Avoiding Scams With Mike Sackmary

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing my friend, Mike Sackary. He specializes in common scams and how we can avoid them. How we can help our loved ones also avoid them. he brings awareness to common scams that come through our email, through our phone common scams that the elderly especially fall for and how we can protect ourselves. Mike always brings us the goods.

What are the biggest scams that are out there now? How do we help ourselves and others, maybe our aging parents, avoid them?

What's wonderful about scammers is that they advertise. We can listen to an advertisement on the radio as we're driving or we can see something pop up and Facebook, LinkedIn or wherever, we can examine that. We can analyze the ad and start learning what signs are looking for.

Three specific scams:

One is the SEO slash Advertising Scam.

Second is business coaches, business incubators, business academies.

Third is protecting seniors.

Starting with SEO advertising, this is the lowest barrier to entry for a scammer. All they need is a social media account and they usually will pay somebody a little bit of money on Fiverr, or one of those type services to design something for them. The first thing we want to look at, is if someone says they are search engine optimization expert, look at the rest of what they're saying. Are they telling you that they are focused on a particular demographic or gender, whatever? That's irrelevant? It's irrelevant because your business you need to reach your intended market.

If the if the ad is something like "we help left handed margin purple haired people from ....." you should be able to help everybody because it's search engine. A search engine is, I say, agnostic. The search engine doesn't know anything. You put terms in, and it goes and makes connections. Which is what you need an SEO person to do for you. This is the same thing with ads for Facebook advertising or LinkedIn advertising.

You want to talk to someone about and learn about in those types of services and offers, what are their results? What can they measure? Who can you talk to that's a reference that has actually used them. When Mike started doing SEO for, they ran into a bunch of scammers. The principles of scamming go back 10s of 1000s of years, it's it's the actual approach changes a little bit, but the core of it is still very easy to recognize. Ask questions, they would send different people from the company to ask questions in different ways.

When you ask someone what results they can prove, they should be talking to you about these are the search terms we use. This is how we measure that the response rate.

Ask the questions. And I would really encourage all your listeners don't second guess yourself. Whether you're male or female, both genders have different levels of intuition, that gut feeling wherever you want to call it. Something feels off don't second guess that to ask the question, if you don't like the answers you're getting just move along. Particularly when it comes to shifting from SEO, which is just a totally agnostic, technical thing into advertising, if you're going to pay somebody to help you advertise to some decide if you want them to design the ad, graphics color look and feel emotional, every ads designed to get an emotional response somehow. Do you want to design it yourself and have someone else do the technical bits. So decide that ahead of time. Obviously, having someone design it will typically cost more. But you should also be dealing with the real professional.

To get avoid being scammed on advertising sales, if someone says, I hear this all the time, take our $5,000 course. And we're going to teach you everything you need to know about advertising on social media, and you'll be a bazillionaire. And you'll have all this passive income.I've seen these schools as high as $10k, They've got 100 200 people in there is that everybody really going to make that kind of return. You really got to think about that. Statistically, it makes no sense. So ask those questions.

Moving into business coaching and incubators, academies, startups, all these terms. There's a lot more that are just going to take your money and leave you pulling out your hair. The big trick here is to ask, if I'll just pick on business coaches for a minute. Ask what level of business they have personally run. And we modeled this in our company, we're business consultants. And so when we're talking to somebody about potentially coming in, as a client, we're like, Okay, this is a level we've been at, when you're ready to move beyond that. These are the kinds of people you would send you to. So rule number one, a coach can't take you somewhere they haven't been. Yes. They can, they can theorize.

There is a difference between mentors and coaches.

But just for this conversation, we'll we'll just lump them together. When you're looking at coaches, where have they already been? What size businesses that they run? Who are the references, you want to be able to call people that have worked for them? You also want to be able to talk to former clients. Some coaches don't have clients yet. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I can think of several people I've known that were just starting out. We told our first couple clients, we haven't really done this before. We've done it for ourselves. We haven't done it for a client. Do you want to be the free guinea pig? Most coaches that you would want to use, have done that. They've helped a couple of clients initially for free just to test out their process. And yes, you know, to get a real testimonial from somebody that actually helped. This is super important. If you're thinking about using a business coach, because they're famous or well known, whatever, whatever. Maybe that's good for you. Maybe not, but definitely ask. Okay, I want to talk to you first one or two clients you ever had, like at the beginning? Can I call?

When you are entering into a relationship with a business coach or a life coach or transformation coach of forgiveness coach or grief, coach, all of those we are working together.

We get to learn, we're learning till the day we die. I encourage people when I have an discovery call with a potential client, I encourage them to ask me a zillion questions. Because if you're willing to invest in me, I want to make sure that you're you're entering entering into this business opportunity with the right person. I'm not the only coach out there, there are lots and lots and lots of us, and there are good ones, and there are bad ones. And without you asking questions, how do you know number one, if I'm a good coach? And number two, are we the right fit? No. Can I help you? Let's talk about it. Let's let's really look into all this. I love the questions. I think it's I think it's a fabulous way. I mean, when I when I hire someone to say when we had the our our basement, which is now my office, when we have all of this redone. It wasn't the first person who walked in and said they could do it that we hired, I asked a bunch of questions. How are you going to do this? What's it going to look like? Well, what is your process? I asked a zillion questions if I'm going to hand my money to you to create a space that I'm going to spend countless hours in every single day. I want it to be what I want. So I'm going to ask questions, of course, I'm going to ask questions, and it should be that way with every area of our lives.

How do you know if you're asking too many questions? That's that's actually a lot easier. In scam avoidance, because a true scammer will lose patients pretty quickly. You're listening for the losing patience are starting to put pressure on me.

There's no such thing as a legitimate business deal with they're gonna tell you, you have to sign up right now.

Never open an email if you don't recognize the return address. Look at the sender's address. And don't copy and paste just open another browser window, type in that sender's address into Google. It's going to direct you back to wherever that came from. And you can see well, I signed up for a free offer from XYZ company and I think this is it. Cool. Type that address in the Google search bar. If it's really from them, it'll be the first thing you'll see is that website. There's so many sophisticated technical scams right now.

How do we protect our seniors? How do we educate them? How do we be there for them?

It's really tricky to know, when a senior has progressed to the point where they're losing cognitive function is that for most people is gradual. I think it's a matter of training. As we train muscle memory, we need to train brain memory. So help your seniors learn a procedure and write it out for him in large font.

The government does not call you just hang up the phone. A legitimate caller is not going to be offended when a senior starts asking questions.

One thing we can all do for seniors, you don't have to be related to seniors to do this. You just out of courtesy need to let them know what you're doing. You can represent them you don't need power of attorney or any of that jazz. That's if you need to sign something. But to just simply advocate or represent them on the phone.

I want everybody to make a comment. I'm curious LinkedIn or blues episode or wherever you you can make a comment with a question in there about scams.