This week on Get Answers, we’re talking about the future of scams.

People spend hours talking about the latest developments in tech: whether it’s massive iPhone launches or breathless chat about the impact of AI, but there’s a trillion dollar industry that doesn’t get nearly as much attention for its constant innovation: fraud.

With the help of BBC Scam Interceptors' co-host Nick Stapleton, we give you the inside scoop of the latest developments in crime, helping you become better equipped to stay one step ahead of the scammers and protect your loved ones.

Sign up to our free Scam Alert newsletter & read our latest update on the most recent scams we've been made aware of here at Which?

Speaker 1 0:02

Hello, and welcome. I'm Harry kind. And I'm Lisa Webb sitting in for Grace Forrell this week. And this is Get Answers for living your best consumer life.

Lisa, lovely to have you here, listeners might recognize your lilting tones from representing which on TV and radio, but your day job is pretty cool, too.

Speaker 2 0:24

I think it is. Yeah. So by trade, I'm an editorial lawyer. So I work at Which? in the legal team, we do loads of stuff, I think people might be surprised to hear that we have lots and lots of companies who don't like what we say about them. And so I'm that sort of first line of defence against those companies. So I work really closely with our content and our research teams to make sure that everything we publish is defensible and accurate, which

Speaker 1 0:48

makes this podcast very easy to get sign off on it. We've got the legal right here in house. We are very lucky to have you. Thank you. Because this week on Get Answers. We're talking about the future of scams. People kind of spend hours talking about the latest developments in tech, whether it's a big iPhone launch or breathless chat about the impact of AI. But there's a trillion dollar industry that doesn't get nearly as much attention for its constant innovation, and that is fraud. Today, we're going to treat the scammers like their Steve Jobs or Bill Gates and give you the inside scoop of the latest developments in crime so that hopefully we're all a bit better equipped to stop them. And I can think of no one better to help with that than the brilliant Nick Stapleton by day, broadcaster and journalist, by night, he's the scourge of the scammer. You probably know him from BBC Scam Interceptors. Nick, welcome to the show.

Unknown Speaker 1:37

Hello, thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 1 1:39

You're very welcome. Thank you for joining us. Should we start with getting some of the rage out of the way we've actually just been talking while setting up about scammers about the victims that we've spoken to. And a lot of the nonsense out there about who are scam victims, any kind of rants you want to get off your chest about that.

Speaker 3 1:57

I've got a rant. Yes, I get really annoyed about the way the conversation around scam victims is framed in this country. So I think the most common response I see almost on social media or otherwise to the show, is people saying the exact phrase, I don't know how they could be so stupid. And this just annoys me endlessly. Because ultimately, a it's incredibly complacent, be it's victim blaming, and it's kind of the last bastion of acceptable victim blaming, I think the world of scams. I see that so often. And I just think, How can you be so complacent as to think that it's people being stupid that leads to this that is just absolutely not the case. And you would never do this? If it was someone being burgled. You wouldn't say oh, you How could you be so stupid as to get burgled? Why is it any different? Without

Speaker 1 2:45

saying you're asking for it? You are setting yourself up for a fail to say the only the stupid can be caught by a scam? Would you say that? You're unscalable? Lisa? No,

Speaker 2 2:55

not at all. And the thing is, I work with this on a daily basis. And I have come so close to getting scammed. It hasn't happened to me yet. But I'm always saying yeah, because there's always an opportunity, there's always a chance that will happen. But we speak to people all the time who have been scammed. And so often, it's people who I think ordinarily you wouldn't have expected and we've all got this idea in our heads of, oh, you know, it's going to be someone older, it's going to be someone who's not as tech savvy. And very often those are the people who like us, they get blamed for being the victim. But actually we see things like parents, those Hi Mum WhatsApp scams that we talk about so often, you know, you've got someone who might be in their 30s, that it's received WhatsApp, and very often what it is, it's about how much you're concentrating in that very moment in those 10 seconds where you receive the message. Are you particularly stressed at that time? Are you particularly busy? Because that's got such an impact on it. But the thing that really, really frustrates me, I think, is the fact that the Crown Prosecution Service, the police, they don't treat this the same way as other crimes. And I think that's really, really apparent, for example, with the Crown Prosecution Service. They don't consider sort of small fry crimes where it's only a few 100 quid being nicked as being as important to prosecute. It's nasty.

Speaker 1 4:16

I mean, we always talk about the stat that fraud something like 40% of all crime is maybe one or 2% of police resources, and has just this attitude of, oh, well, nevermind. It's a very, very minor crime. Have you got any advice? Almost psychological advice? What would you say to people who've who've been scammed?

Speaker 3 4:36

I think by far the most important thing is to try and be comfortable talking about it with other people because the more that the victims of scams feel comfortable engaging, the more they'll feel comfortable seeking advice, the more open conversations we can have about this, and hopefully then the less complacent other people will be. Because the more we can make this just an honest conversation around. You know how people get scammed, why it happens, what kind of things to watch out what jail for the more we can call people up with the tools they need to be able to stop themselves from getting scammed in the first place. Well,

Speaker 1 5:05

that's what you do really well on scam interceptors on the BBC fantastic show. Can you explain a little bit about it, what your role is on that.

Speaker 3 5:13

So I co present the show with Rob wilding. And essentially, we are able to monitor live scams. So we work with an ethical hacker called Jim Browning, who's a brilliant man has a fantastic YouTube channel called Tech Support scams, Jim basically helps us to be able to see into the back end of what scam call centers do. And scam call centers use a very insecure way shall we say of making calls, which is that they use VoIP, which is called Voice over Internet Protocol to dial into the UK. And we're able to tap into their back end and we can basically listen to the calls that they're making. And that in the room basically allows us to use investigative journalism to work out who it is that they're talking to. So if we start with a phone number, maybe we can pick up some details in the call certain call centers, we can also see their computer screens. And what that means is we can see the remote access that they'd like to use to get into their victims phones and computers. And once we can see a victim's phone or computer, we can find out who they are very quickly. Indeed, the end goal of all of that is to talk to that person to stop them from being scammed, either by talking to them by talking to a family member, we just got to try and stop them from paying out before it happens. And I like to say that we slightly kind of flipped the way that journalists are able to cover scams, because in my whole career up until doing this show, I've been an investigative documentary maker for some years, we've only ever been able to tell the story of scam victims retrospectively. So now we've created a situation in which we can actually tell them proactively and we can do something about it before

Speaker 1 6:41

Speaker 3 7:04

So to be able to put into context how bad the problem was, scam calls have gotten in the UK, you need to sort of roll back to about the late 90s. And in the late 90s, a lot of big Western businesses decided it would be a great idea to outsource their legitimate customer support to places like South Asia, where there was cheap labour, high proficiency in it and good English speaking people who are cheaper to employ than they would if they had to employ the same people at home. What they did by doing that obviously created a huge industry, particularly in India, of what they call business process outsourcing, which is basically a tech industry that runs parts of businesses for cheaper than they could do if they were doing it at home. Unfortunately, by the time the late noughties came around quite a lot of the public over here, and in the US as well decided they didn't really like that. And they reflected that back to the companies who were doing it and said, we're not sure we like this, please, can you change it. Now that created a huge problem, because suddenly, lots of other businesses said, Oh, maybe we're also going to pull our business out of South Asia and bring it back to home base call centres, but left a whole generation of people in South Asia who had learned how to run call centres who had customer data, because bear in mind, this was pre GDPR, there wasn't really necessarily any rules about how that customer data that was there had to be stored. And they had no jobs. So of course, criminals came along and said tell you what we'll give you, jobs will create scam call centres, will use a lot of that customer data and will employ all of you and pay you better, probably in many cases, than those businesses did before. What I think we should potentially be looking at as a country is licensing call centres that are not in the UK. So if you imagine there are lots of businesses still who have offshore legitimate call centres in places like the Philippines, they've moved into different parts of the world. But essentially, most big businesses don't want their UK customers to know if they've got a call center that's abroad, so they spoof and that is muddying the waters slightly right, in fact, is muddying the waters a lot. If Ofcom said to them. All right, you guys want to have call centres outside the UK, you want to spoof your numbers, that's fine. But you've got to pay us to do it. And we're going to make a database of every legitimate call centre that does this. You can use voice over internet protocol to call into Britain. You can spoof a UK number, that's fine. But everyone outside of that, who is not on this list, banned no more voice over internet protocol calls spoofing UK numbers if they're not on our pre agreed registered list of people who are paying for the right to do it, but I'm pretty confident it would eliminate a vast majority of scam calls tomorrow. How would you enforce

Speaker 2 9:33

that? Sorry, I'm just being the lawyer. That's a really good question.

Speaker 3 9:36

There's a technological solution to enforce it, which is essentially, as I understand it, a switch that you can flip. So you could say, basically, you've got an exclusion list. These VoIP accounts are allowed to call into the UK with spoof numbers. Anything outside of that is just automatically flagged instantly and banned. But there's even a problem with that, which is that if you spoof a UK mobile, that's going to cause a prop because then it goes into the realm of the mobile providers who need people to be able to ring from abroad when they're roaming. So then what you've got to do is say to the mobile providers, if someone isn't roaming, and they're claiming to call from abroad using a UK mobile number that is with your network, can you block it, please? So there's always gonna be a way around for the scammers. That's the problem. It's a bit of an arms race.

Of course, phone calls are what sounds like a bit of an old fashioned way of being approached or a scam. A lot of this is happening online. Where are those kinds of scams coming from and what technologies help that?

So I think we're seeing a really interesting shift, which is a shift towards scams that take place via text, be that on WhatsApp or telegram or initially via text message or dating apps or your social media. And there's a reason for that. And it's language. Of course, if you're talking to someone on the phone, it's very important that you're able to speak the same language as them at the moment. But if you're having an entire scammer conversation via text, there are now tools out there that mean, your potential victim is the whole world, right? It's more than just Google Translate. Yes. So I've seen a thing called Hello World, which is a Chinese developed app. And it's interesting that it's Chinese developed because the example I saw it in was as a scam that was being run by Chinese organised crime. And this particular type of scam is called pig butchering. It's where you start with what seems like a romantic or a sort of friendly approach. And then it ends up after weeks or months down the road into a crypto investment scam. It's such a gruesome name. Yes. And I'm not going to try and say the Chinese word that it comes from, but it starts with S and it ends in en. And it means butchering pigs, because the idea being that you fatten up the pig, and then you take it for everything, but it has, I've got my phone out now because I'm going to show you both something if that's okay, yes, this came directly from a whistleblower inside a production operation, which was actually in Dubai. And this person lived and worked inside one of four high rises, all of which were dedicated to peak lettering. So we estimated that there might be up to 1000 people working for this particular organisation. The nature of these begrudging operations is such that unfortunately, a lot of people who work for them as scammers are effectively indentured labor, they can leave, and this one was no different. It's half an hour outside of Dubai, it's in the middle of the desert. A lot of people who were working there, scammers didn't have transport so they'd be bused in, and then essentially won't be able to leave until they were bussed out again. So even though they weren't strictly speaking, imprisoned, or strictly speaking, slaves, they were essentially that bingo,

you're gonna run to

what you gonna do. all intents and purposes, they had no option. No

indeed. And this particular place had a double benefit for the people who ran it, which we believe, again, was Chinese organized crime. And that was that it meant they could see a police raid coming from miles away, because they were in the middle of the desert. This one I wanted to show you because it has a particular element to it that I just found so unbelievably shocking, which was that these guys had a model who had taken all the photos for them, and who they had a constant supply of pictures and photos from a

lot of our advice is, you know, do a reverse image search on an image that you've been sent or asked to do a video call.

Yeah. And in the case of this particular group, the model lived in the high rise. That's some insidious staffers. And so what that meant is they could do things like this, which is where a victim's calling the model having a video call with her. Yeah, she's gonna answer her phone and actually have a chat with this guy.

And, you know, she is basically just in a pretty bare room sitting on a bed, having a nice chat with someone who thinks that this is the love of their life across the world. She's a real person.

And that's the point of which I thought, how could you possibly ever know you're being scammed? Yeah, you'd have no way of knowing up until the point where they say, please start investing in cryptocurrency with me. But at that point, you might have been talking to him for months, these guys script was made to last for weeks. And that is all about building trust and window dressing and getting the people you're talking to to really buy into what you're saying. And even when they first made the suggestion of investing in cryptocurrency, it was very much sort of blase. Like, oh, here's the thing I do, and no pressure was applied. And then a few days later, they'd mention it again, and then mention it again. And then the person sort of things out themselves effectively. So I just don't know how you're supposed to know that we're being scammed in that situation.

I don't think I was ever expecting to see a real person who you could actually talk to. And the thing is, they must have to schedule that they must have to fix it, because they can't have her talking to every single person all the time. She won't have enough hours in the day.

No, that's it. But I mean, she was being paid quite handsomely. I've seen the sort of pay structure and she was being paid quite handsomely to be there eight hours a day on call, so that she could just take photos, do videos, and then do video chats with people who were getting really suspicious so they get them over the line. And it's worth saying about that lot as well, just in terms of how much money they actually had. Their operation was so big that they ran out of bandwidth. So what did they do? They paid for a 5g truck to be parked outside therefore towers out all times. And that 5g truck you can see on Google Maps, it's a massive flatbed with a huge radio array on the back of it. That is how much money that group had. This

is crazy. I feel like this is the cutting edge of technology. We still haven't really talked about the future. We've not talked about AI yet. We're going to take a quick break. But afterwards, we aren't going to be talking to an actual AI scam. Don't go away.

Know the value of voting democratic on our votes count, it's important that you save your vote for the November election, will need your help in electing Democrats up and down ticket. Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to reelect Donald Trump again.

So in case you hadn't guessed, that was an AI, deep fake voice of Joe Biden. We used in an actual robo call in actual primary elections in the States. Really quite scary. I mean, I think that's one of the scariest uses of AI. But actually, it's not just happening in the US. It's not just happening to, you know, major world leaders. It is happening in the UK for quite boring scams about insulation. Nick, you've brought with us one of those scams.

Yeah, I got tipped off about this the other day, and I'm quite fascinated by it. So it's probably the best scammer AI I've ever heard. And I've tried by talking to it to trip it up. And I really actually didn't manage to do it in a way that I think would have blown its cover to anybody else who was trying to talk to it when

we wanted to speak to them live right now. But it seems that scams move on quite quickly. The phone number is now dead. But luckily, I spoke to them earlier in the week. Take a listen.

Hello, hello. Oh, hi. Oh, hello. Hi, my name is Joe. And I'm one of the energy advisors covering your area. We're seeing homeowners there making sure that you're the homeowner there are Yes. Yeah. It's about your insulation material in the attic. Some of it has now been classed irritant by the British Lung Foundation. So everybody's entitled to have a last inspection. So check it out and make sure it's not causing any problems. It's a completely free service. So would you like to take advantage of the free inspection to make sure your insulation is safe and working? Well.

Because the loft insulation Do

you will get a call when I put this appointment through it will be allocated to one of the registered surveyors, you'll get a call in 15 to 30 minutes, I'd say from who do our confirmations and allocations. They're a private company, not part of our government scheme where there's grants available or anything like that. But they will be able to tell you exactly who is coming. They'll confirm the date, the time, and they will give you the name of the surveyor that's come in so that you can check to check you know, for security reasons, you can check their ID on the doorstep. Okay.

I need to go on holiday tomorrow.

No problem. But to put you in an age bracket 45 to 79. Yeah, yeah. 107

is incredible. I mean, we couldn't reach it then live because we think it's probably just been shut down. Yeah. But from that recording, she was a bit stilted. I was a bit stilted. To be honest, that sounds like a lot of conversations I've had with people at call centers. And if you were in a in a rush, if you're out on the go, you had a bad line, you could be convinced into thinking that that was a real person, and that they've booked in an appointment for your often solution.

She was just vague enough wasn't Yeah, sure. Oh, I'm the energy advisor, not from where not anything about what energy company? I think like that. Just the energy advisor. Let's be honest, everyone's out looking at energy issues. At the moment. Energy's really high on the agenda for everyone. That was worrying. To be honest, I did worry that you might have been there.

Yeah, I did sound unconvincing there as a human being I failed the jury does happen. Yeah. I mean, what is the advantage really for a scammer to use something like that, rather than just having someone on a call? Honestly,

I think it's just overheads. If you imagine that if you're a scam business, and you want to shift as much dodgy loft insulation as you possibly can. It's that or you pay for robocalls. And you send out 100,000 robo calls in a day. Scam businesses are run like real businesses, there's no difference there. They're going to worry about their overheads. They're going to worry about how much it costs them to rent office space, how much it costs them to buy computers, how much it costs them to employ people. And if they can instead employ one AI who sounds like there might be a woman from South London in their 60s, then brilliant.

And how much do we think that AI is going to cost? That's a very good question.

I honestly don't have I don't have handle on that as

well wouldn't be surprised if it's all open source just free on the free on the internet. I mean, it's I think that is like a funnel almost in that we you are trying to get people to that bottom of the funnel where you take their money. And that opening gambit being an AI conversation means that you can get someone's details, you've got them hooked, and then follow up with a call, presumably with an actual human being, and then follow up with a real life conversation. And maybe you're kind of three or four layers layers down before the con actually begins before you say, I would like your money now, please.

But you know, the genius of that as well, is that the AI is the one doing the lying. Yeah. So once you get the person in your house selling you the loft, insulation, the lies have already happened. And if you're a victim of this, what are you going to say to the police? Or what are you going to say to trading standards, you're going to say our person called me up from this number, and they told me X, Y and Zed? Well, where's your evidence of that? Ultimately, by that point, you're gonna have loft insulation in your house already that you didn't need or want, I just I struggle with with how the authorities are going to be able to deal with that. And

what is your advice to make sure that who you're talking to either is an actual human being, or is some particular human being they are your son or daughter?

I think if you're if you suspect you're talking to an AI, asking it what your name is, is probably quite a good one. Because it's highly unlikely to have that data at its disposal and very unlikely to be even more so to be able to find out. But I think beyond that, if you want to be sure that the person you're talking to is who they say they are, for example, if it is a family member or something like that having a code question. So some piece of information that only that family member could know, which allows you to kind of be sure that you're talking to that person, I think is the only way I would start having, for example, a financial conversation with a family member if they're calling from a number I don't recognize.

Yeah. So for example, you could say, I didn't know what was the name of next door neighbor's cat when we were growing up?

Yeah, exactly. Right. I have one set up with my dad, which relates to the first game of football that we ever went to because I got so paranoid about this. I thought it was time to do it.

But is it paranoia? If you're seeing this happening all the time? Is it really that you're paranoid? Or are you actually just being prepared?

Maybe you're right, I think it may be necessary now

is it also useful to just call back the number that you expect to hear from so if someone calls you from a number you don't recognize, just hang up and call the number you would expect to hear from them on

vas. The classic advice I'd say to people with hi mom scammers, generally speaking is basically if you're getting something out of the blue purporting to be from your child saying I've smashed my phone, contact me on this number, just try them on the original number first, because you'll often find that very, very quickly that way that nothing's wrong, and everything's okay. And you don't need to pay 5000 pounds. So I think that's a very, very good bit of advice. Yeah. I

mean, hopefully that wasn't too pessimistic. There are solutions out there. I mean, which has been really big the last few years on the Online Safety Act, trying to put responsibility on social media companies so that they are responsible for scam ads being put on their platforms, we won that battle, we remains to be seen how it actually works in real life. We've been fighting for the right to reimbursement if you lose money through banking scams. Hopefully that will help people out quite a bit. Do you think things like the Online Safety Act are enough? And do you think big tech companies are going to start pulling away? I think

the chances of getting big tech companies to pull their weight on this anytime in the near future are quite slim, because they're basically too big to have to care. On a national level. Do I think that we could be doing better in educating people about scams? Yes, I think the stock think fraud campaign is great. But the horses bolted some time ago. And I'm worried that this is just way too little too late. I think we need to do a much better job of of getting people to understand how serious a problem this is, and protecting themselves against it.

So we mentioned earlier on about what we're doing a witch and we can't really go for a whole show without mentioning our free weekly scam alert service. So what we do we take all the latest scams doing the rounds right now along with the best advice and put it into a weekly email to keep you safe. Over 450,000 people have signed up and last year, we estimated saved 1.8 million quid that would have been lost to scammers. I'll put the link in the description for today's show. And we'll also put a link to our scam alert Facebook community to there we'll keep you up to date with the latest scams and give you a chance to share your own experiences to help ensure other people don't fall victim.

I subscribe to the email by the way

I learned I think there's two halves to being scam proof. Half of it is recognizing a particular scam and being aware of something doing the rounds. That's very easy to do. If you can see the connection with something that you've read online or in an email, but there are too many scans to be able to know about all of them. There's too much evolving tech. Is there a piece of advice that you've got which is eternal and universal? Is there anything that we should be doing more that can keep us safer?

I think the depressing but ultimately correct piece of advice that I have to give is to say to everybody that absolutely anything that comes completely out of the blue is to be viewed as a scam until proven otherwise. And I want people to be better at verifying and to pausing and thinking Hang on a minute, do I need to do a bit of further investigation here, because whether it's a phone call text message, message on social media message on a dating app, whatever it might be, I think we've reached the point where we just need to go, this person is probably a scammer. And I'm going to make sure that they're not before I proceed.

And I think that advice is great. And I think it's also just, you could have given that to someone in a town in the wild west in 1820. If someone can do comes to town and offers you, you know, the elixir of life, you've got to be doubtful.

The biggest problem is that I think a lot of people think that for some reason, the internet is some kind of safe space. And that's because there's people who take responsibility for certain parts of it, like social media platforms, whatever it is, when they're doing things in that place, they are safe. But the reality is, it isn't. It's like the world, you would never go and buy something from a shop where you couldn't see what the shop was, you couldn't see what the shop, who the shopkeeper was, or see any of their previous customers. And yet, people go online and buy from social media profiles, which are ultimately completely anonymous, and you have no idea who's behind them. So I just think taking a bit of that real life stuff, and applying it to the online world is probably the best thing that most of us can do.

Thank you so much, Nick, it's been fantastic having you on the show today. Where can people find you on socials? And where can they watch your show?

So I’m @StapleNick in almost all places, the first half of my surname, and then my name. And the show is on BBC iPlayer. It's also going at the moment half past eight on BBC One on Monday nights, and the new series will be on in the spring. Well,

a huge thank you for joining us. And hopefully we'll have you back on soon.

Thanks very much.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you'd like to get in touch with us and have your message read out on our next episode. Then we're on email at podcast at which dot credit UK and at which UK on socials. That's where you can go to watch some brilliant videos, what we've been getting up to here on the podcast. Please

also leave us a rating and a review wherever you're listening. And a reminder, you can now listen to all our brilliant Which? podcasts over on YouTube and YouTube music too. So, Harry, what are you up to next?

This is a favourite of mine. We're going to talk about food. This time looking at food delivery apps and a biggie. It's restaurant sustainability. Just how green is your favourite place to eat? We'll tell you more.

Interestingly, I did work on that investigation recently. You remember at the top of the show I mentioned there are loads of organisations out there that don't like what we say. I think you're gonna be in for a treat next time, a whole lot of right of replies. And remember if you want more great stuff to listen to before then check out the which money pod for your personal finances. And we've got the best stories from which magazine narrated for you over on which shorts.

Today's get answers was presented by me, Harry Kind, alongside Lisa Webb, produced and recorded by Rob Lilley-Jones and edited by Eric Bria and thanks again to our wonderful guest, Nick Stapleton. We'll see you next time. Bye bye bye