10 Situational Vulnerabilities with Lou Baxter
Easy Prey9 Nov 2022

10 Situational Vulnerabilities with Lou Baxter

Criminals and trained to hone in on people who are vulnerable. Listen on to learn how you can protect the people you care about and what signs to look out for. Today's guest is Louise Baxter. Lou graduated with a law degree and worked for Sussex Trading Standards. She took over as the chair of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute's consumer power alliance and is the CTSI's lead officer of education. She got frustrated by the system in relation to support of scam victims and started what is now the National Trading Standard Scams Teams, and she was awarded an MBE for protecting vulnerable consumers from financial abuse.

Show Notes:
  • [1:10] - Lou shares her background and why she was driven to be more proactive.
  • [3:05] - Her team deals with specific types of scams.
  • [5:19] - If you respond to one letter scam, your details get passed around to more.
  • [6:54] - There are times of mental health challenges that make you vulnerable, such as grief and high stress.
  • [8:40] - There are different types of vulnerabilities and you could experience several at once.
  • [10:51] - There are mental health impacts when learning that you've been a victim of a scam.
  • [12:35] - Scams are only reported between 5 and 15% of the time.
  • [14:48] - Even Louise has been affected by situational vulnerability.
  • [16:01] - Louise describes the way a lottery scam increases their web of victims.
  • [18:49] - What support is available for scam victims?
  • [20:35] - Louise shares the types of responses her team receives when they reach out to scam victims.
  • [23:00] - Situational vulnerability creates opportunity for scammers to make their message more believable.
  • [25:35] - At the start of Covid-19, vulnerabilities were at an all time high.
  • [27:13] - Criminals can target constantly.
  • [28:38] - One million people have completed the training Louise's company offers.
  • [30:19] - As a society, we need to begin supporting victims rather than shaming them.
  • [32:50] - Scams and fraud are forms of emotional abuse.
  • [34:12] - Lou compares the tactics used by scammers to domestic emotional abuse.
  • [35:41] - Louise explains that most criminals are not in the same country as their targets.
  • [37:35] - There has been some valuable international work that's been done, but every country operates a bit differently in their standards.

Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.

Links and Resources:

Episoder(321)

Art Heists

Art Heists

The world of art theft looks glamorous in the movies, but the reality is far more complicated. From multi-million dollar forgery schemes to undercover FBI operations recovering stolen national treasur...

29 Apr 37min

The Power of Prediction

The Power of Prediction

We make predictions all the time including about the weather, about traffic, about what someone is going to say next. It feels natural, even rational. But when algorithms start making predictions abou...

22 Apr 39min

Privacy vs Reality

Privacy vs Reality

Online security advice often sounds simple until you actually try to follow it. Between password managers, privacy settings, and data brokers, protecting yourself can start to feel like a full-time jo...

15 Apr 58min

Wired to Trust

Wired to Trust

It's easy to think scams only work when someone misses something obvious. In reality, most of them don't look obvious at the start. They show up as normal situations with just enough friction to notic...

8 Apr 41min

Intimate Partner Fraud

Intimate Partner Fraud

Most scams leave a digital trail. A fake email, a spoofed number, a fraudulent website. You can trace them, report them, sometimes even reverse them. But what happens when the scam has no digital trai...

1 Apr 45min

Identity without Passwords

Identity without Passwords

Every day, employees at hotels, restaurants, and resorts across the country are doing exactly what they were hired to do: being warm, responsive, and eager to help. It's what makes hospitality work. I...

25 Mar 38min

When Cybercrime Gets Personal

When Cybercrime Gets Personal

Most security breaches don't begin with sophisticated code or elaborate technical exploits. They begin with a phone call, a convincing email, or someone at a help desk who just wanted to be helpful. T...

18 Mar 45min

Stopping Phone Scams

Stopping Phone Scams

Phone scams get dismissed as background noise or just annoying interruptions and unknown numbers with robotic voices we learn to ignore. But behind that noise is an industry built on psychology, autom...

11 Mar 45min

Populært innen Politikk og nyheter

giver-og-gjengen-vg
aftenpodden
aftenpodden-usa
forklart
popradet
stopp-verden
fotballpodden-2
rss-gukild-johaug
lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
nokon-ma-ga
det-store-bildet
hanna-de-heldige
dine-penger-pengeradet
rss-ness
rss-espen-lee-usensurert
aftenbla-bla
e24-podden
rss-dannet-uten-piano
rss-penger-polser-og-politikk
frokostshowet-pa-p5