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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: A man’s phone rang for a month straight after Google’s AI Overviews handed his number to strangers. How this could happen to you.

Welcome to your wonderful Wednesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Hope your day is off to a better start than this gamer’s. 

Quick background: Forza Horizon is one of the biggest video game franchises on the planet, with some 53 million players. The new one, Forza Horizon 6, launched and pulled in an estimated $140 million before most people could even buy it. It’s Xbox’s Super Bowl.

🏎️ So when a modder leaked gameplay footage of Forza Horizon 6 before release and posted it online for the world to see? Let’s say developer Playground Games did not find it adorable. 

Which totally normal punishment did Xbox give him? A) A seven-day suspension, B) A sternly worded 2,000-word email, C) A 7,973-year ban or D) Mandatory VR driving school? Take your pick, the answer’s at the end! You’re definitely gonna share this with the kiddos.

💧 I write this for you: Get my Splash of AI free newsletter every Thursday. Sign up now at SplashOfAI.com, so it hits your inbox tomorrow morning. I’ll teach you how to use AI to read the fine print before it bites, turn your good work ideas into career wins, avoid chatbot confession traps and more. — Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

You’ve been shopping on Amazon for years. Returned things that didn’t fit, arrived broken or looked nothing like the photos. Normal stuff.

Amazon’s algorithm tracks every return: the category, the frequency, the dollar amount, the reason you clicked. It weighs all of it against your total spending. 

I’ve heard that if your return rate tips past 10% to 15% of your total purchases, Amazon notices. They freeze your account, cancel your Prime membership or permanently ban you. No warning. No appeal.

Amazon won’t confirm the exact number. They want you guessing.

Clothing, shoes and electronics draw the most scrutiny. Gift givers and people who order multiple sizes to try on at home are most at risk. 🙋‍♀️ That’s me.

Some customers were flagged after returning defective items in a short window. Others got banned after returning gifts they never even ordered for themselves.

First: See the damage. Go to Amazon.com (This only works on desktop). Click Account & Lists > Account, then scroll to Manage your data > Data Access and Requests. From there, sign in, select Your Orders and click Submit Request. Request a report from your earliest order to today. Amazon emails you a spreadsheet of everything you’ve ever bought. I did this. Mine goes back years. I gasped out loud. My husband came to check on me. You’ve been warned.

📩 Send this to someone who orders multiple sizes online and returns most of them. The links below are one-click make it happen easy.

You want a tough crowd? Try telling a stadium full of college graduates that AI is coming for their jobs. One commencement speaker found out the hard way, mid-applause lines, mid-speech, in front of thousands. The boos started slow. Then they didn't stop. I guess you could say he really failed to read the room. (Which, ironically, is something AI still can't do either.).

Hit play below. 👇

▶️ Why people booed an AI-forecasting graduation speech →

Or for audio only, click your favorite podcast player below:

Your bank fed the AI: A Community Bank employee fed customer names, birth dates and SSNs into an unauthorized AI app. The bank discovered it and filed a disclosure with the SEC two days later, the equivalent of walking into a police station and confessing. Customers in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia are being notified. They haven’t named the AI tool or said how many people were hit. With security like that, it’s easy to lose interest.

🚗 Drive-by fraud: So a Boca Raton Lyft driver allegedly tried to make Google Gemini his cleanup crew. He accused a teen passenger of wrecking his car, submitted an AI-generated photo as proof, and Lyft charged her dad a cleaning fee. How schemy! The teen caught the fake immediately. Lyft confirmed the image was bogus, sanctioned the driver, and now police may get involved. An idea, quickly snap a pic of the back seat as you leave your rideshare. 

Claude gets richer: Anthropic is a money printer. CEO Dario Amodei disclosed it grew 80x annualized last quarter, though the plan was 10x, which is already a target that makes finance people roll their eyes. Revenue crossed $30 billion. Anthropic is in talks to raise $50 billion at a $900 billion valuation, possibly topping OpenAI for the first time. Where’s the moola coming from? Enterprise. Over 1,000 companies pay Claude $1M or more a year. Wow.

✅ LifeLock is fine, if you like paying more for less. NordProtect does it smarter, better and cheaper, just $4.74 a month. You get real-time dark web scans for your personal info and alerts when something pops up. Why gamble with your identity when you can protect it? Check out NordProtect and save 66% with my exclusive offer.*

Ad-based patriotism: Get this. A developer took apart the official White House Android app, released in March, and found some spicy plumbing. The app reportedly sends precise GPS location data every 4.5 minutes to a third-party ad company. It also routes 77% of its network traffic to outside companies and loads code from a GitHub developer who could change what runs on users’ phones. The administration hasn’t responded. Don’t have the app installed? Keep it that way.

🍎 Apple of my eye: Apple’s newest accessibility update is worth cheering about. Power wheelchair users who can’t operate a joystick can drive their chair using their eyes through Apple Vision Pro. Deaf users get automatic AI-generated subtitles for every video, including clips from friends and family that never had captions. Blind users get real-time AI image descriptions via VoiceOver. Name Recognition works in 50 languages. All processed privately on-device. This is tech doing exactly what it should. Some might say Apple lacked vision before, not anymore.

Your kid’s post-screen meltdown isn’t because they love the app. It’s because the app was designed to keep them wanting. Neuroscientists call it a digital slot machine. I speak with Dr. Michaeleen Doucleff, author of Dopamine Kids, about how she broke the cycle with her own tween daughter.

Listen on Komando.com →

Click your favorite podcast player below to listen now or later:

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Every time you copy something, Windows secretly saves it. Press Win + V instead of Ctrl + V, and a full clipboard history pops up. Paste anything you’ve copied recently, not just the last thing. Turn it on first under Settings > System > Clipboard > Clipboard history. Years of recopying things, completely wasted.

Paramedics check your lock screen first: If something goes wrong, make sure they find the right name. On iPhone: Health > Medical ID, add emergency contacts and flip on Show When Locked. On Android: Settings > Safety and emergency > Emergency contacts, then turn on Show on Lock Screen. Takes two minutes. Do it now. 

🤖 Fix ChatGPT’s personality: You can change how it talks to you. Go to Settings > Personalization > Base style and tone and pick friendly, professional or sarcastic. Then add Custom instructions, things like “keep answers short” or “skip the bullet points.” Night and day difference. FYI: I cover AI tricks like this every Thursday in my free Splash of AI newsletter. Sign up at komando.com/ai. 

Go invisible on Instagram: Nothing good comes from people seeing you’re online and wondering why you haven’t replied. Kill it. Open Instagram, go to Settings and activity > Messages and story replies > Who can see you’re online > Show activity status. Toggle it off. Ghost mode: activated. 

🌙 Dark mode for every website: Your computer’s dark mode is great until you hit a blinding white web page at midnight. Fix it with the free Dark Reader extension in the Chrome Web Store. Pin it, flip any site dark, tweak brightness per page. Your eyes will thank you. Night owls, this one’s yours.

Google announced AI glasses that whisper restaurant reviews in your ear as you walk past, give turn-by-turn directions based on exactly where you’re standing and order your coffee on DoorDash before you even sit down. (Yes, that’s all real.) 

Powered by Gemini. Styled by Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, so you don’t look like a rejected extra from a sci-fi movie. 

Say “Hey, Google.” Audio glasses hit this fall. Display glasses follow. Oh, and one feature lets you say, “Put everyone in funny hats,” and the camera does it. No notes. 

These glasses are definitely high in vitamin see.

🔜 Tomorrow: Google’s AI reportedly gave strangers one man’s phone number for weeks. I’ll explain how old posts, data brokers and chatbots can turn your private info into a public answer, and what you can do to protect yourself.

Oh, and tomorrow’s trivia goes over the weird weight line where drones stop being “just for fun” and start needing official attention.

The answer: C) A 7,973-year ban. Yep. Xbox banned a gamer until Dec. 31, 9999, after he leaked footage of Forza Horizon 6 before it dropped. That’s not a typo. And it’s a hardware ban, meaning a simple computer reinstall won’t save him. The whole machine is locked out.

Microsoft confirmed the ban length was 100% intentional. And Forza Horizon 6 launched anyway, to rave reviews, without him. He’ll have plenty of time to think about what he’s done. About 7,900 years and change, give or take. You know what they say about criminals, they never finish their sentences.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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🎉 Keep it going! You got this! — Kim

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, addlon, Google

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