The Wire Fraud Epidemic and How to Protect Your Firm

Wire fraud is no longer an obvious, easy-to-spot scam. The reality today is much more sophisticated. 

In this episode of the Advisor Turntable Podcast, Brendan Ryan talks with Michael Brice, founder of BW Cyber, about the growing epidemic of wire fraud targeting financial firms, advisors, and even individual investors. In addition to working with advisors and asset managers through BW Cyber, Michael works with the FBI and other government agencies on cybersecurity investigations and has seen it all. He shares real-world examples ranging from compromised email threads to AI-generated voice cloning and deepfake video calls being used to manipulate wiring instructions. 

One of the more reassuring takeaways from the conversation: most wire fraud is not really a technology problem — it’s a human one. And in many cases, relatively simple verification procedures and operational controls can dramatically reduce risk.

As AI continues making digital communication harder to trust, this is becoming an increasingly important operational issue for advisors and firms to understand. The cost of improving these processes is often insignificant compared to the financial and reputational damage one successful scam can cause.

Learn more about BW Cyber: https://www.bwcyberservices.com/about-us/ 

This material is provided for informational purposes only and does not in any sense constitute a solicitation or offer for the purchase or sale of securities nor does it constitute investment advice for any person or a recommendation to take any action. Investment themes and individual securities mentioned may or may not be held in any or all client accounts. The material may contain forward or backward-looking statements regarding intent, beliefs regarding current or past expectations. The views expressed are subject to change based on market and other conditions. The information presented in this report is based on data obtained from third party sources. Although it is believed to be accurate, no representation or warranty is made as to its accuracy or completeness.

The views and opinions expressed throughout this presentation are those of the presenter as of date the podcast is episode is published. The opinions or outlooks may change over time with changing market conditions or other relevant variables.

Some of our podcast guests may be clients. There was no compensation exchanged for their participation. 

Transcript

Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Advisor Turntable Podcast. Today I have Michael Bryce, the founder of BW Cyber, with me. I know most advisors are not necessarily super excited to talk about cybersecurity, but I think that Michael is actually a pretty exciting guy. We'll get into more of that later. But the topic at hand today, and something he's very passionate about and is becoming, I think, a bigger threat and something advisors are encountering more and more is wire fraud. Michael's going to talk about some of the schemes he's seen, the kind of really sinister nature of wire fraud because of how difficult it is to stop, uh, how AI can make that more difficult in the future, um, and kind of what he's seeing on the ground. And then finally, we'll we'll end a little more optimistically of the of the steps you can take to protect yourself. Um yeah, with that, you want to just get right into it, Michael? I I'd love to, Brendan.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

I'd love to. Um You use the term passionate, and and I am very passionate. I want to let you know that that we're working, and I'm personally leading about one wire fraud a week. Um generally, they're anywhere on the low end from, and and this is what I call a good wire fraud, on the low end of 25,000, but more often than not, upwards and two, three quarters of a million to multimillion dollar frauds. And when I say a good one, um if I have a client that loses a $25,000 wire fraud, it's a great lesson learned because most criminals are pretty clever in terms of waiting for the big ones to come and not the small ones. And if you're an asset manager and you're listening to this podcast, that's you. They don't care about your vendor payments. They care about your disbursements, your distributions that are going to your investors.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

When we were doing the prep for this, you mentioned there kind of being a a threshold. I think it was under a million dollars or something, where there's basically no chance of recovery. Is that a sweet spot that that the perpetrators target, or is that just kind of the nature of the beast in enforcement?

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Well, it's a little bit of both. Um what we found is that perpetrators have learned that a lot of our clients have thresholds for how much of a wire needs to be approved or reviewed. And in many instances, that threshold is actually $1 million. So I've I've literally seen criminals stair step on how they trick clients starting at uh under $100,000 and then, you know, $99,000 wire that they trick people into, then a $249,000 wire, and then a $999,000 wire. And, you know, one of the lessons that we talk to our clients as we go through their wire policies, cash management policies, actually, is you know, how much are you willing to lose? And and are you really lilit willing to lose $999,000? Of course, people usually say no, and that's okay. Then, you know, one of the first lessons we say is let's put some controls into to lower those those

Understanding the Nature of Wire Fraud

SPEAKER_01 3:02

review thresholds. And then sadly, on the government side, our government's overwhelmed with fraud. Um there's not really a centralized organization that's responsible because of Congress. Now, the FBI does it. They've got the www.gov uh website, which is where you would report a wire fraud. But they they operate it on what I'd consider to be a best effort. They those guys work tirelessly. But I will tell you that that there's just a certain threshold that if a wire fraud comes through there, I don't think they have the manpower, the person power to to address it. And and because of this epidemic with wire fraud, we're seeing that that if it's less than a million, it's probably gonna be difficult to get somebody's attention. And and that should be a really scary thought.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

And is it is it correct for me to state that this isn't really a technology problem, it's a human problem that they're kind of the weakest. You personally are the weakest link that they're they're targeting, and and almost all of the all of the um perpetuators are are using deceit more than some sort of hacking to get you to get.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah, I I I get a phone call usually, someone says, We think we were hacked, can you check our systems? And I say, hold on, hold on, what happened? Because it's all about motivation. And and just so you understand, in the asset and wealth management industry, you know, the clients that you're working with, it's all about motivation. Criminals don't want to break in just because they broke in. They want basically to do one thing, and that's to monetize either you or your data. So when we do risk assessments and we deal with frauds, it always comes down to show me the money. And in this instance, the tech activity that they do is almost entirely a very simple what we call credential capture, where they trick the person receiving what they think is a real email into submitting their password and uh user ID. You know, if you think about it, you get an email, I've seen this a lot. You get an email, it's from somebody you think you know, it has an attachment that's encrypted. You click on the attachment, and the attachment says go to Microsoft and log in to get it. Okay, it sounds reasonable, and actually Microsoft set it up that way. Thank you, Microsoft. You're helping my business. But it's a terrible process. And so what happens is you put your user ID and password into a site that you think is Microsoft, and instead you're doing what is the equivalent of giving a criminal your car keys and your home address and saying, Hey, my house key is there on the keychain, go steal everything in it. That's what you're doing with your user ID and password. These criminals have very, in a very lowbrow, simple way, they've broken into your email and they're just sitting and watching. And they're waiting to see when you start talking about a wire. And gosh, guys, that's what we do in this business, right? We have distributions, we have disbursements, we pay vendors. Uh, if you're in private equity, you have port co acquisitions, sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and that is what they want. So they'll pass up on the $10,000, $25,000 wires that they might be able to redirect to go for the big ones. And when they

The Human Element in Cybersecurity

SPEAKER_01 6:05

do, it's usually pretty darn simple. All they do is there's a real wire, they just get in the middle, and it's not terrible. I won't waste time today on the podcast, but it's very simple for them to change the wiring instructions. So let's just say I'm doing a transaction with Brendan, and I know I'm gonna send him $50 million because he's selling me a portco. He's the closing agent. And as described on time, he sends me an email with the wiring instructions, except, gosh darn it, my account was broken into it because I clicked on that link and put my user ID and password in. And the instructions I get from Brendan, which by the way, Brendan's email is actual, but the instructions have been changed. So instead of me sending the money to Bank America, I send it to Oklahoma Central Standard Bank or something like that. I think it's correct, and then guess what? I get an email from Brendan that says, hey, Michael, I received the wire. Spoiler alert, it's not Brendan, it's a criminal, but it I think it is because someone's broken into my account. It's really simple to do that. And then I don't even think about it for a couple weeks. By the time I realize I've sent that wire to a fraudulent site, it's gone. 75 to 80 percent of the wire fraud investigations we perform, we can't get back. And it's painful. And that's where my passion comes from because I want to do everything I can to evangelize this epidemic of wire fraud and the embarrassment and shame that goes with it for individuals who are tricked to A, let people know what's happening, and B, get out in front. So instead of it being two, three, four weeks later, they get to me two, three days later. And if you get to me within three days or get to the FBI within three days, we can get your money back.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

That's great. And I should say that we are a customer of BW Cyber, and I assume most of your clients are larger asset managers. Um, is there a difference uh between like a large company that's they're moving, you know, like you said, they could be doing a portfolio transaction, a private equity firm is moving tens of millions of dollars, but individuals they could be buying a home, uh wiring money. Is there a difference uh in in targeting of individuals, or maybe even in our example, financial advisors that may control the movement of some of their client securities versus the big companies? Or is it kind of each kind of has the same point of weakness, and that's the individual? And and or just is the prevalence greater amongst small individuals than bigger companies because maybe they have they hire people like you? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Uh it's a great question. And and sadly, what I would say is in the asset and wealth management music, I'm not gonna talk about the banks. The banks are pretty, pretty tight these days, but that's just because they've got so much regulation and so many people. But I I see it somewhat universally, although when we're working with an organization, uh Brendan, like yours and others, we are here to educate and train you. And my belief is hopefully, A, if if we have the training and B,

The Impact of Wire Fraud on Individuals and Firms

SPEAKER_01 8:57

we put in the policies with these controls to prevent that, we stop it. But I I see these wire frauds happening with individuals. And I can tell a story if you'd like about a very good friend of mine that I actually helped to return his wire all the way up to um private equity and large hedge funds in in the 20, 30, 40, 50 billion AUM range, where in working with them, you know, initially they oh, Michael, we've got it. We we've we've we've locked it down. And and I'm always polite. I'm like, can I just review your cash management policy? And what we find is sometimes, whereas people do have policies and they do understand how to prevent wire fraud, they're preventing wire fraud circa 19, I'm sorry, circa 2019 versus the newer emerging threats and capabilities. So it it applies across the realm, Brendan. The difference is for individuals, it's in the hundreds of thousands or maybe a million dollars for whether it's whether it's uh an organization like yours or fifty or hundred billion dollar AUM large organization, it can be in the tens or even a hundred million plus. We we actually, and I can't get too far into this, we we were three days out and we stopped a wire fraud that would have been for over a hundred million dollars with the PE firm. And and let me tell you, that's that's a big number, a real big number.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Yeah, yeah. I when we were talking before the call, it kind of sounds like for the big organizations you're dealing with, the reputational damage is potentially just as bad as the monetary damage, but maybe for the individual individuals, like in the story you alluded to, if you want to quickly share that, because it was a little bit more positive, but they're you know you know, you're dealing with kind of a life-changing event at the individual level, whereas you know, the firm makes stomach the losses.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Um it it's an interesting dynamic here. The firms that we work with, it's an extremely impactful reputational issue. So they're not talking about it. And right, and if you kind of think about the insidiousness there, if you're not hearing from more than you think is a yeah, it's it's a message we should get across. It's it's epidemic. Um the CFOs that we're dealing with, the last thing they want people to know is that they were not necessarily a good steward of their investors' money. And so the last thing they're going to do is talk publicly or privately. The only reason I know about this is twofold. Either we're hired to do wire frauds and I'm doing it every week, or I do a presentation like this publicly. It tends to be quiet, nobody asks any questions, people look around when I ask if they've been the victim of a wire fraud. And then after the second beer at the at the bar, I have a little bit of a line where people are coming to confession, you know, candidly. And it's always confidential, but but but my message and my passion is to say it's epidemic out there. And if you'd like, we can talk about this risk-reward equation that's going to make it worse with this impending tsunami called AI that's an accelerant to it. Um you did, however, ask about the personal side. It's equally as devastating on the personal side, and even more so, I think there are a lot of people because they're not getting this kind of enforced education through their job like what we're doing today, advocating and evangelizing preventing wire fraud, or going through the CFO who brings us in and says,

Real Life Examples of Wire Fraud

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Michael, review our cash management policy, train our people so it doesn't happen to us. A very good friend of mine was on closing for a house. He's a hard worker, blue-collar person. This was a $365,000 wire that he sent predicated on the instructions he received from his attorney on the closing. His attorney's email had been hacked and he lost the wire. I was fortunate, he was fortunate. He he he he was telling everybody about this loss, and and I can go through this a little bit, the bank wasn't terribly helpful. And um and he just remembered at like day three or day four, I do this for a living. He gave me a holler, and um we were able to work through the FBI, God bless them, great people. These guys dropped everything and were working after hours to help me and help him. And we got his money back. Now it took six weeks. It was 364,000. It took six weeks to get it back. There was no guarantee until the day they were sweating. It was so long that his wife was going to sleep crying every night, thinking they'd lost their life savings. Now, the the good news is they got their money back. Happy ending? Kind of. They didn't get the house, you know? And and and you can imagine how unbelievably emotional this is. But gosh, I'm working, especially it seems like now in the real estate, they're heavily targeted. I'm working with these small firms that are losing one, two, three million dollars. And it's straight out of out of the owner's pockets. So I I guess the message here is it's is it's prevalent. Um, and and the risk reward that goes with it is crazy.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Yeah, the the striking thing about that example is that I mean, I think most people think of wire fraud as, you know, there's a Nigerian prince emailing them and, you know, just send me this money and I I'll send you back triple because just trying to get it out of my war-torn country or whatever. But in your example, the the law firm was hacked. So it's not even it's not even on your friend, it's not even really his mistake. Yeah. But he would be the one paying for it. If the money's gone, the money's gone. There's no you can't insure this. We talked about that. If you want to, if you want to touch on that as well in a second, it's basically an uninsurable risk, even for the large companies. But how what I we'll get into some of the prevention methods, but what what should he have done to avoid this? Because he seems sort of innocent in in that example. Is it just call before you send a wire every time? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's in it and it is. And it's so simple. Um what we advocate predominantly is when you have wiring instructions and it's the first time you've sent a wire to that person, that entity, it is incredibly important that you make an outbound phone call to a known number. Now, there's some caveats here. In this instance, he he should have called the attorney. And the at and and said, hey, these are the instructions I'd gotten from you.

Preventative Measures Against Wire Fraud

SPEAKER_01 15:12

Had he done that, the attorney would say, I don't know what you're talking about. It's not my number, yeah. Yeah. I well, first off, I didn't even give you the wiring instructions yet. Um and and in and in the business as well, um we see where people will get these instructions, at whether it's from uh I mean my favorite is when it comes in from you know an an octogenarian, a family patriarch usually who says, I'm going through a divorce, I've changed bank account, here are my new wiring instructions. And and out of a out of deference to that individual, people might send an email and just say confirming these wire instructions, which of course the criminals do. Or uh what was more advanced in we'll call it 2021, 2022, still looking way back in the rearview mirror, there'd be a phone number in the email that was changed in the footage. It was not the person's, it was the criminal's phone number. And and then you know the client would call the criminal, and of course the criminal would confirm that that the instructions were correct, even they were fraudulent. The newer form today, however, is is for the criminals to to actually call in using voice synthesization and caller ID spoofing, so that literally, Brendan, you you know, I could call maybe a coworker of yours. Um, they would see the phone number coming across as your phone number, the caller ID saying it's you, even though I'm calling from my phone. And using AI voice synthesization, after having listened to you on this podcast, I would be able through AI to talk to them with your voice. That's an extremely powerful way now that we're seeing private equity targeted predominantly to a lesser extent, hedge as well, and on the NFA, CTA, and CPOs, um, to trick people on a wire change, to say, hey, I'm just calling you to let you know, I sent an email and we're changing our wire instructions. Well, shoot, if if I didn't know what I know now, I would believe that. I know that because my mother almost fell for a scam like that. And and it's very pervasive. And and now we're seeing that happen with deep fakes. Where literally now I have the pleasure of somebody recording my my likeness and voice from this podcast. They're overseas. They put that into AI, and then they get on a fake Zoom call with a client, looks like me, sounds like me, and they trick them into sending money. And we've seen that now in the wild. Happened in Hong Kong for $25 million wire fraud, and it's happening in the U.S. now.

SPEAKER_00 17:26

Yeah, could you um actually I want to step back for a second. I know you would rather talk about the topic than yourself, but if you want to just give the listeners maybe like a three to five minute background on how you got to here, how you ended up starting BW Cyber, I think when people think of cybersecurity, they don't maybe think of somebody like you with your background, which I find pretty interesting. Obviously, I think your vigilance comes through when we're talking about the topic, but uh it seemed to me like you've got a much, much more interesting

Michael Bryce's Background and Expertise

SPEAKER_00 17:58

background than maybe people's stereotype of a of an IT guy or a cybersecurity expert might be. Walk me through how we got to here.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

I think you meant cyber geek instead of expert, but I appreciate that. Um you're too kind. Um just brief background because I I am very passionate about this. Um my my focus today is to evangelize the fact that there's an epidemic of wire fraud. It is escalating exponentially with this accelerant called AI being put on top of it, and your peers aren't talking about it. And it's my job to make sure you hear this. Um I get calls all the time. I see people lose money three out of four times, and it bothers me. And and I love working with the FBI and stopping these things and getting people their money back. How did I get here? Uh when I graduated from college, I joined the Marine Corps as an officer, uh, worked in what was at the time uh signals intelligence. Uh it was a combination of working with the infantry and trying to provide some kind of intelligence, uh, 14 miles to 20 miles over the battlefield perimeter. Um, migrated from that role to working for the National Security Agency and then did classified operations through Booz Allen Hamilton, which is a defense contractor as well as a commercial consulting firm. Migrated eventually into uh being a chief information officer, which is where I realized how unbelievably difficult it is to make IT work and to keep people happy. And from there, jumped on the security bandwagon in the late teens, uh, eventually working for one of the largest hedge funds in the world. And that's where I recognized that there was a nexus between understanding what is cybersecurity, how do you overlay cybersecurity with regulatory compliance, which is not an exciting area, obviously, and then speaking to executives on all of that authoritatively. And what I see from our competitors and others is a focus on cybersecurity technology or controls, when really the two things I care about or the three things I care about are your reputation, your need to be compliant to the regs, which gets back to reputation, and then ultimately what criminals are looking for, which is monetary gain. And my goal is to basically address those three. So as an asset or wealth manager, you're protected, you have a great reputation, you don't have a regulatory issue, and by gosh, you don't you don't have some criminal steal your money. And and it's that last part in dealing with doing investigations in which I became involved with the FBI on forensic reports and and financial recovery that have opportunistically migrated into wire fraud investigations. Um it's extremely fulfilling when I get money back, really painful the three out of four times when I and I've gotten to the point now where if someone calls me and it's been a couple weeks since they lost their money, I'll I'll do a v investigation and we won't even charge them. Um, now if you've got a wire fraud out there, don't call me and say you want a free investigation.

The Role of Insurance in Cybersecurity

SPEAKER_01 20:51

But that's that's that tends to be where we go because you you know the last thing I want to do is monetize somebody else's discomfort.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

Yeah, and I mean it sounds like all the value you're providing really is on the preventative side of things. I mean, like you said, the baseline odds are pretty bad. Yeah, there's there's one once the phone's been committed.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

There's one component of this that that I find painful, but it's important, and that is with our larger firms, they they do need to have a forensic investigation. We do need to prove it wasn't an inside job.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

And we also have to have a report for the auditors and for the investors to show that action was taken. There's Reg SP that applies to everybody now, um, that you do have to report these things. And so we we do have to help them with that to make sure that the lesson was learned and it's not going to happen again.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Yeah, I I assume that's more of a from like a legality standpoint rather than an insurance standpoint, because I think as we talked about before, you you basically can't there's no way to there's no way to like buy buy yourself protection from this risk. Is that fair to say? Um not quite.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

But it it tends to be the situation for most people. Um it so So if cybersecurity isn't boring enough by itself, then when you add insurance on top of that, I think we can we can make this exponentially uninteresting. But I'll go down the short because it's very important if you're an asset or wealth manager. Most cybersecurity policies do not cover pooled assets for wire fraud losses. I want to be very clear there. So I've I've got clients that say, hey, I've got a $5 million cyber policy. I should be covered if I have a $5 million wire fraud. And the short answer is absolutely not. Like you mentioned, Brendan, most of those cyber policies at best are going to cover a quarter million. That's it. That quarter million is almost entirely only covered for the GP funds, not for the LP funds. Meaning, if you've got pooled assets and you do a wire that you think you're sending to somebody, it's not covered. So what we recommend to mitigate what I'll call that black hole, which is pretty significant risk, is to look into a financial instrument bond, an FI bond. And we do find that FI bonds will cover pooled assets. Caveat here, though, is that the insurers really took a beating between 2018 and 2022, and they're going to put a lot of caveats into. Yeah, it's not cheap, and they're going to put a lot of caveats in there that are going to make it harder for you to recover if you're tricked. And that's where we pivot then to looking at insurance policies, making people understand the safety net that they have if they're if they're tricked. And then you know there's some mitigating uh controls that we can help them to hopefully not have to go the insurance route.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Yeah, it's interesting when you were going through your background that you you kind of started out in the military. And I think it's fair to say the largest perpetrators of this, far in foreign governments, are at least kind of backing them. Uh, and as you alluded to earlier, from an investment standpoint, the calculus of this is like a no-brainer from their standpoint. There's a very high potential payoff, and because of the inability

Future Outlook and Final Thoughts on Prevention

SPEAKER_00 24:06

to really enforce uh at scale, uh the downside is minimal. So it's something that they're going to continue to invest in. It's not going away. AI is going to make it worse. You alluded to the voice stuff, and that soon that basically nothing digital will be trustable in the future. Um so given that we have this kind of dark outlook, uh what would you say to people if we can kind of just close more positively? What are the simple preventative steps uh people can take? Obviously, just being distrustful of digital wire transfers in general, digital information that's leading to a wire transfer sounds like a place to start. But what are the kind of key things you would just tell an individual or a financial advisor, and maybe they should be telling their clients as well? Yeah. It's a great question.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

So so first, uh I love the way you captured that. Um the the the attackers are almost all offshore, so we can't put cuffs on them. So so the FBI and and our government agencies are constrained to only be reactive, which is crazy. What that means now is Yeah, it's a perfect crime. Uh uh unlimited reward and my favorite part, almost zero risk. What a great equation. Um you put those two together, and the answer, though, is actually really simple. I mean, this is the part I love about my job. And that's that's now evangelizing. If if I'm able to awaken people to this pretty existential risk, financial risk, the solution is relatively simple and it's and it's three-tiered. Um, the first is awareness here. And and that awareness goes into understanding the 2026 threat and how you mitigate it. And the way you mitigate that awareness is you put in updated policies. When we look at cash management policies with wire transfer controls, they appear to be all from like 2019. It seems like every time they've taken what what somebody wrote in 2018, 2019, just put a new year on it, but didn't address those controls, which is changing. I think a lot of people would have liked to freeze time in 2019. Yeah, yeah, you and me both. And and so the awareness then translates into creating an updated, codified cash management policy that explicitly addresses how you confirm wire instructions for the first time and any changes to wire instructions. And by and large, it's really simple. You have to pick up the phone and make an outbound call to a known number. That isn't always easy, especially if you're in PE and you're you're buying a company overseas. Um, but it's critical. And just like KYC is for Hedge, um, we believe that the PE should know who they're going to send money to way early in the deal. So you've got education, you turn that education into codification, it's in a policy, you then enforce training to that policy. Uh most of our clients do the training to policy on wire fraud once a year. My belief is that the efficacy of training wears off in three months. We'd like to see wire fraud training take place every three months. Same thing, nothing new every three months. The last piece is a piece people often overlook, and it's the technology overlay component. Um, example I use is I'm a private pilot. We say that checklists are written in blood, and that is you have a checklist, you're in a hurry, you don't read it, you take off, you forget to put your flaps down on takeoff, and you end up crashing. Simple story there. Well, with wire fraud, despite training, codification of the policy, three-day weekend comes 4th of July, and people are in a hurry to get out the door. They get changes to wiring instructions, the deal's got to close, and they call the number in the email instead of calling a no number, or they forget to call, they send an email to confirm, and there's a million dollars lost, five million, ten million lost, because you don't find out about it until Monday. So the last piece is there are some technology tools out there that we recommend that you can overlay on top of that that will prevent the human error factor from occurring. And those those technology tools also will tell you if the number you've called is a burner phone, if the account you're sending it to was just created. You know? Why am I going to send it why am I gonna send a wire to to to uh to a bank account that was just created three days ago, right? Certain things like that that technology can tell you that that the due diligence process won't. So those three those three areas are critically the best way to prevent wire fraud, relatively simple, um, and makes my life a lot a lot easier and a lot better in dealing with my clients.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Yeah, it's interesting. In the world of evolving technology, something as simple as a checklist can be powerful. We do the same thing when we're trading our strategies, the rotation of how we have to trade them and making sure everything's done. It's just kind of print it out and go through. It's one of the best ways to do it.

SPEAKER_01 28:48

Yep. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

All right. Thank you very much, Michael. This was great. I think really informative. As you said, people aren't talking about it kind of because of the embarrassment factor. Yeah. So it's really, really good to have this information out there and hopefully kind of some of our listeners can can capitalize on this and prevent what can really be a life-altering, fairly unavoidable or unfixable problem when it occurs. Uh, but but hopefully this lets that maybe you save a few people.

SPEAKER_01 29:18

Hey, I I I think just about everybody watching this podcast will know somebody who's either been the victim of wire fraud or has been targeted. And probably 20% of the people watching this will eventually be targeted at some point in the future. Those are the figures that we're seeing. So I hope I've been helpful here, Brendan. It's been a pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you for having me on.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

Thank you, Michael. Have a great day.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

All right, take care.