Steve Wozniak on fighting internet scams Clutch Fire

At the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, the exhibits chart how technology got to where it is today. And there could be no better guide to this history than Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.

In 1976, Wozniak built the Apple 1, and from that he and Steve Jobs built a company. “Incredible times,” said Wozniak. “Just came on down wanting to build a neat product.”

Wozniak was the inventor, Jobs was the master salesman; and when Wozniak created the Apple II, Jobs had something new to sell: the first personal computer to display color. “That was the machine that really made personal computers go, because it was so fun,” Wozniak said. “So many breakthroughs in there that are just so far out-of-the-box.”

I asked, “You helped start the computer revolution that brought us where we are today – good or bad?”

“Well, it was good,” Wozniak replied, “until the internet came and it offered new business models, you know, ways to have power over other people and control a lot of customers. That’s when some of the bad started happening.”

And some of that “bad” has happened to Steve Wozniak, when a scam on YouTube was using his image to steal bitcoin. 

“Of course it’s fraud”  

Wozniak’s wife, Janet, learned of it from one of the victims. “I got an email on our web server, and it said, ‘When are you gonna send me my money?’ And I wrote back and I said, ‘What are you talking about?'”

The scammers had taken video of Wozniak talking about bitcoin. “And then, they put a nice frame around it with a Bitcoin address, [saying] that if you sent him any amount of bitcoin, he would send you double that back,” said Janet. “Of course it’s fraud.”

“Some people said they lost their life savings,” said Steve.

You might think that YouTube, owned by Google, would be quick to take down a fraudulent video using the image of Apple’s co-founder, but you’d be wrong. “We never got to YouTube; our lawyer has gotten to their lawyer, that’s all,” said Steve.

Brian Danitz, Wozniak’s lawyer, said, “We’ve asked YouTube over and over, and it keeps happening.”

So, Wozniak sued YouTube on behalf of some of those who lost money in the bitcoin scam. 

Jennifer Marion is one of those scammed. “I sent in 0.9 bitcoin, worth $59,000 at the time,” she said. Expecting to get more than $100,000 back, Marion said, “I got back nothing.”

I asked, “You didn’t think this is too good to be true? Doubling your money in minutes?”

“You know, in retrospect it seems so obvious that this must be a scam,” Marion said, “but in that moment, I was just comfortable at home, was on YouTube, a well-known platform. I was watching a video from a verified business. And in that moment, I viewed it like a business transaction. Like, if I was in a physical Google store and the Google store representative told me, ‘There’s a representative from a company over there,’ and they said, ‘Okay, we’re doing a special, 50% off if you’re buying cash,’ I kind of viewed it like that. It was kind of like a ‘buy one, get one free’ for a bitcoin.”

Wozniak said, “That’s a crime. You know, a good person, if you see a crime happening, you step in and you do something about it. You try to stop it.”

Wozniak’s lawsuit against YouTube has been tied up in court now for five years, stalled by federal legislation known as Section 230. Attorney Brian Danitz said, “Section 230 is a very broad statute that limits, if not totally, the ability to bring any kind of case against these social media platforms.”

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is sometimes called “the 26 words that created the internet.” It became law in 1996. It reads:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

“It says that anything gets posted, they have no liability at all,” said Wozniak. “It’s totally absolute.”

Google responded to our inquiry about Wozniak’s lawsuit with a statement from José Castañeda, of Google Policy Communications: “We take abuse of our platform seriously and take action quickly when we detect violations … we have tools for users to report channels that are impersonating their likeness or business.”

Janet Wozniak, however, says YouTube did nothing, even though she reported the scam video multiple times: “You know, ‘Please take this down. This is an obvious mistake. This is fraud. You’re YouTube, you’re helping dupe people out of their money,'” she said.

“They wouldn’t,” said Steve.

Jennifer Marion said, “I think that users in general, on YouTube, need to be cautious and know that YouTube isn’t fighting back. These scams that have been refined to be very effective and psychologically manipulative are allowed to continuously be put up on YouTube, so they’re there every day. So, you need to be aware that it’s not safe. Don’t think, ‘Oh, YouTube, Google be good,’ that kind of thing, that it’s safe. It’s not.”

YouTube is not the only platform used by scammers. They now operate across the internet. “Over $10 billion in AI scams are happening on the internet,” said Danitz. “$5 billion in cyber currency scams on the internet. We get contacted every week by people who have been scammed on the internet.”

“Look at spam, look at the phishing attempts just all over the place,” said Wozniak. “And there’s not enough real, I don’t know, muscle to fight it.”

As a pioneer of the personal computer, Wozniak’s goal was to give computing power to the people. The internet did that as well.

I said, “When the internet really began to be a public thing, it seemed to be there to democratize information.”

“Oh, I loved it for that!” said Wozniak. “You could talk to people all over the world. They could publish knowledge that they knew without having to go through a third-party book publisher.”

“What happened to that democratization of the internet?”

“Well, what happened to it was, companies figured out how to exploit it,” Wozniak replied. “Then came the social web and Google. Google had to make money. And the only way to make money is tracking you and selling it to advertisers.”

Wozniak sold most of his Apple stock in the mid-1980s when he left the company. Today, though, he still gets a small paycheck from Apple for making speeches and representing the company.

He says he’s proud to see Apple become a trillion-dollar company. “Apple is still the best,” he said. “And when Apple does things I don’t like, and some of the closeness I wish it were more open, I’ll speak out about it. Nobody buys my voice!”

I asked, “Apple listen to you when you speak out?”

“No,” Wozniak smiled. “Oh, no. Oh, no.”

     
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Produced by Christine Weicher. Editor: Ben McCormick.

     
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