Hey everyone, Scotty here, and wow, what a week it's been in the world of scams. Let me tell you, the criminals are getting bold, but so are the cops catching them.

Just this week in Baxter County, Arkansas, police pulled off an absolutely brilliant sting operation. They set up a controlled delivery with a quarter million dollars in bait money. The scammer was impersonating Sheriff John Montgomery himself, and get this, they told the elderly victim that a deputy named Steve Rogers would pick up the cash. Yeah, like Captain America. Twenty-five-year-old Josiah Kamal Smith from Tuscaloosa showed up at a PostNet in Mountain Home with a fake Illinois driver's license in the name of Steve Rogers. The moment he grabbed that FedEx package on September 24th, boom, he was in custody. His accomplice, Briana Brittany Norwood from Northport, Alabama, was waiting in the car with her own fake Connecticut license. These money mules thought they'd make an easy five hundred bucks but instead caught felony charges for theft and identity fraud.

Meanwhile in Huntley, Illinois, police arrested Taye Sallis Lewis on October 7th for running a romance scam that's particularly nasty. He was the courier picking up cash from a victim with an intellectual disability who had been catfished by someone pretending to be an attractive woman on a dating app. The victim handed over nearly eight thousand dollars in cash and even stole automobile rims worth fourteen hundred bucks from his own brother's garage because the scammers were blackmailing him. When Lewis showed up for another pickup, police were waiting, and they found an illegally stored Glock with an extended magazine in his vehicle.

But here's what you really need to know right now. Bitcoin ATMs have become the scammer's weapon of choice. FBI data shows Americans lost nearly 250 million dollars to Bitcoin ATM scams just last year, more than double from the previous year. In San Jose, Jim Meduri got a call from someone mimicking his son's voice, claiming he'd been arrested. They directed him to a Bitcoin ATM at a bakery where he fed in fifteen thousand dollars, a hundred bucks at a time. Luckily, Santa Clara County Deputy DA Erin West was able to freeze the funds and recover his money, but that's extremely rare.

The scammers are also getting smarter with AI. They're using voice cloning technology to mimic family members and crafting phishing emails that are nearly impossible to distinguish from legitimate messages. According to Bitdefender, ten percent of US users received at least one SMS scam in just the past two months.

So what can you do? Never rush when someone creates urgency. Verify everything through official channels. Use credit cards for online purchases, not debit cards or wire transfers. And if someone asks you to pay through a Bitcoin ATM or gift cards, that's your massive red flag right there.

Thanks so much for tuning in listeners, and please hit that subscribe button so you never miss an update on staying safe online. This has been a quiet please production, for more check out quiet please dot ai.

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This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI