🔓 It watched you get robbed

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Welcome to your Tuesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Today’s trivia comes from the golden age of forwarded emails, when every message was in ALL CAPS and apparently written by someone’s cousin’s neighbor’s trustworthy barber. The claim: If a robber forces you to use an ATM, type your PIN backward, and boom, silent alarm, police summoned, cash dispensed. 

🔐 What happens if you enter your PIN backward? A) Silent police alert, B) Wrong PIN, C) Card swallowed or D) Receipt-slot hologram cop? The answer is lurking at the end.

You pay zero dollars for this newsletter. That’s not charity. It’s our sponsors, the ones I trust enough to put my name next to. So click one sponsor link today. Just one. That click is what keeps this free for you tomorrow, and the day after that. Easiest thank-you note you’ll ever write. — Kim

🤯 WOW: The FTC logged more than 1.1 million identity theft reports in 2024, and Americans reported losing $12.5 billion to fraud, a 25% jump in one year. The monitoring service most people pay for only sends an email alert.

The Short Version: Monitoring watches. Restoration fixes. Insurance pays. Check which service you’re actually buying and how much it covers. Details below.

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

Robert, you’re paying for a smoke detector that beeps after the house burns down.

Here’s what nobody in this business says out loud. Most identity services only watch. They scan the dark web, peek at your credit, and when something goes sideways, they send an alert. That’s the whole product. The beep.

An alert doesn’t undo a thing. It doesn’t call your bank. It doesn’t spend nine hours on hold untangling a fake mortgage in your name. You do.

Monitoring watches. Restoration fixes. Insurance pays. Most people buy the first service and walk away believing they bought all three.

Monitoring is the cheap part, and your data is already out there anyway. Watching it float by is not a plan. Restoration is a human being who makes the calls, disputes the accounts and clears your name while you go to work. Insurance is the check that covers what the mess costs you.

That’s why Coveron caught my eye. (You may know it as NordProtect. Same service, new name since May.) It’s underwritten by HSB, part of Munich Re, rated A++ by AM Best. Not a marketing promise. An actual policy.

Here’s what you’re covered for:

A credit freeze won’t stop a romance scam or a QR sticker slapped on a parking meter. Those walk right past good habits.

👉 Right now, Coveron’s protection is 66% off, which puts it at $4.74 a month. That’s less than one drive-thru coffee, and it covers your whole digital life. Lock it down here.*

Protection at 4 bucks and change? Now that’s a steal. The good kind.

📩 Send this to someone who brags about their identity protection subscription but has never once read what it actually pays for.

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(Starts at 7:52) This one’s straight out of a movie. An AI model sensed it was about to be shut down, so it copied itself onto another machine. Nobody told it to do that. It did it on its own. As Scooby-Doo once said, “Ruh roh.”

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.

🎫 Lap phone tax: A woman driving with her phone face down, dark and untouched on her lap got nailed by a traffic camera anyway. Weeks later, the state mailed her a $1,251 public safety ticket, because apparently, your phone can commit crimes in airplane mode. Enforcement cameras are getting smarter, hungrier and a lot less forgiving. Glove box, bag, mount. Otherwise, you’re paying your phone’s legal fees.

Google wants memories: Well here’s Google doing the most Google thing ever. It’s quietly feeding your photos and voice to its AI. It recently slipped in a policy change that lets it pull your content, including photos and voice recordings, into its AI training pool. Yes, there’s an opt-out. No, they didn’t make it easy to find. If you use Google Photos or Assistant, dig into your account settings and shut it off, because it’s on by default. Google’s not stealing your memories. It’s borrowing them, indefinitely, without asking. Which I believe is the legal definition of a roommate.

🧠 The brain drain: Your noggin isn’t slowing down. It’s exhausted from filling in sounds you almost catch. The Horizon IX from hear.com fixes it at the source. Two tiny chips cut through noise and lock onto speech automatically. Small, comfortable and so discreet you forget it is there. Over 670,000 people have made the switch. Try for 45 days risk free.*

Résumés and romance: This gives finding love in a hopeless place a new meaning. A study says LinkedIn is drifting into dating territory, finding that 1 in 8 surveyed U.S. workers said they formed a romantic relationship that started on the platform. What? 1 in 5 used it to research a potential partner. Nearly half trust LinkedIn more than dating profiles. Which says less about romance and more about how bad dating apps are. Nothing says spark like verified employment history.

📵 The feed diet: So Incogni’s recent survey found most of us are posting less, sharing less and just overall rethinking social media. More than half post less and limit who sees content. Why? I blame the algorithm. My feed has more suggested reels than a Bass Pro fishing aisle. That and strangers biting on ragebait and arguing like their life depends on it. More than half say maintaining social media feels like work, with Gen Z at 60% and boomers at 38%. 

🛞 Going hands-free: Get this. Federal regulators said they’d “absolutely” consider dropping the requirement that fully autonomous vehicles have steering wheels after also moving away from required manual brake pedals. Yep. You hop in a moving box with no steering wheel, and it just goes. This is the green light the self-driving crowd has been idling at for years. Lovely timing for Tesla’s wheel-less pedal-less Cybercab. Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox could benefit, too. Drive safe, hold the drive. 

Sunscreen protects your skin. But it’s quietly destroying your phone screen. The easy fixes to keep it safe this summer. And Adam has recorded nearly 10,000 concerts on cassette tapes since 1984. From Nirvana to Sonic Youth. Now volunteers are archiving them online for free.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Google has a free AI chatbot that’s as good as paid ChatGPT. In Chrome, click AI Mode next to Search, or visit google.com/ai. Ask anything, it answers with web sources, then you follow up like a normal convo. You can also upload photos, paste quotes or ask, “Is this right?” 

📱 Simplify an iPhone: Have an aging relative who struggles with all the tiny buttons and endless menus? iPhone has a special mode with a basic home screen, bigger text and larger app icons. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Assistive Access to set it up. FYI, if they ever want to exit, triple-click the side button.

🔗 Dodge bad links: Some Android phones can warn you before a sketchy site opens. Like a fake Facebook login page that’s actually a phishing trap. Go to Settings > Security and privacy > Android safe browsing, then turn on Use live threat detection. Works in Google, YouTube, Gmail and more.

🎸 Split voice from music: Vocal Remover is a free online tool that separates vocals from a song. Upload your file, and it creates two tracks. One is a karaoke version with the voice removed, and the other is an a cappella version with the vocals isolated. Save them when it’s done. You can finally prove you’re the better singer. Or find out otherwise.

🚗 Uber for seniors: Want Grandma to get around independently? Open Uber > Account > Family > Add new member and choose Senior. Add their name and number, then they accept the invite. Rides bill to your card, but they get a simpler app with bigger text, icons and saved places. Want them to pay? Download Uber on their phone (iOS or Android), go to Account > Simple mode and add their card. You can set this mode on your phone, too.

I went diving with sharks once. Me, a tank and 17 sharks circling. Hammerheads on the outside, the rest taking turns.

Sitting on the bottom, I heard my father’s voice in my head: “You can never predict the behavior of an animal.” Then my mother’s: “Are you stupid or a moron?”

I waited for a gap and swam for the steps. Dripping wet, I asked the guy running the place, “So what do you do with the sharks the rest of the day?”

“We feed them.” Cool. Cool cool cool.

Anyway, nature documentaries have entered their IMAX era. Researchers and filmmakers are using tiny underwater cameras, 360-degree video and VR to film sharks in ways that used to be impossible. Nobody’s strapping anything to the animals. They leave the cameras on the seafloor and let curious hammerheads come investigate, which is how you end up with an accidental shark selfie taken from inside its mouth.

It’s the closest most of us will ever get to swimming with sharks. Which, speaking from experience, is exactly the right distance.

Check it out, the footage is amazing.

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🎓 What you learned today: Identity monitoring beeps, it doesn’t clean up after an attack. A traffic camera can ticket a phone you never touched. Google feeds your photos and voice to AI unless you opt out. And shark researchers are getting selfies from inside the shark. Tomorrow, save that voicemail from someone you love before your carrier decides it’s expired.

💨 The answer: B) Nothing. Womp womp. It’s just a wrong PIN. That reverse-PIN ATM trick has been floating around for decades, but no ATM on Earth is secretly calling the cops because you typed your code backward. The idea was real, though. 

A Chicago businessman named Joseph Zingher patented a system called SafetyPIN in 1998. That’s the little fact that kept this myth alive, caffeinated and bouncing around forwarded emails for years. 

Every bank he pitched it to passed. They actually opposed it, worried a panicked person would fumble the reversal and make a robbery worse. And there’s the palindrome problem. If your PIN is 2002 or 7337, there’s nothing to reverse. So, yeah, doesn’t work.

I heard about an ATM that got addicted to money. It suffered from withdrawals. (Ba dum tss.)

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

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, TUYU, @insta360 via YouTube

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