in business.

David Maimon: And [00:39:00] also, think about friction, right? I mean, uh, criminals or the fraudsters who, at the end of the day, make our lives, the normative people life, more complicated with the banks. Because if the banks or the retailers do not trust us, they will make, you know, a lot of obstacles to get things from them.

Jordan Harbinger: This is why I've got to fricking wait and push a button to get deodorant at CVS because some idiot stole all of it for the last-

David Maimon: Exactly ... six years,

and now I've got to have a permission

David Maimon: slip to get it.

So they ruin it for everyone.

Jordan Harbinger: Before we continue spelunking through this fraud swamp, I guess you don't really spelunk in swamps, don't at me on that, let's hear from the brands keeping this show free legally, which is apparently an important distinction today. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Marathon.

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David Maimon: Now, back to David Maimon.

Jordan Harbinger: I guess the clearest example is TSA. I used to be able to walk through a metal detector to make sure I didn't have a gun on an airplane, and that was it.

Now I've got to take off my shoes and do all this crazy stuff and be there an hour early because they have to have security for the- Yeah ... .0001% of people who want to blow up a plane. Same thing with fraud. The reason we even have all of this nonsense, this tax on our time, sanity, and funds, is because of this exact thing.

David Maimon: That's exactly right, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: So fraud is an industry now and not a crime, and they're not [00:42:00] lone hackers, right? It's a supply chain looking at it. So it's identity thieves, then there's document forgers to give me fake documents for that identity, then maybe, I don't know, somebody who presents well enough to go open an account, and they open accounts all day, and then, I don't know, what, money launderers or something thereafter?

The roles seem like they're specialized, at least looking at the telegram and the, the other things like that.

David Maimon: Yeah, so you definitely have the suppliers. You have the hackers who will get you all the identities. We're talking about an identity theft supply chain, right? Identity theft and synthetic identities.

Synthetic identities are completely bogus identities. So we're not talking about babies or real people identities. We're talking about me coming up with a completely new identity, bogus identity, and using it to create bank accounts, get credit score, take loans.

Jordan Harbinger: Why not just steal a real identity if it exists and it's so easy?

David Maimon: You can definitely do that as well. With synthetic identities, though, you have more leverage. No, you're not competing with anyone else on the identity. It's just you. And so if I- I see ... steal your identity, then both you and I are using the [00:43:00] identity, so I may be maxing. You may be locking your credit score, right, your credit lines, and I won't be able to take any loans under your name.

With the synthetic identities, I'm controlling it. So I will build the identity in such a way that will allow me to open a bank account. I

Jordan Harbinger: see. So this is a fully backstop-

David Maimon: Completely, exactly. Okay. And that will lead to the bust out. And so when we talk about a supply chain, we know there are suppliers of both the stolen and synthetic identities.

We know that there are a lot of producers out there who will help you with the documents, and we talked about the documents a little bit. But not only the driver licenses and the passport, we're talking about utility bills. We're talking about if you don't want to use your face, we will be able to find someone who will be willing to give away their face for you to use when you onboard with the bank.

Now, with AI, you don't even need that because you just create the faces out of scratch, and the producers will help you with that as well. But you definitely have that service. So then you have the distributors, folks out there on Telegram, on dark net selling the service, selling the identity, helping [00:44:00] you getting the credit score you really need in order to take the loan.

And then customers all over the place, right? I mean, so the supply chain is out there, is available, fairly easy to access on Telegram. The dark net is very simple. I know folks don't like when I say that, but all you have to have is just Tor browser on your computer And then know the right URL, you can get, uh, some of those documents.

Jordan Harbinger: And you get the URL, well, I don't know, Google or Telegram? From Google,

David Maimon: yeah. Oh, wow. You just- There's a website called TorTaxi.

Jack Barsky: TorTaxi?

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

David Maimon: And TorTaxi will give you all the names and URLs of all the live markets. So all you have to do is just copy from Google, paste on Tor, and then get to the market.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow, so it's as simple as pasting from one browser to another.

David Maimon: 100%. Oh

Jordan Harbinger: my

David Maimon: gosh. That's exactly what it is.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow, yeah. TorTaxi, yeah.

David Maimon: TorTaxi, right? Access to all the markets, all the live markets.

Jordan Harbinger: That's where you can buy drugs, I assume.

David Maimon: Yes. Then you have some of the forums. A lot of hackers and folks who are interested in hacking will be on the forums, but a lot of fraudsters will be there as [00:45:00] well.

XSS is a Russian one. All you have to do is just copy and paste to the Tor.

Jordan Harbinger: Can we look at Drug Hub? Everybody knows what drugs are.

David Maimon: Yeah, let's see. Yeah. All right, let's go here. So now we're using Tor.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Wow, and you just, boom, paste

David Maimon: in. All right, just paste it. Now let's see what we get And the thing with Tor is that it's slow.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's slow, yeah.

David Maimon: Very slow.

Jordan Harbinger: Because it's encrypted, right?

David Maimon: It's encrypted. It's encrypted, and the encryption takes time, right? And it runs it through its different algorithms of-

Jordan Harbinger: So the way Tor works, can you give us, like, a ten-second overview of Tor and why it works? It's not just a special web browser, it's a special way of looking at the internet.

David Maimon: Right, I mean, it's a special way to communicate with server, right? I mean, so usually on the regular internet, your computer will connect to a server, right? I mean, and, uh, the traffic will be encrypted, but people will know where you're communicating from and where you're communicating to. In Tor, it's very difficult to tell, and that's why you have a- an increased level of anonymity.

That's why the criminals really like, uh, yeah, using this website for their operation. [00:46:00]

Jordan Harbinger: And I know people are going to say, "Why do internet service providers allow Tor to be used?" And the answer is Tor was invented, what, by the US Navy?

David Maimon: Yes, it was, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: And the reason was so that they could use it, correct?

David Maimon: In order to make sure that the traffic is not being exposed, and we have special agents here, we need to allow everybody to sort of use it.

Jordan Harbinger: So the more traffic that is on Tor, the harder it is that somebody on their, under their watch is using it-

David Maimon: 100%, yeah ...

Jordan Harbinger: to talk to the CIA or whatever.

David Maimon: Let's look at BlackBat. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: BlackBat.

David Maimon: We have it ready. So BlackBat is, uh, one of those websites which allow you to actually buy, right, identities and bank accounts, and we can just browse through what we have here.

So what are you in the mood for, man? What do you want to buy?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, let's see. Let me get a fake identity, for sure.

David Maimon: Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: And probably a bank account that already has money in it so I don't look like a broke-ass loser.

David Maimon: So in that sense, to be we need to be clear with respect to whether you want someone real bank account, like a compromised bank account, because you can get that, or you can get a bank account someone created and there's some money in it for the bank account to be used as a drop account, so we're sort of a mule [00:47:00] account.

So let's start with, you said driver licenses, right? Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah, why not? Or a passport if it's just as easy. I want to see if I can get a foreign passport, land borders without getting caught.

David Maimon: This is one of the things I really wanted to do, you know? Like, I wanted to buy a passport, and then hopefully with TSA permission or DHS permission, try and figure out whether they will be able to flag it.

Jordan Harbinger: That was one of my questions is, look, I assume that when I have to scan it, it goes into a database and goes, "This is not a real passport," but Does it do that or does it go, "This number, it passes the checksum that's in our computer, just let the guy go"?

David Maimon: It's a great question. We don't have the answer to that.

Jordan Harbinger: Remember old credit cards? You could type it into a machine and it, if it didn't have the internet, it would just say, "This is a valid number because it's formatted properly." So that's what they did in the '90s, right? You'd go buy a pizza and they would go, "This is real." And then they'd find out on Friday when they called the bank and reconciled all the numbers manually that that one was not real, but they didn't find out for five or seven days.

I think it was called a checksum. It was like, do the numbers do something and algorithmically that [00:48:00] makes sense? Yeah. And if so, this is a real number.

David Maimon: I agree. So there are ways to discover that you're dealing with a fake passport, but I want to see whether folks actually are doing this. I think it'll be extremely interesting to-

Jordan Harbinger: Same

David Maimon: red team it.

Jordan Harbinger: Because what happens if you go, "Hey, this won't scan," and they go, "Oh, you know what? It's bent." "Oh, okay.

David Maimon: Go ahead." I want to see what happens.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I would love to try that.

David Maimon: So here, I mean, here you see driver licenses, ID plus passport, and so you can get all that for $150, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Wait, hold on. What am I getting?

Bulk documents-

David Maimon: You're getting driver license plus ID plus passport front or some both side.

Jordan Harbinger: Digital images thereof. Okay.

David Maimon: You get those for $150. What

Jordan Harbinger: about printed documents that look re- legit, like forgeries? Maybe I'm no slouch and I'm an international drug dealer. I can afford to pay 20 grand for a really good passport.

David Maimon: But you don't need to pay 20 grand.

Jordan Harbinger: That's what's shocking to me, is that it's-

David Maimon: You don't need to pay- ... a 10th of

Jordan Harbinger: the price ... you don't need to pay that much money. That to me just

David Maimon: blows my mind. Yeah. So let's look at bank accounts, right? We talked about bank accounts. Okay, so I mean, maybe you want to [00:49:00] describe what you're seeing here.

Yeah, so- Because it's very intuitive. I mean, you don't have to be an expert

Jordan Harbinger: It is. No, this is not something where I'm reading something that looks like Greek, right? I'm still on BlackBet. They're advertising their Telegram channel where you can probably get tech support or whatever. And what's really funny is at the top it says, "Okay, banks with online access, OctoSession," that probably means some kind of security protocol.

And it says, "Important: To be eligible for a refund due to an invalid account, you must provide a continuous video recording from the moment of purchase to the moment of logging into the account. Without this video, no refund will be issued." So basically they're offering, like, a money-back guarantee if the thing doesn't work.

You have a refund

David Maimon: if it doesn't work.

Jordan Harbinger: They're like, "Hey, look, we might be scamming for a living, but we're not scamming you."

David Maimon: It's all about customer service.

Jordan Harbinger: So why do they want a continuous video? To make sure that you didn't give the account to someone else?

David Maimon: To make sure that you purchase it, right? Then you're actually sort of trying to log in, right?

And that it's actually you doing this.

Jordan Harbinger: I see, okay.

David Maimon: And so if you, if you, if we scroll down, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, look, first result, Bank of America, balance, sorry, $545. I don't [00:50:00] know what extra is. It's some kind of URL.

David Maimon: I'm going to show you what an extra means. So you can just open it.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

David Maimon: And then maybe you want to-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and then it says, "Bank of America Business Online Access Octo Browser Session With Cookies."

David Maimon: And then when it was added, right? When it was added. And then you can see-

Jordan Harbinger: Today ...

David Maimon: and then you see the price.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, in the cart, 56 bucks.

David Maimon: And then if we look at the extra, this is the link we just clicked on, and you see, you actually see the compromised bank account.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, okay. So that's just to prove that it exists and you- That

David Maimon: prove that, yeah, you actually have access.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

David Maimon: You can take control.

Jordan Harbinger: And what does it mean, OctoSession with cookies? What is that?

David Maimon: It's essentially the actual sort of remote desktop protocol that will allow you to connect to the bank account from the victim's computers.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, so they're going to give you a way to make it look like you're connected using a different browser.

Bypass

David Maimon: security.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, okay. Because otherwise it's going to try and text the person. So it just makes it look like you're logging in from a verified browser.

David Maimon: That's my understanding of this, right?

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Geez, I can't even do that on my own browser with my own accounts. You

David Maimon: don't need to, right? Text me. Because, again, it comes with the cookies, right?

And we all see

Jordan Harbinger: it. Oh my [00:51:00] gosh. And then there's Chase. I mean, as we scroll down... And these are all, like, 50 bucks.

David Maimon: Well, I mean, it really depends on the balance. I mean, you see here-

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see ...

David Maimon: price of the accounts are higher.

Jordan Harbinger: Why is that higher?

David Maimon: The balance on the account will be higher, right? I mean-

Jordan Harbinger: It's 8,204.

So wait a minute. If I'm logging into a bank account that has an $8,000 balance, but I bought it for $500, can I just drain these all day and make money, or is that

David Maimon: tricky? It's a good question. If you know what you're doing, then yes, right? I mean, you need to be very careful about what you do. So you're not going to drain the $8,000 immediately, right?

You need to be very strategic about it. You need to look at the spending patterns on the account, and then you need to insert spending that will be similar to what you're seeing out there. And then, yeah, you'll, I mean, maybe not drain it completely, but use it for all kind of purposes, right? I don't think that you'll be able to drain it, because that will raise a huge red flag.

You're going to use it for all kind of purposes. You will start paying your electric bill. You will start sending some money to, I don't know, friends, buy gift cards, Zelle some money to people. But you're not going to drain all [00:52:00] $8,000 immediately.

Jordan Harbinger: But if I'm paying 500 bucks, if I remove 500 bucks from it using Zelle to a friend of mine who's a money mule, it, it's free.

David Maimon: You will be able to do that if... But again, there's high probability that the bank will be flagging you if you do that immediately. You need to be strategic about this.

Jordan Harbinger: I don't have the patience for this.

David Maimon: It really depends how much you invest and how much you get. The prices vary.

Jordan Harbinger: What is lookup info? Does that mean I can find information about a person?

David Maimon: About the person, yeah. Whoa. That individual, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Can people find information about me using this, or

David Maimon: anyone? So lookup info, it, it will give you information about the victim, the actual victim. If someone took over your bank account- Oh,

Jordan Harbinger: I see. I see. Oh ...

David Maimon: and they will be able to look information about you.

Jordan Harbinger: What is Jabber? Email and Jabber.

David Maimon: Jabber is like a text message application.

Jordan Harbinger: I see, okay. So you can contact them using-

David Maimon: Over Jabber, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Okay

David Maimon: And see, that's part of the reason why people don't like working with the dark net and they like Telegram instead, because it's just so damn slow.

Jordan Harbinger: This is quite so.

Telegram, you just, what? You DM the person whose channel you're in and say like, "Hey, I'm interested in a pack of checks"?

David Maimon: Yeah. And it's easy to scroll here. [00:53:00] I'm going to show you. I mean, maybe after we've done that I'll show you Telegram. I don't know if you've seen Telegram.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah, I use Telegram. Not for this obviously.

David Maimon: But have you seen illicit commodities being offered for sale?

Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah, usually the stuff I've used Telegram for that would be considered, not illicit really, but I was following Hamas in there when they were- Okay. Yeah ... posted there. That's not

David Maimon: illegal.

Jordan Harbinger: That's not illegal. I'll show

David Maimon: you

Jordan Harbinger: some- They put their uncensored footage in there. Because I was like, I want to see if this is really is real. This was like October 8 or something. Yeah. I did that. But I've seen people selling things in there that are like credit cards or identities, but it was amateur hour. I mean, they were idiots from another country that were not professional.

David Maimon: So Telegram channels that we spend a lot of time in, you can buy drugs, you can buy weapons.

Uh, we see more and more of those channels where illicit commodities are being offered for sale being blocked, but still there's a lot going on.

Jordan Harbinger: People add me to stuff like this without my permission sometimes, thinking that I'm interested in-

David Maimon: I don't know if it's this that they, uh, they're adding you.

Jordan Harbinger: There's like investment scam ones that I get added to, but then there's other ones where as soon as I joined one that [00:54:00] was for, ugh, it was for some sort of like SIM card thing that was illegal that I was trying to check out and investigate, I got auto added to, "Hey, you want to launder small amounts of money?"

You know, it was stupid stuff- Yeah ... like check, kiting checks. It was just amateur nonsense where the people couldn't even spell. So have you

David Maimon: seen those checks in the past?

Jordan Harbinger: Not like the, what you're showing me right now. I'm looking at a check for 5,000 bucks that somebody had stolen.

David Maimon: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: These are corporate checks.

David Maimon: Yeah, and you see the dates on them, right? I

Jordan Harbinger: mean- Yeah, 1,800 bucks. It's a construction company. It's signed by somebody. I mean, this is a real, that's a real check.

David Maimon: It's a real check.

Jordan Harbinger: Yep. Iowa State Bank Construction LLC. I don't want to say the full name of the company because-

David Maimon: all these checks are being offered for sale, right?

Jordan Harbinger: So

David Maimon: you can

Jordan Harbinger: just buy the actual check?

David Maimon: Yeah.

Jack Barsky: We'll be right back after this because apparently fraud as a service has a better revenue

Jordan Harbinger: model than podcasting, and I refuse to let criminals out monetize me Our newsletter Wee Bit Wiser is making quite a splash. A lot of people [00:55:00] are angry and a lot of people are unhinged, but most of you are positive when you read this thing and you let me know by hitting reply.

It's an under two-minute read just about every Wednesday. It'll affect your psychology, your relationships, and your decisions, hopefully in a good way. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to check it out. It really is a great companion to the show.

David Maimon: Jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it.

Now for the rest of my conversation with David Maimon

Jordan Harbinger: So my dad, his tax check, his payment got stolen. It was 30,000 bucks. They took the check and they deposited it into Navy Federal Credit Union. And so my thought was, are these the dumbest criminals in the world? Because the name of course is attached to the Navy Federal Credit Union bank account.

David Maimon: Well, it depends, right? It really depends.

Jordan Harbinger: If it's a real person.

David Maimon: It depends on so many things, right? First of all, it depends whether they maybe found a victim, a scam victim, like a kid, and they told them, "Listen, help us here. Deposit this check in your bank account, right? We're going to give you $200 just for that.

Send us the rest of the money."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

David Maimon: If that's the case-

Jordan Harbinger: The kid's a victim

David Maimon: too ... you have two victims. You have [00:56:00] your father and then the kid. If they are using CPNs, and this is what we're looking at right now, right? I mean, we're looking at credit profile numbers. So this is what we're seeing here. These are the bogus identities, that they have credit reports.

You see the age of the fake people, see when it- they were added, and you see how much you can buy it. So if they use that, then they don't give a crap.

Jordan Harbinger: I just figured Navy Federal, don't you have to be an armed forces member to use that, or you can anybody-

David Maimon: Well, I mean, you can fake everything, right? I mean, it's not that big of a

Jordan Harbinger: deal, right?

He got his money back almost immediately. He was like, "How come they haven't got my taxes?" "Oh, it got deposited," and they were like, "Oh, boom, fraud." The credit union, I mean, it was deposited into his account that wasn't the IRS. Like, how do you deposit an IRS check- Yeah ... into a personal bank account? That one's on the credit union.

Come on, guys. Again,

David Maimon: I can't really comment on the credit union. I can tell you that this is very common and we're seeing this- Yeah ... all over the place. I mean, what, what we're looking at right now is a compromised account.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. This is KeyBank, some kind of free account, 6 grand in there. Says FDIC insured, available balance as of yesterday, $6,100.

David Maimon: And [00:57:00] they actually showed you-

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, it looks like on May 11th, the person deposited that in there.

David Maimon: So it seems something very similar to what we've just talked about, right? It seems like someone has used this bank account to deposit this check, right? And now they're bragging about the fact that they have the $6,000 and that it will run away with it.

So again, this is, uh, very popular on Telegram.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a nice fat check there, 14,000.

David Maimon: Yeah, and you see the date, right? I mean, it's all-

Jordan Harbinger: Person's handwriting needs work, yeah, but they're renovating their basement and wine cellar. Come on, Steven.

David Maimon: We see all that, right? I mean, and this is offered for

Jordan Harbinger: sale, right?

What, what, these are... So you can just buy that check?

David Maimon: Yeah, we can buy a check right now. I mean, we're not going to do that, obviously.

Jordan Harbinger: No, sir. We can buy, we can buy the check. Not from my kitchen.

David Maimon: Yeah. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: I really want to know if I can get a diplomatic passport and not just a regular passport because that's much harder to get, and also that's the kind of thing where you get pulled over in, I don't know, Panama, and you pull out your diplomatic passport and they just let you go without a bribe because they don't want any trouble.

David Maimon: Once you're on the right market, you can get whatever, uh, you want, right? This is really interesting. I mean, this [00:58:00] is Telegram. So this channel is a channel that helped recruit people to the scam compounds in Cambodia and, and China. I

Jordan Harbinger: see this. Yeah, that I was going to ask you about this. Have you seen

David Maimon: it?

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Yeah, I've seen similar. So this is global recruitment, high-paying job. It looks like that was what the Philippines flag up there? Oh, Laos, Thailand hiring. Oh, hiring Filipinos. Filipinos, yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah. So it is Philippines customer service staff, hours noon to midnight, four days off per month, half day part-time on Saturday, Sunday.

Salary options 1,000 plus 500 USD, whatever that means.

David Maimon: One-year contract. And then you have all these people wanting to get the job.

Jordan Harbinger: So she's interviewing for this position maybe? So she's from Pakistan, and she thinks she's interviewing for what now? I'm still confused about what do these women think they're applying for?

David Maimon: I think they're... I don't want to say that they know they're applying for the scam compound. The jobs that they're advertising are modeling, right?

Jordan Harbinger: That other one was customer service. Yeah, customer- This is a modeling gig.

David Maimon: Yeah. Th- they're all modeling gig. I mean, you just need to sit to a computer and talk to people.

That's the way they sell, and that's essentially what the scam compounds are doing, right?

Jordan Harbinger: I mean- I see. Anyone [00:59:00] HR agent who can arrange the above required... Because this is Chinese global recruitment, high-paying jobs. That immediately is scary.

David Maimon: Yep. Yeah, this is-

Jordan Harbinger: Dubai support services.

David Maimon: Yeah. So you see the location, Cambodia.

You see the salaries.

Jordan Harbinger: Hiring Indonesian male and female in Cambodia. Salary, work location, interested candidate. So that just screams, "We're going to lock you in a ex- scam compound for the next three years-" Yeah, unfo- uh, to the- "... scamming Bitcoin." Maybe to

David Maimon: us, right? '

Jordan Harbinger: Cause we know what this is. Yes, exactly, because- These people just see a job

David Maimon: So again, bank accounts, more bank accounts for sale, and this one, I mean, you see the balance, you see the Octa transfer, as we said earlier, login access.

You get the gender, you get the state where they live, date of birth.

Jordan Harbinger: No phone, yeah, no phone number.

David Maimon: And then you can even get a security question, which is really good,

Jordan Harbinger: right? That's great.

David Maimon: Right?

Jordan Harbinger: I suppose it's great if you're, that's what you- If you're in the market for it, right? Yeah, sure. Okay, so any sort of banks, any sort of checks, and then there's a lid depot where you can get fake license plates and everything like that.

There

David Maimon: you go. I mean, these are some driver licenses for sale if you want.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yeah.

David Maimon: And let's see what they do [01:00:00] here.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's showing that you can scan it. Wait, you can scan it?

David Maimon: That's what they say. Many of the driver licenses, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: But it doesn't show up in the computer as the actual-

David Maimon: I don't know what they show.

I've seen a lot of images and a lot of videos of these guys here just on

Jordan Harbinger: their phone with these- There's Donald Trump on a driver's, on Missouri driver's license.

David Maimon: Yeah. A lot of those driver licenses will scan. A lot of the passports will scan. I've seen a lot of the passports which are being scanned, and all the information of the individual on the computer, on, on the passport- I see

pops up on the computer.

Jordan Harbinger: So the biometric ID or whatever it's called works, the scan works, and it contains the data, but it won't necessarily check out if they use a database-

David Maimon: Right ...

Jordan Harbinger: to reconcile. It's,

David Maimon: yeah, it scan and it will show up the names, and that's old already. I mean, we're talking about 2023 we've seen those videos, right?

I mean, so- Wow ... yeah. So we've seen the driver licenses. So these are the drop bank accounts we were talking about. So the drop bank accounts, I'm taking someone else's identity or a bogus identity. I go to the bank, I open the bank account, and then now I have a drop account, like a mule account to sell. And so if you see [01:01:00] what, you know, the picture right now is a smartphone with a zero balance on the bank account that is open on it, and then a credit card or debit card.

Jordan Harbinger: A debit card, yeah.

David Maimon: Plastic card, and, and essentially the criminals are selling that for you to use in your fraudulent operations. So you have a stolen check And you want to deposit a stolen check, you have an account to deposit it in.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

David Maimon: That's what they're selling here. And of course, you're getting the identity, you're getting sometimes even the phone they used to open the bank account with.

That's what you're seeing on screen right now.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So I just buy a bunch of bank accounts, a bunch of cards that to go along with it. Yep. I buy a bunch of stolen checks. I deposit stolen checks in several of the accounts. I wait for a few of them to clear, I withdraw that money, and then I just vanish.

David Maimon: It's very simplistic way to do it. I mean, you have to sit on those bank accounts a little bit because you need to know when the bank will have less scrutiny on those bank accounts. You will wait on them, and then you will buy the checks, deposit, and disappear.

Jordan Harbinger: So maybe you use it for a few weeks or a few months to, like, I don't know, buy packs of gum and ride the subway?

David Maimon: So this guy, yeah, exactly. 100%. Here they're showing you the identity of the [01:02:00] person that they used to open the bank account with.

Jordan Harbinger: David Smile.

David Maimon: Yeah. And we see it on the bank account website.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see. That's why they show the website. Yeah, just to show, like, "Hey, this is real."

David Maimon: Some more driver licenses.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

David Maimon: These are cloned.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yeah, so that it looks real.

David Maimon: Yeah, so-

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my goodness Oh, yeah

David Maimon: This is a passport, right? I mean, it's... Or a

Jordan Harbinger: driver's license.

David Maimon: What is it? Um,

Jordan Harbinger: real ID kind of, uh, identification document.

David Maimon: Yeah. Oh, is it New York

Jordan Harbinger: State? New York driver's license. Oh, see, I see. There's no photo on it. Right. That's just the blank.

David Maimon: That's right.

Jordan Harbinger: And it, so it just shows you how it looks on their ID. But you see it's the right

David Maimon: piece of material.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

David Maimon: You just need to print on it, right?

Jordan Harbinger: That's got to be Chinese, because who's making something that advanced here? That's an industrial project to make those kinds of blanks. So the detection gap on this, how far in advance are fraudsters?

Are they 12 months ahead of defenses, six months ahead of defenses, five years ahead of defenses?

David Maimon: Ve- very difficult to say. I mean, I think that usually they're 10 steps ahead of us. The industry is constantly trying to keep up with these guys. The problem is that these guys are smart, and then they find [01:03:00] vulnerabilities in the new technology and keep going.

So very difficult for me to quantify the exact time gap. Some people say 18 months, other people say two years. Other expert believe we're a year. But it really depends on the actor. If you're talking to a nation state, for example, who's trying to defraud us, then the gap is huge there, right? But if you're looking at someone from New Jersey right now selling titles, I don't know, like, uh, whether we can't really keep up with that gap quite quickly.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you know Christo Grozev? Does that name ring a bell? No. From Bellingcat. So basically he uncovered this Russian spy ring because he looked at the passports that they had, and he ran the numbers, and they were all part of the same series. So Russia was basically creating these fake passports, but they all had consecutive numbers, something along those lines, and I just thought, "Wow, what a move."

But at the end of the day, they were making real identities for these people, but they just screwed up the numbering and made it really obvious.

David Maimon: This will be yeah-

Jordan Harbinger: They won't do that again ...

David Maimon: the oddball. Exactly. Yeah, they won't do that again. I mean, so fraudsters are really, really sophisticated at this point, and the nation state, who are essentially using the same [01:04:00] ecosystem I'm showing you right now.

You have all those services being offered out there. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, so to speaking.

Jordan Harbinger: Look, banks use static checks, fragmented data. Not just banks, any institution, and fraudsters, obviously, they're using coordinated networks and reused infrastructure, and the systems are just going to detect the fraud after the damage is done.

David Maimon: There are a lot of solutions out there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

David Maimon: We just need to make sure that we keep up with the fraudsters because they're constantly advancing. They're using AI, they're using machine learning. They know what they're doing, and we need to make sure that we are keeping up with them.

Jordan Harbinger: Is it a tech problem or an incentives problem for these institutions to clamp down on this stuff?

David Maimon: Again, I mean, you're, you're talking to humans, right? I mean, and, and the fraudsters really know what they're doing, and the tech, it takes time to come up with better technology quite quickly. So that's a huge challenge. We're talking about bureaucracy in, in those, uh, organizations as well. It takes time to deploy and implement.

The criminals are very fast and they're agile, and once you disrupt them, they will be able to come up at you from a different angle. It's a very difficult game to play.

Jordan Harbinger: It is, yeah. Something that's important to note is it's [01:05:00] not just grandma getting scammed and targeted now, right? Because young people can participate unknowingly because of social engineering.

But you mentioned before, if they found a victim at Navy Federal and they said, "Hey, man, deposit this check and we'll give you 200 bucks." You hear about this online, like a kid thinks he's talking to a girl, he sends her a nude. She turns out to be a dude who goes, "Hey, look, I'm going to expose these if you don't take this check and deposit it in your bank account.

That's all I want. I'll go away after that." And the kid freaks out and goes, "Fine. All I've got to do is deposit a check into the bank and then Zelle you 5,000 bucks? Fine, make it stop." So then they catch that kid, and then he just tells what happened because he's going to go to jail for check fraud, and then says, "Yeah, sorry, Mom, police, I got this guy who did this thing to me."

And then what are you going to do? The poor kid's a victim, too, and then the bank just eats that 30K.

David Maimon: Again, the fraudsters are very sophisticated. I mean, I can tell you one of the things that we're seeing right now, going back to, uh, online romance scam and the sort of new trend in online romance scam, I mean, folks are essentially hooking up with people online, like older folks online.

They look for a specific profile of individuals. [01:06:00] So they will look for individual with credit score of 750 and above. They will look for people who own homes with at least $50,000 to a million dollars in equity. Then they will team up with them, they will hook up with them on some of the dating apps, Facebook, Twitter, whatever.

They will build relationship with them. They will coerce them to open bank accounts using their own name, and then they will coerce them to take home equity lines loans and then funnel the money to those accounts. This is where we at right now. And so when you're talking about the victims, the journey there is just so sad. Because, I mean, they will be very patient. They know exactly what they're doing. The MO is very clear. They look for a specific victim to work, and at the end of the day, those individuals will be losing a lot of money. So you have the kids, you have the older folks, everybody is susceptible to this type of crime.

Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, so this is shifting from hackers stealing something by cracking your password to people being manipulated- Yeah ... and giving them a bunch of the money. What do you think is the most likely way somebody listening gets scammed in the next 12 months? Romance scam, [01:07:00] some kind of identity fraud. What do you think?

David Maimon: I think identity theft.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

David Maimon: I think that's the major thing that we're experiencing in our country. All our identities are out there. We hear about data breaches every day, and the criminals have access to it Now with agentic AI, they can bring it to the next level, so to speak, because you have all these identities.

All you have to do is just feed the identity in an agentic AI tool, and then the tool will allow you to simply create those bank accounts, create those social media accounts, and build a facade around them quite easily without you even doing anything. So that's what we're going to be looking at.

Jordan Harbinger: That is insane.

So what are three things people do each day that you think make them easy targets? Is there any sort of specific actions that people are taking or not taking that make them low-hanging fruit?

David Maimon: We're all out there, right? I mean, on, on our smartphone, on our, on our iPads, we're looking to connect. We're looking to consume things.

We're reading things that we're not really sure about, but then we're taking actions on them. I think one of the important thing people should do is just when they consume all the material, when they get the email, when they read something on the internet, they should pause a little bit, right? Think about what is it you [01:08:00] read.

Try to make sense out of it, and only then take an action. Our attention span is so short at this point, and we just want to go to click on things. That is one of the things that makes us extremely vulnerable to all these types of fraud I just discussed.

Jordan Harbinger: What's a behavior change maybe that can dramatically lower your risk?

Slow down, man.

David Maimon: Slow down. You know? And I'm not good at that. We need to slow down and think about things that we're getting over our mail. Does it make sense for us to click on this? Does it make sense for us

Jordan Harbinger: to sign- Yeah, just because you got a postcard, don't go to the website

David Maimon: on the postcard. Exactly, yeah.

I mean, everything, don't trust. In cybersecurity, this concept of zero trust, I think we should all try and adopt it in the context of fraud because fraudsters are out there, and they're trying to drain our wallets. They're doing a very good job, unfortunately, in, during the last five years. We need to slow down, right?

And think about what it is that we get. Don't click on stuff. Don't send stuff. Don't disclose your information. Be more aware of what's going on out there, and protect your identity.

Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned the agentic AI. Is this essentially a bot that can, what, open bank accounts for you, or- [01:09:00] Yeah. Okay.

David Maimon: Yeah. It's a very sophisticated bot.

Even nowadays, we can use agentic AI to do all kind of things for you. You can have the agentic AI call the bank and start negotiate your rates with them. You can have your agent do everything for you. In the context of my work as a professor and my students, we're able to show that you can Program those agentic AI to create accounts, to create bank accounts, to create retailer accounts fairly quickly.

You can pace the time and make sure that it's not like a bot which will just bombard the bank or the retailer with requests. I mean, you can pace it, you can just feed it with identities. If you're thinking about bogus identities, then you don't even need to feed any identity. You just tell the tool to create it and then build a facade around it.

We talked about it. When you have a synthetic identity, you want to make sure that the synthetic identity has some public record around it. So you want to have a Best Buy account, you want to have an Auto Depot account, you want to make sure that you have a tread line associated with that. It takes time to do that.

That's essentially what you buy when you buy the [01:10:00] identities online. The tool will be able to do that for you quite quickly and get it to the next level. So fascinating stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: It's not that we're getting hacked, it's that we're getting played really. Whether you know it or not, right, you're already out there.

David Maimon: Everything is out there for them to grab and work with.

Jordan Harbinger: So is there a point where verifying identity online just stops working? I mean, if you've got like a fake face and a fake voice and a fake backstop, how do you verify that somebody's real online? I was like-

David Maimon: That's a great question. I'm a sociologist in training.

My PhD is in sociology, and I remember at the time we're talking about Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, community and society. When we were a community, we all knew each other, and so when you went to the bank to try to get a loan or open a bank account, the banker knew who you were, right? I mean, so if you asked for a million dollar, right, so you know, come on.

Yeah, you toilet

Jordan Harbinger: papered my house in '97. Exactly. I'm not giving you a million, only half a million.

David Maimon: So they knew who you were. But now we're society, right? I mean, we can't know everyone, right? But we need to find a way to touch each other as many times as possible in order to verify our identities. [01:11:00] So solutions out there should have that in mind.

You need to have solution that take into consideration where you were, when did you apply to a specific bank account, with which telephone number, from which address, from which IP address have you tried to apply. You know, take into consideration all these historical signals before you actually upload all the driver licenses and the selfies and the liveness test, just to take a look at whether the information you're using, you know, to try and onboard is someone that we've seen in the past.

If it's not, if someone is using your identity from a telephone number we've never seen, it'll be like a huge red flag. So those solutions need to take into consideration those historical signals, and that's, in my mind, the way to verify folks' identities nowadays.

Jordan Harbinger: All right, so what's something that you personally do that most people would find paranoid, but you think it's justified?

David Maimon: I don't use the mail anymore.

Jordan Harbinger: At all?

David Maimon: At all,

Jordan Harbinger: man. Like, the postal mail?

David Maimon: Only UPS, uh, every now and then, and only if I need to ship things for some of the operations.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

David Maimon: But I, I don't use the mail [01:12:00] anymore simply because I

Jordan Harbinger: know- You just don't send anything in the mail?

David Maimon: I don't send checks to, uh, pay my bills, right?

And that is because I'm really paranoid about the mail theft. I

Jordan Harbinger: mean, looking at those stacks of checks, I will never use a check again. That's ridiculous. Like, there were thousands and thousands of checks in that one stack, that one image had, where the guy just said, "Hey, I'm selling checks."

David Maimon: 100%. I check my, uh, bank account quite often because of what I just showed you.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I bet. Me too. You know? I mean, how does that guy even steal that many checks? He has to work in a place where they collect them, or is he just running around Manhattan opening mailboxes?

David Maimon: It depends, right? Could be an insider having access to the behind the scenes and then getting all our envelopes, or they rob the mail carrier for the arrow key, which opens hundreds of mailboxes across the city, and then simply go at night with a car and simply collect the mail, and that's how you're going to get all these checks.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's just brazen as hell. Man, if someone ignores everything else that we have just said, what is the one thing that you would like them to remember?

David Maimon: I think that folks [01:13:00] need to be aware of the fact that their identities are out there, and they need to have protection. That's the most important thing that I want them to hear.

What kind of protection can we have, though? So folks needs to have an identity theft protection plan on their identities. Someone who's using your identity, there are companies out there which will allow you to-

Jordan Harbinger: Like LifeLock

David Maimon: kind of thing? Like LifeLock. Okay. Exactly, yeah. So make sure you have that. I think it's important for you to freeze your credit.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

David Maimon: That essentially means that folks will not be able to take new loans under your name. It doesn't mean that they will not be able to open new bank accounts, so it's important for you to al- also go to websites, Early Warning or ChexSystems, and ask for an annual report of all your bank accounts you have under your name just to see that you identify everything.

These are the major thing that I think folks needs to be aware of, and be vigilant because, again, our identities are out there, and the criminals are using our identities to engage in all kind of fraud. We need to make sure that we get the signals.

Jordan Harbinger: David Maimon, thank you so much. Really interesting/terrifying episode.

David Maimon: Thank you so much for having me, and I really appreciate you doing the homework.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yeah. No, that's

kind of

Jordan Harbinger: how- It's good ... that's kind of how this show goes,

David Maimon: man. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. [01:14:00]

Jordan Harbinger: If you're looking for another episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show to check out, here's a trailer of our interview with Jack Barsky, former KGB spy who posed as an American in a truer than life version of a Hollywood movie.

This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union, secretly becoming a real American. We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War, and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture.

Jack Barsky: I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport control, so for a young person, that really feels good because I never liked rules.

Jordan Harbinger: How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? I know they tried to call you home. Can you take us through that?

Jack Barsky: They called me back as an emergency departure.

They have done this in the past. They call back an agent, and as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are jailed or even executed. I was stalling the Soviets, and then one day [01:15:00] they send one of their resident agents, and he said to me, "You've got to come home, or else you're dead." It was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell them that I'm not returning.

I will not betray any secrets, and please give the money in my account to my German family.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Jack Barsky: End.

Jordan Harbinger: Tell us how you got caught because the story's just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past.

Jack Barsky: I was stopped on the other side of a toll gate. It was a state trooper. "Just like to check your license and registration, and could you step out of the car?"

I step out of the car, still not having a clue what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, somebody approaching me from the back. The fellow introduced himself. He says, "Joe Reilly, FBI," and he showed me this badge. "We would like to talk with you." The first question I asked, "Am I under arrest?" And the answer was, "No."

Then I said, "What took you so long?"

Jordan Harbinger: For more from Jack Barsky, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI and what happened [01:16:00] after that, check out episode 285 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Big thank you to Dr. David Maimon for taking us inside a fraud economy that is way more organized, scalable, and professionally disgusting than most people realize.

And by the way, y'all, I did actually get my fake passport, and wow, does this thing look real. I'd post a photo, but it's so realistic that just seems like a bad idea. I kind of feel the need to say that I may or may not be saying something fictional right now, and I'm not in possession of a fake US passport.

Anyway, it's complete with an AI video of me doing identity checks, moving my head and face around. This was all created based on photos of me, which means it can be made for anybody. The big takeaway here, you're probably not getting hacked by some genius super villain in a hoodie. You're getting played by systems designed to weaponize urgency, trust, fear, greed, loneliness, convenience.

Basically the entire human operating system. And the bad guys don't need to be brilliant anymore, really, at all. AI has lowered the bar. The dark web [01:17:00] sells everything they need: fake IDs, fake faces, fake voices, synthetic identities, fake businesses. Really, the whole criminal buffet is now self-serve. So protect your identity, freeze your credit, freeze your kids' credit, be suspicious of urgency.

Don't trust random links. Well, that's, that '90s called. They want their tips back. Verify through another channel, and remember, if somebody online is making you panic, rush, hide something, send money, or just confirm this one little code, you are not in a conversation. You are on the menu. All things Dr. David Maimon on the website in the show notes.

Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show on the deals page, jordanharbinger.com/deals. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, and this show is created in association with PodcastOne.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi, and it's occurred to me that a lot of them are remote, and many of them I've never met, and now I'm wondering if they're even real. We'll find out someday. [01:18:00] Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in the dark web, fraud, identity theft, or just cybercrime in general, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time