Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign hello, and welcome to another episode of the Bottom Line Me podcast. I'm your host, Ann Allard. Today we're going to shed a little light on a growing threat in our digital world, mobile phone spoofing. Imagine receiving a call that appears to be from someone that you know, only to find out later that it was a scammer. Well, my guest today recently fell victim just to this, and she's here to share her story with us and the impact that it had on her day, some of the lessons she learned, and perhaps some tips and ideas that she might share with you after having been a victim of phone spoofing. So let's take a moment to welcome my guest, Tracy Brown. Tracy, welcome to the Bottom Line Me.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Podcast, and thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you today.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Oh, well, I'm really looking forward to learning more about this. I mean, I think five years ago I didn't even know what the word spoofing was. But today, you know, it's a new world. There's no question about it. Well, before we get started.
Yes. Before we dive into our topic, why don't you take a few minutes to tell our audience a little bit about yourself and what you do at Old Republic Title.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Certainly.
My name is Traci Brown. I work with the New Hampshire Vermont team. I'm the business development manager. So I deal with the agents and kind of like a rep. They're agency rep, but I do a little bit more. I work with the underwriters, and I started with Old Republic title back in 2019, just before the pandemic. So. Oh, my.
Yeah, it's been. It's been a fun ride and baptism by fire, huh? Yes. I work with a great team and, yeah, I like dealing with the agents, and client service has always been one of my strong suits, so it works out well. And here we are.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Well, that's why it's so important to have your phone all the time, isn't it? So.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, we. Yeah, the phone is. Is your lifeline for sure.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly. Well, as I mentioned in my opening, you recently were the victim of phone spoofing. Tell us a little bit about what happened, how it happened when you first realized that you were being spoofed.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Well, you know, spoofing in of itself means to trick. And most people think of phone spoofing. And the typical one is where somebody impersonates a scammer will impersonate a trusted individual or bank. Financial institutions come to mind. Police come to mind. Because if you get A call, and it looks like it's your bank or the local police department, you're very likely to have that conversation. You're going to pick up the phone, you're going to talk to them, you may divulge things to them. So that is more typical of what people know for phone spoofing. Mine was a little bit different. It was outbound spoofing where the scammers took my phone number and blasted it out somehow to over a thousand people. And it was as if I was calling these people. And what happened was my phone in the course of that Tuesday started ringing and it didn't stop until 9:00 at night. And I logged over a thousand calls, text jammed my voicemail. And what was happening were people were thinking that I was legitimately calling them, only I wasn't. And I stopped answering the phone and put it on mute. And of course, about a half an hour into this, I started thinking, oh, this seems weird, and I started thinking of spoofing. But I was more familiar with it in terms of say, somebody trying to call me to get in. Fraudster scammers, they're looking to get data, they're looking to get money, they're looking to get information. So I think that's more typical. In my case, I couldn't figure it out exactly what they would want because they weren't using my number to bring calls to them. And I'm not a financial institution, I'm not somebody, I'm not a high value individual in terms of I don't have access to anything. So redirecting people, my number to somebody else wouldn't really give them anything. So it was very strange.
I called my carrier, there wasn't much they could do.
Again, I put the phone on mute. I was not answering calls, people were texting.
It was just a completely wild ride. And I did some research to try to understand what happened and why it happened. And I found out that this outgoing spoofing serves a purpose because there was nothing that they were going to gain from me other than I have a good phone number, I have a number that's not a spammy number and my number is not on a block list. So the reason somebody like me would get targeted or somebody, you know, whose phone number is clean, so to speak, is because they throw it out to a lot of local. Because they'll see a local number and people will likely answer because it is local. And what happens is they look for pickup rates for people say, oh, how likely are they to pick it up? And while they're doing that, it could create a problem for my phone number because now my phone number could get blocked. So the more good numbers that they can do that with, the frees them up to use other numbers to, say, conduct an actual scam. So I was kind of like a tool in a bigger. A bigger wheel. It's like, oh, let's use this phone number. And they do it all the time to. To create a problem. It's like that they're trying to say, oh, let me throw some shade. She's the bad guy, and I'm over here and I'm really the bad guy. But I don't come across as the bad guy because it's. It's her. So that's kind of how that played out. So it was a little bit. A little bit of a twist in that respect.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Nothing I've ever heard.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it took me a while to figure it out.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: Yeah. What you're describing, you know, in the first part of this is very typical. Somebody's trying to scam you. But, yeah, I was scratching my head thinking, what's to gain from messing up your day? Which is. I'm sure what they did.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: They did. It was. You know, the thing is, it was very frustrating, and I had actual agents trying to reach me. And luckily, you know, they know to call, they know to text, they know to email. And I was grateful that they chose to email because I could get my emails, because the phone. The calls were coming in so rapidly that dialing out was almost impossible. It was like whack a mole. Like, oh, my gosh, how quickly can I get out an outbound call, an outgoing call? Because the numbers were coming in so fast, it didn't have a chance. And I had one agent in particular that had been working on something and very much needed to talk to me. And when I finally got through to him, I said, I am so sorry. I apologize profusely. And I told them what happened because I didn't want them to think I was ignoring them. And they know that I've been dealing with them for six years now. And my agents know that I'm a responsive person. And that's. You know, we all have our things, and that's. They know that I'm somebody that does. So this whole spamming, spoofing thing threw that off for me. And it's funny because I'm not somebody that gets very rattled, but I have to say, by the end of the day, I was thoroughly rattled. And it was. It was very frustrating. And I found myself saying I could have thrown my phone into the ocean because I thought, oh, my gosh, this is on the stock.
And so when I got a hold of Verizon, who's my carrier, they're like, well, there's not much we can do. You can report it to the ftc.
You can wait it out again, you know, other than call blocking and spam filtering, which I had on, but it didn't. It didn't catch, you know, was catching them as it went on. And this went on for three days. The next day, I think I got just under 500 calls. The third day, I got 250 something. And it petered out because at the end of the day, the bottom line is if it didn't stop, then my only option would have been to get a new phone number, which I didn't really want to do for so many reasons, but that's kind of what happens. And in some ways that would suit the spammer because they burned my phone number. I won't get a new number, and maybe they'll do it to me again.
And that's kind of what it is. They're just. It's being used in a bigger.
Again, it's. It's like I was part of a bigger plan. You know, they had nothing to gain from me. You know, they weren't looking for my financial information. They weren't looking to scam me. They weren't trying to get me to invest, you know, that sort of thing. But they were utilizing a resource that I had a good phone number to, you know, throw shade and to increase pickups in other areas because people will. And all the numbers were local. So I live in Mass. I'm on the Mass, New Hampshire border. So all the calls that were coming in to me were Massachusetts or New Hampshire exchanges. So very local. Whereas if it was a number from, like, California, it wouldn't have resonated with me. But wherever you are, I think there's the sense of, oh, it's a local number. It must be good. So I think that's why they do it. You know, the call doesn't come in. If a scammer is trying to scam you, you don't look down and say, oh, it says, hey, I'm trying to scam you. Please answer the phone. It's not quite like that. It's. It's like, oh, let me appear like I'm a trusted number or even a number close to somebody else's that, you know, because you're likely to pick it up. And in my case, with my job, you know, Monday through Friday, say 9ish to 5ish, I'm more likely to answer the phone because I'm like, oh, okay. I'm technically on the clock. So you never know where a call could be coming from. So you don't want to be unavailable. Although I do. My feeling is I've learned because of voice cloning and AI and a lot of stuff and scamming, I don't answer the phone unless it comes up. And I know the exact number the person comes up on my, my dialer. I let it go in a voicemail because if you were to call me and I don't know your number and you say, hey, this is Dan, well, I'm going to call you back, you know, so nobody's really going to be upset that I didn't answer the phone. And I do tell people a lot of times maybe, unless, you know, the better thing is to not answer the phone. But, you know, and I think I've learned most of that because in my six years here, I've been focused. Wire fraud, seller impersonation fraud, vacant landscams. Because of so much of fraud impacting our industry. That's become my, you know, my niche. And I talk a lot about that to the agents. So I've. My awareness has grown. My husband jokes, he says, can we have dinner where we don't talk about this stuff? I'm like, no, I just learned about a new fraud today. Like, oh, no, stop. So it's kind of funny. At the end of the day, it's like, oh my God, how many are there out there? And I said, I don't know. Every day I wake up and I find something new, which is crazy. So I'm always thinking about that. And, you know, at the end of the day I wanted to share my story because, hey, maybe it could happen to somebody else and let people know what's happening. Because I think it's important to share our stories and to let people know, you know, what can you do in this case? You, you can report it. You can get a spam block or filter, which a lot of us do have. Or if it doesn't go away, you end up getting a new phone number, which seems like very drastic, but there's not a lot of options in knowing that their goal was just to use your phone number. Not to get to you, but to use you in a bigger scheme, so to speak.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: Did it fill up your voicemail box too?
[00:11:51] Speaker B: Oh, it did, yeah. So when I was in the sales meeting. What was happening is it was filling up my, my text. And it was kind of funny because you see, you know, you get text, it comes up, you get one, two. It was crazy. And I was trying to delete them and then I said, oh, let me click on the voicemail. And it was so I was try. As fast as I was deleting voicemails, they were getting filled. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. And that's how the email started. Got people emailing me, say, hey, I tried to call you, I tried to text you and I couldn't leave a voicemail. And they said, of course not. Because, you know, it was, believe it or not, getting a thousand phone calls from 9:05 to I think 8, 10pm is a lot of calls. They were coming in. I think I counted like an hour. It was like one hour was like. It was just the wildest number. I said, how fast is this happening? Because my ability to call out even a program number where I had to say, click on your name and hit send. I couldn't do that fast enough. It was like, oh, why was that?
[00:12:53] Speaker A: Because a call was coming in.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Yes, call was coming in. I, I've never. And. And if I wasn't trying to call out and I had the phone sitting there, but the. It was just like one would end. There was almost like no space in between picture. You know, you're trying to, you know, get in between two things and you couldn't even get a slice of paper in there. It's like there was just no opportunity to get out. And I think that's what led to my frustration because I was trying so hard to be able to first call Verizon or to call my agent back.
And it was, you know, and, you know, typically when I go to the sales meeting, I. We leave our phones there and I leave it on vibrate. No one wants to hear phone ringing. But it was so crazy that I put it on mute because vibrate itself, the thing was just like bouncing on the table. It was going off. Yeah, it was, it was just too much. So I said, okay, put it on mute, but. But you could see it. And then I kept going, okay, let me click off and try to delete text messages, try to delete the voicemail because I'm panicking. I'm like, somebody, you know, somebody needs to get a hold of me and they're not going to be able to get a hold of me. Now I understand. I'm not in the medical field. I'm not a brain surgeon. I'm not going to save a life. But I'm in the service industry. And at the end of the day, when people can't get a hold of you and there's a consequence.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Exactly, there is.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: And, you know, I have some agents. You know, I'll talk to them and they'll say, can you take me off the ledge? And I'm like, oh, of course. You know, I'm like, sometimes it's just having. Having this person that will listen to you and go, okay, I'm going to help you. You know, just, you know, just. Just that. Because I think a lot of times, like, when we reach out, call somebody because we need help, you know, maybe it's something to do with our Internet or something, and we get somebody on the other end who's not willing to help or not able, or they don't know what they're doing, or they're just not responding to us, we get frustrated. So, for us and for myself and my team, the goal is to deliver stellar customer service. And part of that is being responsive and talking to people and finding out what their issue is and how I can help and being honest, too. If I know the answer, I'll give you the answer. Sometimes it's like, that's a great question. I don't know. You know, somebody called me today and said, hey, do you have. Does ort have videos that explain, you know, tell the difference between the basic policy and the enhanced? I said, I don't know, Let me look. So I got off the thing and I went into the easy market, and we had three of them. Like, this is great. So we downloaded them, put them, you know, set them up for them, emailed them, and I said, let me know if you like these, and if you do, I'll create an easy market account and you can do these. And she's like, oh, I love them. And that was one of those things. Like, I didn't know the answer, but I'm like, oh, let me check. And then I said, if we didn't have them, maybe we could create them. But it turns out we had three. And, you know, who knew, you know, because you try to know everything that you have. It's like, oh, I'm in the store and I'm in the thing and all this stuff, because these are, you know, that's just one snippet of something that somebody needed. You know, was it a big deal? No. But the fact that I was very excited within 10 minutes, I found it. I'm like, this is great.
But that's the kind of thing. And in the role that somebody like myself plays or the other reps, we're all about the service, you know, we were, you know, I jokingly say, because when people say, what do you do? I said, I'm paid to be nice.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: I said, because I'm paid to be nice. Very good.
I know.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: That's what I say. Like, what's your job? You know, you meet somebody, like, what do you do for a living? I said, oh, I work for ort. What do you do? I said, I'm paid to be nice. And they go, no, for real? I said, no. Kind of. I said, you know, I'm not underwriting. So I said, yeah, that's kind of how I wrap it up. And I like to talk about fraud and scams, you know, as often as anyone will let me.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: Well, isn't it interesting that it is something that you like to talk about and that you end up being scammed yourself? I mean, it's just incredible. I got to ask you one more question about how this all happened. So the reason you couldn't make a call out was because calls were coming into you so quickly, and the calls were they come. Were they in response to the scammer actually calling out all these other. Other numbers?
[00:17:13] Speaker B: I. I don't know if they were. Somebody was sitting there calling or a group of somebodies, or they had a program, you know, maybe some computer generated thing that could call you, but they didn't really want to talk to you. Their goal was to get you to call me back. So that piece, I'm not 100% sure.
And it makes me think, because of the rapid fire of calls, that either they had a lot of people doing this, meaning, like 25 people, say, lined up and going, okay, start dialing numbers. And what was happening is my phone number was showing up on your caller id. That's why you called me back. Because you're like, oh, Tracy, you just call. Well, in this case, if you know me and say, tracy, you just called me. But it was like, hey, your number call up. And I knew that because the very first one, I was on the phone with somebody from ort. And as I was hanging up, I had no choice but to answer it because I clicked to hang up and the call came in and they said, hey, you just called me. And I said, no, I didn't. I was thinking I was just on the phone and I said, no, I didn't call. You know, it came up in the thing and I said, no. They said, no, your number came up. I said, well, it couldn't have. And I said, I need to go. Goodbye. And then as I was hanging up, another call came in. And it was the same thing. Like, oh, your call came up. And I'm like, no, it didn't. Now I'm like, okay, this is weird. I hung up and there was. It was enough time for me to hang up that the calls were coming in, but I was not answering. But I was reading the text, and the text, they were starting up. Hey, you called me or hey, I got a call from number. You know, you looking for landscaping? Are you looking for daycare? You're looking for, you know, massage therapist? You know, it was a variety of stuff. So these were all. Yeah, this. It was interesting. I think my favorite was the tattoo artist. Hey, you looking for a tattoo? Like, no, not today. Yeah, well, it was just random and. But that's. That's what it was. They. They were getting a call from me, but it wasn't from me. And I don't know if it was series of phones or computer generated or however interesting, however it was.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Well, you're usually the one talking people off the ledge, and that day you needed somebody to talk you off the ledge, I bet.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: Yeah. No, yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Let's put it this way. The poor people at Verizon got. Got. Got an earful because I'm like, fix this. Like, you need to fix this. I need to, you know. You know, because you're frustrated and, you know, you couldn't stop. Like, I did not stop it.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: And.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: And the bottom line is there was no way to stop it, you know, other than shutting my phone off.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Well, that was kind of.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: Well, speaking of bottom lines, we've got a lot of them here. But as you know, I always like to end our conversation with a bottom line. And I think, you know, what were the lessons learned or what would you suggest or tell anyone that's listening to this that they could do to prevent it or what they should do in the event that they became victim to it?
[00:20:13] Speaker B: I don't think there's anything you can do to prevent it, because I think it is random. I think what you can do is not answer the call. You know, don't. Don't pick up the phone.
You can notify your carrier, you know, ensure you have a good spam filter, and if it persists, the bottom line is you're going to need a new phone number and I think the biggest takeaway is, you know, as much as, like, I've had people say to me, oh, you talk about, you know, a lot about frauds and scams. And I said, well, more than I did yesterday, but somebody said, oh, you would never get scammed. And I said, I have as much chance to get scammed as anyone else. There is not there. We, none of us are immune to clicking on the link, answering the call for a variety of reasons, because we're human. We're very capable of being socially engineered. And I think that, you know, as much as we try to be careful and, you know, stop, think, you know, try to figure it out, don't react to the urgency and all those steps that we learn, I think we're human. And, you know, in the mid. In the moment, in the heat of the moment, we, you know, our God gets let down, and we do react. And I think the bigger issue, the most important takeaway is to tell the story, let people know what happened.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:21:32] Speaker B: Too often we feel like, oh, no one, no one's. This hasn't happened to anybody but me. And I think the fraudsters and the scammers count on that. Because if we're not having the conversation and we're not sharing the story and we're not talking about what's out there, then people don't realize it's actually out there. So I think doing that, and I do try to do that, I'm on LinkedIn. I share a lot about frauds, not only within our industry, but just general, because it's, you know, it's pervasive everywhere, so that, you know, maybe create the awareness. But I don't think. I don't think anything is 100% preventable. And there are a lot of people who've come forward who are, you know, working in cybersecurity that have shared their stories about being scammed. So none of us are immune. And we have to, you know, maybe, you know, be. Be kinder to ourselves and say, oh, why did this happen to me? You know, and don't feel bad about it. And when people say, hey, they've had this experience, maybe they clicked on the link, maybe, you know, they. They started dialoguing with somebody and they got involved in a romance scandal. Rather than look at them and make them feel bad, maybe we're. We're just a little bit more compassionate and realize that fraudsters, they're good at what they do. They're very good at what they do. They use the technology and they use the psychology. And that's how they do it and you know they make a lot of money so it's a lucrative business.
That's the bottom line. Frauds just make a lot of money and that's why they're doing it.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: I guess so. Well, I think the other great bottom line here is sharing stories and I'm, you know, I want to thank you so much for being willing to come on and share your story with us. I think, I mean I've never heard of it but I'm paying closer attention to all those things now and having you share this story is one of the ways that we can help everybody out there. So thank you very much, Tracy. Much appreciate your time for having me.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: I appreciate it.
[00:23:33] Speaker A: Great. All right. And to our audience, we once again thank you all for joining us. Until we meet again, let's all continue to learn, grow and hopefully prosper. Thanks.
