Scam Solutions: Fighting Scams with Smarter Tech
Scamnetic’s Al Pasqual dives into using technology to confirm identity, spot scam activity, and protect consumers from the criminals that want to steal from them.
Episode 40: At Stolen, we spend a lot of time speaking about the scamdemic. More often, we’re encountering people who have seen the stories about the scam compounds. They’ve heard the statistics about billions of dollars stolen every year. They know how bad it is.
Let’s talk about solutions. Who’s doing things that are helping? How can we collaborate to multiply the impact of our efforts to fight scams? This week, Erin talks to Scamnetic CEO Al Pasqual about putting technology to work in protecting people from scams.
The goal is to use technology to protect users from scams by identifying attempts at deception. Is the person selling the chicken coop on Facebook Marketplace who they say they are? Or are they a continent away, waiting for you to send money?
More than half of all buyers and sellers on Facebook Marketplace are not real. — Al Pasqual
Scamnetic partners with telecom companies, financial services firms, and service providers that provide scam-awareness software as a service to their business and consumer customers.
When the software on your phone identifies a problem and alerts you, it provides evidence, which makes it easier to kind of break the spell. When your kid tells you you’re being scammed, it’s harder to hear. When you have technical data that shows scam activity, it’s easier to accept.
We’re saying, “Look at all this evidence we found.” It’s not just, “Dad, I’ve heard about these scams, You should watch out.” — Al Pasqual, Scamnetic
Educating people about scams and creating awareness is part of the equation. But remembering what you learned about red flags of an impersonation scam may not come to mind when you’re having a stressful day.
They catch you in exactly the situation where you have 27 things going on, and now, “Oh my God, I didn’t show up for jury duty, and the sheriff is going to come arrest me.”
The software can look for what Pasqual calls “indicators of deception.” It can find signs, such as web links in text messages that lead to phishing sites, specific language patterns in messages, deepfake videos, and other things. The software will give you a notification. When you click, it explains what it found and why it’s suspicious.
Erin and Al also talk about how AI is playing a role in making it easier for scammers to:
Develop perfect phishing emails and websites with just a few clicks of a button.
Create deepfake messages and videos at scale to target more people, more effectively.
Use agentic AI — create conversational AI agents that do the work for human scammers
And they talk about solutions to expand education, build safeguards into technology infrastructure, and generally make it more difficult and time-consuming for scammers to operate. But there’s a lot to do. And both sides — the scammers and the people fighting the scams — have access to technology and are looking for ways to outsmart the other.
Who Is Al Pasqual?
A recognized expert on cybercrime, Al Pascual is the CEO and Founder of Scamnetic. A successful technology entrepreneur and a former managing executive of Javelin Strategy & Research, Al has spent his career laser-focused on protecting consumers and organizations from financially motivated crimes. His past research on consumer identity theft has been cited by hundreds of media outlets and presented at conferences worldwide. Al started his career fighting fraudsters at HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and FIS, where, as an investigator, his work resulted in the arrest of more than 400 suspects.
Episode Chapters
00:00 Understanding Scams vs. Fraud
05:14 The Journey to Addressing Scams
10:19 The Role of Technology in Scam Detection
12:59 Real-Life Applications of Scam Prevention
15:32 Accessibility of Scam Prevention Tools
18:13 The Evolution of Credit Card Security
20:37 Scams and Vulnerability Awareness
24:25 The Impact of AI and Deepfakes
25:50 Banking’s Role in Scam Prevention
28:03 The Need for Comprehensive Solutions
33:17 Looking Ahead: Innovations and Support
Useful Links
Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back. Find Stolen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and other major podcast platforms.
Sponsors of Stolen
BioCatch prevents financial crime by recognizing patterns in human behavior, continuously collecting 3,000 anonymized data points – keystroke and mouse activity, touch screen behavior, physical device attributes, and more – as people interact with their digital banking platforms. With these inputs, BioCatch's models reveal patterns that distinguish the criminal from the legitimate.
Scamnetic is a leader in AI-powered scam detection and prevention, protecting individuals, businesses, and financial institutions from digital scams. With solutions like KnowScam and IDeveryone, Scamnetic delivers real-time scam insights, identity verification, and intervention. Restoring trust, reducing losses, and empowering organizations to safeguard customers in an increasingly complex digital world.
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