It's Wednesday morning. Time for the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. Today they talked about the Samsung Galaxy Fold, the fake 5-star reviews on Amazon, and how much your tax info is worth on the dark web.
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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Transcript:
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 04/24/2019
Samsung Fold Problem - How Much Your Tax Info Sells For - Matt's Bad Amazon Headphones
Craig Peterson 0:00 Hey, everybody, we talked this morning about the Samsung fold problem, how much your tax and photos worth on the dark web and Matt bought some headphones online on Amazon based on the star ratings. And guess what? They aren't so good. So we talked about that as well. So here we go Craig Peterson with Ken and Matt in Maine, this morning.
Matt Gagnon0:26 WGAN Wednesday morning, that time and that day means Craig Peterson, man about town and tech guru joins us as he does now. What's going on, Craig?
Craig 0:37 Hey, good morning. Caribou still has snow on the ground. But that's a shocker.
Ken Altshuler 0:45 Which is why we should annex it to Canada. It doesn't belong in America, get rid of it.
So I didn't see this on your, we're not going, I'm sure you've talked about the Samson folding tablet fiasco. And since I love to talk about how Samsung sucks. Any comment on Samsung?
Craig 1:09 You summed it up there in one word.
Ken 1:11 Well, thank you for joining us.
Matt 1:16 Oh, you fanboys.
Ken 1:17 I haven't had that with my iPhone, Matt.
Matt 1:19 At least they're trying to develop something new.
Craig 1:22 It's a problem. And of course, we're talking about these folding things. With the Galaxy Fold. The screens are breaking and people are kind of getting upset. But it's a cool new technology. Matt's right for once, Ken. You know.
Ken 1:37 Matt's never right. Ever.
Craig 1:40 Ever? Oh, come on. I was trying to give you one Matt. So here's a problem. It's, how do I even explain this? Okay, here we go. I've got one Matt. The Apple MacBook Pro has a similar problem. And that is that when you're bending these things, sometimes those cables are, and the conductors are extremely, extremely small. And when you bend them a lot, of course you get mechanical breakdowns and that's what's happening right now with the galaxy fold and with the MacBook Pro, in fact, both companies are scrambling Apple's scrambling to get a new MacBook Pro out this September. And it looks like they're kind of pushing it up a little sooner than they had wanted to. Because of the two big problems with the MacBook Pro. One is the keyboard is still an issue for a lot of people. I just I don't like the feel of it. I don't. Ken, you like the feel your MacBook Pro keyboard right?
Ken 2:42 I do. Well, I kind of like the raised a little better. I've got a use of this. But that when I was raised lettering, I liked it a little better.
Craig 2:52 Yeah, I'd like to the old one little bit better. And then there's some problems with the cables in the screen there. And then the Galaxy Fold from Samsung is incredibly new technology. No one's really tried to do this quite this way before. And so it's it's kind of falling on its face. But also Samsung doesn't have the profit margin Apple does to invest in some of this stuff. So it's impressive what they did. But I'm not sure it'll ever be, well ever is a long time. Right. But anytime soon?
Matt 3:22 I don't know, I guess I don't understand. And I'm a Samsung aficionado, if you will. So I don't get why you'd want it. I don't want to fold my phone. Is it just because you want to get a bigger screen? I guess. And so you can fold it that way? I don't care that much. Yeah, I mean, where is the demand for this? That I mean, I want to have a tablet, but I wanted the size of a phone. I really don't a tablet the size of my phone.
Craig 3:47 Well, it's the phablet thing, right? But let's go back again to Apple as an example, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Henry Ford, let's go way back to Henry Ford. He said if we had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. And Steve Jobs said of you know, we came up with the with the iPod and then the iPhone. And it, nobody was asking for it. And then when they came up with these bigger ones, like the one I have sitting right in front of me right now, they came up with a bigger screens and displays people were not asking for that either. And yet, in all of those cases, they became very, very popular. So as a business person, I've got to say, you, you have to what's the word cannibalize your own business, even if you have a business model and your business is doing well, if you don't compete against yourself with some new innovations, someone else is going to compete against yourself with that same innovation that you didn't bother doing. So I've got to in this case, praise Samsung for trying it. And I also agree with both you guys, I don't really want one that big. I have an iPad, if I need it, you know something that's bigger, but you know, having it in my pocket is going to be is going to be problematic. So I think that's why. So good, good on them for trying something new. But they definitely did not pull it off.
Matt 5:10 Talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us at this time, every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Craig, when I buy stuff on Amazon, I admit that I am one of the people that will you know, take like three different I actually, here's a good example, I just bought some wireless headphones, so that I could go running and not have the stupid wires in my face all the time. When I did that, I found like four or five different ones on Amazon and I checked out the reviews to see what people thought of them. And I, I will say I gave a couple extra points to the one that had better reviews. And I ended up buying it and I'm not terribly happy with it. Was I taken was was that were there a lot of phony reviews that are on these Amazon items and has this become a problem?
Craig 5:53 Well, that's a really good point because there's an article I have up on my site this week. It's from The Hustle. But this one particular was headphones, his iPhone plug it has that little iPhone connector on it. And it was ranked five stars, almost it had almost 4000 5-star reviews. And yet when the guy order did, that connector came right off broke off for like almost the first time right in his iPhone when he was trying to use it. And it's it is a real problem in something that we've kind of known about for a while. But the reason that's happening I think is very interesting. We used to have a, we still do, a lot of people here in the US who are buying stuff in China or from someplace else. They're shipping it over here. And then they are selling it on Amazon, they're reselling. And what's been happening over the last two to three years is these Chinese companies that are making these things have figured out, well, maybe we can get rid of that middleman. And so they've been shipping directly to Amazon. We're not going to get into all of the details here of how that all works. But they ship their stuff over and then they sell it. So there are some things that are going on that are kind of bad. You know, there's 82% of Americans, both all probably all three of us, right? Who checked the reviews, who checked the stars in it. But it turns out that there are sellers in China, who are paying people here in the US, they have secret Facebook groups, they have all closed Facebook groups, and they have other ways of communicating. And they will have you buy their product, they'll reimburse you for having bought it from Amazon. And then they'll give you an extra 10 bucks if you give it a five star review online. And so this guy got into this, he started poking around, he was invited to be a reviewer of this nice little iPhone charger cable. And he found out that there is a big underbelly here there's a site you might want to check out called Fakespot, F-A-K-E-S-P-O-T. And people are looking at these five star reviews and Fakespot had a look at these. And found that in fact, there there there is star inflation going on. And they use some interesting ways to try and figure it out. But kind of on average, it's about a half a star inflation on some of these products. And when maybe as many as 30% of all of these reviews online are fake. And that is a real problem, Matt.
Matt 8:46 So I have this to blame for my wireless headphones not working the way that I want them to. Excellent.
Craig 8:50 It might be.
Matt 8:53 I really just want to blame someone, Craig. So I'm gonna go ahead and pick this and call it good.
Craig 8:57 Call it good. When you get right down to it, read the reviews and see if they're all the same. I found reviews, I did a search online about this that said I haven't tried this product but and do a search for that. Go to Google and tell it to search Amazon for I haven't tried this product. And you will find reviews where people are giving a five star review and saying I haven't tried this product. So look for those, when you're looking at a product and then also look for people saying almost the exact same thing over and over again. And for me something that spooks me badly is very poor English. And that means that they aren't you know, they aren't people who can speak English well. So maybe they're legit. Maybe they're great people. But I get a little nervous about it.
Ken 9:53 We are down with Craig Peterson. He's our tech guru.
Matt 9:58 Peterson.
Ken 9:59 Exactly what I said. He joins us, everyone Wednesday at 7:38. Sorry for the cough.
Matt 10:06 We're now at 7:48. 10 minutes into the segment.
Ken 10:09 I didn't. I know, but he joins us at 7:38.
Matt 10:11 I'm just saying.
Ken 10:12 I didn't know the dark web, I know dark web deals with a lot of bad, you know, kiddie porn, but I didn't know it looked at my taxes.
Matt 10:23 Are you saying that you can Donald Trump's taxes on the dark web?
Ken 10:26 Yeah. Can we go down and find out?
Craig 10:29 You will if the congressional committee catch all of them. Here's what's going on, I want to give everyone a quick piece of advice here. And that is if you have filed an extension for your taxes, file them as soon as you possibly can. Because what's happening is the bad guys are doing a couple of things. We already know they've got your passwords, we already know they've got your accounts. And we already know that most Americans are still using one of 10 passwords, people. And because of that what they've done now is the bad guys are hijacking People's Bank Accounts unbeknownst to them. So you can still use your bank account, but the bad guys have access to it. And then they are filing fake tax returns. And they're filing those big tax returns. And then they're pulling the money, all of it, including your tax return out of your bank account. And so that's how they get the guys you say well, I don't get much money. Yeah, but you're looking forward to that $500 tax refund. Well so are the bad guys. And they are paying online, anywhere from $1 for up to $52 for W-2s, 1040s, your name, your social security number and your birthdate is worth as little as 19 cents on the dark web. But just think of that. It can take you 300 hours to recover your credit and name and it's only worth 19 cents. And you can if you want to become a bad guy, you can get a how to guide to cash in on a victim's tax return for only $70 on the dark web. So it's our money, our identity isn't worth much. But if it's worth more than 17 cents to you, maybe you should change your passwords and use a password manager like 1Password or Lastpass online because man this is a real problem. And the best way to deal with this particular the taxes is to file your return early before the bad guys file one on your behalf.
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