{"id":655,"date":"2009-09-01T01:38:53","date_gmt":"2009-09-01T06:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=655"},"modified":"2009-09-13T00:09:34","modified_gmt":"2009-09-13T05:09:34","slug":"talking-about-google-work-from-home-scams-on-good-morning-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2009\/talking-about-google-work-from-home-scams-on-good-morning-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking about Google work from home scams on Good Morning America"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was on Good Morning America this morning, interviewed for a story about the many online work-at-home scams that are floating around the web these days. Here’s a link to the story on the web site<\/a>, and here’s a direct link to the video<\/a><\/del>. Edit: I guess GMA’s urls don’t really work, the actual video at the link keeps changing. I even used their “link to this” button! I’ll try to find a more permanent url.<\/em> I would embed the video for you here but unfortunately ABCNews doesn’t seem to allow embedding. <\/p>\n

This is a very important story – these scams employ a number of social engineering techniques to seem trustworthy and they are tricking people who are desperate for work out of their money. The folks at GMA did a good job explaining the issue without getting too technical and confusing – please forward this on to anyone you know who’s wondering about schemes like these. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

If you’ve clicked through and watched the video, you might have noticed something – they got my name wrong! I assure you that I am, and always have been Jason Morrison and not James Morrison.<\/p>\n

Besides getting ribbed by coworkers ad friends, this naming mishap is propagating to local ABC affiliates<\/a>. How long until I’m forced to change my name just to convince everyone I’m really me?<\/p>\n

This is my second trip to TV as a Googler, last year I was interviewed on The Morning Show in Australia for our Google Docs-based baby name poll<\/a>. This issue is much more serious, so I did more preparation this time. It’s hard to boil down important information into small pieces for broadcast news. My natural tendency is to explain, which works well when I’m giving a presentation on a technical topic but doesn’t work as well in a 90-second segment for a non-technical audience. <\/p>\n

They actually filmed a lot more than what you see – it took about a half hour to get through all the questions and some establishing shots. I’m not too worried that they only grabbed a couple of snippets from the interview – I am, after all, just a geeky guy trying to warn people about uncouth spammers, not a television personality. It’s quite possible that I didn’t give them a lot of usable film. The important thing is that the info is getting out there.<\/p>\n

By the way, this is one of the things I like about working for Google – I’m not sure most companies would go out and tell people about a scam using the company logo<\/a>. I think in the long term, anything we can do to educate and protect our users is beneficial. <\/p>\n

Also, notice that they put me right out in front of the camera – Google is one of the few companies that will send journalists right to someone who really knows about an issue, rather than always using PR professionals and spokespeople. I bet the idea of having a programmer speak on national TV is horrifying to most companies. <\/p>\n

So how did I (or this James person) do? Should they hide me back in the cubicles?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was on Good Morning America this morning, interviewed for a story about the many online work-at-home scams that are floating around the web these days. Here’s a link to the story on the web site, and here’s a direct link to the video. Edit: I guess GMA’s urls don’t really work, the actual video […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[672,673,80,671,663,220,116],"class_list":["post-655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-abc-news","tag-good-morning-america","tag-google","tag-google-money-tree","tag-scam","tag-spam","tag-video"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":662,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655\/revisions\/662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}