Opt-Inspire's Rural & Agricultural Expansion with Fraud Protect

Opt-Inspire is dedicated to spreading awareness about cybersafety and digital literacy, especially in underserved and vulnerable communities. Our organization’s goal extends beyond education to protecting and empowering the communities we serve, and our workshops are designed to achieve this goal through their interactive nature, engaging attendees and ensuring the material truly sticks. Currently, Opt-Inspire serves the senior community and families and children. However, expanding on its commitment to vulnerable communities, Opt-Inspire has grown into rural and agricultural outreach, an initiative led by Rural & Agricultural Community Ambassador Colin Merkley, Founder of Fraud Protect, LLC. These communities have historically been underserved, making them a natural fit for Opt-Inspire’s mission. Colin specializes in this area because he himself grew up in rural Nevada to a family involved in Cattle ranching. His passion for keeping these communities safe is powered by his experiences and background in cybersecurity and fraud prevention, which truly drives the program forward. 

To begin the expansion, Colin recently conducted a workshop during Anpiro’s national sales meeting in Oklahoma City on Aug 4th. Colin’s presentation covered financial fraud, including phishing, impersonation, AI voice scams, and other tactics, focusing heavily on fraud types that are common in rural and agricultural areas. He broke the five main signs of a scam down, including looking for an unknown number, an abbreviated name, scare tactics, odd grammar, and finally, telling you to open links. You can spot red flags by looking for unexpected contact, requests for personal information, payment demands, poor grammar or strange links, pressure to act immediately, and also being told to keep it a secret or lie. Attendees then worked through practice examples, applying these signs and red flags to determine whether sample messages were scams or legitimate, putting their new knowledge into practice.

Colin also outlined several key strategies: be skeptical, safeguard personal information, and always verify a sender or caller’s identity. His guiding phrase is pause, verify, and reflect. He outlined the best practices on social media, such as thinking before you click, following trustworthy sources, and using privacy settings, and then he went into the best practices for general cybersecurity, such as using strong passwords, two-factor authentication, and marking suspicious messages as junk or spam. Additionally, he says that sometimes it can be important to freeze your credit, limit social media details, and review the public search results for your name, phone number, and address. 

If something happens to you, Colin recommends the following steps: contact your bank or financial institution, contact local law enforcement and request a police report, report scams to the FTC, report internet-enabled crime to IC3, for older adult fraud concerns, contact the DOJ Elder Fraud Hotline or AARP, and share what happened with trusted family, neighbors, and community groups. He closed by encouraging everyone to stay informed, revisit the strategies from the presentation, and foster open communication about these experiences. Talking about getting scammed can feel embarrassing, but doing so helps protect others in the community.