Chad Longo: That last layer is also very interesting because you’ve created an ability to transfer money internationally without ever entering the formal financial system. So you don’t even need the black market peso exchange anymore. You can just buy tokens on a platform, creatively move them around, and then eventually get them back to where they belong.
AJ Nash: Hello, and welcome to another episode of NeedleStack. I’m your host, AJ Nash. I’ve got, geez, I don’t know, 20 some odd years of experience in the intelligence community. Been in the private sector about a decade, primarily focused on intelligence-driven security, building intelligence practices, and all things related to that.
And that’s building off a career in the intelligence community, like I said, about 20 years, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, counter-trafficking in persons, chasing war criminals, all sorts of interesting things. But I’m excited to be here today. We’re gonna have a really cool conversation. First, let’s talk to Kacper, the co-host of the show.
Kacper, you wanna tell people about yourself before we jump in?
Kacper Piwowar: Yeah. So hey, everybody. So my name is Kacper. I’m the senior product marketing manager at Authentic8. Been in cybersecurity for quite some time, mainly on the corporate side. Excited to have this discussion. Honestly, I think it’s super interesting for everybody who’s listening in. Yeah, AJ, let’s just, let’s get into it.
AJ Nash: So we got Chad Longo, as our guest today. Very cool to have Chad on. He’s an expert in anti-money laundering, counter-financing of terrorism, and open source intelligence, career rooted in the US intelligence community, He played a pivotal role in pioneering the integration of social media and publicly available information into national security operations, particularly in support of AML and CFT initiatives.
Over the past decade, Chad’s developed a reputation as a trusted subject matter expert in social media investigations and financial crime intelligence with recognition from multiple federal agencies. Chad, anything you wanna add to that very cool bio before we jump into the discussion?
Chad Longo: No, I’m already blushing. Thanks.
AJ Nash: So if, those of you who are only listening don’t know, but if you’re watching, you can tell Chad actually does have a little rose in his cheeks today. So I don’t know if he’s really blushing or if he’s just tan.
Chad Longo: It’s hot down here.
AJ Nash: But let’s get into the show.
Today we’re gonna talk about influencers as high-risk individuals. Very interesting topic. I gotta tell you, for those of you who are listening today, I got a little preview of some of the talking notes. I love how we’re defining influencers, and I think there’s gonna be some very interesting topics of conversation here that, quite frankly, I wasn’t prepared for.
So it should be a good time. You know, Kacper, why don’t you go ahead and kick us off, man? What’s, what are we gonna start with?
Kacper Piwowar: I mean, it’s one of those topics that I think you get a lot of mainstream kind of definitions of it, and I think everybody either cringes at the word influencers or is super excited, because there is a particular relevance of those individuals right now, especially around the cybersecurity space. We often don’t think of it as, like, a cybersecurity risk or a financial risk or any of that. We kind of see it as, you know, whatever the content is produced and who the person is or the character, right? Oftentimes it’s not even the person. And Chad, I know that you have a plethora of experience in this area, and when we talk about influencers specifically, who are we talking about and what sort of platforms are they on?
Chad Longo: So I think there’s two kind of ways that you need to think about influencers. One is size and one is kind of the way that they approach their audience, to figure out exactly what definition of influencer we’re evaluating. First, probably most conventional way is just size. Like what do you think of an influencer when you think of an influencer in terms of their followership? And there’s a few different categories. Conventionally, tiers are nano, which is roughly one to 10,000 followers. Micro about the 10 to 100,000 range. Macro, 100,000 to a million, and mega/celebrity, which is over a million. We also have to think about the term celebrity there and what a celebrity is anymore, because influencers are taking over that notoriety as well. So you can have somebody who crosses both worlds. The mega tier is where like the majority of the headlines are, and we’ll talk about one of those here, a little bit later. But, that’s really where the financial crime risk is probably the lowest because those accounts are typically audited. They’re represented by an agency. They’re contractually papered. If you’re a sports star and you’re contracting with Nike and you’re an influencer, you have paperwork. Those are less risky than what we would wanna focus on here, which is really in the micro and nano tiers, ’cause those have accumulated just enough of an audience to be dangerous. They’re operationally useful, but they’re not big enough to attract scrutiny, and they can still be cheap to run. So in my opinion, an organized crime group wouldn’t want to go after an influencer that has four million followers. They’re gonna wanna go after 40 or 50, or they’re gonna have to go smaller ones that have 40 or 50,000 each because they’re more resilient, they’re less deniable on platform and they’re really below a threshold that’s going to matter for most folks who are monitoring them. The second though is from a financial crime perspective and the way that they’re able to move their audiences. So looking at audience monetized type of influencers. So those are the ones that have the brand deals, the sponsorships, ad revenue. They’re getting the money because they have a followership. So their capital, if you will, is the number of people who are willing to really listen to their message. Beyond that, you get into what are audience funded. So those are the types of influencers who typically start out as like really low level folks who you’ve never heard of, don’t really have a reason to hear of, but gain a following. And they’re getting tips on platform. They’re getting gifts, subscriptions, memberships, those sorts of things. They’re getting it from individuals. So they’re individual accounts, I wanna stress not always people, but they’re individual accounts that are gifting money to a particular influencer.
And the last is really that, they’re selling to the audience. So that’s where you see these people who are talking about merchandise, courses, digital tokens that they’re trying to promote, other digital products, and the money again arrives from customers. So in that case, the relationship is slightly different.
There’s still a followership kind of influencer relationship, but they’re also a customer of the influencer.
Kacper Piwowar: Hmm. Interesting. So you mentioned that the larger influencers, they have agencies. Like, they actually have full-on agencies that manage them. And I think that’s kind of interesting because oftentimes we get this view that the influencer’s acting alone, right? Especially with the video media that’s coming out.
Like, they run their own shop. They’re just this kind of person that, collects the checks in their private bank account and buys their Bugattis, right?
Chad Longo: It’s funny. You would think that, right? There’s a whole influencer community of influencers that help influencers influence, if that makes any sense. So there are people out there whose influence is that they influence influencers, and they advise them on how to do what they do.
So those often are very legitimate relationships, right? But it’s some person, for whatever reason, whether it’s a business or it’s just, a teenager that wants to make extra cash, they’ll hire these agencies to give them advice on what kind of content to post, how to post it, when to post it, how to tag it, what platforms to share it back across. And that’s a whole industry in and of itself.
AJ Nash: Who influences the influencers who influence the influencers? Like how far does this unravel, right? How many layers deep does this go before we just get to like one person that just runs everything?
Chad Longo: I’m sure in some way it’s like a self-licking ice cream cone, right?
AJ Nash: I think it all eventually just ends with a Kardashian. At some point it all just comes down to the Kardashians, and then it works out from there.
Chad Longo: Don’t forget that Kim Kardashian was implicated in a financial crime on social media and was banned from it for a number of years.
Kacper Piwowar: Surprise, surprise.
AJ Nash: That’s true, as were many others, obviously. Let’s not get sued by the Kardashians. So, you know, it’s, that’s a fact, by the way, for anybody asking. We’re not saying guilt or innocent. He stated a fact, and that’s Chad’s words, not mine. So we’ve talked a bit about, like it’s interesting y- the layers, right? You got the nano and the micro. I honestly didn’t know all that. If there was something smaller than nano, that would be me. But you said nano starts at one, so I guess we qualify as nano influencers already. But, what about the platforms that these people are on, right?
I mean, immediately TikTok comes to mind, of course, but, there’s more than that. What do you typically consider to be the biggest platforms that influencers are on? Is there a limit to what is a platform that’s considered an influencer platform or not, you know, versus not?
How do you see that?
Chad Longo: So before I get into calling out platforms and assigning risk to them, this is by no means a judgment of the platform or saying that they’re complicit in any way, shape, or form. Most of them are trying to fight this back. It’s just a battle that they’re gonna lose because the regulators and banks haven’t caught onto it yet.
There’s a system here that needs to change. But as it stands now, there are what I would consider risky platforms and less risky platforms. The risky platforms are the ones that create any sort of financial transfer capability, which is largely, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, all have ways that you can pay somebody online. That creates an added problem because it allows a money launderer or a criminal in general to do the first layer of money laundering, which is placement. So they’ve added that money now to the financial system in a way, because they’re going to be able to exit it on some end for fiat currency or something of value.
They’re already starting the process, which is really a fundamental difference between what we’re dealing with in social media and every other financial crime typology that’s come out before it, is that the process is starting completely outside the bank, and a lot of times it can end completely outside the bank.
So the bank is the last one to know that any of this has happened. So if we look at TikTok, there’s a gifting and coin-operated economy that the audience is funding. So I can be a TikToker with zero notoriety and be getting thousands of tips from all of these different accounts, and the influencer might not exist.
The accounts tipping might not exist. They could all be run as bots. There’s anecdotal evidence to support all this. Another problem with talking about it is I think we’re still in the frontier of understanding just how big the financial crime problem is in social media. But those are the places that I look first. The others are where if we want to get beyond just the tipping economy in something like TikTok and you start thinking about things like, what you were joking about earlier, OnlyFans and Fansly.
There’s a subscription element to OnlyFans. It doesn’t exist on a lot of the other platforms. So people are getting monthly fees from from folks. They’re also getting ad revenue, and then they can flip that notoriety into into influence on other platforms.
So rarely do you see an OnlyFans influencer that isn’t also on X, isn’t also on, TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube. Obviously, their adult content isn’t there, but they’re blending across platforms, which creates an additional complication when you’re talking about money laundering operations because it allows a diversification of the same account.
So I can have a demonstrable income from three different accounts that aren’t really actually demonstrable, if that makes sense. There’s almost this authentication of wealth because I’m across multiple platforms but it’s assumed because of the way the society interprets the influencer and an influencer’s gotten wealth.
Kacper Piwowar: What’s interesting that you brought up is. Well, there’s actually a couple things. one is like cash versus credits, right? I think if we’re thinking about it logically, the cash component kind of makes sense, right? Somebody sends thirty-five bucks, and that’s through, whatever banking system they use or PayPal or whatnot. It’s like, okay, they paid for it. They gave them a tip of twenty bucks. They deposit the twenty bucks. I can kind of follow that logic. Does the credit part start to really make things kind of weird? Because now technically you bought the credits, you’ve added a layer, and then you’re giving them credits instead of cash, and then it’s like, well, I gave them credits, it’s not cash.
Like, do the two equal out? Do they not? I’d imagine that the ramifications of both are kind of interesting in their mix.
Chad Longo: I think you were almost alluding to like a legitimate payment in a way, Kacper, and think probablya better way to talk about it in terms of the topic for today is cash versus credit or, real fiat currency versus token, right?
So how do you think about that in general in terms of money laundering risk is then really the underlying question.
You guys might know better than I do because I’m not a crypto expert by any means. I know enough to be dangerous, but I’m really not an expert on it. But my opinion, when I put money into a digital token, I’m adding another layer. So I’ve gone now from placement to layering. So I take that money. Let’s just like follow the whole process here. Drug dealer has $1,000 in cash that they need to do something with. They go out and buy a bunch of prepaid cards. They use those cards now, so they’ve placed the money. Now they need to use those cards to buy the tokens. So now they’ve layered the money, and then they’re going to use those tokens to pay an influencer. So they’ve added that additional layer, and now they’re going to that influencer to pay for rent, for all these other things that don’t actually exist, and then eventually converge back to the ultimate beneficial owner of the funds who’s, living wherever across the world. That last layer is also very interesting because you’ve created an ability to transfer money internationally without ever entering the formal, financial system. So you don’t even need the black market peso exchange anymore. You can just buy tokens on a platform, creatively move them around, and then eventually get them back to where they belong.
AJ Nash: Well, yeah, and it’s not even the crypto at that point necessarily. We’ve focused a lot over the last few years about cryptocurrency and where that fits into the criminal enterprises. But we haven’t focused on these other digital currencies for lack of a better word, tokens, right?
There are gaming platforms. Designed for children to play games on that have their own monetary systems, right? So you can run money through that and it goes through like cartoon characters and whatnot.
But again, it’s another way to wash money. I took real money, I bought something that has notional value of some kind, transferred that to somebody. It can be cashed out, as you said, internationally. It eventually turns back into fiat currency. There is no system to track all of that. Like it just doesn’t, doesn’t exist.
You know, it’s crossed over international boundaries. It’s crossed over different businesses. It isn’t designed for that purpose. And it can be done at scale, you know, through a whole network, right? So as you said, I’ve gotten ill-gotten gains. I’ve got my $1,000 in drug money, whatever it is, I have to make it go away.
It’s not very hard to make it go away as long as you’ve got these partnerships set up. Everybody I’m sure gets their little slice if they’re on the deal. The influencer that has been created an influencer but never really was one, it’s just all the people that are building up their influence are part of the same criminal enterprise.
And then that influencer’s taking, I’m gonna guess ’cause I don’t know the answers, 2%, 5%, 10%, whatever it is. Their slice for moving the money, right? It’s just traditional fencing or money laundering in a new format. It’s been around forever. Diamond thieves have done this for a long time.
Or art thieves, whatever it is. You stole something, you have to cash it out somehow. But in this case, you already have the cash. You gotta turn it into something that’s not cash and then turn it back into cash someplace else. And there’s, yeah, there’s no system. This is all well out of the banking system.
It’s well out of regulation. And the platforms we’re talking about, whether they’re social media platforms or gaming platforms, they aren’t designed for this purpose. They’re also not held accountable for this. This isn’t part of their job, right? This isn’t expected. No laws were put in place to talk about how these systems would happen.
When it’s money, as, you know, as Kacper, as you said, if it’s a social media, if it’s Fansly or whatever, you know, OnlyFans, you know, if it’s money for money, that’s still somewhat traceable. It doesn’t take a great forensic accountant to figure it out. But if it isn’t money for money, it’s money for something we’ve decided has some kind of value, whether it’s crypto, whether it’s tokens on a platform, whatever it might be, but it can also be cashed back out later as money, there’s no system for that anywhere.
There’s no regulation for it. There’s no regulatory body even for it. There’s no system for it. And you’re talking about worldwide millions of accounts, millions of users, between active valid users and however many criminals are mixed in there, or people who might be involved in criminality as a side thing just ’cause, it’s there some days. It seems like a virtually impossible problem to tackle.
Kacper Piwowar: And I think the micro part of it that we were talking about, it coming in, like, smaller amounts, like $10, $20, you know, $50, even the effort it takes to unwind that and get down to that single source is not worth, you know, the time and resources that these agencies would have to spend to do so. So when you spread it out, like you said, over, like, a million accounts, and let’s say, you know, the operation is sophisticated in nature, the effort to start tracking those down one by one is, like, Herculean, right?
Like, and then is it worth it? This person put $20, we find out it’s some random bank account in, like, Bucharest, right? Are we gonna really pursue that? Probably not.
AJ Nash: Totally on a side note, we’re launching NeedleStack tokens this week. No, I’m just kidding. Don’t inquire about that. It’s not a real thing.
Chad Longo: So you guys actually raised two really interesting issues and it really speaks to the evolution of traditional money laundering as we had known it up until this point and how we’re currently evolving. And if we get back to your point, AJ, about the complexity of the placement layering, and integration phases of the money laundering process and how it’s occurring now.
If we look back on it, there are parallels, right? So if we think about the cash-heavy businesses of the 1970s and 1980s, the height of the cocaine crisis, they were buying car washes and salons.
Kacper Piwowar: Yeah.
Chad Longo: All the cash-intensive businesses, either pre-credit card, so they could say that there were, you know, thousands of dollars of sale a night, but in fact, the place was completely empty and there’s no way to verify that. Same problem that we currently have with money laundering through social media platforms is that the ability to verify doesn’t really exist. How do I verify that Chad actually donated to AJ and that Chad is a real person, AJ is a real person, Chad’s cash is a legitimate source of funds, and the payment is not for an illegal purpose? Like, that’s a very difficult thing. So to your point, Kacper, at scale, it’s almost impossible. Well, okay, how did they start to do it in the traditional money laundering sense once credit cards became a thing and, you know, there was more traceability and, and Swift was more accurate and there all sorts of systems in place to be able to start to detect this thing intra-bank. You know, mules emerged, right? So we started seeing intense, you know, mule activities where people are being recruited to go deposit, you know, small amounts of cash into ATMs and then that would be transferred to bank accounts. You don’t need to do that anymore. You can create a digital mule army.
So those tokens that are being created, that’s a digital mule farm. I mean, at the end of the day, you can create thousands of mules that are taking those tiny little bits and, Kacper, you’re 100% right. Do I care about the one dude who did it one time, theoretically from Bucharest? The bank’s going to have trouble dedicating resource to that.
Now, that person’s probably not going to do it once. It’s probably not a one and done sort of deal. They’re probably going to do it thousands of times. So then that person becomes a person of interest. But you’re still dealing with a volume that is frankly just, it’s too big.
AJ Nash: Yeah. Well, and they can do it across different banks, right? You can do it at multiple banks through multiple different ATMs. You can use casinos. Casinos are great cash places, by the way. You go in there with money, get some tokens, and then wander around for a while, hand those off, whatever it takes, and those get cashed out with something else.
As long as it’s less than 10 grand, there’s no documentation of that. It’s ubiquitous, right? It’s almost everywhere and very hard to stop. We’ve created several layers of economy that didn’t used to exist. You mentioned the cocaine crisis. Those guys would’ve been thrilled to have this back then. Car washes and laundromats were all cash businesses, so they were great to do it, but much harder than this. This is an easy way to go. Anybody can stand up a website. and there’s, I’m sure, an endless supply of people willing to become instant influencers, right?
Because there’s money in that. people wanna be famous and et cetera, and how hard is it to be an influencer, especially, if you’re being set up for success? The hardest part about being an influencer is that you actually build an audience. Well, what if the audience is built for you?
It’s criminals who prop you up knowingly or unknowingly, and all of a sudden you launch this platform, you start doing things, and lo and behold, you’ve got a million followers, which are a combination of bots and criminals. Who wouldn’t want that? So, I’m curious of your thoughts on that, actually.
Witting versus unwitting. Do you have examples of bogus influencers, like who they were, why they exist? Did they know? Are there examples of some that are witting and some that are unwitting?
Chad Longo: You know, the unwitting ones are hard, because a lot of times they’re kids. So the best example I have is actually a girl from the UK. Don’t wanna go into specifics of the story because she was a minor at the time, but was recruited as a money mule and was facing up to, I think it was 14 years, in prison. , And also for, I think maybe it’s a year in prison. Yeah, a year in prison, four years or 14 years of not being bankable. Something like that. I don’t know the exact S or FCA regulation. But was recruited online, wound up using her mom’s bank account, and had zero idea. It was a get rich quick scheme, basically cash flipping, saying, you know, “Hey, if you, if you do this, then, you know, you’ll get money fast,” blah, blah, blah, blah.
So effectively, she’s a victim to start. But then she started using her influence to influence friends, say, you know, “Hey, you should do this too,” because in my mind it’s real. It’s not, it’s not a scam. So I would consider her, in most ways, an unwitting participant in the scheme. There are broader examples where, you know, like influencers are, are pushed to, to pump out narratives that maybe aren’t right, but they’re buying into them and just because of their popularity, their notoriety, they could move the market.
So if we start thinking about polymarkets, because an influencer is influenced the right way, a position gets influenced the right way, and then the person who’s made the influence is betting against it and makes a tremendous.
AJ Nash: And imagine if that person is somebody who has political power, for instance. Then there’s chances to manipulate entire markets, too. But anyway, back to your point.
Chad Longo: If we think about like witting ones though, there’s a bunch of really interesting examples. Jay Mazini, I believe is in Michigan, is a really interesting one. He was sentenced to 84 months in prison, ordered to forfeit 10 million, in his ill-gotten profits for essentially a Ponzi scheme that he was running.
But I would call it like affinity or trust, arbitrage, because essentially what he was doing was targeting his own community. And he was going out and like, and I don’t, I don’t know about you guys, I’ve seen a lot of these videos where people are going out to like… And it’s not to say that they aren’t real or they aren’t genuine in a lot of cases. So everything I say here is like, there’s a small minority of people that are doing bad things. There’s probably a good majority of people who are doing good things. But these people who go out in the communities are g- giving away cash for being nice or, you know, helping the homeless guy by giving $1,000. Where’s that money coming from? It’s coming from the platform. So people are giving this person money because they believe that this person’s doing good, and then there’s an assumption of wealth because this person has a large followership. So they’re making money off of their nice deeds So what happened in, I guess his real name’s, Jabara Igbara, but Jay Mazini.
He was doing that, but essentially within the Muslim community and was getting people to make donations, because, he was doing good things and he would start basically explaining to the bank that the large cash flow was because of these donations that he was getting from his community. But he was also using purported stock exchange mechanisms. He was using electronics for resale, other ventures that he was trying to explain away losses, with the cash that he was getting. So just again, an influencer that was taking advantage of his own community’s trust in him because he was doing good things for the community, ultimately was a financial criminal. So really interesting example. The other one is, I think where I contradict myself in terms of the risk placement on the tier sizes is probably one of the best-known ones, which is, Ramon Abbas, also known as Hushpuppi.
AJ Nash: Hushpuppi. I love this guy.
Chad Longo: Gotta love Hushpuppi. And he was definitely winning. He admitted to laundering a significant sum.
I believe it was somewhere around…
AJ Nash: 300 million, give or take, something like that?
Chad Longo: Yeah, somewhere around there. I think the real figure is multiples of that north. I think he was just trying to avoid additional criminal charges.
AJ Nash: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve read it, I’ve read up to a billion, somewhere in that neighborhood was estimated.
Chad Longo: He has fairly well documented connections. If you read, Jeff White’s book, “The Lazarus Heist,” really interesting read on, Hushpuppi and his connections to the Lazarus Group out of North Korea. I think it’s one of the best documented examples of an influencer being used for large throughput of funds that were likely coming from potentially state sponsors, to get that money back to their own coffers. Obviously, he’s taking a huge cut, like that’s his payment for the risk that he’s taking. I’ve seen reports that, it’s between somewhere around 20%, that he was, taking for his portion of the risk. And that’s acceptable, when you’re in the money laundering space because it allows you to leverage these channels that you wouldn’t otherwise have access to. And for Hushpuppi, it creates this legitimacy of wealth. When he appears online, the bank analyst, the EDD analyst, OSINT investigator in general, is gonna look and say, “Oh, well, I mean, he’s rich ’cause he’s on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, and that’s all, like he’s rich. He does real estate.” Okay. Where’s verification of him getting rich from doing real estate? That’s the extra step that often gets missed in these cases. But I think those are probably the two of the best documented examples of an influencer wittingly conducting money laundering operations.
AJ Nash: And for those who don’t know Hushpuppi, totally worth looking up, by the way. I want to say it’s Nigerian originally, if I’m not mistaken.
Chad Longo: Nigerian national, I think ultimately arrested in Dubai.
AJ Nash: He was in Dubai, right. And so when they pick him up in Dubai, reportedly, 13 luxury cars worth about $7 million, 21 laptops, 47 smartphones, 15 memory storage devices, so hard drives, five external hard drives, 800,000 emails of potential victims, oh, and, and 40 million in cash.
That’s what they had in his apartment at Palazzo Versace in Dubai. That is a very suspicious amount of things to have in your home and on your property. And yeah, so I remember this guy ’cause he was big and he was flashy by design, right? All of his social media stuff was about wealth and opulence and living this life jet, you know, private jets and just some terrible, terrible clothes.
I’m sure they’re very expensive, but he had terrible taste in clothes. But it was just so out there. And like you said, people go, “Well, yeah, he’s rich, he’s doing all these things.” But no, he was… Nothing he did was legitimate. And he didn’t really hide it all that well or really try to.
I don’t know if he thought Dubai was beyond the reach of, of international law, which it is not. but, by design, I mean, Dubai doesn’t wanna be, you know, the UAE isn’t trying to be outside of the legal systems. Last I saw, I think 50 Cent actually bought the rights or, or I don’t know if you have to buy the rights when it’s criminal, but I think he’s making a documentary on Hushpuppi was the last I’d seen, if anybody wants to know, you know, if you’re interested, Hushpuppi is definitely worth checking out. It’s a great story. I think it’s a really good story.
Kacper Piwowar: Yeah. The other thing that was interesting on those stories is that even though the system, as we’ve described, is not exactly built or suited to help, you know, track these complex types of transactions, there was some sort of justice at the end, right? Like, these guys actually got time in jail. They had to forfeit the money. Like, I think there was some sort of prosecutionary justice to a degree. Mind you, it’s probably far and few between with how many actors there are out there, but at least it shows that the system’s actually willing to penalize people who are…
AJ Nash: Hushpuppi got 11 years. I don’t know how much that he’ll actually serve. I think his restitution was like $1.7 He’s got you know, two and a half million followers on Instagram, so he’ll probably still be there when he gets out of prison.
Chad Longo: I could be very wrong there, but last I looked at his account, it had recent stuff, and he still has active accounts unless they’re impersonations.
AJ Nash: You’re right. Somebody else might be using those accounts. But I mean, he didn’t pay restitution that seems to come close to equaling what his ill-gotten gains were, right? And it’s easy to make money disappear. Obviously, this is what they do for a living, right? So, the risk-reward factor is kind of an interesting component to this.
You know, when people go down this path, even if maybe you’re not thinking you’re going to, the risk-reward calculations could make an otherwise honest person get up one day and go, “You know, maybe it’s worth it.” Like, and you know, don’t ask this question, yourselves, but, you know, what’s it worth, right?
If somebody came to me today and said, “Hey, how’d you like to have $100 million? All you gotta do is move some money around.” I mean, don’t ask a lot of questions on who that money is for and where it’s going. I mean, I don’t know if 100 million is the number or if it’s a billion, whatever it is. I think most people do have a price where you start going, “Eh, you know, okay, is any money really clean?
At what point is it worth doing? You know, is the risk there, 100 million? You know, yeah, prison seems like a bad place, but 100 million seems like a lot of money.” You know, I think you could convince a lot of people.
Kacper Piwowar: You raise a good point with that, AJ. And actually, that was kinda like what I was thinking, with risk reward is, when you start getting entangled with some of these groups, like, you know, whether it’s a North Korean hacker group or even the cartels, isn’t there also a physical threat? Like, once you’ve agreed to these things and they know where you are, they know who you are, if you don’t follow through, like I would imagine there could be a very visible physical threat of we’ve, paid X amount of money, you’ve gotten this wealthy from it, you’re not stopping. Like, you’ll stop when we tell you to stop, right?
Chad Longo: There’s been a bunch of movies, made out of the cocaine era about, exactly that. So I think you’re right, Kacper. I think an important point to foot stomp, though, is that only between like 1% and 2% of global money laundering activity according to the UN report, UN, ODC, is actually detected annually. That’s, you know, the estimate, right? And we’re talking about, again, the industry has trouble figuring out what to agree on in terms of the severity of the problem. You’ve got the conservative side that says it’s about 800 billion. You’ve got the aggressive side that thinks it’s closer to 5 trillion, annually.
And you start thinking about that in terms of global GDP, and you’re up to potentially 5% of global GDP in laundered cash alone. That’s a major economy. So you talk about trying to whether or not people are willing to accept the risk and what the number is. I would argue the number is pretty low. I’d say if somebody on average gets offered a million dollars to run an account, and they’re dirt poor living in rural Idaho trying to get by on minimum wage and not doing it, especially in today’s economy, then are you gonna take a million dollars and the risk?
AJ Nash: That’s just like in the US. I mean, again, Hushpuppi was originally from Nigeria, right? Money goes a lot further in some places of the world, right? You know, a million dollars is enough money for many Americans, as you said, to go, “Yeah, all right. That’s enough to take a risk.”
I mean, that’s life-changing money. That is unfathomable money in third world countries. Yes, I think the number doesn’t have to be 100 million or anything like that or anything close. I think it can be a relatively small number, at least to get you started. And then the other issue, you know, as Kashfa pointed out, is either you get hooked, you’re in it whether you wanna be or not, or maybe you just get hooked on the money itself. Like, there’s easy money has a way of making you want more of it. You know, it’s just kinda how things work in life. And so even if it wasn’t, something significant at first, then you want more, you know, and there’s more to it. And if it’s, whether it’s 800 billion or 5 trillion annually, and I suspect it’s closer to the 5 trillion, but whichever one it is, as you said, only about 2% is estimated to be caught.
I don’t know many people who won’t commit, quote-unquote, “victimless crime” that they think they have a 98% chance of getting away with. I think that’s, that’s a challenge. You know, there aren’t that many pious people in the world, you know, that, that won’t do it if you have a 98% chance of getting away with it and you believe it’s a victimless crime.
Chad Longo: The victimless crime part, ’cause I think we’d have money laundering experts jumping down our throats if I didn’t say money laundering is not a victimless crime. It undermines organized crime, and it, you know, in a lot of cases these people aren’t even willing participants. Like if we look at pig butchering farms in Southeast Asia, all these people are trafficked.
AJ Nash: There’d be a difference between, hey, would you take a million dollars to move money versus would you take a million dollars to murder somebody, right?
They don’t necessarily gather that that million dollars you’re taking to move money also could result in murdering somebody or harming people. There’s a feeling of it being victimless because it’s detached. But I agree with you, it’s definitely not. This is not a victimless crime. There are victims in this process, but people feel detached enough from it that they can justify it to themselves. When compared with whatever their current suffering is. You said if they’re in abject poverty or whatever it is, you know, the person who can’t pay their healthcare bills or their mortgage, they’ve got their own problems, right? And so people have a tendency to forget about the problems of others. And so the temptation seems, incredibly, real. You know, I’m curious how, this wasn’t one of the questions we prepped, so you may not have answered this, but, like, how does some of this stuff start, right? So, we’ll use this as an example. Kacper and I have this podcast, this little podcast with seven people that watch it, and three of them are actually, three of them are here right now, right? But so, you know, would somebody reach out and be like, “Hey, we’ve got an idea.” You know, “We wanna sponsor the show.” Or what is it? How does that happen? How does a criminal enterprise target somebody and approach them from the standpoint of doing that?
Or is it just they’re launching their own things from the beginning? Have you seen some of how this nexus unfolds, how this is created?
Chad Longo: It depends on exactly what we’re talking about in terms of the financial manipulation because the typology is really important there.
So if it’s a money mule operation, and they’re just trying to launder as much cash as they can, so let’s just think about the Mexican cartels in the United States trying to launder cash so they can get it back to Mexico.
AJ Nash: Mm-hmm.
Chad Longo: In that case, my assumption would be they would probably try to approach an influencer who is representative of their market in some way. So, you know, similar ethnic profile, maybe has, you know, a pull, you know, has some sort of cross-border presence. So I think the profile of the individual is really important so that the audience looks appropriate for getting the money, from point A to point Z. And then approach that influencer and say, “Hey, I’m, you know, from XYZ company. We wanna do a joint sponsorship with you,” blah, blah, blah, um, promote our product, and then people start buying the product. The product never ships. There’s justification for the product being shipped or for the funds being moved, and bing, bang, boom, you’ve had an unwitting influencer that’s been laundering your cash on the side. You just find the right person who doesn’t really have those scruples, and there’s plenty of them. You go on, just do a quick search for get rich quick schemes, and they come up in two seconds, and you can easily leverage that type of a person to, to do what you wanna do. Some of the harder ones to detect really are like these, these courses, that people are advertising or get rich quick schemes. The one I keep getting like inundated with right now is AI arbitrage and this kind of douchey looking dude out of Dubai who’s like, “Let me tell you about how I made $30 million in the last two years and traveled the world and worked seven minutes a day.” Why would somebody who’s advertising that they make that much money advertise a course that you pay for and have to, you know, give them money. When they’re making that much? There’s no reason. There’s absolutely no reason, unless that’s somehow making them so much more money that it’s worth their while. But there’s thousands of these. We saw it with dropshipping with Amazon. We saw it with a bunch of the crypto schemes. You know, “Here, take my crypto course and I’ll tell you how I made bazillions of dollars.” Seeing it now with poly market manipulation schemes, like how do you bet in, the position markets. You’ve created a situation now where the criminal and launderer are also the influencer, and they’re defrauding a population of people for cash, right? So they’re getting payment from their following, if you will, to take these courses. And the courses are complete BS. They’re, you know, it’s, you literally are just providing over your money. We mentioned Nigeria earlier, not to pick on them. But a lot of those videos are AI generated, and they’re being created by a couple of criminal organizations that started out as university fraternities.
So Black Axe, Yahoo Boys, and they’re running full-blown criminal enterprises in Nigeria almost unchecked. And some of them are just awful. Like, you can start to think about child sextortion and it’s, I mean, you now have kids that are committing suicide because of the fraud that’s occurring from influencers online. It’s really quite mind-blowing. But yeah. Anyway, sorry, long-winded way of answering your question, but I think it really depends on the typology, how, who gets targeted, how they’re used, because each scenario is just a bit different.
Kacper Piwowar: So Chad, that kind of begs the question of like, we’ve talked about influencers from what would be a somewhat realistic lens because we’ve seen some of them face up for some of their crimes. But how does the average user in these days actually determine who’s real and who’s fake, right? ‘Cause we have this rise of AI influencers, and I think this kind of nestles in with the rise of synthetic identities globally, right, where it goes beyond influencers, and this is just like a subset of it where it’s being impacted. But it’s particularly relevant here because their messaging is critical to their followers. Their followers tend to, obviously weigh a degree of respect on what that influencer says, and if that influencer at the end of the day is not real, how do you start to judge the ramifications of what they do? And then that also flips the question of fake followers, so synthetic followers as well. So you have, you know, an AI influencer, synthetic followers, and then now let’s, layer in as much as we can, make it as complex as possible, and the transactions now happen from, not a real account or person to, another not a real account or person, and then somehow that gets flushed out on the back end.
So what’s your thoughts on that?
Chad Longo: Yeah. This whole world is just so complicated. So how do you prove what’s real, especially in the age of AI? I’ll just say this, and this has been true, I think, for the existence of most mainstream, social media platforms, at least since influencers have become a, relevant thing. A manufactured audience can be bought for next to nothing. So you can create an army of synthetic people, and an influencer can be completely authentic. They can be a real person, with, real audience, real content, carrying somebody else’s ad revenue, and then sell that ID. So now, I have a real, potential followership. But you have a real followership, real individual. Now I’ve sold that to AJ. AJ just changes the picture, starts messaging out other things. Algorithm picks it up. It doesn’t matter really if my other followership cares about what AJ’s talking about now. The account looks incredibly real, but now it’s a synthetic ID. So it’s gone from real to synthetic because AJ’s bought it and now he’s manipulating it and he’s driving it. So ID takeover, synthetic ID, whatever you want to call it,
he’s taking it for that purpose.
AJ Nash: Yeah, but it’s a seasoned account at that point. It’s been around for a long time. It’s got followership. It’s not something that just spiked out of nowhere, right? I’ve got years of followers and like I said, the pattern of content, maybe something changes, but that’s a whole different set of analysis that people might not do. I’ve seen a ton of this. I think most people have not necessarily tied to the crimes we’re talking about, but social media’s full of this. Twitter has been just massive for this over the last few years. and you’ve seen a lot of action in the political arena. Somebody who was, you know, at one point a far pick a side, and then snap of fingers, now they’re a far pick the other side. The timeline isn’t even cleaned up. They don’t even try sometimes to clean it out. You just go back far and you’re like, “Wait a minute. You were totally the other person before.” Some have gotten better and cleaned out the timeline. They’ll buy it and then clean it completely out and then start over.
But meanwhile, if you do the research, it’s like, well, this account’s been around since 2003 or whatever. And so it seems like it’s a much more legitimate account, and it wasn’t either way. Like, it was being run out of a foreign country trying to influence US politics before, and it still is. It’s just trying to influence the other direction now. It isn’t the monetary component, but you can do the same thing, you know, from the monetary standpoint. It isn’t hard to acquire accounts or shuffle the accounts, You can shuffle the username, you know, on Twitter and other platforms, and shuffle the content and the flow and the, and the, the intent. But the account itself is seasoned. It’s been around for a long time. and people, if I’m not mistaken, people would sit down and launch, like launch hundreds of accounts and then just let them grow. You know, let them sit there. You find accounts on all platforms, LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera, where the account’s completely blank.
It’s just there. It’s a dummy name. It’s something nondescript. A lot of times you’re like, “This account’s just sitting there with nothing on it.” There’s a reason for that. It’s curing as we speak, or it’s in the process of transition. I’ve seen it happen nearly live on LinkedIn at one point where somebody came after me and it was clearly some sort of a scam. And then I watched and it went down, and then it came back up with a totally different name, a totally different picture. And you’re like, “This was just repurposed while I was watching it happen,” basically, ’cause they had DM’d me, and then you wait for it to show up again. I don’t know how much of that’s tied to money laundering, but it certainly would have the same effect.
Chad Longo: And I don’t know like that every one of those would be an example of money laundering, but you’ve got to ask why they’re doing it, and there’s usually a financial motive. I think that’s the one interesting thing about, you know, money laundering as a, as a discipline, as a study, as, as a profession. Anything that’s criminal typically has a financial motive. There are very few crimes that don’t have a financial motive, right? At larger scale. Like, we don’t have organized crime rings that are just like, “I just wanna do this because I hate trees.” There might be an altruistic motive to start, but then we get into the whole debate of terrorism. But if we’re talking about, you know, true crime, like most of these things have some sort of financial motive. Like fraud usually ends up with a financial gain. Trafficking, those are all financially driven. They do it for the intense profit. So if those people are interacting online and trying to do something with social media and influencers, there’s likely a criminal element to it. I would say anybody who’s trying to do things like create bot accounts, they have a financial motive. It might just be that they are, wanna sell it to a brand so that brand can accelerate faster. That’s still a questionable practice at best. But at any rate, I would always, if it has those kind of hallmarks that you were just talking about, AJ, I would be very suspicious as an OSINT practitioner. I would look for that account age, the follower, count, but then I’d do exactly what you did and go back in history. What does their footprint actually look like? Do they even have a third-party footprint? I mean, that’s a huge tell, right? Like if it’s just a bunch of pictures that have been repurposed, it’s completely synthetic. If now it’s, pictures of you and you’re being tagged with Kacper and you’re appearing in various places around the world, yes, there’s potential that it’s AI, but at the end of the day, it’s likely a lived-in account. It’s likely real.
Kacper Piwowar: Yeah.
Chad Longo: You potentially, maybe you sell it. But I think other things that people need to be aware of is that engagement quality doesn’t necessarily equal quantity. If an account has really good quality engagement with their followership, like there’s conversations back and forth, there’s shares, retweets, whatever the platform’s terminology is. That’s likely more authentic than one that has 10,000 posts of cat pictures.
I can do that in a day with a bot if I wanted to.
Kacper Piwowar: Yeah. Yeah.
Chad Longo: All the things that I would consider if I was somebody trying to evaluate whether or not the account was real or potentially risky.
Kacper Piwowar: Yeah, and it makes sense. And the other kind of aspect that I think is also important to take into this is influencers themselves. It’s not really a pivot, but it’s another aspect of it is they’re also creating risks in a sense of they… Because you brought it up with the posts and whatnot of oversharing data, locations, schedules, personal details, which makes them a target of social engineering or whatnot. They generally have teams, right? You mentioned, you know, agencies, so they have assistants, editors and managers. I’d imagine their OpSec is not particularly tight. So they probably share an account. And then you have what you just touched on, which is exploiting their followers, right? And that was a main theme of this discussion, which is cybercriminals ultimately, you know, whether or not you work with them, they also have the ability to take your account and then be able to trick your fans and trick your base.
So I think there is, a ton of security risks along with the whole AML theme, which is, with an industry like this, which we don’t fully understand, in terms of its complexity, let alone regulate, it’s this kind of greenfield space. I’d imagine that a lot of these launderers are probably salivating, perhaps taking notes of everything we’re talking about, and do the opposite, right?
Chad Longo: Yeah. Along those lines, like one thing that we’ve heard about, it was an example I was going to use but I backed off of it just because it is quite sensitive. But we’ve seen criminals actually, hack particularly the accounts of minors and do an account takeover, ’cause a lot of times the minor just says, “Well, screw it. I’ll just create a new one.” Like, there’s no sense in dealing with this. So they hack them, take them over, and then, will resell those so that people can act like boys, girls, whatever. But I think the same can be true for just about any demographic. Just unfortunately that one was a case out of Michigan where the, the kid unfortunately committed suicide, after the extortion act occurred. But I mean, that’s, that’s real and it’s an industry. Like again, we go back to the Nigerian, organized crime rings that were formerly fraternities, they do that at scale. so you know, taking real accounts, and that again gets back to where this is such a difficult practice. You know, as an OSINT practitioner, do you again figure out where that account stopped being real and became something else? It’s no longer Becky who, you know, lives in Malibu. It’s now, you know, Joe Schmoe who lives in the UK. And I think a lot of times that’s really difficult to determine. At a celebrity scale, you’re absolutely right. Like too many people have access to an account. It just takes one, you can influence an entire audience, and it might be worth it to say that one thing.
AJ Nash: Well, we’re long on time, so we’ll probably have to do some editing of this. There was a couple things I wanted to get your thoughts on. From the ability to do this, from the mechanisms for doing this, you know, we talked about, like, we didn’t talk about NFTs, which were, like, a big thing for, like, eight minutes and I think have sort of gone away, right? It’s non-fungible tokens, which I was never even able to get, wrap my head around what the hell it was supposed to be or the value’s supposed to be. I freely admit I don’t understand it. But for a while, you know, there was that, right? You could buy a digital monkey for, I don’t know, $5 million. And I think that may have gone away, but I’m curious about your thoughts on where that fits in. But then the other one that made a lot of news, was FTX. You know, Sam Bankman-Fried, who got very famous people to get involved. You’re talking about influencers and what, Tom Brady was in on that and, you know, Kevin O’Leary. Huge, huge scam, $8 billion. I don’t think the famous people were ever implicated, any of it. I think they may have been unwitting, other than the fact they were paid a lot to do it. But I’m curious about your thoughts on those two pieces, which I realize are different topics, and how they fit into the grand scheme of these things, where NFTs were in terms of how to move money and what do you do when the very rich and famous become unwitting parts of this, and how do people protect themselves from both sides of that?
Chad Longo: I think the Friedman example’s interesting because that gets into the whole realm of financial regulations that fall outside of, you know, like typical FinCEN stuff where I live. So if you’re talking about financial advice now on, on media or social media platforms, that’s actually fairly heavily regulated by SEC. So you can’t, you can’t give unsolicited financial advice. You can’t represent yourself as a financial advisor. Now whether or not the media, social media platforms have figured out a way to actually de-platform these people, at scale is, is questionable. You flip that into the realm of being a celebrity, well, they’re paid endorsements, right? So, you know, I think as long as they’re giving the appropriate disclaimers, they can walk away from it.
AJ Nash: And they did.
Chad Longo: And then you question whether or not what they’re representing is legitimate. I joke about the Mario Lopez example because I do get a lot of his stuff on various platforms, just because of the type of stuff that I research. I get really weird financial advice. But I look at it and go, “Man, maybe he does believe in it. I don’t know. And maybe the program is real.” But at the end of the day, it makes you pause and go, “Huh, here’s a pretty rich guy representing something that doesn’t align with his world that we know of. I should probably think a little bit more about that.” So even though it’s Tom Brady, it’s Mario Lopez, it’s Kim Kardashian, are they representing something that is questionable?
Because they probably haven’t done their due diligence.
AJ Nash: There was a contract, they were offered money to speak for something, and it wasn’t just obvious and overtly bad, and they took it. It’s a while unrelated, I just saw something on social media today. Somebody was quoting constitutional law, because, you know, everybody’s a constitutional legal expert on social media now. And the expert they were quoting was Rob Schneider. And you may be surprised to know that Rob Schneider’s not a constitutional legal scholar, and everything he had said was wrong. I sadly felt the need to correct it on Twitter, which is a waste of my time. But, I couldn’t resist saying, “I don’t think you wanna take your constitutional legal advice from Rob Schneider.” Whether you think he’s a good actor or entertainer or not is really beside the point. I can assure you he’s not a constitutional legal scholar. But people will do that. They will latch onto it. It’s Deuce Bigalow, right? People will latch on to a person they like, an entity they like, and suddenly believe the things they say, even when they know what they’re saying has nothing to do with this person’s background or experience.
It’s not as though Rob Schneider quietly went to law school in his free time and, you know… That happens, I guess, sometimes. It didn’t with Rob Schneider. If anybody wants to look up his credentials, he has no legal credentials. But it’s the same thing. I don’t think anybody thought that the people that were speaking for FTX knew anything about crypto. Matt Damon, I think, was the only one. There was a Super Bowl commercial. I have no idea how much they paid for that. Matt Damon doesn’t know anything about crypto, and he’s not supposed to. He’s an actor. But people get dragged into these things and then they make bad decisions on it or they get roped in. So I guess we gotta close up, but I wanna ask you, this is the hardest question, so good luck. What advice do you give people? Like, we’ve just said all these things that are out here, right? Putting aside the advice of, “Hey, don’t be greedy. Don’t be willing to do bad things for money,” ’cause that’s good advice and people are gonna follow it or not. But how do you avoid being the unwitting victim? I know we talked about a few of those things, but I wanna put a finer point on it for those who made it all the way through the end of the show. Like, how do you avoid being the easy target and victim of these kind of things?
Chad Longo: Yeah. That’s a difficult one.
I think the, cleanest rules available, and they don’t really require the user to assess whether or not somebody is being fully authentic. A legitimate creator is selling something and they’re gonna deliver it. So you’re getting something for whatever that engagement is. Fraud, the user’s gonna ask you to send funds first and then wait. So if they’re asking you to send anything, don’t. And the last is that the laundering operation is going to somehow get you to receive funds. Don’t let that happen. So from just a purely anti-financial crime perspective, to try to avoid fraud, to try to avoid being an unwitting involved party in money laundering, those would be my three biggest rules in social media. My other one is just, this is just so basic, but get rich quick schemes are usually the ones that get people kind of screwed over the most on these platforms, and it goes back to that old adage: If it sounds too good to be true, it really is. So don’t click on it, don’t follow it, don’t engage with it. Those are the bigger ways to avoid particularly fraud online, those are my, my little nuggets
AJ Nash: All good advice. The only piece I would add in thinking it through it is also don’t be afraid to admit if it happened and stop.
I’m gonna, confess, as a younger person, get rich schemes, I wanted to get rich, too. I, I remember, and I’m old enough to remember when it was on television, right? The guy sitting in front of the two Rolls-Royces the mansion talking about how he buys and sells properties and you can, too. And I actually went to one of those seminars, and I actually bought some materials, right? It was nothing. I mean, it, obviously it went nowhere. You know, but I also didn’t continue to be pop committed and go, “I’m already in this, I should do more, and I should buy another seminar.” I realized, I was able to look in the mirror and go, “Okay, you are a sucker. Don’t keep being a sucker. It happens.” And I feel like that’s a piece that sometimes people are like, as long as you continue to go, you can continue to convince yourself you haven’t been fooled. You know? “Oh, no, I just gotta do one more thing.
Oh, it’s just the next thing,” right? You’re still on the path to success. It’s hard for some people to just go, “No, I admit it. I shouldn’t have done this. It was wrong. It was stupid. I got fooled.” It happens. We’re humans. And so that’s the only thing I would throw in there is if it does happen to you, just when you figure it out, just accept it and cut off.
We all make bad choices and mistakes. I certainly did at one point when I was younger. It was a few hundred bucks, which was a lot for me then. But you just get up and go, “Okay, well that guy won, suckered me. Time to move on.” And I wonder how many people that’s the problem. They get sucked in and then, they can’t admit it.
Kacper Piwowar: Sunk costs, right? It’s better to lose a couple hundred bucks than it is a couple thousand, right? So just understand it’s like when you made up your mind and you’ve realized that it’s like, “All right, well, at least I only lost a couple hundred bucks instead of going down the rabbit hole and trying to protect my ego,” right?
AJ Nash: Yeah. Yeah, and chasing that money that’s not gonna show up, right? And, and maybe hurting other people in the process, so. All right. This has been really interesting and listen, I’d do another hour of this frankly, but I don’t think anybody’s listening to it. But I think it’s been really interesting, Chad. I really, wanna thank you for coming on and talking about this. I know there’s more material. If people wanna get in touch with you, if they wanna learn more about this, what’s the easiest way to do it?
Chad Longo: They can find me on LinkedIn or, you can always message me on my, business account, which is chad.longo@fivecast.com
AJ Nash: Well listen, I wanna thank you. Kacper. Anything you wanna leave the audience with before we do the close out here?
Kacper Piwowar: I think we’re still quite topical with it. This is a subject that is gonna have more and more discussions around it as people start to investigate and dig deeper into especially the AML components, with influencers. And I think, with the whole synthetic influencers, that’s opening up another box, right?
I’m excited to kind of watch it unfold, and not become a victim myself, hopefully. But, who knows?
AJ Nash: Yeah. I agree. And for anybody who wonders, Kacper and I are real. We’re not synthetic. And, we accept all donations. So I’ll get you a account for that, some crypto, wallet for you. Listen, let’s wrap it up here. I wanna thank everybody again. Thank all of you.
Thank everybody who’s watching and listening. If you like the show, please, let us know, right? Like it, subscribe, tell people. If you don’t like the show, shut up. Tell Kacper. We’ll try to be better. But, please do spread the word. And if you have ideas for how to make the show better, let us know. We’re always looking to, to be better. The show is about you, the audience, and about guests like Chad. They’re not, it’s not about us. And if you know somebody who should be on the show, let us know that, too. We’re always looking for great new people to have on the show, so we can have interesting conversations like that. So, you can find us at authentic8.com/needlestack. It’s authentic8, the number eight .com/needlestack. You can find us on all the platforms. It’s not hard to find us. Obviously you found us if you’re listening right now. So with that, I’m gonna go ahead and wrap it up. Thanks again to everybody. This has been another episode of NeedleStack.
