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Hey everyone, it’s Scott Benton here. I am the host of the classroom 2 courtroom podcast. How are you? We are here to help you transition from law school student into your professional career as an actual attorney having passed the bar with Flying colors
and today we’re gonna look at the question of how do I protect my firm from scams?
How do I protect my firm from scams? Now, scams, as you may or may not know, are just a daily part of life. They affect all of us. Even you yourself probably receive several emails, maybe even text messages and sometimes junk mail day after day that are clearly scams. If you ever want to see a giant collection of scams, go to your junk folder on your email and just browse through those a little bit and you’ll [00:01:00] see.
Many scams, one right after the other. Sometimes They promise you 10 million dollars from a long lost relative, or maybe there’s a class action suit against a major corporation they want you to participate in, or sometimes it’s coming from someone with a royal title in a far off land, and they seem to want to give you an enormous amount of money.
Despite the fact that they don’t know the first thing about you, and I know all of this because I get the same emails all of the time, and by now because I’ve seen many come through on my email that I just know they’re scams, and you probably do too. But as far as law firms go, You have to understand that they are also susceptible to scams, and there’s all kinds of scams.
Some are more sophisticated than others. You want to remain as hypervigilant as you can about the potential for scams. Sometimes they come in emails, sometimes there are wire [00:02:00] transfer interceptors that will get a hold of wire transfer instructions, and they will substitute their own. Wire transfer instructions so that the money ends up in their account and not in the account that you intend them to Go to so the question becomes as a new attorney How do you protect the firm that you’re now working for from scams?
And how do you not participate in those? You know that there are a lot of email scams, you know that There is the potential for those to come in, whether it’s on your personal email or your work email, and you just have to use the same precautions at work that you use in your personal life.
So as an example, it’s all going to be about awareness. You just need to be aware that scams are a thing and you probably are, but you want to double down when it comes to being at work and you want to know that scams can happen there as well. Now, You would think that a bunch of attorneys who deal with clients that oftentimes get [00:03:00] scammed wouldn’t necessarily have this problem, but sometimes scams can be pretty sophisticated.
[00:03:05] Scott Benton: Look at the state of AI right now or deep fake videos. You can make anybody look like anybody. You can make anyone sound like anybody. In some cases, in many cases, even you can create people out of fake videos. where no one is even available in order to put a deep fake face over them, you can just create a person out of nothing.
[00:03:29] Scott Benton: So be aware of that. Be aware that your perceptions can be deceived and you want to know that there are all kinds of scams out there. that you want to protect yourself against.
Now there are lots of alerts that go out there. One of the best ones that I know of happens to be the AARP. Now the AARP is for retired people, but it turns out that a lot of people who are either elderly and their retirement years, that they tend to get scammed a [00:04:00] lot for one reason or another.
We can discuss that if you like, but for the most part, we know. That people who are elderly do become prime targets of scammers because people who are elderly oftentimes will respond, and they’re not really so up to date with technology, or maybe they don’t understand AI, or maybe they don’t understand deepfakes, these are just not subjects that they typically know about a lot of times they’re isolated maybe their ability to cognitively process information is starting to decline and so they become easy to deceive and they become targets of scamsters and fraudsters and all kinds of ne’er do wells out there that intend Harm to everyone around them and those people are also going to be contacting you in your own personal life as they do me and my own personal life and in your work life.
So awareness is key. Awareness that this happens is going to [00:05:00] be very important for you and you want to make sure that any time anything comes in. That looks questionable. You just on email. For instance, you just want to delete those. Just delete them. Don’t open them. Don’t click on any of the links. The links are designed sometimes to infiltrate your computer.
Hopefully you have a firewall that will prevent that. But again, being aware and understanding what the current scams are. You want to make sure that you have some information about that. And as I was saying, you can go to AARP, go to their website. You can sign up for their alerts because so many of their members do get.
scam attempts made on them. So the AARP, they pay very particular attention and very close attention to the new scams that come up. So I’m signed up for those alerts. I think they’re text alerts, they might even be email alerts, whichever, however you want to receive those. And whenever they discover that there’s a new [00:06:00] scam going on, I’ll get that alert and I can read through it and know what to look out for.
And so you want to have that kind of awareness when it comes to scams to protect yourself and to protect the firm. So I hope that’s helpful information for you. Do know that this is something you need to worry about. Or at least look out for you want to stay as vigilant as you can to prevent scams from harming you or harming your firm.
And you want to make sure that you’re staying in front of all of the new scams that come along because there is a sort of chameleon S quality that they have. They evolve, they change new technologies come along and those new technologies are always exploited such as AI and deep fakes in order to create new, even.
harder to detect scams. Hopefully this arms you a little bit to go into your first job as an attorney and make sure you’re protecting yourself and protecting your scam. My name is Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom to Courtroom podcast. Thank you so much for watching this episode. If you’re finding this to [00:07:00] be valuable information and you’d like to receive an alert every time we put out a new episode, you can go to our website.
Our website is classroom2courtroom. com. That’s classroom, the number two. courtroom dot com. You can leave us your contact information there and we will send out an alert. So that you know a new episode is available. Don’t forget to share and subscribe. And we hope you’ll join us on our next episode of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast.
And we also hope you’ll join us in the meantime of making the world a better place one client at a time. Thank you so much.
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