SCAM LIKELY

Colokum Craft Coffee USE THE PROMO CODE "WSMG15" FOR 15% OFF YOUR COFFEE PURCHASE Boomer Bunker Dischord Become a Bunker Dweller 24 SCAM LIKELY NATIONAL DAY: National Just Because Day — A day to do something kind or fun for no particular reason. BIRTHDAY: Aaron Paul (born 1979) — Actor best known for Breaking Bad. THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 2003 — Mars made its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years. ----- SCAM LIKELY (FTC / Consumer Protection) Your phone used to ring because somebody had your number. Now a scammer can arrive with your number, your relatives, your habits — and maybe a cloned voice that sounds like somebody you love. • AI voice cloning can turn short public audio clips into convincing impersonations. • Caller-ID spoofing and cheap internet calling make mass scam attempts easy to launch and hard to trace. • FTC: consumers reported $3.5 billion lost to imposter scams in 2025. ------ THE NEW PHONE BOOK’S HERE! (FTC / Data Brokers) The old phone book gave strangers a name, address and number. The modern version can assemble far more — public records, online activity, relatives, location information and commercially collected data. • People-search sites are data brokers: they compile information from public records, public profiles and other brokers, then sell or share reports. • The FTC has pursued cases involving sensitive location data and has warned brokers about restrictions on transferring sensitive American data to foreign adversaries. • The punchline: an industry profits from collecting the data, while another industry sells us blocking, monitoring, removal and identity-protection services. ----- THE CLOUD HAS A POWER BILL (U.S. Department of Energy) The scammer is not sitting inside a data center — but the digital economy that makes massive-scale data collection, AI, automation and cloud computing possible lives on physical infrastructure. • AI growth is one driver of rapidly rising data-center electricity demand. • DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scenarios estimate data centers could account for roughly 9.5%–15.3% of U.S. electricity use by 2030. • The Road Rage question: we eliminated the phone book, automated the middleman, monetized the information — and now we need enormous buildings and enormous amounts of electricity to keep the digital machine running. ----- SHOW CREDITS: Thank you to my co-host, Ken Madden of MaddK Studio Jason Radosevich Horrible Designs Cast: Kate the Duchess of NJ and John Jamingo of theBoomer Bunker Aaron of I had to Say it Boomer Bob of the Boomer Bob Show Supporters: Steve McShane of the Razor Wire News Josh Roberts from New Hampshire and you can always leave a comment by email: bruce@wsmgmedia.com