Scam Squad

This week, Scam Squad has Shawn Dyer, Chief Fraud Specialist from Montecito Bank & Trust, joins host Patti Teel and Chief Investigator Kristina Perkins of the Santa Barbara District Attornye’s Office to discuss Imposter Scams, as well as other scam now affecting Santa Barbara County. The scams that are resurfacing again are the Online Work Scam, International Lottery Scam, and with a broad sweep of other Imposter Scams, the crooks pretend to be employees from such entities as banks, or vendors like Pay Pal, law enforcement and other such entities. The Imposter calls the victims and try to convince them there has been a breech or a problem in their account and they need to stop it by having the victim send the scammer money in the for of gift cards to fix the breech problem. So listen and find out more about how to protect yourself from these current scams.

loan & romance scams by Hub for Podcasting

Chief investigator Kristina Perkins discusses how the Dept of Justice has created a new Faud Center that focuses on items such as the Tax Tariff Fraud. It ia callied the National Fraud Detection Center. What Kristina likes about it is that it will bring all the agencies together and is a multi-agency team that will investigate government program fraud. They will try to break down institutional silos usuing analysts across a variety of communities and they will leverage multiple technologies. Hopefully, from a federal level, this is something that we can all benefit from. Kristina goes on to talk about recent scams surfacing in the Santa Barbara communitity such as QR Code Scams.

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Santa Barbara City Councilman, Eric Friedman, warns about the Downloadable Invitation Scam and shares advice on avoiding this scam and others. He also reviews the steps you can take if you think your identity was stolen.

You can call the non-urgent Santa Barbara Police Dept at 805-897-2300
Councilman Eric Friedman also invites you to contact him.
Direct: 805-564-5320
Email: efriedman@santabarbaraca.gov