That Tech Pod
Welcome to That Tech Pod, a podcast co-hosted by Laura Milstein, Gabi Schulte and Kevin Albert. Each Tuesday, That Tech Pod will feature in depth discussions about data privacy, cybersecurity, eDiscovery, and tech innovations with heavy hitters in the industry. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode! Visit thattechpod.com for more information.
That Tech Pod
Why Smart People Still Fall for Scams with Al Pascual
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This week, we sit down with Al Pascual, CEO and founder of Scamnetic, to talk about fraud from the inside out. Al didn’t come up through product or engineering. He started his career chasing real fraud cases, shaped early on by parents who were cops and a first job in a bank fraud department. That hands-on experience is what pushed him from treating fraud as “just a job” to seeing it as his lane.
We get into the scam patterns that worry him most right now, including pig butchering and sextortion schemes that still aren’t getting enough mainstream attention. Al makes a clear case that fraud isn’t primarily a data or tooling problem. It’s a human one. Psychology, pressure, shame, and timing matter more than most defenses want to admit. When a big fraud story hits the news, he explains how coverage often misses the point by focusing on the tech and ignoring the manipulation. Al shares one of the strangest cases he’s worked, and what it taught him about how creative and absurd fraudsters can be. We also tackle the reality of AI-enabled scams, including voice cloning. How common is it really, and who’s actually at risk? Kevin is skeptical he’d fall for it, while Laura shares a story about a friend losing $500 to a gift card scam, a reminder that real people get caught all the time. This one is a grounded, sometimes funny, and occasionally unsettling look at how fraud really works, and why understanding people matters as much as understanding systems.
A recognized expert on cybercrime, Al Pascual is the CEO and Founder of Scamnetic. Scamnetic is a software solution for scam detection and protection that uses AI to analyze incoming communications in real time and flag or score risk before someone falls for a scam. 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 around the world. Al cut his teeth fighting fraudsters at HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and FIS, where during his time as an investigator, his work resulted in the arrest of more than four hundred suspects.
Hello and welcome to that tech pod where we discuss all things e-discovery, data privacy, cybersecurity, tech innovations. I'm Laura Melstein.
SPEAKER_01And I'm Kevin Albert.
SPEAKER_00And each week we bring on heavy headers from the industry to help us break down these topics. And today, Kevin, who are we talking to?
SPEAKER_01Today we're talking to Al Pasqual, a recognized expert on cybercrime. Al is the CEO and founder of Scabnetic. Scabnetic is a software solution for scam detection and protection that uses AI to analyze incoming communications in real time and flag or score its risk behavior before someone falls for a scam. A successful technology entrepreneur and a former managing executor of Javelin Strategy and Research, Al has spent his career laser focused on protecting customers and organizations from financially motivated crime. His past research on consumer identity theft has been cited by hundreds of media outlets and presented at conferences around the world. Al cut his teeth fighting fraudsters at HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and FIS. Where during his time as an investigator, his work resulted in arrest of more than 400 suspects. Al, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02Oh, thanks for every go.
SPEAKER_00Just just Kevin, what about me, Al? Hurtful. This happens every time. I just I have to say it, Al, every single time, and our listeners are probably tired of me announcing it. Every time Kevin says welcome to the show, it's thanks, Kevin. But if I say welcome to the show, it's thanks, Laura and Kevin. I don't know what it is, but it's hurtful, Al, you uh fell victim to it again. I guess I I'm the victim in it, but another day, another hate crime. Here we go. But Al, I too am excited for you to be here, especially because you kind of you you came on chasing actual fraud cases. And that's different. That's different than someone who's who came through like product or engineering. Like you were like, no, I'm out there, I'm catching them. Let's get a little crazy. I I want to dive into that more. Can you tell me more about your background? When was that moment that you were like, you know what? This isn't it isn't a job. This this is who I am, this is my identity, this is my lane. I'm owl. You know, tell me more.
SPEAKER_02Yes, so I'll give you this the short version. So my parents were cops. They were actually both detectives NYPD. I wanted to go to college. My parents said, great, go to college, but you can't be a cop, otherwise, we're not gonna send you to college. And so I went to college, did a bunch of different stuff, became a banker for a little bit, and then they stuck me in the fraud department. And I realized just how much fraud there was and how good I was at catching it. And maybe it's because of my parents, maybe it's something genetic, who knows? But you know, it was really apparent to me when people were lying to the bank or the bank's partners, right, about the things that they were buying, the things that they wanted to borrow the money for, who they really were. And, you know, over time then I started to do things I had to do more with, you know, data and technology and other partners, and it just became like a it became a part of me, I guess, and I became a part of it. And now that's you know, for better or worse, all I kind of see and and focus on outside of obviously my family and eating food and things like that.
SPEAKER_01So, what's the most dangerous scam pattern that you're seeing right now that maybe hasn't even hit mainstream awareness yet?
SPEAKER_02So two different things, Kevin. I think uh the most dangerous one by far is probably well no, you know, maybe I can answer them both and answer them sort of the same way. So with scams, the ones that I think create the greatest potential likelihood that someone's gonna harm themselves are the ones that are the most disconcerting. And they are both definitely on the rise. It's like two forms that I think are really increasingly prevalent. You've got the ones that target people who have a lot of money to lose, they're long cons, they call them pig butchering. The idea is you start slow, they build a relationship, happens over many months, and then they try to steal hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. If you give up your life savings, your retirement, right? You know what your kids are going to inherit. And a lot of people take that very, very personally. And you know, they try to hurt themselves, and the money is one thing, right? The personal harm is another. Opposite end of the spectrum is sex tortion. A lot of that targets younger people, especially young men, the financial ones, anyway. There's actually a whole new kind of spin on it that actually targets uh young women, but it has a very much uh kind of sex tortion angle to it. So you know, those are the ones that that maybe bother me the most for very, very obvious reasons, and they're both you know picking up steam.
SPEAKER_01What does pig butchering mean? Like I don't know if I know that term.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so pig butchering it comes from a Chinese term for fattening the pig. Really, again, it's an unfortunate name, but you know, clearly the criminals don't really care. So the premise is it starts very innocently. So we may all get these kinds of out-of-the-blue communications, text messages, messages on WhatsApp or social media where they've mistaken us for someone else, or they connect with us on some sort of you know, in some sort of like a group setting, or whether it's kinda like your shared interest, that sort of thing. And they're just it seems like they're just being friendly, right? They just you're looking for a connection, and little by little they will ingratiate themselves, build a relationship, it may move into different channels of communication, sometimes even audio, video, and that's why increasingly now deep fakes have become so prevalent in scams. And it's not just people pretending to be Keanu Reeves, right, or Brad Pitt. You know, scammers are orienting themselves to really to be able to cater to their audience, and so you'll see scams involving deepfakes where you know the the the criminal is pretending to be a you know 55 or 60-year-old man because they know the woman on the other side of the equation is in that same age range and she's looking for a relationship with someone in the same age. And so it's become incredibly sophisticated because it happens over such a long period of time and the trust is built in that way, they're very, very hard to dislodge. People don't necessarily see the force for the trees, even when the money leaves, it tends to be small amounts in the beginning. Maybe you know, you even get your money back. They've they figured out that by taking their time, the prize at the end can be just so much bigger as opposed to rushing to get paid.
SPEAKER_01So funny to me. See, I always hear those, like the stories about those AI clone voice scams where people impersonate your like loved ones or whatever. I always feel like those uh those always sound fake to me. And so I'm surprised to hear that people actually fall for those. I don't know, just kind of funny to me.
SPEAKER_00Well, wait, wait, wait. I wanna I wanna jump in on that though, Kevin. When you're saying they feel fake, like if your wife, if they tried to impersonate your wife, or what if it was like a friend you haven't talked to in a while?
SPEAKER_01Uh for me, like I feel like I would be able to kind of suss that out that that's fake. Like, I feel like I'm not like a person who's necessarily gonna get caught up in one of those things because I'm gonna you know be able to see right through it real fast. Maybe I'm just naive. I don't know. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00That's kind of my be like Al, you've got a trick, Kevin, now now that he said that in like two weeks. Let's do something.
SPEAKER_01I don't know, it just feels obvious to me. Like I don't know.
SPEAKER_00Al, what do you think?
SPEAKER_02So I that missed a couple different things, right? So in the case of something like pig butchering, these are not they're not impersonating people you know, right? They are taking on a third-party persona, but it's someone that you're building a relationship with, so you have no basis for comparison. That being said, Kevin, there are a lot of instances of people getting tricked into thinking that, like, for example, someone in their family has been kidnapped and they have to pay a ransom in order to get that family member back. I actually did a piece with uh with MasterCard, and it involved telling the story of a young woman who thought her mother had been kidnapped. And so she ended up like she went, it was a terrible ordeal, but she eventually got to her car and drove somewhere to get on a payphone to have a conversation with these criminals, and they were manipulating her for the whole the whole time. So they uh these things happen. People do get convinced and they can go to great lengths just because it sounds like it's it's a loved one.
SPEAKER_01That's the problem I have with it. Like, I don't have a lot of cash on hand. Like if you're calling like Jeff Bezos or you're calling like Elon Musk, I assume those guys just had cash. Like, if you're just calling a random person, who's just gonna get cash to be like, oh, of course, I gotta go bail out my mom or whatever. I don't know. That that part of it seems so unlikely to me.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, they start they start big. Sometimes they'll go smaller and smaller and smaller, but they'll also convince people to take loans, mortgage their house. Like they then they ask those questions brazenly, uh they just gotta do it enough, and eventually someone is gonna do it.
SPEAKER_00No, I mean I I'm gonna go with you here, Al, because I'm gonna share a story to s uh about somebody that I actually know this person, and I hope that he's listening and he's feeling shamed now. But I won't say his name, I'll just shame him publicly. He'll know. But I knew somebody who was on, he was single and he was trying to date, and he met somebody that he was like, Oh, uh, we're they were talking on a normal dating site, like nothing weird. And they had been talking for a while, they had moved to texting, but they had never actually met up yet. And then the person, I I guess she said something like she was having some issues getting some like gift cards. And so she basically convinces him and explains to him to this thing where he she was basically like, Can you go get gift cards and then scratch them off, give me the numbers, and I will send money into your account. He got a few gift cards. She put money into his account. So he sees there's money in the account and he's like, Oh, okay. And then she's like, I hate to do this. Can you get some more gift cards? Tons and tons of gift cards. And he tells me, he's like, I got her so many gift cards, it was like hundreds of dollars of gift cards. And I was like, What? And then he's like, No, it's okay though. She put money in the account. I was like, that's gonna disappear. And it did. The money, of course, comes out of the account. This person disappears. It was a whole scam from somebody he had been talking to for like months. And to me, the saddest part is this person or bot or whatever for the did all this for like maybe $500. I'm like, what a waste of time. Like it just seems insane. But also to him, he genuinely thought this makes sense and money went into his account before it was then taken out. So I don't know. What are your thoughts on that, Al? I thought it was crazy.
SPEAKER_02You know, it's if you think about the economics of how these things work, that's not super crazy. What a lot of people don't know is that when you're talking to someone either on the phone or by text or DM, when you're being scammed, more often than not, it's someone living in, you know, a scam call center in Southeast Asia, you know, or somewhere else in the world, they have someone in the Caribbean. These people tend to be human trafficking victims. They generally don't get paid, even though some do. And so, you know, the costs to conduct these scams are negligible for the people who actually make the money. Now, if you don't perform as an employee, then bad, bad, bad things happen to you. But you know, these people aren't making a minimum wage or you know, even something reasonable. They're making zero. Right. So that 500 bucks is the difference between them eating lunch, right, or eating anything that day or not, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_00I'm just saying weeks of time. Like they had weeks without eating lunch for that. It's that's a whole thing, and it's super sad, but you're not wrong. So we're finally admitting that fraud is a human and psychological problem, okay? Not just a data problem, right?
SPEAKER_02Oh, very much so.
SPEAKER_00Well, with that being said, then when a major fraud story breaks in the news, let's get a little crazy here. What's the first sign that the coverage is missing the real issue? And is it really that it's missing the real issue, or is it just the data? Like tie those together.
SPEAKER_02I think when there's coverage of you know these kinds of financial and identity crimes, they generally take one of maybe a couple angles. They're either focused on the very kind of human impact of these crimes. So there's it's a human interest story, right? You know, someone was you know very much hurt by it, took maybe their again, their whole life savings. There was one recently in the news about a bank and a woman losing a lot of money to it, and so it becomes very focused on the victim, which of course is a good place to focus and never should have happened in the first place. The other angle is more of a kind of like a macro level you know analysis of this big picture issue. But I think in either case, they never really talk about why these things happen so successfully. There's never any kind of like true root cause analysis, and they don't look at you know the role that different players play in allowing these things to happen. Because if you think about how these schemes work, it's not just that there's a criminal somewhere, you know, on one side of the world and a victim on the other, right? There's a whole ecosystem of technology and service providers in the middle, some of whom benefit obviously very distinctly from these things happening one way or another. And rarely do they get talked about. I mean, it happens on occasion, but no one's looking at, you know, from A to B to C to D and talking about all the different steps that it took for that scam to succeed. But I think if we really spent some time breaking it down, naming names, right, calling out the processes that were broken, there'd be a lot more effort towards fixing things. But that's process-based analysis of scams and fraud, I don't make I don't think it makes for super interesting reading. Plus, it's really hard to put together a pithy, you know, headline around that kind of stuff, too.
SPEAKER_01So, I mean, obviously you've probably worked on some really strange fraud cases over the years. Is there one that still makes you laugh or one that you still think about? And what did it teach you about how fraud really works?
SPEAKER_02So, yeah, there was a uh case, and I forget, I think I I was talking to someone about this the other day, and I forget if it was if I was just in the room or if it was one of mine. But I was an investigator for years, and there was an individual who was basically stealing identity information, and they were stealing it from a uh like one of those income tax businesses. Like I think it was it actually it was, it was liberty tax, not to call any particular business, but it was liberty tax, and I know it was liberty tax because when we figured out where the data was coming from, we were working with I believe it was Secret Service, right? And Secret Service sent because it never becomes financial crimes. So if you don't know, the Secret Service works for the Treasury Department technically, and half of their mandate is to stop financial crimes. Anyway, so they were going to this particular location and we were on the phone with them because we were looking for somebody, like it's someone that we knew at that location who was stealing personal information, and we had identified them, and they had a picture, right? So Secret Service is driving down the street getting ready to go to this business, and all of a sudden you can or you can hear him go, Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that's him. Wait, that's him back up. And so I guess on the way there, like we're thinking he's like you know, like a tax accountant or whatever, right? Working inside this business. No, so he was the guy dressed up outside as the Statue of Liberty holding one of those big spinny signs, you know, in the street, and you you know, the car backs up, right? And you could hear him getting out of the door and telling him to freeze, and it becomes a foot chase. And so they're chasing the Statue of Liberty down the street, and they tackle him in the street. There's a lot of like, you know, a lot of very sad outcomes in what in what I do and what I've done, you know, previously. There's a lot of you know, things that are very much and wholly uninteresting because they're numbers oriented. But every once in a while, something utterly ridiculous happens, and that was just funny. And I think there's a photo somewhere of this guy too, you know, but like you know, in his in his outfit. But yeah, you never know.
SPEAKER_00Is he back out there spinning today?
SPEAKER_02It could be.
SPEAKER_00Oh man.
SPEAKER_02Very well could be.
SPEAKER_00We'll need a follow-up. You have been amazing, but before I let you go, I have one question that I I've wanted to ask before you even got on. I've just been waiting. Because I'm just kind of intrigued by this on like a global scale. So, from news from abroad about countries like Singapore taking you know dramatic legal steps against scammers, you you hear things like this all the time. What do you think of harsher penalties as a deterrent? Do you think it actually works, or do you think it's just like a waste?
SPEAKER_02So harsher penalties. I think that the people that were grabbed when they shut down some of these scam centers are there's a really good chance they'll get executed. But I also suspect it's a show and that many of these scam centers are still very much under the protection of local governments, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, I mean you can make the punishments whatever you like, but I don't think the paradigm there is such that it really matters.
SPEAKER_00That's what that's kind of how I feel. That's why it was something I was thinking about before, because I'm just like, I think you get to that point and to even when you talked about earlier that like $500 is the difference between if you eat or not, it kind of comes down to what do you have to lose, where are you at, and all of these other things. Uh to me, I don't know if it makes a difference.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think we need to focus on you know all the businesses that make money along the way. Yeah, as opposed to and the ones it's the ones that we can control and influence, right, as individuals with our governments, but we're not we're not changing the behavior of folks on the other side of the world.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We really appreciate your time and hope that you'll come back.
SPEAKER_02Well, thank you for having me, Laura.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, see, just to me, Kev. Just me.
SPEAKER_01Fine. Fair enough.
SPEAKER_00So Kevin, we just talked to Al, and before I ask you your tech takeaways, I just want to know. So this is a this is a little random, but you know the hashtag me too movement.
SPEAKER_01Sure, of course.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so before it was hashtag, it was the pound sign. So we could all argue that you're saying pound me too or hashtag me too, which are very different viewpoints. But with a name like Al and the AI movement, I kind of argue that if you're looking at it and you don't know, it's is it Al or is it AI? Like who are we talking to? And I know once an L, one's an I, but I mean, come on, debatable. Anyway, what were your tech takeaways?
SPEAKER_01So for me, I thought it was interesting. Uh, you know, I I kind of feel like a lot of this feels like a data problem, but I actually liked his perspective that it's way more of a human problem. And so I think that's interesting. You know, I I I I always wonder about sort of these things. I I'm glad he kind of pushed back on my it seems like a thing that like not say gullible people, but like, you know, that only those type of people are getting caught up in. But I liked that he was talking about how it is real people. The scams seem to change and the losses grow, but patterns are all sort of the same. You know, we're manipulating humans. And so I thought it was really good. I really liked him. I thought his background was interesting, coming from a family of cops and sort of moving through bank fraud and all that. So I'm really glad we had him on. What about you? What are your tech takeaways?
SPEAKER_00No, totally. I love talking about scammers in any uh capacity, and that may sound ridiculous, but as much as a scammer is so bad, I find it so interesting because there's so much intelligence behind a good scammer. And even though it's like you don't want to give the bad guys credit, I always think I'm like, ah, if you but if you used your powers for good and all the things that you could do, and it's it is fascinating because it is so much of a human thing, but it is also so much of a data thing. And it's that fine line that we're constantly gonna dance over no matter how strongly I feel one way or another. My mind's gonna shift to the next way the next day because it it is both are so intertwined. If you have strong feelings about today's episode, if you want to know more about Al, scammers, cyber, cybercrime, anything in general, we'd love to hear from you. Please give us a buzz, give us a ping, say hello. You can talk to us directly at contact at thattechpod.com. If you haven't already, please head on over to www.thattechpod.com to enter your email and subscribe, get some swag. It's holiday season, and what's better to wear than that tech pod gear? Absolutely nothing. You heard it here first. We are selling stuff and LinkedIn.com slash that tech pod. That's where you can give us a follow. We might be on other social medias, but really, who wants to be when you're on LinkedIn? It really is just the best one, isn't it? But anyway, Kevin, is there anything else our listeners can do?
SPEAKER_01Yep, go to wherever you're podcast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or what have you, and leave us a review, leave us a rating, let us know how we're doing. All that stuff helps us with the algorithms and gets us out there, which is much appreciated. Thanks everybody.
SPEAKER_00Thanks everyone.