Rob's Notes 45: Former Secret Service Agent On Why Law Enforcement Can't Fix Scams
And some news coming on Monday...
On Monday we’ll be updating the InfoHawk website, so check the site then!
In other news, I really love talking to entrepreneurs who are working on trust, security or safety products. So I sat down with Tate Jarrow, who I worked with back at Google on the Google One VPN.
Tate has an unusually relevant résumé for anti-scam work: West Point grad, Army Airborne Ranger, then 8+ years as a Secret Service special agent on the cybercrime squad, followed by five years at Google. He’s now building Rebound, which he describes as “antivirus, but for scams” — software that sits on your devices, watches what you see across email, web, and apps, and alerts you in the moment when it spots a scam.
Here’s why I think you should listen:
A real insider’s take on why law enforcement can’t fix this. Tate’s blunt point is that you can’t arrest or prosecute your way out of scams because the criminals run like businesses (profits, salaries, specialization), and shutting one operation down just pushes it elsewhere. The fix has to come from platforms, technology, and changing the economics for attackers.
Useful myth-busting about victims. The data point that stuck with me: people who are confident they can spot a scam are statistically more likely to get fooled. Every demographic gets hit, and the “only dumb people fall for this” framing actually makes all of us more vulnerable by lowering our guard.
A clear-eyed view of the AI threat. Voice deepfakes of loved ones, personalized attacks at scale, and data-broker-fueled targeting mean the old “watch for misspellings” advice is dead.
The structural gaps we get into — outdated privacy regulation, companies treating a leaked email as “no big deal” when it’s actually social-engineering gold, and platforms failing to share the right kind of threat data (they trade IPs, but scammers operate on phone numbers, emails, and accounts).
A hook close to my heart: the idea of building tools so the tech-savvy among us can help protect our parents and families without surveilling them.
And because I can’t help myself, I also tell you, dear listener, about the very first way I ever made money with computers (an anti-virus story!) back in the day. You’ll have to listen to get the full story.
It’s a candid, experience-grounded conversation about why scams have become the biggest crime category almost nobody is seriously defending against.
Here’s the episode on YouTube, Apple or Spotify - please subscribe and/or leave us a positive review if you like this kind of content!
