AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Online Shopping Scams, ISIS, DOJ, SpaceX Starlink

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on the Jim Polito show this morning and spoke with Steve Fourni who was sitting in for Jim.  We discussed what happened this week with the DOJ and Online shopping scams, some run by ISIS -- yes that ISIS.  Then we discussed a new technology that can change rural internet forever.  SpaceX Starlink. Here we go with Steve.

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: It's pretty obvious when you're reading that this is a generic review that is not mentioning any of the features that you might be looking for in that product.

Hey, Just when you thought it was not safe to shop online, it turns out yeah. It really wasn't safe to shop online and it still isn't. Oh my gosh.

Now the terrorists are in on the PPE thing. Craig Peterson here, and I was on this morning on Mr. Jim Polito show. Steve Fourni. I was sitting in for him and we had some fun discussions.

Here we go.

[00:00:39] Steve Fourni: It's Steve Fourni in for Jim this morning and you know what that music means? We do it at this time.

Every Tuesday. Here we go to our favorite Canadian, our good friend, Craig Peterson, with all the information. Good morning, Craig. How are you, sir?

[00:00:52] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. I guess that's my cue.

[00:00:55] Steve Fourni: Yeah, that's the best I got. I can give you a more elongated intro, but I'd rather people hear from you. Not me, you know what I mean?  It's funny, we've heard about the PPE scams. We've heard about the stimulus check scams. Never let a good scam go by without ISIS getting involved. Craig, what's the latest on that?

[00:01:14] Craig Peterson: Isn't that the weirdest thing ever. ISIS of all groups. Yeah, they've gotten in on this big time and that you can go to the website right now, facemaskcenter.com. You're going to see a seizure warning. The justice department has been tracking what's been going on. Apparently our friends at ISIS have been selling, all kinds of personal protective equipment, like masks Tyvec suits, the goggles, the face shields, et cetera.

Apparently some of these scams sites and maybe also including this ISIS site, but they'll ship a substantially inferior products. California ordered a bunch, Governor Newsom out there from China, through a friend of his, kickbacks, you gotta make sure you're doing that if you're in government. They were all substandard and they are showing up all over the dark web.

Now, in the case of ISIS, apparently, they were not shipping products. So we've got millions of people who are desperate for these protective pieces of equipment. And they were. Sending money to ISIS. It's just absolutely amazing.

So the FBI department of justice has shot these particular sites down right now. We've got to be very careful when we're online looking for some of this stuff.

Pay attention when you're shopping online, go to a site that's well known.  I like Amazon in many ways. I use it all the time. You can look at the ratings, although there are obviously people who are putting fake ratings up. They actually pay people to put a fake positive rating. If you see something where there are 500 right positive ratings, it's probably legit. I've had to turn to eBay.

Do you know Steve? I have chickens and I also am a beekeeper. Did you know that?

[00:03:11] Steve Fourni: I didn't. That's good. That's interesting information.

[00:03:16] Craig Peterson: When I'm taking care of my bees, for the first year I didn't even wear it and he loves it all.  Usually, you only get stung if you grab a bee right. They're not going to really bother you except in the fall when they start getting more aggressive protecting their honey.

I use some heavy surgical gloves, these really great gloves. I love them. They are extra thick and extra long so they go over my beekeeper's suit on the arm and I have had a devil of a time trying to find them, but I did find them on eBay. Somebody still had some, the prices a little higher than it used to be, but not that much higher, maybe a buck or two.

I've been looking for them for months.  I'm, I know I'm not alone. Obviously I'm not a doctor or practicing medicine anymore. The bottom line. It's hard to find this stuff. If you go to eBay, what I do is check the ratings. eBay's great about that. This guy had over a half a million ratings, and he had five stars on average, like 4.9 something.

So I felt safe buying from him and pretty sure that it wasn't ISIS that was involved. Then I tracked the package as it was being shipped.

[00:04:32] Steve Fourni: We're talking with Craig Peterson and yeah, eBay's one that I don't spend too much time on. and again, I bought some stuff on Amazon that, it took four weeks to get here and then you get it and it's basically just a hunk of junk. And you're looking at it's like made in China or whatever.

So are there things, like oftentimes I'll go to the product description and even everybody says, buy American and when you're buying stuff online, a lot of times you can't really see that information.

Are there places that you mentioned reviews and stuff, but is there stuff in the description may be that people should be looking for when they're buying stuff online? To know that it's legitimate. Are there like keywords we should be looking for or anything like that?

[00:05:07] Craig Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. when you're looking at these reviews that people are posting, it's usually a dead giveaway if the grammar is poor. Now, if you flunked out first grade English, maybe you're going to have a hard time with that. If you see a lot of reviews, sometimes 50 reviews or a hundred, and I did a whole show on this at one point, that is just terribly written. Or it's pretty obvious when you're reading, but this is a generic review that is not mentioning any of the features that you might be looking for in that product. It's probably fake.

So there's a couple of tips to look for when you are looking at those reviews.

[00:05:49] Steve Fourni: Interesting. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru and good stuff, especially when you're buying, whatever that whatever the hot product is. In this case, unfortunately, it's PPE. But when you're trying to buy the same thing, everybody else is buying. That's really the time that you really need to keep that antenna up.

[00:06:05] Craig Peterson: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. they're massive volume of all these illegitimate materials it's being sold, never delivered. The fact is that in this case, ISIS decided to get on the business and making some money and using it for terrorism.

[00:06:22] Steve Fourni: Oh boy, that's unfortunate. Craigo, let's switch gears here a little bit and talk about SpaceX. what is the latest stuff going on with SpaceX?

[00:06:31] Craig Peterson: Oh, this is so cool. SpaceX Elon Musk has got a bunch of businesses going. Their stock is up and down. They had some good news this last week, but what we didn't talk about right now is Starlink.

SpaceX got a license to put thousands of satellites up into orbit and they just launched some more. They launched 58 of them this last weekend. Isn't that amazing. So right now, Starlink has about 540 satellites in orbit. What's happening is that SpaceX is setting up what's called a constellation of satellites.

These satellites are all orbiting the earth. Trying to cover the entire earth. It is going to give you, they say eventually here, gigabit internet anywhere in the world, which is just amazing.

Now, here's cool news for us here in the Northeast. That is that SpaceX is looking for beta testers, and they're going to have two different rounds of beta testing.

If you are living in rural, anywhere in Mass in Vermont, and anywhere up here in the Northeast and Connecticut, Rhode Island. They are looking for you because that's right now where this first part of the constellation is aimed. You can get what right now looks like it's about 50 megabits, 500 hundred bits worth of speed.

Now, if you've got cable, I've got three gigabits to go to my house, but I'm not normal. 50 megabits that is a joke to me, but if you're in a rural area, Steve, people are really just striving to get any internet, very slow internet in many places.

There are two things they're going to help you out with that. One is five G if it comes to your area. But it's not going to come to many rural areas in reality. Right now has the best coverage and you can use that event surely here in place of your cable or your telephone internet. Now with Starlink, you can go to their website and they're charging Steve. I hope you're sitting down, the first month is a dollar for 50 megabits. Then it doubles every month after that. If you can believe that it goes to $2 a month after that for 50 megabits. It's phenomenal. So here's the trick. They're looking for beta testers and that they want them in different areas here in the Northeast.

And, you can maybe get it. There are no guarantees at all, but where you want to go online and apply is to go right now to starlink.com. I've registered for this as well because I want to see what's happening, but they will provide you with a satellite dish that takes you about 20 minutes to mount give or take. They have lip mounts. They have roof mounts. They have mounts to put into your lawn. It's just a pole with the satellite dish on top. These are small dishes. It's not like the big old KU, K band stuff that I used to have.  You can install it yourself. It's included in that dollar and, now you're often running. So this is so cool. When they're done with this, which is probably next year. You're going to be able to get inexpensive internet, certainly throughout the Northeast US, and eventually around the world.

[00:10:12] Steve Fourni: I hope they get that information to the people of a rural Vermont, via telegram. Cause otherwise, they have no internet to even get that. In fact, when I go to my, my, I go to my inlaws it's little, cause it was a little like this, you know,

A lot of those places like up in Vermont, they like it that way. They're like this might work for them because they're like, how dare you put a cell phone tower in the middle of that beautiful field that nobody's using. So they're very anti, that, so this might actually be a way for them to actually, I don't know, get with the times a little bit,

[00:10:46] Craig Peterson: eventually, it'll be gigabit and it's going to be going to go up. That $2 per month fee isn't going to last.

[00:10:52] Steve Fourni: Yeah. I figured. and lastly, I guess on this, what is, what do you think that's going to do to the rest of the marketplace? Obviously that's going to affect what Xfinity and Comcast and everybody else's are offering if this thing takes off.

[00:11:05] Craig Peterson: Yeah. Look at the Comcast that they've lost a half a million subscribers here recently is that business is dying because they were so greedy. It wasn't just Comcast. It was all of the providers. It was ESPN saying, if you want any of our content, you have to pay for everybody who has cable. That type of mentality is going to kill these companies.

So they're starting to cut back. They're starting to unbundle things. I love the competition. The five G as well as the satellite networks, because a SpaceX isn't the only one is really going to bring some of these, prices down. Finally, we had hoped that having online streaming was going to make it happen like that but of course it just hasn't. The competition when it settles in. The FCC under Trump has been really strong on trying to make sure there is competition. It's going to be phenomenal.

[00:12:06] Steve Fourni: Hopefully, I can get rid of the house phone that Comcast made me get that somewhere in the basement. That phone number, I don't even know what it is, but you gotta have a landline. Okay. Great, wonderful.

Craig. Yeah. What's the best way for people to get more information from you on a regular basis.

[00:12:21] Craig Peterson: The best way is to get my newsletter. If you go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, you're going to be able to get my weekly newsletter that has these stories and so much more. Then also it has the links to my radio show, which you'll hear on Saturdays at 11:00 AM. Right here, the same station.

[00:12:39] Steve Fourni: That's great. And make sure you're listening to those links outside of the hours of six to nine, please. Of course. no, just kidding, Craig. we appreciate the time, have yourself a wonderful rest of the day and we'll catch up soon.

[00:12:51] Craig Peterson: Take care, Steve. Bye. Bye.

[00:12:52] Steve Fourni: Alright, take it easy. Yeah, I'm with Craig. I love competition, especially with the, how long has it been, where we've been handcuffed by our cable provider?

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