Cyber Security Expert | "A 15 Year Old Stole $26M" | Your Bank Account Is At Risk

Speaker A: The 15 year old kid stole $24.5 million. The same 15 year old kid stole about 1.7, 1.8 million from a guy named Rob Ross.

Speaker B: What?

Speaker A: The last conference I went to, I was with like eight business leaders and six of the eight people there had been SIM swap, and it ended up costing 3 to $400 billion in business.

Speaker B: Can you kind of share what is a SIM swap and how does it work?

Speaker A: A nefarious person impersonates you bribe a phone store employee, or they bribe a customer support agent. If you get sim swap, they can blackmail you, can steal Bitcoin. All you got to do is sim swap. Crypto account. I own your cable account and I own your bank account.

Speaker B: And a big part of this is social engineering. How does it work?

Speaker A: An expert at, uh, social engineering convinced the mobile operator that she was his new wife. She had a plan, a YouTube video in the background of a baby crying. And in two minutes she had added her name to the account. She changed the password on the account and had added her own email.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: Mark Kreitzman is a cyber security Expert with over 25 years of experience in the industry. He's now the chief cyber evangelist at Foni Mobile, a secure mobile service designed to protect users from SIM swap attacks and other mobile. And today he's here to share insights

Speaker B: about the current and future threats and

Speaker A: how to mitigate your personal and business risks as it pertains to mobile. In 2018, Afani was born out of a, uh, sort of a tragedy that happened to two different people. It's a long story, but I had 90 days where I didn't sleep. I was thinking somebody had to solve this.

Speaker B: For people who want to learn about Afani, how does it work?

Speaker A: It's very easy. Everybody has a mobile service, right? We provide a mobile service with global connectivity. We can keep you secure. We can do that globally, protect SIM swaps, we do human verifications. We also ensure our customers against SIM swap losses with the line of insurance up to $5 million. And our entire job is to make sure that insurance policy is never used.

Speaker B: People do to sort of future proof some of these risks, especially with the

Speaker A: advancement of AI, what people need to do is they. Hi, I'm, um, Mark Kreitzman. I'm one of the Passionate Few.

Speaker B: Hey, guys. Welcome to this episode of the Passionate Few podcast. Today we have a very special episode as we sit down with Mark Kriseman. And today we're going to talk all about cyber security and how your phone can actually be a source of a lot of crime that you may not be aware of. So if you want to protect your assets, your finances, and your future, you'll want to pay attention to this interview to the very end. So, with no further ado, thank you so much, Mark, for being on the show and talking about Fonny and security today as it relates to mobile devices and ensuring people protect their assets. Thanks for being on the show.

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: Absolutely, Mark. So let's get right into it. Um, a lot of people see what's going on in the cybersecurity space. We'll talk a little bit about why this is so important for so many entrepreneurs. But before we begin, can you give the audience a little bit of context as to who you are and what AFONI is exactly, before we get into a little bit about your backstory and the business?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So, Mark Kreitzman. I've been in Cyber Security since 2001. I've worked for a couple different co founders, built companies that have been acquired by Microsoft. Uh, another one was acquired by Cisco Systems, and another one is yet to be acquired, hopefully soon. But, uh, 2018, Afani was born, uh, out of sort, uh, of a tragedy that happened to two different people. That's how two different people came together. But, um, my entire career has been basically cybersecurity with a focus on telecom and mobile security.

Speaker B: Okay. And then when it comes to cyber security, can you talk a little bit about, you know, where the kind of, uh, inception for this came from? I think a lot of people have seen, you know, I think most recently, I believe T Mobile and AT&T had over $70 billion worth of money stolen from various accounts as it relates to SIM swapping and a lot of different cybersecurity breaches. So can you give the audience a little bit of context as to what cybersecurity traditionally is and how it's evolving in present day as it relates to mobile devices?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, the main thing that's happening with cyber security today is people have this picture of some hacker in a basement somewhere, like, hacking into code. And, you know, they watch a lot of movies and things like that. But the reality today is that they're focused on humans making mistakes, and they're using all these different attacks called quishing and phishing and spear phishing and trying to get people to click on links, click on images, uh, and, you know, later on, we'll probably talk a little bit about AI. And so the AI is just off the charts, and it's making hackers uh, able to hack people in mass and, and try and get them to like I say, click on links and images and uh, you know, the fake customer support. So it's, it's all about trying to trick the human into making mistakes, creating panic, getting them to make decisions very quickly.

Speaker B: And what is Afani and how was the idea born? If you could share a little bit about the origin story because I think it's pretty fascinating and I think a lot of business owners and people with a lot of assets to protect will find it interesting at every level.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the origin story is like one of the unique things about Afani.

Speaker B: It.

Speaker A: And it's because it started out with uh, multiple tragedies that happened to two different people and that's how we met. So to, to the backstory of how it happened for me is I was driving to visit my parents. I was in the middle of Arizona between Phoenix and Tucson and I was talking to my father because I was on my way to visit my parents and my phone just cut off. And I thought, well, I'm in the middle of the desert, there's no cell towers out here and it'll come back. Well, it didn't come back after like two or three minutes got a weird message on my phone. So I started thinking I really hope that the credit card I have on file expired or something because if not it means I was SIM swap, meaning my mobile account got stolen away. And so there I was in the desert. There's no stores out there. There's um, you know, gas stations don't really have pay phones anymore. And so I ended up driving the 45 minutes to my parents house. I pulled up to the garage, WI fi connected to my phone and six password resets went on my phone. And so I knew exactly what had happened. Somebody took, stole my mobile account away. And then it's. It's a long story but I had 90 days where I didn't sleep. I was, I never used wi fi for 90 days because I was afraid that would mask the fact that somebody stole my mobile account away. And uh, the carriers go into liability, uh, protection mode. So they end up um, from that they end up protecting the hacker more than they do the victim. Now through that process I was thinking somebody had to solve this. And I was looking on the app stores and I was just looking for a solution because I was trying to do my own, my own startup in the mobile app space. And um, I couldn't find anybody on social media. Yeah, well, and that it affected my business as well because they got into my hosting account and uh, damaged the website and so they really went after me. Uh, and the worst thing part is they actually ported my number back after 61 minutes and I didn't think that could happen. And so they took control of it, reset passwords, ported it back. And that's the reason I couldn't sleep for like 90 days, because I was afraid that if I slept at 10pm and they sim swapped me at 11pm Then what could they do between 11pm and you know, 6am and uh, and so it's a, ah, it's a pretty devastating experience. You don't want it to happen to you. And um, and so what happened to that process is somebody had to solve this. And I found somebody on LinkedIn that, that had it in their uh, profile and it wasn't their main business. They were off working with a couple other guys building what ended up being one of the biggest bitcoin ATM networks. And so it's sort of a side project for him and he was into bitcoin, I was into bitcoin. So we kind of hit it off. And then after like our third call, I'm like, hey, I, I've been building cybersecurity companies since 2001. I'm, I'm really, really angry. It wasn't like I, we, it wasn't like either of us woke up and said, uh, hey, this would be a great idea because he got, he got SIM swapped three times. So he was a big target in the crypto space, in the bitcoin space. So he solved it for himself. And the first thing we did was name it to Afoni. And that was back at the very end of 2018. We were the very first secure mobile service in the industry. So we kind of kicked it off right then. We don't even know whether we had a business or not. We just know that it was happening to a lot of people. And then the latest evaluation, if you look at what the investors have valued the secure mobile security space now it's over a billion dollars. So from, from those two hacks where we came together and became, you know, said like, okay, we're going to do this. That has now resulted in a industry now that investors at least value at just over, somewhere around just over a billion dollars over the, you know, six year, six and a half year period.

Speaker B: Hey guys, we'll get back to the video in a sec. But first, quick question for you business owners watching. How many different apps are you paying for Every single month just to keep your business running. Email software, text plat, booking apps, CRMs, funnel builders, project management tools, the list goes on, sometimes adding up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month. Sound familiar? Well, thanks to today's sponsor, High Level, you don't have to juggle all that anymore. High Level is the number one all in one marketing and CRM platform that replaces all those scatter tools with one simple dashboard. With High Level, you can capture leads, automate follow ups, use AI to write texts and emails, manage clients, send campaigns, and even build websites and funnels all under one roof. Thousands of entrepreneurs and agencies are already saving money and scaling more profits faster with it, including me. And here's the best part. You and your business can get started today with an exclusive 30 day trial, completely free, if you click the link in the description below to sign up. So don't wait. Start your free trial and let's start growing your business today. Thanks to High Level for sponsoring this video. And now let's get back to the show. That's fascinating to think about too, because traditionally when a lot of people think about cyber security, they think about enterprise accounts, right? Oh, I, I don't have to worry about cyber security. I'm not a big company with 100 customers, a thousand customers, 10,000 employees, all this data, right? Most people think cyber security has to be this big enterprise thing, but they don't realize that they have such vulnerability in their phone. So I'm curious, for people who don't know, what is a SIM swap in layman's terms, for people who aren't familiar with it, is it something that affects SIM cards? Is it eims? Is it, um, you know, does it matter from carrier to carrier? Does it relate to if it's Apple or Samsung or. You're more vulnerable for somebody who knows zero. Um, can you kind of share what is a SIM swap and how does it work?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of people know what a legal SIM swap is. Maybe not by that word. In fact, just before this, I was talking to one of our Hollywood customers who was in the, in the phone store getting her new phone. And so let's say you have an iPhone 15 today and you go to the phone store and you buy the iPhone 17 and ah, then you work with the Apple store or you call your carrier and say, okay, um, I want my mobile account now to work on my iPhone 17. That's what's called a SIM swap. Or sometimes it's called a port over. But that is a legal SIM swap, so you get it moved over, it's now on your iPhone 17 and you're happy, you walk out of the store, you, you shut the, down the call down with your carrier and you're good to go. So that's legal. Now the illegal SIM swap is when a nefarious person, I don't like to call them attackers because, or hackers because you don't have to learn any coding. Like a 15 year old kid can do this to you and they have. In fact, a 15 year old kid stole $24.5 million um, a couple years ago.

Speaker B: What? Um, but wait, wait, real quick, I gotta ask. Yeah, what's that story? Real quick, sidebar.

Speaker A: Um, a 15 year old kid partnered with an older adult and stole 24 to 25 million dollars from Michael M. Terrapin, the investor. And then the same 15 year old kid stole about 1.7, 1.8 million from a guy named Rob Ross. And I've met both of them and we actually had Rob Ross consult for us for a while. Uh, uh, one 15 year old kid and he made a mistake like a year later, two years later where he, uh, the guy that he was partnered with was an older, he wasn't, he was, I don't know if he drank too much or did drugs or something, but he started talking and then they ended up getting busted. Um, but, but so it's not a hacker. That 15 year old kid doesn't know how to write any code. He basically just learned how to impersonate somebody on the phone. And so what it is is a nefarious person impersonates you or they bribe a phone store employee or they bribe a customer support agent that you know behind the 800 number or there's actually um, and you can Google this, but there's been like three, four, five people that work inside of a carrier that work together to target people. And that's why the carriers have a hard time controlling this because there's insiders that do it. Because there's a lot of money in this, right? Like you SIM swap the right person. You can, you can, you can blackmail, you can steal Bitcoin, you can um, download all their emails, do, do a lot of different, uh, things, but it comes down to bribery, trickery, impersonation. And on the carrier side of things, they have multiple, you know, enormous call centers. So you can't control that. You, and then if you walk into a phone store, you're, you know, you're handing them the phone, you're verifying yourself. So do they have cameras, do they have audio, uh, recording? Uh, a lot of, a lot of people don't realize that the. There's tons. Most of the stores are actually independently owned. So you may see like the big brand on the front of the building, but it might be owned by an individual who owns one store, but they might own like 300 stores. And so you're relying on them protecting you. And in my case. So I had to trick another third party phone store during a trip when I was in South Lake Tahoe. And I had to tell the, the person behind the counter that I wanted to buy a gift card for somebody that helped me while I was traveling because the carrier wouldn't let me know what state this happened in. They wouldn't even let me know, you know, it's a port over my mobile number. I'm like, hey, what state? What city? I wanted to know if it was a professional. And they refused to tell me. And I got a police report. They refused. I had the police column on their police line. They refused. But I had to trick a phone store and get into giving me the employee. And it ended up being somebody that worked at a third party phone store in Memphis, Tennessee. At the time, I lived in Northern California and I hadn't been to Tennessee in 15 years. So somebody got me m my information, like off a website or saw an interview of me. Uh, you know, I was on, I was on one or two crypto websites at the time. I had done a couple, um, you know, videos on, on Crypto or, or interviewed people on Crypto at that time. And so they must have just kind of picked me randomly. But when I confronted the carrier that I have the id, the store, and I know where they work, they. That's when they finally said after 90 days that, okay, it was, it was an employee's like, last day. And they got three people. They attacked three people. And you were like, it was like a lottery. They randomly picked you. And so. And all it was was because I had my profile set up, but I had to be in a store with my driver's license and my passport because I knew this could happen. And it was simply a third party phone store that, uh, where this woman just lighted the computer and said, I was standing there. And they actually blamed it on me and said, ah, well, I must have allowed somebody to, to get a copy of my driver's license. So I filed with California DMV and asked like, hey, did somebody request a copy of my driver's license? So when it came up for Renewal. And I go to the counter. Uh, the lady's like, I've never seen this before, but your driver's license is frozen. That somebody, somebody put in a report that your license was stolen. And so I had to actually pay money. I, uh, had to travel from Arizona. I was taking care of my parents. You know, this is like, beginning of, uh, some health issues. I had to go stay in Stockton, California, meet with a DMV investigator. And so that was sort of like the icing on the cake of the pain of this. Of sort, uh, of the slap in the face that I had to go. I didn't even know DMV investigators existed. And I had to go prove that I was who I was so I can get a driver's license because it actually just expired, um, because it took me like a week to get up there. And so I couldn't fly back. So it was like, kind of nervous. I'm like, well, I hope I get my license. And so, yeah, it's painful, it's. But the digital privacy part of it, the, uh, fact that somebody could steal your mobile account away and sync up. Imagine somebody syncs up your. An email app of yours, your email, or multiple emails, and then downloads three years of history. Like, what. What could they get? You know, tax returns, wire transfers, uh, all the notifications, what banks you use, authenticator apps, all those things are in our email. We don't really think about it. And. And so you'd hate to have one email get ex. You know, get leaked out, let alone having, you know, 3,000.

Speaker B: No.

Speaker A: And, uh, it's. It's bad.

Speaker B: And a big part of this is social engineering. Right. Can you give the audience a little bit of context as to that? Because social engineering, first time I heard of it, you know, I wasn't familiar with the term, but it's kind of similar to what you're saying. Right? Because I would imagine, like, are these things committed by, you know, some sort of digital hacking of getting the information? If it's an eim, is it. Most of the time, you know, people calling in social engineering and kind of finessing, for lack of a better word, a lot of the carriers, what are the dominant methods? I guess, like, if. If there's a breakdown of, like, the different ways in which this type of stuff happens just to share with the audience, like, what are some of the most dominant ways it does.

Speaker A: Yeah, I would say, I say it originally started with just pure impersonation and people that are good at sales and convincing people to do that. And there's a great video that was from a DEFCON show in Las Vegas where this reporter had a, a white hat hacker, an expert at social, uh, engineering, call his carrier. And they, they filmed this. And the guy's like, uh, ah, my, my mobile carrier's got my back. And in two minutes she had convinced the mobile operator that she was his new wife. And she had a baby crying in the background. She had a plan, a YouTube video in the background of a video crying. And in two minutes she had changed, she had added her name to the account, she changed the password on the account, change the PIN on the account, and had it added her own email.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: And, and so now, so they can do this in two or three steps. So now she gets that change and she can say, oh, thank a lot, thanks a lot, you've been great. And the, the rep thinks they've helped them. She could wait an hour, call back in. And now when she verifies it's not even social engineering anymore, she can say, I'm so. And so. This is the email, this is the pin. And now it's like, boom, bullseye, you're in.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And now I want to make this move. So another popular method is that people have family accounts and what they don't realize with, with when you have a direct carrier account is that, um, you basically have a credit account. So they have your Social Security, your birthday and all of that. And so somebody can walk in, impersonate you and say, I want to buy a phone off of my account and my name is, you know, Mark Kreitzman. And, and if they can't verify that person, there's no penalty. They'll just say, oh, I need your Social Security. And oh, yeah, I forgot it. They can walk out now. Get, go get Social Security, go to, you know, drive a couple miles, go to a different store, right? And there's actually a, uh, there's actually a YouTube video, a news clip of this woman that went to like a hut. She got caught because she went to 120 different stores simply because she wanted to harass this person.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: She was trying to harass this other lady. She kept going in, trying to do it. So, um, and, and fortunately they ended up catching her. But there's no penalty in doing that. So a lot of it is fake IDs, or they can have a buddy, let's say they have a buddy that works at the phone store and they just arrange that they're going to do this SIM swap and they know they have cameras on them. At least at the real stores that the ones owned by the carriers and they can just go through the motions. So what's your password? And he says you know, you know, quiet enough. And he types it in and, and uh, and may be able to just, or you know, arrange a deal but if you've got insiders too. But in terms of the uh, you know the, the data discovery, the all of us in the US have been in so many data breaches and in fact we have a tool on our, on our website, it's called NumbersCan. You put your mobile number in there and it's going to tell you how many data breaches you've been in. And my main number's been in.

Speaker B: What's the last, what's the website, what's the website for people who

Speaker A: are. There's a link for a number scan and you put your mobile number in there and there's a bunch of tools that do that. But ours uh, is specific to the mobile number and then it tells you how many data breaches. So the last time I checked it's kind of useless for me to check again because now it's probably 10, 11, 12 and it's kind of irrelevant. But the last time I checked it was nine. And these are from like Facebook scrapes, LinkedIn scrapes, but also like hospital data breaches, travel bureau government data breaches that all these things are out of your control. Um, and you know of course there's like just massive data breaches right. That hundreds of millions of record not. And you mentioned the carrier data uh breaches right? So AT&T's had a couple of them. T mobile's had more of than probably the rest of the carriers in the last five years they've all been penalized hundreds of millions of dollars. And so all this information is available and if you add in data brokers, your just normal Google searches and the dark web.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: You can use AI searches and you can, you can figure out all the information you need. You can actually, there's actually sales tools out there like legitimate innocent sales tools that are like Legion tools where I can discover pretty much anybody's email id. I don't use it myself but you can get a list of like all and if you do it on yourself it'll come up with email IDs you forgot you ever even used in your life. Like you just haven't used them like 12 years. And it'll come up with phone numbers, landlines, phone numbers, information on family members. And so that's why these family plans are kind of dangerous because your plan is only as secure as the weakest person in your family. You're trusting that people on that family plan are not clicking on bad links and, and clicking on emails and you know, volunteering information about your plan. And so it's just very easy to get a lot of information about people. It's uh, the data discovery, the ability to get info on people is like, give me 90 seconds and there's enough free tools out there, let alone paying for tools.

Speaker B: How fast, yeah, how fast can people get hacked? And like what is the dominant portion of people who've been hacked? I guess I, I guess a simple way to put it is like how fast can people get hacked? And what percentage of people that get hacked don't even know it for a long time.

Speaker A: Yeah, I would say that, I would say that uh, early on we're talking like two, three minutes to SIM swap. Somebody literally calling up because the carriers were, the trend had been to the point where they had yet to even try and stop it. And so just sort of like that DEFCON example I gave before, it's literally calling up and, and having enough information like here's the name, the address is my mobile number. And then they'll say okay Mark, what's your PIN number? Oh, you know what, I lost my phone. I kept the PIN on the phone. Oh, no problem Mark, we'll, we'll verify you another way.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And then it's going to be information that I've already known about you. And if I don't know something, like I said, I'll go find out. And so in some cases it can be three minutes, in some cases it might be five. And then there's the cases where it's like two or three stops where it's a call up in three minutes I had an email to I pretend I'm somebody's husband. I add the email to it. And uh, um, but now that you know, some targets are so, are so valuable, some people are so valuable, the information about them, the information in their email, the money, crypto, things like that, um, blackmailing, you know, people that own, let's say you 10, you know, you've built up your own social media, right? So if you get SIM swap and they, they could then potentially take over your, a YouTube channel, um, you know, an X.com account. And uh, and so in terms of the people that are, that are big targets now, um, it's shifting a little bit, but it was initially like celebrities and then it Became wealthy people. And then crypto came along and crypto exploded. SIM swaps, you know, because, you know, people were buying crypto, but they weren't even thinking about security. They're setting up corporations. Coinbase accounts is brand new. And, um. And they. They would wake up one day, there's nothing in their account. They had no idea, like, how did this happen? Like, how could I. You know, Then they want to sue Coinbase. And, um. And then, um, it. And it's still crypto, so crypto's still the number one thing, but they're now going after executives and middle managers, especially people in IT organizations. And, uh. And so they can SIM swap a middle manager. And there's a. There's. I can't. I can't remember the name, but just really, in the last six months, there was a middle manager over in the uk. He got SIM swapped. And they must have planned this out because they sim swapped him. Then they knew enough to impersonate him with the IT group inside of the company.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: And got them to reset passwords for him. They then loaded ransomware in and ended up costing them 3 to $400 billion in business. There's a. There's a insurance company where an executive got SIM swapped in the US that resulted in a data breach of 68,000 records. And two insurance companies came out about a year and a half ago recommending, hey, you got to start locking down, you know, the SIM swapping. And so they're starting to go after SIM swaps. There's actually a digital exchange that was out of Manhattan. Uh, um, and they had a middle manager got SIM swap. They used that SIM swap to access the backend systems of the business. They deleted all the historical transactions. And so all these customers lost confidence, right, because all the historical transactions were gone. And then they took the customer database and then they released that, you know, posted like three or four locations on the Dark Web. And so all the hackers are grabbing it. And then all the spam came in pretending to be that business, saying, like, hey, we got hacked, and you need to click here. And then that started resulting in SIM swaps. And so the early origin of Afani, you know, we were. We were brand new. We had no idea if we had anything. And we kept adding somebody, like, every two or three days, basically just two of us, seven by 24. And. But then in, like, the eighth or ninth month, all of a sudden there's. There was a big data breach. And then. And then all of a sudden, it's like every day now we start getting calls at 2:00am and 11:00pm and we, so we, now we got to add somebody because now we're like not sleeping. And then a let. And then there was a company that got their date, their customer, entire customer database leaked and then they started getting the spam and all sudden sim swaps of those, those their customers. It went off the charts. And then we had a podcast, uh, a guy who used us, very, very famous guy mention this on a podcast. And then all sudden the calls start coming in and that's when our growth started. And so every time there's a major data breach, I think that people start waking up because everybody's, everybody knows somebody that's been sim swap, like a family member, somebody at work. I went, the last conference I went to, I sat down and somebody I was with like eight business leaders and, and uh, one of the guys goes, oh Mark, so what do you do? And well we're, we're a secure mobile service that protects uh, important people. We protect against SIM swaps. And six of the eight people there had been SIM swapped.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: And, and now they were big investors. And so that was like a, and that was kind of early on. That was uh, that was a big wake up call that hey, we, we really got something here because these are like big names and one of um, them at the, at the table ended up uh, investing a small amount. We didn't, we haven't done any VC. We don't, we don't want any VCs right now. We've been, we wanted full control and we're self funded and uh, but we had, but we had so many big names that wanted to put money in that one day I woke up, I'm like, we, we got so many big names that use us that why don't we take a personal investment from them? And so our, our investors, if you can call them that, it's personal money is like a who's who. And so that was, that was like really cool. And so we have some people that you know, rooting us on and cheering us on. Uh, but one of the people at that table ended up being one of the people that uh, that joined in on that.

Speaker B: Wow. That's pretty interesting too because a lot of times, you know, people haven't heard about these stories but the fact that you know, people say the best way to start a business is to solve your own problems. Right. And so with like more and more people encountering it, I'm curious two things. Number one, where did the Yafani name come from? Uh, if you can share that. And then two, what is the actual specific model if people want to, you know, I know we'll put a link in the description down below for people to learn a little bit more. But where did you guys get the name for Afani? And then how does it work once people want to join to protect themselves against some of these, these, uh, hacks.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I love, I love being asked that because so when we, when we started the. He had originally named it Don't Port. And so Don't Port. Like one of the first calls, Don't Port as in don't port my number. Oh, don't portray Don't Port. Yeah, like as in don't. And then the word port.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And, and so I got our third call. He's like, you know, what do you think is the first thing we should do? Like, well, we got to rename the company because Don't Port. It's very specific. And you know, I've been in cybersecurity a long time. I got ideas I want to add to this. And so he, he's an entrepreneur, so he's done a couple startups. And so he has domain names for a number of different things where he goes and grabs a domain and it grabs all social media. Sort of prepared, right? So he's got this list of things and he's like, what do you think about a. Funny. And so at the time we didn't have to worry about name changes because there's only a couple people using it. And um, I was like, oh, look, why don't we try it for 30 days? That's kind of like a normal thing, right? And then after about 30 days it's like, should we keep this? And so I was like, I don't know, I'm kind of used to it now. It's like, kind of sounds like, ah, sort of a little European, sort of high class, right? Sort of like a, you know, like, like a Tesla. Funny. Sounds like maybe slightly Italian. And I go. And I go, hold on a second, I'm. And I did a Google search right then and I wanted to make sure it didn't stand for something bad, right? And so it turns out that, um, the words associated with the fawning were like enlightenment. And so. And it was just like three or four, like bullseyes. And it's like, you know, I love the word enlightenment. And so I was like, oh, we can't change it now. And so we stuck with Afani. And, uh, we're very happy about that. We have. And then the second question. Oh, the second question is, um, was the question like, how do you sign up for Afani?

Speaker B: The second question is for people who want to learn about Afani, you know, how does it work, how can they sign up, how much does it cost and what does it actually look like? Is it a physical chip, is it a digital service? Like for audience who knows nothing? And they go, wow, this is pretty interesting. I want to check out a fonny. Um, what can they expect from how it works?

Speaker A: Yeah. So funny is a website and you can go to our YouTube, we get a lot of videos on there. I mean I'm in most of the thumbnails, I've done most of the videos myself, but it's very easy. So you know everybody has a mobile service, right? So you have your voice, text, your data from att, Verizon, T Mobile, Mint Mobile, whoever you're getting it from. And you already pay the bill.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: So to, to move to Afani you do have to port your number over to Afani. But the good news is is you're already paying a carrier. So it's now it's basically just like rerouting your payment over to a fani. Now we're fannie. We're set up as what's called an mvno and that is we're a mobile virtual network operator of AT&T& Verizon. And there's a reason we selected those two. And so we're basically resellers of AT&T and Verizon where we have full control over the account. And so to sign up, all the signups are done off the website. In fact we've got a link for your community, um, that hopefully by now you've posted, but you can go to that link and learn more about Afani. And um, all the purchases are done online that way it's encrypted. And then also there's a need to know even inside of Afani. But you order, you'll get a confirmation email and then through that process you will have set up an Afoni account and then you in there is a link to set up an activation call. And so you're gonna have, we're gonna set you up with an activation manager and you're gonna have a call just like you and I are having with each other right now. And they're gonna, they do this all day long, six days a week. And they're going to walk uh, you through the process. Your number will get ported over to Afani and now. And one of the main things that happens when we do that is that when we port you over to Fani, we're unplugging you from the system. Because one of the biggest dangers of how this industry works is like, if you're, if your numbers move to a fani, you don't have to call your carrier to say you're canceling, and a FANI doesn't have to call your carrier to say Omar's canceling. It is done via a portal that all the resellers, all the stores, all the carriers, their customer support have. And these changes are made without actual human verification. Now, when you port that to Afani, nobody can pull you out of Afani without actually talking to a human at a fani and going through that human verification. It's an. It's a very expensive way to operate. And this is why the industry doesn't do, do it this way. Because if you're going to leave them, they just. We don't want to spend any money on you. Okay, you're going to leave and, and we're going to make it so you don't even have to talk to us anymore. But the process is you set up that activation call, we walk you through it, and, you know, 10, 15 minutes later, you're now on a fan and you have say AT and T with void state of text. We actually add additional services to it, which I'm happy to cover that as well. So you're not just getting AT AND T, you know, voice, text data, us, Canada, Mexico. You're getting much more things that we throw in with no extra charge on our price. And now you have peace of mind. And we also ensure our customers against SIM swap losses with the line of insurance up to $5 million.

Speaker B: Wow, that's pretty incredible. And that includes crypto. That includes any kind of form of, um, of value with that $5 million insured.

Speaker A: It's monetary value, but also, let's say you're traveling and the SIM swap caused you, you know, travel issues and things like that. So it's, it's a, it's an insurance policy. It is specific to SIM swap losses, but it's to recover your expenses. Yeah, and, and, uh, and, and the simplest way actually to describe our business is we provide a mobile service with global connectivity and our entire job is to make sure that insurance policy is never used. That's our motivation, is that we never want that insurance policy to ever be used. Now, if it ever, you know, if it ever did you know, happen because it's, you can never say never. If it ever did happen and somebody got covered by it, then it would be we got SIM swapped once and we covered 100% of their losses.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, but our goal is that we never have to say even that. And uh, and that's, that's the motivation for our protection.

Speaker B: And how much does, if, how much does ifani go for? You know, for people who are interested in what countries do you guys um, cover?

Speaker A: So afani is it's 99 per month and that's all taxes, all fees and that's if you do the monthly billing. And that includes say AT&T with voice text data in the US that also includes 10, 10 gigabytes of free international data roaming in 205 countries. So if you're somebody who travels overseas like three times a year or more, then now we become a no brainer. And in addition to that, on the AT&T option we offer 500 free international calling minutes and we find that that covers about 90% of our base. Like we don't, we, we actually want to cut expenses by giving things for free because it's more expensive for us to actually try and sell like a data esim for $10, $20 or um, hey, do you want international long calling? So we just throw in 500 minutes for free. So if you you know, call Germany, Spain, France, uh, Australia, Thailand or something, then you get 500 free minutes. You don't have to worry about it. Wi uh, FI calling is also included globe and it works globally. So if you're behind WI fi, whether you're at home, uh, uh, using home WI fi office or you're say in Bali, Indonesia, you're on vacation. Bali, Indonesia, behind WI Fi you can call Back to the U.S. for free, unlimited. And if somebody calls your fani number and you've got a WI FI connection, whether it's a hotspot connection connected up to somebody's phone or the hotel WI fi, then your phone will ring and it's free. You can answer it and it's free.

Speaker B: Oh, that's awesome.

Speaker A: That also means, yeah, that also means that if you're in Bali, Indonesia and you've got a WI FI connection, you can actually use those 500 free international calling minutes. Because when you're behind WI fi, your phone thinks it's in the US So like if you're on an island in Thailand behind WI fi, I can call, I can call locally in Thailand, I can call Singapore, I can call Vietnam and I get those 500 free minutes, but I can call back to the US for free. And then there's this extra, extra bonus, two extra bonuses is that we also support what we call a dual ESIM config. And what I mean by that is that your phone we could have ESIM1B18T. So you get at&T US, Canada, Mexico, voice text data. And then we provide you with the afani Global Data ESIM and ESNIM M2. Now what that means is that as you travel around, you land in Tokyo, you've got LTE 5G that's free for the 10 gigabytes. It also means that even if you're in the US you have backup disaster recovery. So you can, let's say you go to a ski resort and only Verizon's there. And so you have AT and T. Verizon's there will take the data. Literally takes 15 seconds, switch the data to Verizon. And now when you go skiing you have Verizon data. And so it works as disaster recovery. It expands your coverage. And then if you're like in Florida and a hurricane comes and takes an AT&T dollar down, then switch your data over to Verizon for the week that it takes for them to get that tower back up. Uh, or we can actually even switch your account from 18:2 to Verizon. And we have done that. But uh, that data EIM is right there so that um, you're not left stranded with no mobile service. And, and we're the only ones we know of that we're that are doing this. And the goal is, because what we don't want is people to travel and buying these cheap travel ESIMs because they have no guarantee of like data privacy that could be, be collecting data. Um, you might end up on 3G networks. And 3G networks are the older networks and that's where you get exposed. So we want people to go on vacation or business Trips and have LTE and 5G because it's an encrypted protocol. But the extra bonus with this dual ESIM config, because we enable WI fi calling globally. And the 500 calling minutes, is that on an iPhone 13 and above and the iPhone 12 third gen SE, we have the, we enable the ability for calling with that second data esim. So it's using your AFFONNY number, but it's, it's, it's treating the data ESIM as a WI FI connection. And so uh, if you're in Singapore and you're Walking down the street and somebody calls you, you pick it up, it's free. You want to call locally in Singapore, you want to call Spain, Germany, you don't even need a WI fi connection on the, on the iPhone. You can call back to the US over the iPhone and it's unlimited. So that $10 a day, $15 a day that people are normally paying when they go overseas. Our iPhone customers don't, they love it. They say, this is a game changer. And uh, we have people that fly to Tokyo. It works right out of the gate. They land, did get data connectivity, they can make a phone call, get their Uber, they can receive phone calls, and they don't have to pay that, you know, $100 for 10 days or more to have that kind of roaming. And the only limitation on it is that there's 15 countries in the world that that does that do block wi fi calling altogether. The only one that people would care about really is Dubai. Uh, but the other ones are countries that typically like the, the American or Canadian's not gonna, uh, you know, travel to anyways. Um, but the beauty of it is you have global connectivity and uh, and you're secure doing it. And you don't have to land in Vietnam to find out that your mobile account's been stolen away and that somebody's had, you know, 12 hours of resetting passwords. And because if they have time, they'll, they'll get into your emails, they'll reset authenticator apps. Ah, they, they will, you know, call banks and things because once they have their number, they can call people that you're associated with. Um, you know, one of the scary things is you mentioned that these data breaches, so when people's. Because this is kind of the future thing, but it's already happening, right? And you can see with these robocalls is AI. And so now you can just sort of imagine that AI can now go look at your call list. If they have, if they can get your call records and, and who you're texting and who's texting you, then they can have AI go and figure out that this number's Amber. This is your friend Bob, this is your co worker Jim.

Speaker B: Decipher it from there.

Speaker A: Yeah, and, and learn, and learn things about them. Because, because we all have, uh, you know, marketing profiles and, and so they could actually get to the point where it's like, hey, have you played golf with Jim lately? Or have you seen Amber's like this or that and have AI chat conversations with people that make it now sound real human.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And this is already starting, starting to happen. The other thing that's happening is these robocalls. Now what, what they do is they get a big list of our names and the, and the mobile numbers and then they'll dial it and it'll be your wife's number or it'll be your number. And so I was talking to a cyber security consultant a couple days ago, and I'm actually interviewing her tomorrow, but she, um. Um. Well, actually, no, she told me a different story. But. But one of the people that just signed up recently, a couple days ago was saying that their friend got a call from his wife. The caller ID came in his wife's name, and the caller said that we've kidnapped your wife. And so it's like, well, that, that's kind of horrible. And then told me the whole story about it. So these kind of things are happening and then.

Speaker B: And they're using AI, right, to simulate it and then hold them for ransom and that kind of a thing, even though it didn't even actually happen, they're just sort of manufacturing of AI and voice and context and. Yeah, reference.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So imagine they're like 65, 70 years old. Like somebody. If I got that call, I'm going to panic. And if it's. I have multiple phones, so I just have another phone. Like, I'd be calling them on the side, but, um, but, but, you know, some people are going to panic and, and, and you know, they're going to ask for money. Um, another case just a couple days ago, and this one's a little bit more innocent, but long term, it can be devastating. Is, um. A friend of mine called up, called me up. He's like, hey, would this mean I'm hacked? I just got a call for myself and I'm like, no, like. And he's like, seriously, it's my first last name. Like, you know, how can that happen? So it's like, well, check the number they're calling from. It ended up being a number out of Poland. And so it got me kind of curious. Okay, so why would somebody do this? There's like, basic things that I could think of. And so I started doing the research on it. And, um, so what they want you, what they want you to do is they want you to call back and it's going to be one of these premium numbers. And so you, you're leaving them a voicemail. You're mad, you know, that might, you might get charged like $3, $5 or more. You Know, per minute, not realizing, you know, 30 days later you get this bill. They could also do it to, um, for you to complain, you're yelling at them or whatever. But they want to, they want to record your voice.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: And do AI cloning on your voice. And they may just do it because they're good impersonators and they want to try and just get personal information about you.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Uh, but there's a whole number of reasons that might do it. But this is sort of going to be the next trend because all the numbers are out there. And, uh, I was just talking to one of my friends about potential solutions to try and. Because it's hard to, uh, prevent yourself, uh, your own data from being leaked because you and I have no control over it. Right. Even your friends. We rely, we send text messages to people. You're relying that they're going to keep their call records secure. But, uh, most people don't. They click on all kinds of links, all kinds of pictures. Uh, you know, people get a new number and then they just, they give it to their mom and their mom puts your name in the, you know, in the, in her call list. And, and you know, those things get leaked.

Speaker B: And I've even seen things where, for example, my mom was telling me she got a message from Verizon and was like, hey, um, there was an issue with your billing in Verizon. If you fix it now, redeem your brand new iPad or thousand dollar bill gift card and you go to the website and it's Verizome with a M M instead of an N. But to the person skimming it, you know, they don't, they just assume that's a sister website or, you know what I mean, they have my, clearly they have my number and know I have an account. And so my mom went in there and like put in her information. And then luckily my dad caught her right before she was putting it in. But what they'll do is they'll actually get your username and your password and now you've input it to their system. Now they know, boom. On Verizon you have that they get access to your stuff and can literally just ping pong it like that. It's pretty crazy. I'm curious, uh, Mark, in your experience with cyber security on mobile and SIM swapping, is it more risky with iPhone and Apple or with Samsung and Android, which device is more secure as you see it, as a cyber security expert?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. So the security of the phone, anything you put on your phone the type of phone you buy. Um, and we know this is true because we have four different secure phone providers that reached out to us. We didn't reach out to them. They came to us and said, we got the most secure phone we believe in the world until somebody puts a SIM in it. And the problem is that you could have the greatest iPhone, the greatest Android, the best and most secure graphene OS phone or whatever boutique OS that you're using. You could have the best antivirus, best vpn. You could have treated that device like it's gold, like your life depends on it. Never clicked on a link, put it in a Faraday bag, put that in a waterproof safe, drop it in South Lake Tahoe. And when it comes to SIM swapping, if they, if they point your. Because the SIM swap happens in the network. So like you're a T Mobile customer, they're convincing T Mobile to, to, to change the systems inside of T Mobile to point your account to somebody else's

Speaker B: phone in the cloud.

Speaker A: So, uh, in the cloud. So your phone is completely out of the equation. Everything you've done on your phone, everything you've done to keep it secure, completely out of the equation. Some people think that, well, my phone has to get stolen for me to get SIM swapped. And that's complete myth, it's not true, doesn't need to happen. And then some people will say, well, I put a SIM pin lock on my phone, there's a four digit PIN that I can do on that. But again, your phone, that only locks your phone, the SIM to your phone and it's becomes uh, irrelevant. Your phone is in a safe at the bottom of South Lake Tahoe. It could have the, the best, strongest PIN on it. It's completely irrelevant because they're making the change from. So in terms of the operating system and the phone, it's not relevant. There is some advantages. There is, you know, a couple, there's a couple differences and a lot of it comes down to people's understanding of how to use a device. I mean iPhones are great, very secure, but they have a lot of fun features, right? The, the, the Apple icloud, the syncing, the Airdrop, Bluetooth and all of that. You know, if you've got five different Apple devices, you know, you can make all five of them ring when somebody calls you and it's like, okay, that's kind of cool. Like I've got my iPad sitting here. If I want to, you know, answer a phone call, I can do it. Or you know, or facetime or something. The problem is those features can be used against you. So, like having Airdrop open up to like, everyone around you. Uh, you know, people can send you nefarious files. You accidentally hit, you know, accept. They could name the files. When it pops up, it looks like, oh, I, I should accept that. Um, and. But iPhone has a lockdown mode. So every, every iPhone. Now, if you've, if you've kept the operating system up to date, for those people that want to have the most secure iPhone, there's a lockdown mode under Settings. You just go in there, you turn it on, your phone reboots and it locks it down. It makes it. There's a couple things that, um, are a little bit different, but it's locked down. Um, you know, Android, Android, to me, it really depends on who you're asking. I think, I think Android in terms of malware is just a little bit more open to, uh, enablement. Uh, iPhones. A lot of it comes down to the fact that iPhones are just a little bit more complex. A lot more settings. People may have certain settings toggled on or off. Um, but graphene OS is right now it's, uh, probably one of the more. It's the fastest growing and it's the only, the only operating system for the really secure people that I would recommend is using the graphene OS on a Pixel phone. And so if you really want to get secure, but when it comes down to SIM swapping, yeah, all that is irrelevant.

Speaker B: What are your top three pieces of advice for people to make sure they're secure on mobile? If they're wanting to take those first steps, maybe just before signing up with something like Afani, what are one, two or three steps that people can do to really secure themselves? Aside from joining with Afani?

Speaker A: Yeah. So the things you can do for free, and some of these are like, what not to do. The most common mistake people will make is they go out and they buy an Android phone or get the iPhone, they set it up with an iCloud ID, email ID or Gmail, and then use that same email to open up a Coinbase account, bank of America, Wells Fargo. They email their parents, their family, their friends, they sign up for their golf league or Facebook, not realizing that they're advertising their login. So that's half of like, you need a login and a password, right, to get in. And so to give you an example of what a hacker can do is if I can get 10 emails of somebody and let's say I know they're in crypto, I could go to the top five crypto accounts, you know, Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and put all their email IDs in one at a time. Say, forgot password. I could go to bank, I could go to the top five banks and put somebody's email ID in there and say forgot password. Now it's going, it's going to say, um, we just texted you. Enter the, Enter the SMS or enter a six digit code from your authenticator app. And now I know, now I know how I need to hack you. So if it says, you know, enter the sms, we just sent you an SMS code, enter it now. Now I know all I got to do is sim swap you and I own your bank account, I own your crypto account, I own your cable account, whatever it is. If it says that, enter, um, the six digit authenticator code. Typically you have to get to somebody's email so they could attempt to go through their email and try and break in directly to their email because, so they're uh, a lot of the mobile hacks are not necessarily like, they're hacking into like iOS operating system or Android operating system because they can go directly to a computer and put your iCloud ID, you know, on their computer, in a Browser, your email IDs, so they can do it that way. And then the backup for that is they can sim swap you, then get into your email accounts, then get into your Authenticator app. And that's why time matters. So when somebody's, if you're playing golf and you don't look at your phone for four hours, which is when I'm playing golf, even now I'm, I have PTSD over this as a victim. So even now when I'm playing golf, like almost every hole I'll pick up like I got lte. And even though like, you know, um, you know I'm using a fonny, it's like I'm, I, I, I seriously have ptsd. And uh, but on long flights, you know, if I had, if I had just a regular carrier account, like I think I would go nuts on a long flight, it would be the first thing I check I landed, you know, M is, can I check and see if my phone works? Because imagine they have, have, you know, a lot of flights go through Taipei, go through Tokyo, you know, 24 hours sometimes imagine they have 14 hours, right? You know, we actually have a number of air pilots out of Orlando for a particular carrier. Because the first pilot called me up and he said that he's like, I Don't know if somebody, it's somebody we're working with that knows when we're on the plane or if it's something that's like tracking.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, because a lot of it has to deal with the psychological awareness of your personal situation and leverage, leverage the ignorance.

Speaker A: So speak. Yeah, they know that you're out of communication for the nine hour, eight hour flight. So from Orlando to Paris, Orlando to Frankfurt, London, whatever it is. Um, every once in a while one of them, they would land and their mobile account wouldn't work because they got stolen away. And so we ended up getting uh, probably about four or five uh, pilots that, that were out of a particular airline in that area and they all signed up individually. And, and so um, if they know you're a business travel traveler, then um, you know, that's a good time to get you. And, but you know, sleeping, obviously it's a great time to get somebody. A uh, lot of people just don't look at their phone. Right. Like they, they might not look at the phone for hours. And so in my case I happen to be looking at my phone and um, and so in my sense, even though I got, I was in the middle of the desert, I feel lucky because they only got me for 61 minutes. Now again, I didn't think that was possible but uh, uh, for them to port it back. But yeah, that was, that was scary for me.

Speaker B: And then let me ask you, this is how do you see the future of AI and cyber security as it relates to mobile devices getting more and more challenging if people don't, you know, take the necessary precautionary steps to help themselves? I mean people are getting more and more sophisticated, AI is getting more and more sophisticated. What can people do to sort of future proof, uh, some of these risks, especially with the advancement of AI. I mean, are there new things you guys are seeing with AI where they're getting more and more sophisticated with it? Uh, you know, what are some things people can do to protect themselves given the nature of AI and used against them potentially?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Um, I kind of forgot to, I get so into this as a, as a victim. I get into mobile security so it's easy for my brain to go off. But um, so um, what people need to do is they, they got to be very careful about uh, what information they post online, social media, because a lot of people are volunteering their information like on Facebook. It's, it's, you do like you don't want to put your birthday on there. You know, it's nice to have like whatever, 10, 20, 30 people. Like, I don't even like to say hello, happy birthday to people on their birthday, like if I get a notification because I feel like I'm exposing their identity. Like, yeah, I'm only one out of 20 people, but I don't want to participate in it. So I'll actually wait two days and say happy belated birthday. And it's all, it's actually safer to put the wrong birthday like on social media than it, than it probably would be to be no birthday. Because these data collectors are collecting all this data about us. So be very careful. And especially like with, you know, these, all these new AI tools are coming out and so, um, you know, you get freemiums, you get to use it free for X number of tokens or time. And so people will put their emails in there, you know, and do the, do an SMS verification or email verification. And so again, you're volunteering that information out. So you want to create a couple email IDs that you're using for those, for those cases, have an email that you just communicate like family, family and friends, but have different ones for your bank, for your crypto, uh, for, you know, especially for social media. You know, people will use social media and then use an alias and they think they're somehow hidden behind that. There's, there's what's called fingerprinting. To tell you how far this has gone. There's two different things that people don't realize that are going on. In fact, I was just coding a tool for a friend of mine that asked me to help him to do this. And um. But there's a graphical representation of us, a marketing graphical representation. And so I ended up building this tool for the friend where if I put uh, if I do, it's a browser check and it draws this sort of rectangular box and this triangle thing and a hash. And that's what I'm known as. I ran it on myself. And so we all have this hash and these graphical representations of um, uh, the activities of what we do online. And, and so, and there's also what's called browser fingerprinting. And so the other tool that I coded for him was to be able to do a browser fingerprint. And we ran this on different browsers. So I did it on a Safari, I did it on a Chrome, and on Chrome and Safari it came up like 95%, um, ability for somebody to accompany that did data collection to fingerprint me. And the fingerprinting is like apps you use your behavior, um, the things you're searching for. Then I used uh, DuckDuckGo and this and the, the score went down. Then it went to brave and the square, you know, really went down on this fingerprinting. And so uh, even if you're very careful, it's just the data collection by Apple, Google, your bank. Everybody's collecting our data. It's, it's the most valuable thing on the planet. It's a, it's a, it. The, the industry of data collection is larger than oil and gas and, and so we're all valuable in terms of the data they have on us.

Speaker B: And it's only growing. It's only growing. That's the thing is, I think more and more people realize and for the price point, I love that you guys mentioned it. You know, for 99 bucks a month, you know, for a hundred bucks a month people can secure literally something that could cost them tens, if not hundreds, if not, you know, thousands, millions of dollars. Um, in the grand scheme it can

Speaker A: cost the business, you know. Yeah. Hundreds of millions and, and hurt, hurt reputation. And like, like I said before, it's, it put one of them out of business because they couldn't recover. It was, you know, it was, it wasn't. The SIM swap itself is the SIM swap and what they were able to do with it.

Speaker B: Mhm. It's like giving someone else keys to your.

Speaker A: Pretty much it is the master key to our lives basically. Like if somebody can, you know, take it away and you know, and you know, in terms of services, um, you know, I kind of, I don't want to kind of give away what, you know. Fonny's going to be releasing in the next couple of months, but we are working on um, expanding our services. We're getting into like encrypted DNS and, and things like that. And so in a couple of months we will come out with uh, with the premium service. But yeah, you just have to be really careful about who you're giving your information to and just not volunteer it. And uh, especially if somebody's calling you and you, they're a stranger. You know, people borrow your phone.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: If they got an emergency and they need to call somebody and ah, you're going to allow them to use it, dial for them and then hand them the phone because they could take your phone and like if they have Verizon, for example, there's like a hash, four digits hash and that returns a temporary transfer pin. So I could get that. Pretend like I make a phone Call delete, you know, make sure that that notification is not on the phone. Hand it back to them now. I have, you know, X number of hours, I have the, I have their mobile number and I have the transfer, temporary transfer pin. These are two of the most important things that you give to the carrier to then port that number out. And uh, you know, and so elderly people like, you know, the odd thing about this industry that we're in is that anyone can go on Google and type, excuse me, YouTube and do a search on SIM swap news and you'll see local channels all over the country. Chicago, Orlando, Dallas, uh, you know, New York, the local channels covering the dangers of SIM swap. And it hits crypto people, they interview people that come on, tell their story about how they lost everything, uh, especially in Florida or a lot of retired people and you'll see all those kinds of news. But then on the national news, my, my theory is that the telecom industry is the second largest advertiser behind pharmaceuticals. And so you don't want to have a night show on one of the three big channels and talk about how vulnerable carriers are because you never hear this mentioned like on CNN or those channels. And the only person who actually has talked about the mobile, the mobile space where um, he, he, he did like a five minute news clip on how the US Government bought everybody's location data in the US without a warrant or subpoena. And that was Lou Dobbs. And then about a week later he didn't have a job anymore. And so I have, I have no idea whether it was related to that or not. Um, but you know, I was picturing when he did that, I was picturing the carriers calling up and saying like, hey, like uh, you know, we're thinking about dropping our sponsorship. I'm sure Lou's probably pissed off a bunch of people for a bunch of news clips. But it was, but, but being in this industry it kind of made me wonder that uh, if it related to that. But you know, but that shows that, you know, the U.S. government buys, is, you know, bought data, our location data. Like why would the US Government want to buy the location data of all the direct customers of these carriers? You know, what's so special about that? That's one of the reasons why like at a funny, um, you know, there's some people that have now come into the industry. Yeah. Like it's one of the reasons why, to find, we don't go around making claims like we're going to take you off grid, we're security first. And we add privacy in the sense that, uh, when you pay a fani, we have an advantage. We're prepaid. So prepaid means that we don't have to follow all what's called the CALEA laws of the carriers, at least one of them, and that is the kyc. And so carrier has all your, they have your birthday, your Social Security ifani. We don't collect that. We don't collect call records or SMS records. You can get it from us, you have to verify. Then we request from the carrier. So we can provide somebody that. But we're not collecting that data. And, but even though we, we keep you private from like the phone stores and the carrier, the carriers and the customer support, the reality is, is that you take your phone home and you use WI fi behind a WI fi router that you, you're paying somebody for, right? Your name's on that account and your phone's attached into that. Every day you're calling your mom and your mom calls you, like all these connections. And if the government, for example, wants to know where you live, they can get subpoenas. They could say, tell me where this phone number has been most of the time for the last six months. And there's going to be a blue dot on somebody's house and it's going to be hard to say, like, yeah, they don't live there. Right. They obviously spend all their time in this house. And so, um, that's why we don't, you know, since I'm the chief kind of marketing, kind of spokesperson, I do the interviews and podcasters, I know that I limit sales in one sense that we're not willing to go out and, and make claims that we can't do. And so if anyone's telling you, like, hey, we're going to take you completely off grid, I would, I would question that. We can keep you secure. We can keep you on LTE 5G secure encrypted protocols. We can do that globally, protect SIM swaps. We can, we do human verifications, we can protect from verifications. The humans are the only way to do that because voice cloning, the video cloning now, is getting better and better. Right? Like, um, you know, we're playing around with, with, um, the, the video avatars partly because it's a good way to kind of expand your advertising, but we want to do it because we want to become experts at it, because we want to defend against it.

Speaker B: Right, exactly.

Speaker A: And so any kind of, you know, any kind of customer support that is not human, like, it's uh, would scare me to use their service. Right, right. Um, and so it's the voice clone. We actually have a customer that. He joined us beforehand and we wouldn't have stopped this, but he happened. He was a, um, founder and CEO of a crypto hedge fund. Um, he ended up losing over a million dollars because, um, holy cow. Uh, the financial exchange he was using, a very professional one. Um, one of the steps was voice cloning. And so somebody had cloned his voice to get, you know, past that. And I remember I haven't done a wire transfer, you know, in years just because I use now Bitcoin to do it or XRP to do it. But, you know, there used to be that and probably still is where it's like when you want to execute a wire transfer, it says, repeat after me. My name is such and such. And I want to execute this wire transfer or something like that. And it's. And it's, you know, that's a security check. Well, those are. No, those no longer valid. Any, any. Anyone can clone my voice now. You and I were on video hundreds and hundreds of times. Anyone could go on YouTube. It's like a, you know, one minute of scanning of one of our videos

Speaker B: and that's a rap.

Speaker A: They create a voice, they got a voice for life. And uh, you know, one. One of the recommendations I, I heard from, ah, a consultant, um, that I was talking to last week is that they suggest that every family should have a code word. And, and when they said that it was like, oh God, I can't believe I didn't think of that. Because when I went during COVID we went and helped my parents, um, because my, my mother had dementia at the time and Covid was going on. So we went there and spent a while. I was amazed at how many people would call my parents, parents, house and claiming to be, uh, one of their daughters or sons. And um, oh yeah, and I could hear, I could hear my dad saying, you know, shame on you. And so I actually convinced him. I'm like, you know, you're tired. You're old enough now. Like, what, what you need to do is just play with them and be, oh, really? Oh, tell me, like, where you been? How you doing? And if they ask, when they ask for the 2,000 or 5,000, you know, ask them like, well, why wouldn't I just send you 10 if I'm. And, and so, you know, if you get time like you're watching golf. And so he does that now and then eventually he'll tell him like, yeah, you know, like what you're doing, this is bad. The problem with that, the problem that all of us face now is it's no longer the hacker in the basement or this is organized crime now. And so, um, like I said in the pre call, um, I spent a lot of time in Asia because we have rental properties there. And so we're watching news over there and the, this, the scam call centers, uh, it's not just people voluntarily to be part of these scam call centers. They'll advertise jobs, people travel there, they go to Cambodia and they think they're showing up for a legitimate job and they go into this compound and they're kidnapped. They take their phone away, they take their passport, all their IDs away, and they're basically imprisoned and they're forced to hack all of us. And so they'll get somebody from say, Vietnam to hack Vietnamese people from Tokyo, from Japan.

Speaker B: So they localize the crime and so,

Speaker A: you know, and they give them US phone numbers and uh, and then use that. So we have organized crime around the world that are trying, whether it's SIM swapping, trying to hack into your icloud, your cloud accounts, your business, it's huge business. So, um, Trump like six months ago announced that they recovered 15 billion in Bitcoin. And that was from a Cambodian scam center. They had scammed enough people and, and that was only what they were, could recover. So organized crime is now, they're, they're, they're earning billions per year scamming all of us. And that's emails, that's everything. It's even now like if you go to a restaurant and the, the menus to see a menu, it's a QR code, right? So you have to like, make sure somebody didn't put a sticker over that, that menu, that menu, qr. Or you go, you go to an unmanned parking lot and you're in LA, you're in space 117 and you scan the QR to pay. Now you just paid your $30 to park all day or something, you know, in the bay area, probably $50 by now. Um, you know, you scan that thinking that you just paid to park your car, you come back and you've got a ticket or there's a problem, but they put a sticker over that QR code and it's very easy. You can brand, you can make branded QR codes and make looks exactly like it, and you just put that right over the top. And uh, and so that's called Cushing. So there's so many things going on where they can try and take our money and it's, it's be like a four hour call, like go through all of them.

Speaker B: No, it's, it's wild to think about too because it's becoming more and more prevalent. I wanted to ask before we wrap up here and share the link with some of the audience is who is Ifani for? Right. If someone's watching this and they're like wow, I'm fascinated by this and they're looking to get started, you know, who specifically is it for and how quickly does it work? Once someone says, you know what, I want to sign up and I want to try it out for myself.

Speaker A: Yeah. So the, the I would say the first thing is anybody who has something to lose and that can be, it could be money, crypto, proprietary data, reputation or their business. If somebody got a hold of your mobile account and then could get into like email accounts, cloud accounts or business, um, access, if you have something to lose then you need this kind of protection. The, the, the other thing is we say that we're for people that use their phone. So if you're a doctor, if you're an attorney, if you're a businessman executive and you have a phone number and you have, you actually, you have to use it, right? Or, or you use it for ah, like verification because 80% of the financial institutions in the US still use SMS verification. And the only reason I can think that they do that, do SMS only is because if they put an authenticator app on there or started supporting Yubikeys, their customer support costs would explode. So companies as well as the carriers basically have done the math and said that it's cheaper to deal with the fraud than it is to protect the customer. And I know this because I've actually had attorneys try and hire me to defend their SIM swap victim. So they want to sue T Mobile, Verizon AT&T. So they contact me and say would you be an expert witness? And my, my response is I always want to learn about what happened. So I use that as a learning experience. But then I say, you know, I can't because I don't want to in public go against the industry of the people that we resell. And, and uh, um, but why note but the attorneys have told me that the carrier's defense is that SIM swaps have been normalized in the industry and because it's normalized, therefore they don't feel like they should be held accountable.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And one of Our biggest fans is actually an ex CISO of AT&T and he told us that he wanted to do this with AT&T a long time ago, but it's too niche, it would be too costly for such a small part of the market. And uh, and then he proposed to one of the carriers, hey, why don't you just, you know, resell a funny. And I, I, you know, I even said, well, I've already talked to a second in command at one of the carriers. And the, and the guy said it's a great idea. The problem is that if we offer a fawney, then um, we basically saying like, our carrier's secure, but if you really want to be secure, you have to buy this.

Speaker B: Right, Right.

Speaker A: And it's a bad look for him. He ended up getting the same response and you know, sort of. And it's one of the reasons why like I, the, because people always ask like, well, aren't the carriers just gonna like someday do this? And it's like, well, they're gonna, they're gonna continue put up like barriers to try and prevent it, but they have too many holes and uh, and a

Speaker B: lot of red tape at scale.

Speaker A: Yeah, a lot of red tape. Too many, too many employees to control. Um, like I said, the industry's built that uh, you don't even have to talk to the carrier to like cancel. And if they were to do it, if they were to say like, okay, we're gonna start doing human verification anytime we wants, wants to cancel, like they become nonprofit. And so the difference for a fani. One of the reasons why we can be successful is because not only are we selling like a service like AT&T where you get pretty much the same service if you buy direct, but you get privacy, you get the line of insurance coverage, you get the mobile data coverage globally, you get the WI fi calling globally, you get the 500 free minutes, you get the dual ESIM configuration fig, you get the expanded coverage. Even in the US you get the data as backup. All this in addition to it. And, and our churn rate's less than 2% and we don't even do contracts. We're pay as you go. You can pay by month or you can pay annually and you save almost two, two months of billing, but we also offer 60 day money back guarantee. So even if you paid the annual fee, try this. And we don't impress you? You don't have peace of mind? Uh, you don't feel comfortable with this. After 60 days you'll, if you pay even if you pay the annual, you get it all back. So we're trying to be the no risk carrier so that you can, you can come try us. And with the discount code, with that, with the link, you get $99 off. So if you choose monthly, your second month is free. And so even for that two month trial, you're only paying for one month. And you'll get that month back if you um, you're dissatisfied. But even if you pay the year and 60 days, you get the whole 100% that you paid back. Now let's say you cancel that after six months, you're going to get that prorated six months back. To make it a lot. So we don't do contracts. All the carriers are trying to lock people into phones. They lock you on this phone, it makes you harder to travel because you can't put like other carriers on the phone because it's locked. But they want to finance phones because they want you to be locked in for the two years. And a uh, lot of people don't think about that. But uh, um, yeah, that's just the way the industry works.

Speaker B: I love that. And it's literally risk free. Like that risk free guarantee means that like not only is it month to month, but if you're not totally satisfied. I love that you said peace of mind. Then it's 100% money back guarantee. That's phenomenal. I think what you guys are doing is.

Speaker A: Yeah, and that, that 2% or less churn includes like people that have left to go to go overseas. And by the way, if, if you live overseas and you want a US number, we can serve you. We have customers that have been overseas now for probably four years plus 100 outside the U.S. they want a U.S. number. They're like a U.S. expat or they do banking like in Manhattan with Goldman Sachs and all that. So they want that extra protection. And so we can serve you with no extra still the same price. And especially if the have the iPhone. We've been signing up some um, some small companies in the financial space. Well they'll have like two people in Cayman Islands, couple in the US A couple Canada, Bali, Indonesia, Bangkok, uh, Melbourne or something. They'll have like six employees, 12 employees, all new iPhones, dual ESM config. We put them on AT&T. Um, so they get the calling with, with that data Esim. Um, they can call each other, they get the 500 free minutes, they can text each other call back to the US unlimited. They can receive calls unlimited over these phones. It's great for business. So, you know, if you've got a business and you want everybody to have a US mobile number and even if they're out overseas, we can do that. And we, and we have been doing that and it's terrific for, for those people that are, that are uh, that are overseas.

Speaker B: Very cool, Mark. Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on and uh, sharing a bunch of, not only value of what people can do to protect themselves, but also some of the alternatives that exist out there, like Afani and just for educating us. Because I think so many people have no idea. You know, like I mentioned at the top, uh, you know, of the, of the call here is like so many people think that cyber security is this thing that's meant for, you know, corporations or you know, these big companies. They don't realize that more and more these companies are inventing so much data, information, finances that are in our pocket and literally like I've never heard of insurance, uh, on that type of stuff. Right. Peace of mind insurance, if you will. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing that. And also like I mentioned, we'll put some links in the description down below. If you guys want to learn more from, from Mark, see some of the other interviews that he's done sharing Afani as well as check out the Ifani link in the description below. I personally am going to go check out how many times I have been, uh, breached, uh, with my content. So I'm very excited to see that as well. And uh, Mark, where can people learn more or sign up if they'd like, uh, to join Afani today?

Speaker A: Um, yeah, so we provided your community with a link and so definitely you want to post that link here and so you want to use that because we love to know where people are coming from. That's going to give you a 99 discount as well. So again, it's going to be your second month free or it's going to take 99 off the annual fee, which you're already saving two plus two plus months by doing that. Plus the 99. Um, our YouTube channel. I've got tons of videos that talk about not only SIM swapping, but everything from MZ catchers and DNS hijacking, all the kind of things. Um, I start to cover graphene OS phones and so that's a great place to learn about us. And I forgot the rest of your question, but, uh, I love the fact, you know, I love coming on these shows and we're very proud of the fact that this started as a tragedy with us, and now I get to talk to people like you. Um, many high profile people. Um, literally, like an hour before this call started, one of our customers out of Hollywood called me for one of the phone stores and he's like, hey, I just picked up a new phone. And so I get to talk to people like that and have video calls with people that I've watched play basketball. Uh, you know, for. I, uh, don't want to say which team it is, but we have, um, you know, a couple high profile basketball players and I get to have video of people like that. And so, um, I, I want to thank you for allowing us to educate people on this and I, uh, enjoyed it. It was great meeting you and spending the time with you.

Speaker B: Awesome, man. Mark, thank you so much. And for guys who are interested, men or women interested in checking it out again, check out afoni, uh dot com. We'll put the link in the description down below and feel free to comment what questions you guys have, what you guys want to learn, and see how we can add some value to you to help save all that good stuff that's in your pocket. Till next time, make sure to live strong, live with passion. Smash that subscribe button and we'll see you guys on the next inspiring episode. Mark, thank you so much for being on the show today. Appreciate you m.