264. Adam Levin on Identity Theft and How to Protect Yourself from Scammers, Phishers, and Fraudsters of All Types
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2022
⏱️ 101 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Increasingly, identity theft is a fact of life: from fake companies selling "credit card insurance"; criminal, medical, and child identity theft; catphishers, tax fraud, fake debt collectors who threaten you with legal action; and much more. We might once have hoped to protect ourselves from hackers with airtight passwords and aggressive spam filters, and those are good ideas as far as they go. But with the breaches of huge organizations like Target, AshleyMadison.com, JPMorgan Chase, Sony, Anthem, and even the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, more than a billion personal records have already been stolen, and chances are good that you're already in harm's way. This doesn't mean there's no hope. Your identity may get stolen, but it doesn't have to be a life-changing event.
In this conversation, Shermer speaks with Adam Levin, a consumer advocate with more than 30 years' experience in personal finance, privacy, real estate and government service. A former director of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, Levin is Chairman and founder of CyberScout. A longtime consumer advocate and identity fraud expert, Levin provides a method to help you keep hackers, phishers, and spammers from becoming your problem. As Levin shows, these folks get a lot less scary if you see them coming.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. |
| 0:11.6 | Welcome to the Michael Sherman Shower Show. Welcome to the Michael Sherman Show. |
| 0:15.0 | I'm your host Michael Sherman. |
| 0:17.0 | This episode is brought to you by Wondrium |
| 0:20.0 | and especially their new documentary called Solving for Zero. |
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| 0:51.2 | reducing our energy consumption away from carbon. |
| 0:55.0 | And how do you do that? Wow, there's a bunch of really interesting |
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| 1:01.0 | For example, there's this concrete that absorbs CO2 gases |
| 1:06.0 | from the atmosphere. Right, it's like a building made of concrete or a road made |
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| 1:17.4 | There's another one organization called the C-I-M-M-Y-T, which is developing drought-resistant, flood-resistant, and pest-resistant crops that can |
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| 1:41.2 | And so on, there's just literally hundreds of different small things we could do so |
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