How I Almost Lost Everything to a Social Engineering Scam (And How to Protect Yourself) | Ep. 81

Mike teaches white hat hacking and social engineering. And yesterday, a scammer almost got him.

Episode 81 of Start It or Scrap It opens with Mike breaking down exactly what happened: a spoofed Google security email that was verified clean at every technical level, a convincing phone call from someone with an American accent, and an auto-saved password on a fake login page that gave scammers 30 seconds of access before Mike changed his password and locked everything down. If he had waited three more minutes, they would have had access to his brokerage account and potentially everything else.

The episode then moves into one of the most practical conversations the show has had about where business opportunity actually is right now, why the trades are going to be the gold mine of the next decade, and how to use AI as a business tool rather than a reason to stay on the sideline.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Cold open highlights
1:00 Intro and World Cup US team discussion
3:30 Mike reveals he almost fell victim to a social engineering scam
4:22 The Poland login panic at the World Cup set him up for this
5:30 The spoofed Google email: how it passed every technical test
7:10 The convincing phone call with an American accent
7:48 He entered his password and immediately knew what was happening
8:00 How he got out: changed password, froze brokerage account, hung up
8:27 Three more minutes and they would have had everything
9:13 How someone who teaches this fell for it anyway
9:50 The number one rule: never enter your password when asked via a link
10:53 Your bank and Google will never call you about a security issue
11:35 Enable two-factor authentication on every account
12:42 Different password for every account, no exceptions
13:00 Scammers exploited the anxiety from the Poland incident two weeks earlier
15:10 Mighty Tiger question: how to step away from doing all the work
17:00 The process of building processes: start with the first hire
18:30 Document the job, hire someone, then build the next process
22:15 Gnarly Carl question: business models that are underrated right now
27:18 The trades are going to be the gold mine of the next decade
27:38 80% of current tradespeople are within ten years of retiring
28:29 Average age of a home builder has increased 20 years in seven
29:33 Two couples: trade school vs college degree, who is winning?
30:03 The college fund argument and why the electrician path may win
32:06 Supply and demand in the trades: prices have doubled in five years
32:58 That is the one thing that will not change in 100 years
33:42 The CEO of Ford and the mechanic shortage
34:50 Lean on Me and what mechanics made in the 80s vs today
36:21 You do not have to do the work to own the business
36:47 Sponsor someone through trade school with a work contract
37:24 The handyman franchise whose ideal buyer was a restaurant manager
38:42 If you can project manage, you can own almost any service business
41:27 Benny Link question: should AI competition stop you from starting a business?
41:51 AI is not a reason not to start. It changes what you should start.
43:42 Gummi is building a personal AI assistant to answer his phone
45:22 How AI filters out unqualified leads before they reach you
47:41 AI and the skill gap: great people get dramatically better, others get marginally less bad
50:00 AI chatbot case study: filtering 90% of junk calls for a client
51:50 The AI voice agent for Okeanos that handles 70% of calls without a human
53:00 Does AI voice remove the upsell opportunity? The tradeoff discussion
56:15 Clayton McDonald and the AI business discussion: Codex breakdown
57:00 Marketing your AI business and why coding knowledge helps output quality
58:00 How regional language nuance makes the difference between good and great AI output
59:30 Claude argued with Mike for six minutes about something it was wrong about
1:00:00 You are in the top 2% of AI users if you know to prompt by region
1:01:00 The wife at the Fortune 500 company who was the advanced AI user
1:02:00 Clayton invited to be a guest on the show
1:02:45 Daycare vs T brand: do not start a daycare
1:03:38 Closing

Hosted by Mike Terkanian (business attorney and software developer)
and Gummi Sigurdarson (marketing expert)

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/kZWdUExmI94

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