Speaking Service

I was grateful for this chance that I had to do my speaking service. For this assignment I forced myself to go out of my way and talk to people that I have never met before. Often in the crossroads in the MC I would find some people sitting alone and ask strike up a conversation with them. My main goal was usually to ask people about how they came to be there and a little about their testimonies. I heard many touching stories from people as they talked about powerful spiritual experiences. I learned a lot about the foresight and architecture of our God. There are often so many moving pieces and without knowing the full story it would seem like most people are here by complete chance. But after hearing it all it is easy to see the Lord’s hands in their life. I learned a lot about talking to people and about asking questions to help people be more willing to open up.

Scam video

Scams

click here to watch the video

Jacob Gibson

Comm 102 Section 7

November 22, 2013

 Specific Purpose: To persuade the class to become and stay informed about the common scams that happen today.

Central Idea: You need to stay actively informed so that you do not lose you hard earned money

Elevator Speech: Scammers make thousands of dollars a day, you can avoid being the victim and loosing thousands by becoming informed and taking a few seconds to think before acting. 

Scams, How to Avoid Them

Introduction: (Attention Getter) I want you to imagine that you are a hardworking parent. You have spent years earning a living and are living a comfortable life when you run into unfortunate circumstances.  You lose your job and have to get a new one making less. Its Christmas time and you want to get a little extra cash to buy your kids some good presents. You have an extra car that you don’t use that often so you decide to sell it for $2500. Living in this day and age you post an ad on Craig’s list. A few days later you are contacted via email and a gentleman says he is interested in buying your car. You trade phone numbers and he gives you a call. He explains to you that he is currently in Japan on a business trip but he really does want your car so he offers to pay you in advance and an extra $100 to make sure you hold onto the car for him. This sounds like a great deal to you. He even emails you a copy of his driver’s license and his Facebook URL as proof that he really is who he claims to be, along with his home address and work address, promising that you will receive a check in the next couple days. The guy calls you again the next day and asks you for a favor. He says that he is going to be home in a few days but that he is having problems taking the money out of his bank from overseas. He also says that he needs a little extra cash to help him survive one more week and offers you an extra $50 to help him out bringing your total to $2650 for the car. He agrees to send you a check and ask that you cash it, take your agreed amount and forward the rest to him. A few days later you receive a check for $5000. You cash the check and take your agreed $2650 and wire the remaining $2350 to him via Western Union. A few days pass and you have not heard from him. You check your bank account and realize that the check you cashed for this guy bounced and the bake withdrew the $5000 from your account and charged you a $30 fee for the bad check. You have been scammed and lost almost $2350. You try to contact him and ask for reimbursement but you find the phone number and email address no longer exist. The address turn out to be fake and the Facebook account turns out to be real, but it was a hacked account. Merry Christmas to you and you your kids. (Credibility Statement) Almost this exact same story happened to a friend of mine who was already struggling financially. I have spent years studying magic tricks, which is a form and often the means of scamming others. The more I learn, the more terrified I am about how easy it is to lose money and time simply because I was not aware of what was happening. (Significance/Relation to Audience) Over and over I have met and heard stories of people who have been scammed loosing thousands of dollars. More often than not though it is much more subtle then the story I just told you. It is likely that it has happened to you and you don’t even know about it. Central Idea: You need to stay actively informed so that you do not lose your hard earned money. (Preview) I have 2 purposes today. First, I want to inform you about a couple of the more common scams that happen in our society and second I need you to please understand why it is that although you are doing a great job now you need to do better if you hope to avoid losing your money.

Body:

I. Main Point:  Scammers are able to get thousands of dollars in a single day from people like us, simply because people are uninformed, misinformed or as is usually the case under-informed. How many of you have been cashiers? Pay attention to what happens in the video I am about to show you, I want to see how many people catch it. (Show Scam school slide (scam school "Money, a Short Con and Crime = Short Change." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeLl4ZQjocA)

A. That was from a podcast called scam school. What happened?

1. Brian was able to scam $10 from this lady because she did not take a step back and think before acting. He threw a lot of numbers at her and tried to get her to forget what she had just done. Time delay is one of the scam artist best assets

            2. Often they will do things right in front of you and then quickly distract you in the hopes that you will forget what just happened.

B.  A Seattle Times article called “Quick-Change Con” interviewed a lot of people who had this happen to them. I fear that most people never find out why it is that their draw is short on cash.

                         

[Transition] There are many different types of scams. It is imperative that you stay informed in what is happening. I do not expect you to fall for these basic scams (Show slide of common internet advertising scams). You are too smart of that you have grown up with theses all your life.

II. Main Point: The things that we fall for are often much more subtle. (change slide)

A. look at these statistics from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2012_IC3Report.pdf). Every year they gather the data from all the complaints they have received. The graph on the right shows you that the number of complaints has been growing drastically over the past few years. Understand that this is only a small fraction of the number of actual scams that are done online each year. Only those reported directly to the IC3 are numbered here. This does not include those reported directly to law enforcement and those that where not reported.

B.  289,874 reported being scammed last year of that 114,908 lost a significant amount of money. $525,441,110.00 where lost which averages out to about $4,573.00 per person.

C. I was curious to see the different dynamics of people who were scammed and the results surprised me. Look at this table over 9,000 more men reported being scammed them women. I also looked at the college age dynamics and it turned out that just under 40% of all reported scams where form people ages 20-40 years old. That is a lot of scams for our age group.

D. now take a look at the amount of money lost on different scams.

·         Auto Fraud  where people sale cars they don’t have or don’t really own $64,572,334.97 lost

·         FBI Impersonation E-mail Scam where people pretend to be government agents and fine people when they don’t have the authority to do so. $4,672,985.06 reported as lost

·         Intimidation/Extortion Scams  this is basically blackmail $10,624,427.14 lost

·         Hit Man Scam where people [pretend to be a hitman often finding our information about you and your family and try to scare you into paying them not to kill you. $ 1,884,002.11

·         Scareware / Ransomware have any of you ever seen this on your computer (show picture of out of date flash) often these are scams wanting to download a virus to your computer that will steal your information or use you or your computer to get money. $134,899.85 where gained using this method.

·         Real Estate Fraud  $15,418,734.82

·         Romance Scams  we probably don’t need to go into detail about theses  $55,991,601.08

(Transition) Many of you know someone who has or have yourself fallen for one of these scams, even if you are not aware of it. These happen all of the time and are more common than we are often prone to think.

a.      Here is a brief list of some of the more common scams. (Show slide of the commons email scams) This is from The FTC’s report on common scams that appear in people email boxes. This is a little outdated but many of these are just as common today as they were then. All of you have received an email or text offering you one of theses. They happen constantly and sometimes one of those computer scams are used so that they can use your computer and email address to scam others.

(Transition)  I want to talk briefly about a fairly common scam that all of you who have a smartphone or tablet have probably fallen prey to. How many of you have paid for an app in the app store?

III. Main Point: Many of you probably looked at the reviews for that app before buying it. You probably found a lot of good reviews so you decided that you were going to pay for the app. I am going to explain how you might have been scammed by doing this. This is an article in the magazine New Scientist.

            (Show squibble slide) Have any ever heard of this app? It used to be popular but not as much anymore. Now have any of you ever heard of Mechanical Turk? Many people haven’t. It is a business owned by Amazon. They offer outsourcing for menial task to business. The problem with this is that some of the makers for Squibble started paying Mechanical Turk to have people go online and give their apps high ratings. This means that all of those ratings you see could potentially be paid to be there. Think about that the next time that you go to download an app.        

(Transition)  So what if you do happen to be scammed what should you do them?

IV. Main Point: The sooner you report it the better for you it will be.

a.      (Click to reporting slide) There are numerous places that you can go to report a scam. This is a list of places as identified by the website www.onguardonline.gov

b.      It is your responsibility to report it to help other not fall victim like you did. Many of the reasons people are able to get away with this is because they do not report it.

c.       (change to IC3 reporting slide) It is easy to report it here and it will be quickly turned to the law enforcement that will best handle the case

Conclusion: (Transition/Review of main points) The threat that theses scammers pose is real. People fall over and over again to the same things and theses criminals are able to walk away with thousands of dollars simply because people say this can’t happen to me. You need to know about the scams that happen commonly in our society. You need to understand that yes it can happen to you. It is much more common than many of us would like to think. Scams don’t have to be big they can be as simple as posting false reviews for things online. If you are scammed it is you responsibility to report it. (Restatement of Central Idea) It is your responsibility to stay informed. If you don’t you will lose your hard earned money. (Note of Finality) Scam artist will do all they can to steal every penny they can from you. You must understand that this can happen to you and you need to do all you can to prevent it. Thank you. Are there any questions?

Works Cited

"2012 IC3Report." Rpt. in Http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2012_IC3Report.pdf. Web.

"Avoiding Online Scams." OnGuard Online. Web. 22 Nov. 2013. <http://www.onguardonline.gov/articles/0001-avoiding-online-scams>.

Brushwood, Brian. "Money, a Short Con and Crime = Short Change." Interview. Video blog post. Youtube. TestTube, 29 Dec. 2009. Web. 22 Nov. 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeLl4ZQjocA>.

Iovino, Zena, and Jim Giles. "Mischief and Fraud in the Crowdsourced Workforce." New Scientist 11 July 2011. Print.

Kusumoto, Kay. "Quick-Change Con Artists Find Their Prey In The Unwary Cashier." Seattle times [Seattle] Apr.-May 1992. Print.

"Scams." Craigslist. Web. <http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams>.

United States. Federal Trade Commission. Consumer and Business Education. The Dirty Dozen. Washington, D.C., 1998. Print.

Imagines used in Powerpoint

https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/50512_125061534227969_3761314_n.jpg

http://travisrmartin.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Random-Winner-Certificate.jpg

http://relationshipplaybook.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/act_now.jpg

My Familiar to Strange Speech

Jacob Gibson

Public speaking 7:45AM

November 4, 2013

Specific Purpose: To talk about a mission from the perspective of a war zone

Central Idea: The Mission is a War Zone

                                                                  At War With the Adversary

Introduction:  (Attention Getter) In 2009 I was drafted to fight in in the bloodiest war I had ever seen. I was told from the beginning that few who go come back the same, if they come back at all. I was determined to prove myself. I quickly received my orders and was shipped off to a base near headquarters where my training began.

Body:

1)      Main point: At the preparation center, we were required to wear our uniforms at all times with our names clearly visible.

a)      Each morning they would wake us up early, feed us a breakfast that was filling but hardly satisfying, then drill us throughout the day. Once a week a commander would come to instruct all the new recruits.

b)       The hardest part for many was adapting to the structure of military life. It was often difficult to communicate with our families and we were required to give up much for the battle at hand.

c)       Alas the time came when we were found ready to be shipped out. By bus and plane they transported us to remote parts of the world. I was far from ready but they sent me anyways. We were fighting an Enemy which none of us had ever seen before. The fear that so easily penetrated our hearts was astonishing.

2)      Transition: Quickly after arriving we were introduced to our war hardened general who would be directing our cause.

a)      Because of the size of the foes army, all of us where teamed up with an experienced soldier to be our infield instructor, then sent to different parts of the vast wasteland.

b)       Alone and behind enemy lines, our job was to rescue those who were prisoners of war and others who were missing in action. Every morning we would wake early and do some simple drills to get our minds going then go off to battle. Often the challenging part was knowing the difference between friend and foe.

c)        We had the ability to call upon the president at any time but his communication to us was often hazy and hard to interpret so we did our best.

d)      Hour after hour and day after day, we would labor. We often found that the enemy had published propaganda against us. Few locals where on our side and many did not trust us. But we had a secret weapon that saved us in many times of trouble.

e)      The most troubling times was when we located those we were sent to find and we would sneak them all the way to the border just to have them recaptured again.

f)       I will admit in that first trench I was unable to recover any of fellow soldiers.

3)      Transition: Months passed and I was ordered to abandon my efforts there and relocate. I did so but I was troubled that I had failed so much.

a)      I am amazed at the power of our president. Somehow he knew everything. Though he was never seen he found ways to give us help when we most needed it. He would find was to remotely disarm many of the jailers and grant us access to the prison cells that held our friends captive. Often Intel would come in the midst of a particularly bloody battle and the tides would swiftly change in our favor.

b)      Many times I wondered if I would ever have success, but slowly I began to find the key. The surest path was always with the help of the locals. At the beginning of my tour I would rarely use them but I learned how to gain their trust through them help the others.

c)       When we did find someone who was able to escape we had another solder inspect them to make sure they were who they claimed to be, then they would have to travel through a vast lake to return home.

4)      Transition/ Conclusion: Finally, the day came when I was asked to step down. I had many scars and had seen many battles.

a)      Though the war was continuing I was asked to return home and help prepare others to fight in my place. I was worn and tired, the rumors I had heard where true. The time seemed to slip by unnoticed. Near the end I often reflected on my time there, they were right. I had changed. In many ways I had become more hardened, but I had also learned to love even those who were lost and afraid. I was honorably discharged and asked to give a speech on all that I had witnessed. I now see things differently. [Note of finality] I am a new man ready to return to the battle on another day.