Hello, this is ██████████ calling from the AARP Fraud Watch Network in ████████. I'm calling to invite you to join a live conversation happening right now to learn ways to help protect yourself and your loved ones from fraud and scams. We have invited the financial industry regulatory authority FINRA to join us to share ways to spot and stop a scam. This will be your opportunity to get the latest information about scams and fraud and learn more about the AARP Fraud Watch Network. Please stay on the line to join this important toll free conversation. If you need to reach AARP during regular business hours, please call ██████████████ or just stay on the line to join this important conversation. Please hold while we connect you to the this AARP event is currently in progress. Please note that this call may be monitored, recorded or rebroadcast. If you would like to ask a question during Today's event, press Star 3 on your telephone keypad at any time. So it allows me to decide whether it's somebody I want to engage with or not based off of the message that they would leave me. Now, we do get these unexpected solicitations in a variety of different sources. Some of them come in through the telephone, some of them come through text messages or emails. One of the areas that we're continuing to see a rise in is misdirected text messages. So it might be a message that you receive that has just kind of this generic question or ask. It might be something like are you home? Or do you have time to catch up? And again, it's coming from an individual that, that we don't know, it's not somebody in our contacts and it gets us to do respond. And by using those kind of cryptic messages, we're more likely to respond because we either want to be a nice person and say, oh, I think you've got the wrong number, or ask them who is this? But that opens up that opportunity for that individual to start building a connection, to build rapport, to start establishing trust. And I'll give an example that happened to me in real life. So my daughter plays travel sports and we were at a tournament, we had just checked out of our hotel, we were moving from field to field and I got a message from a number that I didn't know and it simply said, you forgot your bag. Now for me, in that moment that made sense. We could have left a bag at the hotel that we had just checked out of. We could have left a bag at one of the fields that we were Moving from. So in that moment, in that scenario, for me, it made sense. Somebody on the team or somebody from the hotel could have been reaching out, telling me that I forgot a bag. Now, I work in this space. This is the type of, you know, fraud prevention is something that I do for a living. So, again, I approach with a head, with a healthy level of skepticism. I looked at the number. I. I researched what that number was. I saw that it was an area code outside of the country. I knew that this was likely not the hotel that I had just checked out of. I knew that if it was somebody on my daughter's team, that they would be able to either grab the bag or I'd have them listed in my contacts. So I avoided that situation by not responding. But if I would have responded, that conversation could have started, and it could have been an innocent conversation to start where the person's just trying to build up that connection, and then from there, who knows the route that it could have taken? So, again, I like to use a healthy level of skepticism. It provides me the opportunity to take control of the situation as opposed to the person on the other end having the upper hand and taking control. I mentioned in that situation that I looked at the phone number and verified independently. That's a great tactic to take, whether it's a phone call, whether it's a text message, an email, whatever it may be. By doing that independent research, that independent verification, you can often see whether it's something that you believe to be true or not. Thank you so much, ███. This is great information. I know that there are.