🚨 The 3-second scam

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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: Your home router is leaking. Yes, yours. I’ll show you the 30-second check that tells you if strangers are already on your Wi-Fi.

Hello to you this Cinco de Mayo, {{first_name | friend}}. Picture your emoji keyboard for a second. You’ve got pizza, burger, hot dog, burrito. Even a floppy disk and a VCR tape (two things nobody under 30 has ever touched). But Taco Bell got 33,000 signatures on a petition to make one certain food emoji happen.

🌮 The fast-food franchise sent the petition straight to the Unicode Consortium, the small Silicon Valley nonprofit that controls every emoji on every phone in the world. What year did the taco emoji get added to your phone? A) 2007, B) 2012, C) 2015 or D) Last Tuesday, when Big Tortilla finally won? The truth is wrapped up at the end.

📞 Be honest with yourself: Your phone bill is on autopay, and you haven’t looked at it since 2019. If you’re over 50 and paying more than $100 a month, stop wasting money. Get one line for $35 and the second month free. That’s $900 back in your pocket annually. See how much you can save now.* — Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

It’s a Sunday. She’s finishing up breakfast. Her phone rings. It’s her daughter Sarah.

It’s her daughter sobbing. The cry she’s only heard once, when her dog died. “Mom. Mom. He’s gone. There was an accident. Oh, God, Mom.”

She sits down because her knees won’t hold her. Her husband is at the stove and can hear his daughter through the speaker.

Married seven months ago. Three months pregnant. The babymoon in Mexico.

The voice says there was a Jet Ski, hit the rocks. The hospital won’t release his body until the family pays. Cash, wired right away. The hotel can help process it, but it has to be in the next hour or they move him to a government facility and it’ll be weeks, maybe months, before anything can be done to bring his remains back home. “Mom, please. I can’t do this alone.”

The mother reaches for her purse. The father opens his banking app. They wired $18,000.

It wasn’t Sarah. Sarah was eating breakfast and reading a book at a resort beachfront café in Cabo, phone face-down on the table.

The voice was AI. The sobbing was AI. The scammer pulled three seconds of Sarah’s voice from a wedding video her bridesmaid posted to Instagram seven months ago. McAfee found that voice clones from three-second samples hit 85% accuracy and that 70% of Americans surveyed couldn’t tell a cloned voice from the real one.

The BBB put out a fresh warning in April 2026. 

The old script was about an arrested grandkid. The new script scrapes social media for life events. Engagements. Pregnancies. Vacations. Reunions. Then they call parents with the version that gets the wallet open fastest.

One fix works every time. Costs nothing.

A family code word. One word your immediate family agrees on tonight. Not a pet’s name. Not your street. Nothing that’s been on social media. Make it weird. Pickleback. Otterpop. Walnut.

Any emergency call asking for money, you ask for the word. If the caller can’t say it? Hang up.

Three more things this week:

Sarah’s parents got $2,000 back. The bank could only claw back what hadn’t cleared.

Pick the word. Tell the family. Lock it in tonight.

🗣️ TEXT/POST THIS STAT: AI can clone your voice from 3 seconds of audio. 70% of people can’t tell the difference. The fix? One family code word. Get the full play at GetKim.com.

📩 Send this to someone who is about to get married, take a honeymoon or post their pregnancy on Instagram. Share this now:

(Starts at 11:26) Apple’s foldable iPhone is nearly here, and it’s bringing a massive screen, a titanium hinge and a record-breaking price tag. It’s an iPad Mini when you need it and a phone when you don’t. Is this just a pricey flip phone?

Listen on Komando.com →

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

The official trap: A phishing crew is using Google’s AppSheet to send fake Meta policy violation emails that sail through spam checks. They tell Facebook Business owners their page gets deleted in 24 hours unless they click appeal. Malwarebytes says the campaign has snagged 30,000 victims, 68% American. The lesson is boring: Urgent plus official often equals trap. Don’t fall for it.

📓 Diary spills beans: Romance is at the point where the diary talks back. A woman recently sat at her boyfriend’s computer, opened ChatGPT and read every conversation he’d had with it. Therapy-adjacent complaining about her and their relationship. Yeah, they broke up. ChatGPT logs are diary entries with time stamps. Shared computer? Log out. Use a Temporary Chat.

Prison gets takeout: Somewhere a guy is doing time and getting better delivery service than the rest of us. Federal prisons have seen 2,000+ drone incidents at 122 facilities since 2020, dropping drugs, weapons, escape tools, phones and crab legs. Crab legs! One warden called it DoorDash for inmates, which is funny until you remember the menu includes weapons. Prisons are installing netting, using jammers and detection systems and, get this, deploying trained falcons. 

Pouch came up empty: Everyone's cheering school phone bans like they're the cure all. The new NBER study tracked 43,000 schools using Yondr lock pouches. The verdict? Test scores barely budged. Attendance? Same. Cyberbullying? Same. Disciplinary incidents actually spiked in year one. Phones aren't the disease. They're the symptom. Until parents put their own phones down, kids aren't going to fall in love with algebra because a pouch ate their TikTok.

🙏🏻 The Facebook miracle: A teen with bone cancer secretly logged into his mom’s Facebook account because doctors said he was running out of time. He needed an experimental drug, but it wasn’t approved for kids his age. The post blew up overnight, strangers shared it, doctors noticed and a pharma company stepped in. He got the drug, started treatment and is responding well. Sometimes Facebook is the worst. Sometimes it’s a lifeline.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: YouTube needs constant hints. A few questionable late-night clicks can wreck your home page. Tap the three dots next to the thumbnail of a video you don’t want to see again and select Not interested. And if there’s one particular influencer you’re done seeing, tap the three dots again and choose Don’t recommend channel. Your algorithm should get the message.

👂 Have you checked your ears? Apple ran a hearing study with the University of Michigan and found that lots of folks don’t realize they have hearing loss. They tend to walk slower, too. Wild. Got a pair of AirPods Pro 3? Open Settings, tap your AirPods at the top, then hit Take a Hearing Test > Get Started. You’ll be done in five minutes. Do it in a quiet room. Not medical advice, but it could help you catch a problem early.

Pay for Lyft with miles: Lyft lets you pay for rides with United Airlines miles. You need to be a United MileagePlus member and link your United and Lyft accounts. And yes, it works on everyday trips, airport runs and premium rides. Look for the Pay with miles option when booking in the Lyft app. Save your cash for overpriced airport coffee.

🛡️ Your antivirus is a sitting duck: Today’s malware uses sophisticated AI to bypass old-school security. If your protection is more than a year old, you’re basically leaving the front door unlocked. Webroot is built for the now, it’s lightning-fast, blocks threats in real-time and won’t hog your system resources. Deal: Get 62% off Webroot Essentials today.* 

Android apps need boundaries: If new downloads keep popping up on your home screen, there’s a setting causing it. Long-press an empty spot on your home screen, tap Settings and turn off Add new apps to Home screen. To clean up what’s already there, long-press an app icon and tap Remove. Phew, your wallpaper can breathe again.

🔐 Hide important files: VeraCrypt is a free tool that lets you create an encrypted vault on your computer or USB drive. Think of it like a password-protected container for anything you want kept private. Unlock it, drag your files in, then lock it again. Anyone who steals your laptop or USB won’t be able to see what’s inside without the password. Works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Nothing says comfort like being emotionally profiled in 4K. After decades architecting consumer robots like the iRobot vacuum, Colin Angle wants you to bond with his new creation: a soft, doe-eyed machine that reacts to your mood without saying a word. 

The Familiar uses AI to interpret gestures, tone and context, deciding whether to approach you or give you space. It builds a long-term social graph of you, and data is stored locally. 

Basically, it’s a reverse-Tamagotchi, where you’re the animal it’s trying to help keep alive. More pics and vids here.

🔜 Tomorrow: Your router is the front door to your entire digital life. And it’s wide open. I’ll walk you through the dead giveaways your Wi-Fi’s been hijacked (slow speeds are just the start) and the five-minute fixes that boot freeloaders and criminals off your network for good. Don’t miss it.

The answer: C) 2015. This means for the first eight years of the iPhone’s existence, you could text someone a floppy disk but not a taco. Plot twist: Unicode insists the taco was in the works before Taco Bell launched its petition. (Sure, Unicode. Sure.)

💁🏼‍♀️ Either way, Taco Bell cashed the check. They built a #TacoEmojiEngine on Twitter that turned any emoji combo into a custom taco GIF, racked up half a million tweets in five days. Now that’s something to taco ’bout. Bad geek joke incoming: What did the IT support guy do after eating Taco Bell? He troubleshat. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Speaking of, let’s keep the emoji train going. Coming up in tomorrow’s trivia, one emoji got dethroned, and humanity’s new favorite says a lot about our collective condition. You don’t want to use this certain emoji anymore.

💲 What’s your phone bill really costing you? If you’re paying over $100 a month, you’re overspending. If you’re 50 or older, you can get one unlimited line for $35 and your second month free with my exclusive link. Same networks. Solid coverage. No contract. See how much you could save with Consumer Cellular.*

P.S. Someone in this Kim Komando community is sitting at 86 referrals through “Share The Current.” Fourteen away from a virtual sit-down with me. How fun! Meanwhile, there are prizes at every step along the way. A mug. A hat. A hoodie. And my AI Prompt Hack Pack (12 AI prompts that I use, and you will, too!) the second you hit three referrals. Your link is at the bottom of every issue.

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

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, HELLEE, Familiar Machines & Magic

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