In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss how financial scams are coming from every direction—phone calls, email phishing scams, text message scams, social media, and even door-to-door encounters—and why a little healthy skepticism is now a key part of scam prevention. They share real-world scam alert examples hitting their community right now, especially senior scams, and explain how staying cautious can protect both your money and your mindset as you work to secure your retirement.

Listen in to learn about how to avoid scams by slowing down when urgency hits, verifying sources before clicking anything, and recognizing the red flags behind gift card scams, IRS scam calls, and the increasingly convincing threats of AI voice cloning scams and deepfake scam tactics. These practical cybersecurity tips also support smart identity theft prevention—an important part of retirement planning for anyone who wants to keep retiring comfortably on track.

In this episode, find out:

·     How gift card scams exploit the holiday rush and why “pay with gift cards” is a major scam alert

·     Why IRS scam calls and “official” threats (like unpaid penalties) are designed to trigger fear and urgency

·     How a jury duty scam can use phone number spoofing to appear like it’s coming from a real sheriff’s department

·     The best ways to avoid clicking links in email phishing scams and text message scams, even when they look legitimate

·     How emerging tech (like AI voice cloning scams and deepfake scam videos) is changing the landscape of senior scams and financial scams

Tweetable Quotes:

·     Radon Stancil: “If you ever get a call from a police department or sheriff’s department saying you have a warrant for your arrest or you missed jury duty—it’s a scam. Hang up.”

·     Murs Tariq: “If there’s urgency, weird payment methods like gift cards or crypto, or they want you to click right now—pause and ask why.”

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Welcome, everyone, to Secure Your Retirement Podcast. Today is a very important 

podcast. This is something that is becoming more and more of an issue, and that is 

scams. And they are coming from every single direction. It is something that at our 

firm, at Peace of Mind, Wealth Management, we train on it every single month. 

There’s always something new, things that are coming at us. And here’s the nice 

thing. Experts tell us, and we know that when we talk about these things, 

they are not meant to scare you. They are meant to inform you. And it equips us 

to not get scammed. It equips us to be cautious. We learn about new tools like AI 

or we learn about new scams, how people are trying things. And when we learn about 

it, yes, it makes us a little skeptical, but that’s okay. It’s okay to be a little 

skeptical because if we’re skeptical, we’re going to double and triple and quadruple 

check things before we give away private information, before we give away any payment 

information, before we do any of those, 

seeing, things that we’re hearing about. Again, to educate not to scare. All right. 

Set that up pretty good there, Murs. Don’t scare anybody too bad. What’s our first 

thing we want to talk about? So, the first one that is becoming more and more 

popular is this idea of holiday gift card scams. So especially right now, 

it is holiday season. And a lot of the way the world operates right now, it’s just 

so much easier to go get a gift card than it is to try to figure out what 

someone wants and go buy them a gift. So, gift cards have become a very common 

gifting technique and they can be delivered online. They can be delivered through the 

mail. You can go buy them at the store. And so, what a lot of the scams around 

these are becoming is you have people calling you up, emailing you and saying that 

you a balance or something like that and they’re wanting to get paid in 

gift cards or they’re asking you to go get gift cards to make payments to catch 

you up so you don’t get in trouble, so you know we’ve heard of people 

impersonating the IRS saying you’re you owe on back taxes or you owe this penalty 

or that penalty and the amount of urgency they put around this conversation 

especially if they get you on the phone, they scare you into them into thinking that 

they are actually the IRS. Whereas if you go to the IRS’s website, they make it 

very clear that they don’t make personal phone calls. Everything they do is through 

letters. And so just be very wary if you get called up and you think or they’re 

trying to convince you that you owe some money, or you have this service done and 

you owe for an invoice. Or even you get an email from someone who you think is 

your friend or family member or child or grandchild emailing saying, 

hey, I just want a gift card this year, send it to this email. It could be an 

email that’s been compromised. And while normally it’s very easy to just do that, 

you want to be very, very careful about the emails and the text and the phone 

calls that we are receiving today. On the email side, a very easy thing to do is 

check where that email actually came from. So, you know, check what comes after 

the at symbol. So is it at Gmail .com or is it at irs .gov, 

right? You know, look for where it comes from. And if it doesn’t make sense or you 

have a question about it or question it even more. Because that’s where the most 

common scams are right now through email and text, and they just get you and 

they get you engaged. And then they have ways and tactics to get you to give them 

money or send them a gift card number or a pin or something like that. So that’s 

a big one. Be careful about the holiday gift card scams going on right now. Radon, 

I know you went through something personally here that you shared with our team, and 

it was quite the entertaining story. I’m glad you came out, you know, not scarred 

by it, but it’s a good one to tell. So go ahead. Yeah, so now for, you know, we 

have listeners all over the country and even some outside of the country. So where 

we are from our office and where we reside is in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

So, our local county is Wake County. But I got a call just the other day as I was 

pulling up to the office. So, you know, early morning and the person cuts on the 

phone and says, is this Radon Stancil? I said yes, a very confident sounding 

person. And they said, this is, you know, Sheriff Deputy with the local Wake. 

family member. You’re going to think about something that throws you emotionally off. 

So immediately I was like very much in tune as to what was next. And he’s and I 

after I verified that he was talking to me, I was now listening intently and he 

says, let’s get down the business. And I said, okay. And he says, why did you not 

show up for jury duty on, uh, this specific date that you were supposed to show up 

for jury duty. I said, I didn’t have anything for jury duty. I’ve never gotten 

anything for jury duty. And he said, so you didn’t get and sign a certified copy 

of a mail that you got in the mail for it. And he made it like a grand jury. 

This is what you’re going to be in. I’m like, no, I did not get that. He goes, 

is it possible anybody else signed for you? I said, no, it is not possible because 

my wife is very good about details. She would have told me if she signed for 

anything. And so basically, he then goes on to tell the story that there are two 

citations out for my arrest. And he says, can you make it down to the Wake County 

Sheriff Department? And I said, what’s the address? And he said the address, 3300 

South Salisbury Street, which is right downtown. Well, I’m on my phone and I’m 

Googling where is the Wake County Sheriff Department. And it’s right. So, nothing at 

this point is sounding crazy other than the fact that you’re going to get arrested 

for not going to a jury duty. That part, you know, my brain was questioning a 

little bit, but it was like, come to the Wake County Sheriff’s Department, and if 

you come down here, we won’t, we’ll basically won’t arrest you. Well, I’m like, 

well, that sounds pretty normal, I guess. I mean, I don’t know. He said they’re 

doing a courtesy call because they think this is a mistake. And I’m like, okay, 

well, that’s nice. Well, then that’s where the story shifted, because now he tells 

me, I have to stay on the phone with him all the way to the County, the County, 

the County, Wake County Sheriff’s Department, which made me a little bit worried 

because I’m like, why are they tracking me? What’s going on? But then the very 

quickly, the story shifted again and it was like, hold on, you’re going to talk to 

my captain. And now they start talking to be about the penalties. Well, as they’re 

doing this, now my brain is catching up with this doesn’t seem accurate. And so, by 

this time now, I am, I’m Googling. What if someone calls you from the Sheriff’s 

Department? Number one thing comes up. 

address or that phone number. So, the number one thing it said, just like the IRS, 

the Wake County Sheriff Department, the police department is not going to call you 

about a warrant for your arrest, jury duty. They don’t do that. 

They’ll send you documentation, but they’re not going to call you. But it threw my 

brain off on that one little emotion thinking maybe my kid’s in trouble and it just 

threw me off of my thinking. I did not share the information with them. We were 

headed down that direction, though, meaning that they were headed down the direction 

where they were going to start to tell me that I, I, you know, could pay this 

online and delay until I could get to the next thing. Because I think it threw 

them off because I said I could be there in 15 minutes. And I think that threw 

them off because I’m sure most people will be like, I’m already at work. I can’t 

get down to the sheriff’s department right now. It’ll be tomorrow or I’m out of 

town and that’s where they could kind of go down this whole path. So, here’s the 

information if you ever get a call from a police department sheriff’s department 

could come up as the weight county sheriff department the police department any of 

those things it could come up as that remember they don’t call you for that they’ll 

send you documentation you may actually have a sheriff show up at your house to 

arrest you if you really had one out there but they’re not going to call you and 

tell you that they’re that’s the case so very heavy lesson learned on a scam that 

is going on here in the rale area I’m sure they’re using it in other parts of the 

country. All right, let’s hit our next one, Murs. All right, so this one is, it 

makes you, I mean, we’re trying not to scare people, but this one just creeps me 

out a little bit just because, you know, a lot of what we’ve experienced is over 

the phone through text, through email, like the phone call that you got from the 

Sheriff’s Department, like a lot of the emails that we see coming through, but this 

one is actually in -person door -to -door type of sales. And what we’re seeing here, 

it’s kind of more focus on home improvement or making you think that you need to 

get something done at your house. And so how this has been working is they knock 

on your door and they’ll say something like, hey, we’re working in your neighborhood 

and our crew’s already here. So, you know, we’ll give you a discount on a service, 

whether that’s tree trimming or, you know, taking a look at your roof or landscaping 

or whatever it is, you know, to put the mulch down or we’ve got extra concrete 

from this driveway that we just poured over there. You’ve got cracks in your 

concrete. We 

the services and then the team will come back, you know, in a week or so to 

complete the actual work. And so, they get some money up front and guess what? You 

never see them. Or we’ve heard of examples where they’ll give you a number as far 

as what is going to cost to do whatever type of home improvement that they 

recommend. And it seems like a very attractive number. And then they say, oh, we 

didn’t see this, we didn’t see that, and your number starts to double and triple. 

So, it’s all these different types of scams that are being done face to face. It’s 

so, you know, if you’re in this type of scenario and you start hearing, 

or you start feeling like it’s a deal that’s too good to be true, or there’s a 

lot of high pressure. We know in the door -to -door world, it just always feels 

uncomfortable and high pressure, but unusually high pressure, I guess, if you feel 

that, or they’re not giving you a written estimate, or you’re not seeing a car that 

has a logo on it, you know, that resembles a company that you’re aware of. All of 

these things are things that take into account if you open up that door, but, you 

know, I think a lot of today, people aren’t opening that door. So just be vigilant. 

That’s kind of the story here, is that the scams and the, the, the creativity that 

we’re seeing in this world is getting better and better. So, you just need to always 

be asking yourself, does this seem too good to be true? Is this legitimate? And at 

the end of the day, there’s no reason to make a decision on the spot. That’s what 

they want. The second you make an engagement with them; they know that they’ve got 

someone that they can bend that will a little bit. So just be careful, be vigilant. 

The big one, though, Radon is all around the email online and social media stuff. 

What are we seeing over there? Yeah, this is by far the 

you $1,100 for your new iPhone. It’s supposed to be here in two weeks. 

If this is a mistake, click here. Well, my brain, if you don’t think for a second, 

you’re going, I didn’t get an iPhone. I got to stop this right now. And that’s all 

they want you to do is that click on that link and provide them with information. 

If you didn’t order an iPhone, if you didn’t order something on Amazon, don’t click 

on the link. Get off of that and go to the Amazon or go to the iPhone, or go to 

Apple, rather, go to the source. Don’t try to deal with it through that. So, you 

got to act, you got to be vigilant about your thoughts because sometimes we get so 

busy, we just click before we think. Another big one is email. An email is very 

difficult. We through our system here at Peace of Mind Wealth Management, 

we actually have a service that sends fake emails to us, all of us as employees, 

to make sure we’re not clicking. Because if we click on it, it’s going to come up 

and it’s going to say, hey, this was not real. And it’s going to now teach you a 

lesson and it does a mark and then we’ve got to talk about it if you click on 

that. So, nobody wants to click on anything because you shouldn’t. So, if I get an 

email from something that says click here to do this or that, it’s better to get 

out of the email and go to the site itself. So instead of getting an email from 

Amazon and saying I got to click on something to verify, which they never asked you 

to do that by the way, but then just go to Amazon. Go to your Amazon account and 

click in that way. It’s safe. The other big one is that your friend who you know 

really well, emails you and ask you a question. Be very careful. 

Always check and just go click on the email address. And if you know your email, 

like if I know that it’s Murs Tariq @ Gmail .com and I click on it and it’s 

some big, long numbers at Gmail .com. That’s not Merse. Now Merse could be emailing 

me and asking me that he needs help. He needs some information or needs help 

because he’s got a problem. Hey, can you send me some money? I got in trouble and 

I just need you to send me something, right? And the big one in what we get is, 

as a company, is I’ll get an email from almost every one of the employees. 

The nice thing is they do it enough that, I mean, it’ll say to me, hey, I’m 

updated my checking account, please update my payroll. Well, I know we’re never going 

to do that because they know not to do that. So, I don’t even, those are big bad 

signs that you can get. But if you’re not thinking, you’re going to click on 

something in an email. Another big one is you’ve got a problem. It’ll tell you that 

you’re, if you go Windows, there’s a problem with your windows. And so, you’ve got a 

problem and you’ve got a virus. Click here to clean up the virus or click here to 

talk to Microsoft about this virus. That is all fake because they want to get your 

information. So just be very careful. Always look at who the email is from. And if 

I got an email from a friend saying I need help, I’m not going to reply to the 

email. I’m going to call my friend. And I’m going to call them on their number. 

I’m not going to, because another one is they could go, hey, I don’t have my cell 

phone call me at this number. Not real. Not real. They’re just trying to give you 

to another that they can get to somebody who might sound like your friend because 

you can do that with AI. So, call that. If you cannot call them on their number, 

on that number that you’ve got for them; your friend will be okay. You can help 

them out later. It is 99 .99 % a chance of it being a scam. 

So be careful, be vigilant. All right, Merce, let’s sum this up. Yeah, so big, 

big, the moral of the story is to be vigilant. 

And so, you know, things to be aware of, red flag wise, if there’s urgency behind 

something, ask yourself, why is this such an urgent decision that needs to be made 

right now? If they’re asking for weird payment methods, like gift cards or 

cryptocurrency, or using apps like Venmo and PayPal and all those different things or 

wire transfers, all of these are red flags when it comes to payments. 

We talked about web links, be aware of the ones that you’re clicking on, and don’t 

give out your information. Don’t give out your social security number or bank account 

numbers or pins or passwords or any of that stuff. No real institution is going to 

need that up until a certain point, right? If you’re opening an account with a bank 

or something like that, eventually you have to give that. But they’re not calling 

you and saying, hey, let’s open up an account, give me your social, right? That’s a 

whole different conversation. If you’re in that scenario, just be aware, and there’s 

nothing wrong with hanging up the phone. I know sometimes we’re just too polite and 

we don’t want to hang up, but if you know you’re in it, just hang it up and 

don’t give out any more information. Call the organization itself. Like Radon said, 

you know, Amazon could send you certain things or you could have a local 

organization that you work with that has been hacked or something like that, call 

the organization directly and say, hey, did you send me this email or go to their 

website? And if you feel so inclined, there are agencies that you can report these 

fishing scams and things like that, too. So, at the end of the day, technology has 

been great to us. It will continue to be great to us. But with that, as always, 

there’s going to be bad actors. And so, we just have to be prepared for it, 

especially as we head into this holiday season. Okay, everyone, we certainly 

appreciate you listening to us today.