accounts,

you know, your landlines, your mobile numbers, your emails, they're all being profiled to you.

And there are AI tools out there where you can say, okay, go and take a look at this person.

Tell me all the phone numbers and emails associated with that person.

And it'll get like your brothers and sisters and parents' phone numbers and emails as well.

But it will profile to you.

And And an example of this is a guy wanted to show me, he wanted to demo a simple AI sales lead tool to me.

Now, are there other sort of free things that people could do, you know, start doing 10 minutes from now? Or, you know, what do you guys do to help protect folks from SIM swapping?

out of the trap.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So I started out in the telco industry.

I came out very young.

AT&T hired me out of my master's program and they waited for me for nine months.

So I got lucky out of a decent sized class where they picked me and said, we'll wait for you.

And And I had been a coder in college, and that's how I put myself through college.

So to that point, can you tell the audience a little bit more about Afani, how it does things differently?

And so after everything had happened and you had figured it out, did you have any recourse or what were your next steps?

Yeah, the recourse, that's a great question because that's when I discovered the arbitration clauses.

And At the time, in terms of money, what it was stolen from me, I had 2.2 Bitcoin stolen from me out of my Coinbase account.

And at that time, Bitcoin was like $800, I think, per Bitcoin.

And so it was like a week later, I just went out and bought another Bitcoin.

And so it wasn't this feeling of like, okay, this is like, and I, and I had no idea.

I never thought Bitcoin would go to, you know, what it is today.

Is that what you're talking about? Or are you talking about making obfuscated even further than that?

Oh, wow.

And so I had built up, say, around 30,000 followers on social media and 25,000 downloads on the app.

At the time, if you search for crypto reward apps, that was number one.

And I hadn't really even launched it yet.

I was just sort of experimenting and developing.

We had like, I don't know, 12, 13 apps on the app.

on the play store.

Now, can you explain what Ifani does to protect people? Is it part of the network? Is it a network? To help our listeners understand, where does Ifani fit in to help us with something like that?

Right.

They'd go and get their garbage and open it up and look for mobile phone bills and could use that.

But at this point, and I've put a couple of videos out on this over the last 18 months, data privacy in the US is dead.

It's dead.

Your information, my information has been breached.

Everybody listening to this has been breached 10, 20, 30 different times and breached in a way that we don't have control over it.

there's not really much you can do because it's like government organizations get breached hospital systems get breached uh travel agencies get breached and then of course most people will voluntarily give up their information so they sign up for like free ai tools or um There's all kinds of free tools that people volunteer their information out on.

Now, one of the questions I made some notes here, just one of the things I was thinking about, Why is mobile phones right now the biggest security risk? Why do you think that

Wow.

To make a 90-day story just very, very short.

It was very painful.

I didn't sleep for like 90 days.

I didn't use Wi-Fi for like 90 days because I was afraid it would mask.

Because I started to think about what happens if I go to bed at 10 p.m., my mobile account's taken at 11, and then they port it back at 5 a.m.

So if I woke up at 3 a.m., 5 a.m., 7 a.m., the first thing I do is grab my phone.

My voice is my password, yeah.

SS7, talk to us about how it is that we simply cannot shake that protocol completely.

Yeah, well, we're getting close to it.

So SS7 came out, it was invented in the mid 70s.

And then it was deployed in the late 70s, early 80s.

It was signaling, whenever you called an 800 number, or when you called somebody, it was basically just a signaling to tell the networks how to connect the path together.

But the problem was, is that The protocol grew and it was being used all over the world, but it wasn't built with security in mind and it wasn't encrypted.

And so you couldn't just wake up one day and just change it because then all of a sudden the whole world could not communicate with each other.

So how did your own victim experience play out?

Tell us how you got not only into cybersecurity, but how did you get into this whole space to begin with, you know, this and became an entrepreneur? We'd like to get a little bit of background.

Yeah, I have to go back a very long ways.

I was one of those lucky people where my next door neighbor, my best friend's father bought the first Apple computer that had come out as a little kid typing on it and typing, you know, basic code out of out of that was in a insert in one of the computer magazines to create a game.

And that's kind of how I first got into it.

And then just just my mind works very well with computers.

I've never really taken like computer classes, but I can program and I've Put myself through college programming, writing in like four different languages as a consultant while I was going to school.

Put myself through the bachelor's and master's by programming, even though I didn't end up with a computer science degree.

Yeah,

portability project.

So at one point in time, up until the early 90s, when you bought an 800 number, you were stuck at whatever carrier you bought it from or leased it from.

So if you got it from AT&T, you couldn't switch it over to Verizon or T-Mobile.

So as part of the breakup, 800 portability was one of the things that was required by the FCC, meaning that if you had an 800 number from, say, Verizon, or WorldCom or whoever you're leasing it from at that time, if you got a better rate, you could switch it over to AT&T or switch it over to Verizon because basically they have monopolies on the 800 numbers.

So I was assigned as one of two people to control SS7, what they called SS7 translations, which was all these commands that you would put into the SS7 network.

that allowed the portability of 800 numbers.

And AT&T in New Jersey, they'd create all these commands.

What were you doing in 2018 when this happened to you?

But I wanted you to keep going, but I just want to throw that in there because I think you're also talking in some respects about all of those things are now a constant noise, even if we're not paying attention to them anymore.

Yeah, and my experience has been is when a company tries to roll out security measures, people spend more time trying to figure out how to get around them.

Sure.

And so that becomes another issue.

Now, in terms of what Afani does and why we're necessary and why the carriers can't do this is, first of all, why it's needed.

And so what people kind of forget about the fact that they get secure phones, no matter how secure that phone is, they secure their operating system, they have VPN and antivirus, and they might have an MDM attached to their company, and they could invest all they want in securing that phone.

And the problem is with a SIM swap is that when a SIM swap is when a nefarious person gets your mobile service, to stop pointing at your phone to pointing to the SIM or eSIM over in the hands of the phone of that nefarious person.

for sure.

I think a lot of business owners and people with a lot of assets to protect will find it interesting at every level.

Yeah, I think the origin story is like one of the unique things about Afani.

And it's because it started out with multiple tragedies that happened to two different people and that's how we met.

So to the back story of how it happened for me is I was driving to visit my parents.

I was in the middle of Arizona between Phoenix and Tucson.

And I was talking to my father because I was on my way to visit my parents and my phone just cut off.

And I thought, well, I'm in the middle of the desert.

Sidebar.

So is it even safe to use password managers given these breaches?

So.

In terms of a seed phrase, I would say it's never safe.

I would never put a seed phrase in anything that is software based.

And in fact, the latest cold storage wallet I set up was a seedless solution.

So it doesn't even have a seed phrase.

The seed phrase is basically three different cards to set it up.

For those who are not familiar with Afani service, can you talk about it and how it adds these layers of protection so that people aren't at risk of SIM swaps and other hacks?