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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: AI can spot if your pet is in pain from one photo. I’ll show you how to try it.

Let’s get this Monday started, {{first_name | friend}}. Sending your assistant used to involve an actual human with a calendar and a coffee. Now tech CEOs are building AI clones of themselves. Same face, same voice, same oddly rehearsed hand gestures. Very normal.

The pitch is that your AI double can handle the boring stuff while the real you does the important work. But one CEO of a major fintech company sent his digital twin to do something genuinely serious, in front of investors, and it shocked the business world. 

🎭 Guess what a real tech CEO’s AI clone got sent to do: A) Deliver the company’s official quarterly earnings report to investors, B) Show up to the CEO’s kid’s parent-teacher conference, C) Get married to another CEO’s avatar in a metaverse ceremony, D) Host the company holiday party and roast the entire C-suite. Place your bets. The answer is lurking at the end.

🧽 That random scam call that knew your name? The “package delivery” text with your actual address? Scammers didn’t guess. They bought you. Data brokers package up your phone number, your address, your relatives, your medical issues, your politics and sell it to anyone with a credit card. Incogni puts real humans to work and scrubs you off those lists. I use it. I trust it. Get 60% off right now.* — Kim

TODAY’S DEEP DIVE

The uninvited passenger

Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando

TL;DR

  • Your phone auto-catches AirTags and SmartTags. Tile slips right past your phone, so you need its own app. 

  • Cellular GPS trackers you have to find by hand. 

  • Here’s the full sweep on hidden tracking devices, plus the safety steps that matter most if you find one.

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

You keep running into your ex. At the store. A friend’s place. A restaurant 20 miles away. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe something the size of a quarter is riding in your car, telling them exactly where you go.

Hidden trackers used to be spy movie stuff. Now anyone can grab one for $30. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found 14% of stalking victims had their location tracked by an electronic device.

If your gut says you’re being followed, don’t talk yourself out of it. Let’s sweep.

📱 Your phone finds and misses 

Bluetooth tags like Apple AirTags and Samsung SmartTags ping nearby phones, and your phone can rat them out. Note I said can.

  • On iPhone, open Find My, tap Items, then Items Detected Near You. Your phone sends automatic notifications if an unknown AirTag has been traveling with you, so check your alerts, too.

  • On most Android phones, go to Settings, then Safety and emergency, then Unknown tracker alerts and tap Scan. The exact path varies by phone maker. Samsung folks may need to look in a slightly different spot. One catch: A stalker can pop the speaker out of an AirTag, so it never beeps.

🔵 The Tile blind spot: Tile trackers will not set off automatic alerts. Your phone stays quiet. To check, download the free Tile app, open Scan and Secure and follow the walk-around steps. No Tile account needed. But know Tile’s Anti-Theft Mode can hide a tracker from that scan. Frustrating, I know.

🔦 Now search by hand 

  • Cellular GPS trackers use cell signals, not Bluetooth, so no app will flag them. You have to look. Outside your vehicle, run your hand inside the wheel wells, behind the bumpers, along the undercarriage and behind the grille. Many devices are magnetic. 

  • Inside the car, check under and behind the seats, the glove box, the trunk, the spare-tire well and under the floor mats. 

  • Then look under the dash for the OBD-II port. If there’s a small box plugged in there you didn’t add, it’s a tracker. An RF (radio frequency) detector ($32) catches active devices. Turn off your phone’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, then sweep slowly.

🛑 If you find a device, don’t yank it out 

Pulling it tips off the other person and can escalate things fast. It’s also evidence. Leave any hardwired or wired-in device alone. That’s a job for a mechanic or police, not you. 

Photograph it where it sits, note the date and time and write down the serial number. Tracking someone without consent is a crime in most places. Loop in police, and use a phone your stalker can’t see.

🆘 Help is here: Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788, 24/7 and confidential. If you’re in immediate danger, call 911. When you reach out, use a phone or computer the person you suspect can’t access.

📩 Send this to someone who has said, “I feel like he always knows where I am.” It might be the most important thing they read this week. Use the links below.

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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

Make yourself invisible to scammers online

Most scams don’t start with a clever trick, they start with your personal information being easy to find. Your phone number, address, email, even details about your family are collected and sold by data broker sites every day. That’s how scammers know exactly who to target and how. 

That’s why I use Incogni. It works behind the scenes to track down where your personal data is exposed online, and submits removal requests on your behalf. In my case, Incogni has sent 2,847 removal requests to have my personal information removed from data broker and people search sites. It continuously monitors more than 420 of these types of sites, and when your info pops up, they’ll request removal.

Doing this yourself would take countless hours. Incogni handles it automatically, and if you want even more protection, their Unlimited plan proactively scans the web looking for exposures and takes care of the removals for you. Less exposure means less risk. 

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📺 YOUTUBE: THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW

Watch now or bookmark for later

There’s a new robot butler that does your laundry and gets you water. But it has a secret. It’s controlled by a human in the next room. Turns out the robot uprising is just a guy in a headset trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

Hit the link below to see what the robot looks like 👇

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

WEB WATERCOOLER

🏖️ Vacation rental ghosts: Booking a summer rental? Slow down, partner. Airbnb scams have jumped 30 times since 2023. The newest trick is super sneaky. Instead of fake websites, crooks are hijacking real verified host accounts. Yep, the ones with years of glowing reviews. Scammers take your money for a place that doesn’t exist, and you find out when you show up to an empty curb. Pay inside the app only, never by wire or gift card, and skip any off-platform link. 

Make $400,00 a year: That’s how much Anthropic wants to pay someone to decide whether Claude sounds like a helpful coworker or an overenthusiastic guidance counselor. The job listing for a head of copy and content has a price range of $320,000 to $400,000. They also want an enterprise art director (pay up to $385,000) to be the human creative direction for AI output. OpenAI and Perplexity are staffing up, too.

📡 Quick one that'll save you real money. The towers your phone connects to? AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile rent most of them. Consumer Cellular uses those very same towers and charges about half, or even less than that depending on your plan. Same coverage. Same calls. Way smaller bill. Switch now with code KIM50 for an extra $50 off. I'd say the big carriers dropped the ball, but they'd just charge you to pick it back up. 🏈 See for yourself.*

House for shares: Imagine handing over your house keys and getting private AI shares you might not be allowed to sell. That’s the weird new thing some sellers are testing, with a South Florida family saying their $2.6 million waterfront place could be paid for in OpenAI, Anthropic or SpaceX stock. Sounds glamorous until taxes walk in with a sledgehammer. Primary-home gains can get a $250,000 or $500,000 exclusion, but stock has its own tax mess, plus accredited-investor rules.

🚣‍♀️ Oar-some solo mission: The most captivating positive thing online right now? Kelsey Pfendler, 31, alone in a 24-foot rowboat in the middle of the Pacific. She left Monterey on May 21, rowing 2,400 miles to Oahu. Solo. Unsupported. No chase boat, no resupply. She makes her own drinking water and sleeps in short bursts. She's on pace to become the first American woman to pull it off, with 1.4 million people (including me!) cheering every stroke. Here she is on Facebook and Instagram. You got this, Kelsey! I’m hoping we can book her on my show after her journey!

KIM’S DAILY DEALS

As an Amazon Associate, some links pay us a commission at no extra cost to you. Keeps this newsletter free. Thank you.

⚠️ Better safe than sorry

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.

📻 Off-grid hero: Emergency radio (17% off, $31)
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Image: Leaton

🔋 Power reserve: A pack of AA & AAA batteries (39% off, $24, 48-count) is an easy prep move. Flashlights, smoke detectors and gear all run on ’em.

Easy escape plan: These car safety hammers (19% off, $13, two-pack) bust windows and cut seat belts in seconds. A glove-box must-have.

💧 Sip safely: The LifeStraw (36% off, $10) turns a sketchy tap, river or stream into safe drinking water. Perfect for hiking or if store shelves go bare.

Cut covered: Bactine’s liquid bandage (16% off, $6) numbs the sting, cleans and seals small wounds in one step. Toss it in your first aid kit or purse.

🌦️ Weather the unexpected: Stock up on more emergency essentials on my storefront.

Prices and deals were accurate at the time of publication.

DEVICE ADVICE

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Not a fan of Google’s AI Overview? Add a space, then -ai to the end of your search. For example: “When is Apple’s next big drop -ai.” Voila, regular websites like the good old days, minus the AI summaries. Psst, more little tricks like this in my free Splash of AI newsletter every Thursday.

Cut down doomscrolling: Put your phone screen into grayscale mode. It makes Instagram and Facebook way less entertaining. On iPhone, open Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters, then choose Grayscale. On Android, go to Settings > Accessibility > Vision enhancements > Color correction. Stay strong. You’ll survive.

⚙️ PC lagging after startup? Some apps can add themselves to your Windows startup list, which is why your computer feels slow when you turn it on. Turn on a warning. Head to Settings > System > Notifications. Then scroll down and toggle on Startup App Notification. Next time an app sneaks itself in, you’ll know.

Mac screenshot shortcut: Most folks wait for the screenshot thumbnail, hunt down the saved file, then still have to delete it later. Skip all that. Press Cmd + Shift + 4, select the area, then hold Control before you release. It copies to your clipboard. Paste it anywhere with Cmd + V. No cleanup necessary.

🎨 Design without the degree: You can make professional-looking social media posts, videos or flyers with Canva. It has ready-made templates for practically anything. Even that birthday card you forgot about. Pick one, swap in your own photos, text or clips, and that’s it. Bonus: Teachers can get premium features for free.

Be on the show! Got a question only I can answer? Spill it here. You might end up on the air with me. 

WHAT THE TECH?

Image: Philips

🌞 Fake sky, real mood

Light tells your body when to wake up and wind down. Problem is, most of us spend all day under lighting that never changes, and our internal clocks pay for it. Think being a casino all day but at least we have a clock.

Philips' new Skylight is an LED ceiling panel that fakes a real sky, sliding from cool morning blue to warm evening gold as the day goes.

Starts around $580. Steep, sure. Sun's out, sort of. I see uses for this tech.

LOGGING OUT …

🔜 Tomorrow: Cats and dogs are experts at hiding pain. Now the AI on your phone can read the tiny signs right off their faces.

The answer: A) Deliver the company’s official quarterly earnings report to investors. Yep. In May 2025, Klarna, the buy now, pay later giant, had CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski deliver the Q1 results. Except it wasn’t him. It was a hyperrealistic AI avatar wearing his face. The clone opened with, “It’s me, or rather my AI avatar.”

The only tells? It barely blinked, and the lip-sync was a hair off. Otherwise, eerily convincing.

👨🏼‍💼 Then it snowballed. Days later, Zoom’s CEO sent his own avatar to an earnings call. The CEO of Customers Bank had an AI clone read his remarks to Wall Street analysts. And Meta is reportedly building a photorealistic AI Zuckerberg, so tens of thousands of employees can “talk to him” while the real one skips the meeting.

Speaking of, my husband said he doesn’t understand the science behind cloning. I told him, “That makes two of us.” (Good one!)

🕵️‍♀️ They can’t scam you if they can’t find you: Every robocall, spam text and “hi, Grandma” scam starts the same way: A data broker sold your info. Your name, address, phone, email, even your relatives. Incogni scrubs you off hundreds of these sites and keeps scrubbing every single week. I set mine up once. Haven’t thought about it since. The spam dropped. The texts stopped. The scammers moved on to easier targets. Get 60% off right now.*

Here's what you learned today, free of charge: how to sweep your car for a hidden tracker (and why you never yank one out), that the "CEO" on that earnings call might've been an AI clone, how to ditch Google's AI Overview with one keystroke, and that one woman is rowing 2,400 miles across the Pacific alone right now. Not bad for five minutes.

🪜 Nobody jumps straight to the top of the ladder. You earn it one rung at a time, so keep climbing. Things are looking up! — Kim

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

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HOW’D WE DO?

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Leaton, Philips

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