April 17, 2026
We’re making a change in the weekly articles, beginning today with this one.
The three articles will continue to be free. And the Working Profit Investment Letter will continue with the same detailed investment advice and same subscription price ($19/month…$195/year).
We get inquiries and requests about growing net worth from our subscribers. Not specific investment ideas (which are in the WPIL) but general advice. Given my 50 years of experience, there is value we can add without crossing over into the WPIL which is designed for investors/traders.
So, we will now have one piece each week in the realm of what we can call Money plus two others in Politics/History/Social/Humor totaling three.
And here we go.
Don’t fall for the scam!
When I was in my prior career, we spent a great deal of time securing privacy and care for our clients to be sure we were not opening them, and the firm up to hucksters, scam artists and similar criminals. I can tell you that wherever you do your banking or investing, your provider is under more or less constant attack from bad people trying to break into systems. It comes from many different places, simultaneously, a kind of constant hailstorm of potentially destructive invasion.
This is, for example, why you’re often put through those cumbersome routines of verifying your identity, each and every time you go in. Why you have to verify who you are in two different ways. Why proper password selection is so important. I can’t guarantee it, but if your password is ‘password123’ you’re opening yourself up for problems. Ping ping ping.
Here are a number of ways you can protect yourself and loved ones and avoid serious problems.
Do not give information out over the phone.
Unless you can absolutely verify to whom you are speaking, why would you trust some voice on the phone? And in the AI era, voices are being mimicked and all of that. No, that’s not your son calling from school with an emergency funding need. It’s a bot! This means that if you have a credit card inquiry or issue, you call the number on the back of your credit card. You don’t call the number the voice gives you. Or an email gives you.
Some families will have a family password so they are able to verify each other when it’s a voice on the phone or a frantic text message (how do you know that their phone hasn’t been stolen?).
You cannot be too careful. The elderly have been bilked out of over $2B this year (FBI) in vishing (voice phishing) incidents.
Do not be panicked into acting!
You receive a text indicating you are in arrears on something. A traffic ticket, a payment, could be almost anything. Dire things are promised if you don’t click on the link to clean it up. And inevitably, the link opens you up to giving out information that will be used to steal from you.
If you have legitimate account somewhere, you will not be threatened…people miss payments all the time. Verification is simple…just call the phone number given on the statement you receive each month. But do not engage in any way with that warning text.
When in doubt do not answer the phone!
I get so many unsolicited calls due to my businesses and publishing; I simply do not pick up the phone unless the caller is in my Contacts. I don’t care what the caller ID says. If it is legitimate, they’ll leave a voicemail. Or an email. If not, I delete and report Spam or Phishing.
If you pick up the phone and say ‘hello’ and there is a five second lag, you are almost certainly being put into a call center trying to get at you…the machine senses your voice before you’re transferred.
In an email just look at the address.
They’re easy to spot:
OK www.microsoft.com
NOT www.microsoft29423ericslate20342@ (some weird internet address)
Misspellings, poor use of capital letters, general sloppiness. It should be easy to avoid those. Right click, hit “delete” and “block.”
Never buy any investment or financial product from a voice over the phone whom you do not absolutely know.
Gentle readers, gold and silver offerings are the most prevalent and I can tell you that they inevitably are poor quality, over-priced, over-hyped. This especially includes most TV coin shows. Those beautiful Morgan Silver Dollars you’ll be offered, even if the real deal, will not be well-priced.
Just don’t, please. You want to buy gold or silver, go to www.usmint.gov. The government is not the cheapest, but you won’t be scammed. To get best deal, just Google “largest bullion dealers.” I’ve used www.moneymetals.com. Large, well-known and well-regarded dealer. Over here, we are not paid to recommend anyone, just to be clear on that.
Stick to US gold uncirculated coins, you should pay somewhere around 3% over the price of gold, say, for a one-ounce gold Liberty. And always get a price from 2-3 dealers…they all markup differently and prices will vary. However, you do want to give yourself some basic education before you begin, so search AI or whatever and ask questions and start to learn. Warning…people will put out educational sites which are just fronts for high pressure sales efforts.
Use a password locker
I use Roboform. I have a password that unlocks it and inside are all my user/password combinations. When you log onto something, it senses it and adds it to your locker. Its free, I’ve used it for years. Warning! Don’t lose the password to the locker. I don’t know what happens to you, but my guess is that at best it’s a drill to get back in. But its all secure and you can control the access, and you don’t have your stuff sitting on a card in your wallet.
Note: We all have favorite passwords. Your email address for user and your most favorite password, if discovered, will result in some bad actor pinging all kinds of commons sites trying to get in with your information.
Use a VPN on your browser
A VPN hides you from the Internet. To make a complete set, I use Firefox Private Browsing for my internet access, I use their Mozilla VPN while I’m on the Internet. I use their Duck Duck Go for my search engine. I also use Claude.AI Sonnet. All of that offers a serious amount of protection and anonymity.
Our policy at WP
The lawyers gave us all the website language, and you get that. But in practical terms…
We do not acknowledge you as a subscriber/reader to anyone. We do not sell your information. We are not paid to recommend other vendors or providers. We don’t sell a list of emails, of names, of anything. We don’t clutter you with advertising. We treat you as we would like to be treated.
We sincerely hope this all helps.
Thoughts, questions, or reflections? I’d love to hear them. You can reach me anytime at anthony@workingprofit.com
