Recognizing persuasion techniques helps you make more informed financial decisions.

Julia Chin, founder of JFourth Solutions, joined me to talk about how financial literacy, inclusion, and crime prevention intersect, and why recognizing persuasion and manipulation is essential to protecting ourselves from financial harm.

What Stood Out 

• Financial literacy, inclusion, and consumer protection work together to support better financial decisions.
• Recognizing persuasion and manipulation helps people identify potential financial exploitation.
• Emotional stress, loneliness, and urgency can increase vulnerability to scams.
• AI can make scams more personalized, making awareness and human connection increasingly important.

The Bottom Line: Financial readiness includes recognizing when you're being pressured and asking better questions before making a financial decision.

 🎥 Watch this episode below: 

🎧 Listen to the podcast below or on your favorite podcast app. 

Connect with Julia Chin: 

• JFourth Solutions Website: https://www.jfourthsolutions.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pekyee-julia-chin/
• Tripwire Newsletter (Substack): https://thetripwire.substack.com/
• The Fourth Perspective (LinkedIn Newsletter): https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7421859851661877248/

Book:

• Chronicles of the Technosaurus by Julia Chin (Amazon)

Referenced: 

• Dignity and Financial Literacy on The Get Ready Money Podcast with Peter Kwadwo Asare Nyarko (YouTube)
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Scammers with Cathy Sikorski, Cameron Huddleston and Neil Granger on the Get Ready Before Life Happens Podcast (watch or listen)
• How Financial Resilience Protects People from Scams with Julia Chin on the Get Ready Before Life Happens Podcast (watch or listen)

Bio: 

Julia Chin has spent 36 years fighting financial crime , not with a badge, but with knowledge. From audit rooms to boardrooms, she's seen how financial systems can both protect and exclude the people they're meant to serve — and how financial criminals exploit that gap. Today, through JFourth Solutions, her newsletter Tripwire (co-authored with her partner in crime, Ren Chang), and The Fourth Perspective on LinkedIn, Julia champions financial literacy as protection, helping individuals and professionals ask the right questions, spot the red flags, and build the kind of resilience that survives life's shocks. Her belief: everyone has a role to play in making our financial world safer - no badge required.

This episode is a collaboration with The Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards (the MAIAs) which celebrate the increasingly important work being done to help people understand money better. Learn more: https://www.maiawards.org.  

Transcript

Tony Steuer:
Recognizing persuasion techniques is part of making better financial decisions.

Welcome back to Get Ready: Before Life Happens. I’m your host, Tony Steuer.

Today, I’m pleased to be joined again by Julia Chin.

Julia, welcome back to Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

Julia Chin:
Hello, Tony. Thank you so much for having me again. I’m so honored.

Tony:
I’m honored to have you.

As we were talking pre-show, you’ve been doing some really powerful writing on LinkedIn. Quite a few of your posts inspired me to say, “We have to talk again.”

Let’s launch in with a conversation about how financial literacy, financial inclusion, and financial crime are connected.

Julia:
Good question.

This is a question I get asked quite a few times because these are three areas I’m very passionate about. They don’t seem to be connected: financial inclusion, financial literacy, and fighting financial crime.

They seem like separate disciplines with separate teams, separate conferences, separate budgets, and separate skill sets.

Over the years, especially in the last four years or so, I noticed something.

I’ll give you an example.

My cousin drives a tour bus for a living. He doesn’t have compliance training, a banking background, or anything like that. But when I described how money muling works, he didn’t blink.

He said, “Oh, this is happening,” and he was able to describe to me how it happens because he had watched his colleagues, fellow bus drivers, become money mules.

So people outside the financial system are aware of financial crimes. They are exposed to it. They just don’t have the language for it.

That is the other thing, especially for blue-collar workers or people who don’t have financial literacy training. What could they get themselves into?

This is where financial literacy comes in. It helps make sure they know and understand that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

I also believe that the majority of human beings out there want to do good. We want to be good people. Only a very small percentage of people are not.

But look at this situation. Say, for example, money muling. If I am a mother with three children and I don’t have a job, and someone comes up and says, “Can I borrow your bank account? For every $100,000 you let me move through your bank account, you can keep $10,000.”

That could be really attractive.

Maybe I say, “No, I’m not interested.” But say one of my children falls sick. Do you think I would take it?

This is where having that financial literacy, awareness, and understanding is important.

And when we talk about financial literacy, we also want to talk about financial inclusion.

There are two parts to it. People still need access to the banking system and to be able to get loans. And even when they are able to get loans, we want to make sure they are not in a predatory environment or becoming over-indebted.

All of that comes together, and financial crime naturally sits in there.

So I would say the three of them form a trinity.

Tony:
I think so.

As you and I talked about, we need to back up before financial literacy and talk about how people are thinking, how they recognize these tactics, and where people are.

You wrote a powerful LinkedIn article on this as well. Somebody who is struggling may not be in the position to say no to something like money muling if the other choices are their kids not having medicine or not being able to survive.

That makes it much harder to say no to those things.

How does that play in for you? Could you expand on what you wrote about this?

Julia:
To me, this got me thinking about the design of products.

When it comes to product development, a lot of people think about compliance by design. That means making sure you comply with all the regulations.

But that is the minimum. Otherwise, you get yourself into trouble and you lose your license.

Then comes the other part. This probably became more popular since we started to have more scams, or “scandemic,” as we call it.

I term it security by design.

Compliance by design is a given. Then we also want to make sure our tools, apps, and data are protected and free from hacking. That is security by design.

When you start building a product, you look at it from a security point of view. Is there data protection? Can people get phished? Things like that.

From there, I can see it evolving into a deeper conversation about safety by design.

What do I mean by safety? The product has to be safe. It should not cause people to get into more debt, and it should not cause harm.

In the spirit of wanting to do good for financial inclusion, these are the things that evolve.

If we have inclusion without literacy, there may be confusion. If we have literacy without financial crime prevention, there are other considerations to think about.

The safety, security, and entire design comes together.

Tony:
That is a powerful point.

In my career, I did some work on best practices, litigation consulting, elder financial abuse, and things like that.

It wasn’t necessarily a case where people were financially illiterate. They understood the terms and were educated, but they were still victims of financial predators operating outside the edges of the system.

In the U.S., the insurance regulatory system is fragmented by state. Each state has to adopt certain things, and then regulators have to follow up.

At least in the States, and I assume this is true all over the world, regulators struggle to keep up with the latest financial products. A lot of regulatory work is reactive rather than proactive.

Are you seeing that?

Julia:
Yes.

At the moment, we have a lot of tools in the market, but many of them are reactive. They are talking about how we can prevent fraud and scams from happening, but this is often already with experience or knowledge of a particular crime that is happening.

We are not yet at the stage of being proactive and finding a way to stop certain things from happening before they happen.

I would say we are building things after they have already happened.

Tony:
That is powerful.

That is also something missing from financial literacy, in my mind. We have to help people think about how financial persuasion works and how financial manipulation works.

Maybe let’s dive into financial persuasion.

How do you feel persuasion influences our financial choices?

Julia:
A lot of it has to do with what motivates us.

Persuasion is where we are able to be easily persuaded because of something that motivates us, drives us, or reflects our values.

Even the example of needing extra money because my child needs to go to the hospital. It does not take much to persuade someone to do it.

Manipulation is different. That normally happens, especially with social engineering, when someone makes friends because there is loneliness.

There have been many cases where it started with a romance scam and then turned into persuading people to make investments.

They all come together. I would say there is a triangle of persuasion, manipulation, and scamming.

Tony:
Persuasion, manipulation, and scamming.

Let’s stick with persuasion for a minute.

Can you share some examples of how people may encounter these persuasion tactics in their financial lives?

Julia:
Some of them can be nudges, which we use in marketing.

Nudges can have a good side. It is like a knife. You can use it to cut vegetables, or you can use it to harm someone.

It is the same thing with persuasion.

Sometimes you don’t have to do a big show to persuade somebody to do something. Over a period of time, you use small messages.

In marketing, we have subliminal marketing. Even what I have in my background is part of that. I am not directly saying, “This is my company, and I am selling you things,” but it gets into people’s minds.

That is also a form of persuasion.

Tony:
You can even think about little kids. Little kids use small nudges, sometimes to the point where it becomes annoying when they want something.

“Hey, Mom, can I get a candy bar? Dad, can I get a candy bar? A candy bar would be great right now.”

Finally, you either get them the candy bar or say, “No, there’s no candy bar right now.”

Julia:
If they can’t persuade, they will manipulate.

Tony:
That’s true.

That is something for people to recognize. Sometimes it is not necessarily bad. It is a human way of wanting people to see our point of view.

My books are behind me. That is a slight reminder that Get Ready is the name of my books and the show. When people think of me, I want them to think of Get Ready, and vice versa.

It is not necessarily always bad, but sometimes it crosses over.

How can people start to recognize persuasion techniques so they can see when persuasion is being turned against them?

Julia:
First, recognize there is nothing inherently evil with persuasion or manipulation. To persuade and to manipulate is human. Let humans continue to be human.

At the same time, have caution.

The most important thing, which everybody always talks about, is that if it looks too good to be true, chances are it is too good to be true.

When somebody starts asking you for a lot of money, take a step back and ask, “Why does this person need so much money?”

I am always cautious, but I also worry that my time will come when a story that is meant for me is being told and I could fall for it.

It doesn’t mean I won’t. I am very mindful that the story has not been created for me yet.

I am especially cautious when somebody asks me for money, particularly somebody I barely know. Or somebody who may be very nice to me from the beginning for three months.

Hopefully, I don’t fall for the person thinking they are going to be the love of my life and we are going to spend the rest of our lives together.

Be nice, but also be aware. When somebody asks for money after knowing you for just three months, that is something to be aware of.

Tony:
I did an episode with our colleague Frances Yong, and she said basically anybody can be a victim of a scam. If you haven’t been a victim yet, it is just because the scam hasn’t been designed for you yet.

That is the danger with AI.

Are there any signals you recommend people watch for? You mentioned people asking for money. What other signals are out there?

Julia:
There is a term people call love bombing.

Generally, we are friends now, Tony, and we don’t love-bomb each other or call each other darling.

Tony:
Oh, okay.

Julia:
If somebody you barely know, or somebody you just met, suddenly starts throwing too many compliments at you or using too many terms of endearment, especially very quickly, be careful.

Maybe culturally I am not used to it. I don’t know what it is like in the States. Maybe it is more common in the West.

But I would be really careful about too much endearment in the short term.

Tony:
In the U.S., that is also something we would call creepy.

You are right. Scammers become your best friend. They are very good at what they do, and they use a series of techniques.

Before we wrap up, I want to get into how persuasion tactics are used in normal financial services sales. They may be used to get you to open a 401(k) or invest in a certain fund. They are also used to get someone to take an action, like in a romance scam when someone asks for money.

How do you feel persuasion works in this way?

Julia:
I think it was Daniel Pink who wrote To Sell Is Human.

That is normal. Even when I am talking to you, I am trying to get you to my side, so I try to persuade you. That is normal.

Something I feel is important for us as individuals is to understand our current emotional state.

For example, if I am really down this week because something happened, this is the time when I know I could use some tender loving care. If somebody happens to come along, it is easy during those emotional weak times to fall.

Personally, I try to be aware of my emotional state at any point in time.

If I know I am really down, I make sure I stay away from certain things, certain people, certain food, or alcohol because I know it could get me into trouble.

Tony:
Alcohol does tend to get people in trouble.

Sometimes if you’re down, there is a stereotype of people eating ice cream when they’re feeling down.

I think checking your emotions is a very good thing.

When somebody is pitching a financial thing to you, whether it is an insurance policy, Bitcoin, a real estate deal, or something else, ask yourself: where am I? Am I in a good spot to make a decision? Or are they using a manipulation tactic on me?

Julia:
I wanted to share something about my mom.

She bought a funeral package because she was not feeling well at the time. It was not cheap. For the past three years, we have been paying installments for her funeral package.

There is nothing wrong with it. It is legitimate. But I felt, “Why did you go and buy a funeral package?”

I know where those people are lurking. They are probably lurking around the hospital.

She happened to be not feeling well at that time. She had a TIA, a mini stroke, and the person got her at that time.

Tony:
Is she doing better?

Julia:
She bought it over five years ago.

I felt annoyed that she bought something without consulting us. Then she changed her mind because she said, “I got the piece of land,” and then later said, “I shouldn’t have bought the land because I wanted to be cremated.”

Tony:
You raise a really good point.

This happens, especially with elders. Fraudsters use the red flag of urgency. They use the red flag of isolation.

They might say, “Let me talk to you over here. You don’t want to call your daughter. She is just going to talk you out of this. She doesn’t understand how this works.”

When somebody tells you not to talk to someone else because they won’t understand, that is a huge warning sign.

Julia:
Yes. Isolation is a huge one.

Tony:
The other thing I want to make sure we touch on is something you mentioned before the show.

There are anti-fraud tools, but we don’t really have tools against manipulation.

Would you go into that a little bit?

Julia:
The biggest thing about the anti-fraud tools we have right now is that they target unauthorized transactions.

But when it comes to authorized push payments, it typically has something to do with manipulation, social engineering, or some form of making us decide to push the button ourselves.

I would throw the question back to the public or people who may have an idea.

I am not psychologically trained, but what can we do to help people become more aware of manipulation while it is happening?

As I mentioned, I try to be aware of my emotional state at any point in time. It is about mindfulness.

That sounds like a buzzword, but it is being mindful that this person could potentially be manipulating me.

On the other hand, we don’t want to take the humanness out of humans.

How do we do that?

Tony:
We can’t build a system to do all of these things.

At the end of the day, each of us needs to be aware. For people watching and listening, I’ll throw in a link to a show I did called “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Scammers” because it points out a lot of these things you and I have been talking about.

At the end of the day, we have to take our own precautions and be aware of red flags.

Knowing the five types of mutual funds, how they operate, and what an expense charge is can be important. But if we can’t spot a red flag, or if we can’t spot where we are emotionally, that comes before savings and spending and everything else.

That is almost a survival thing.

We also talked about not taking the humanness out of being human. How do we continue to trust?

People might be thinking now, “Wow, I have to be careful of everything.”

How can people find some balance?

Julia:
I must admit, I have gone to the state of paranoia now. I think I have been destroyed by my occupation.

But I would say the most important thing is not to be in a hurry to make certain decisions.

Look up and be more aware rather than always keeping our heads down and working at our desks.

Look out once in a while to see what is around us. Try to have a general awareness of our surroundings.

It is not just about ourselves, but also about our loved ones around us.

Do you see any changes in their behavior? They might be going through something.

Especially with our kids and our parents, we want to be sure they don’t get into trouble because when they are in trouble, we get into trouble too.

It is about looking up and not always being at our desks, looking at our laptops, or being on social media. Look around.

Tony:
That is powerful advice.

Especially with aging parents, we may not always be able to stop them from doing something.

I was talking with somebody on the show, and she said you could have Post-it notes on their phone or laptop that say not to talk to strangers or not to give money to strangers.

Cognitive decline is inevitable at a certain age. But the person I was talking to said her dad would just take the Post-it notes off the phone and ignore them. She had to take away the phone, but then he would answer emails.

She was aware of what was going on and the behavior. Unfortunately, older adults often pick up the phone and talk to people because they are trained to pick up the phone. They have been picking up the phone for 50, 60, or 70 years.

A ringing phone is still something they respond to, even though many of us don’t really have phone calls as much anymore.

Julia:
Before we close, I thought I would touch on AI.

It is like a gift and a curse.

I’ll talk about my mom again. My mom is 84. Someone introduced her to the wonders of ChatGPT, and she doesn’t speak English. She speaks Chinese. My Chinese is not very good.

What she has started doing is talking to ChatGPT, and the voice sounds like her grandson, my son.

Tony:
Oh boy.

Julia:
There are days when she will play it back to me and she will have this look on her face.

ChatGPT is affirming her.

I think, as an elderly person, just like all of us, she loves affirmation. I hardly have the chance to spend time with her, so she plays a lot with ChatGPT at her age.

She says, “See, ChatGPT agrees with me. ChatGPT thinks I’m clever.”

This can get very addictive, even knowing it is artificial.

Now imagine somebody making use of the same tool to write persuasive language.

Tony:
That is something we all need to be aware of.

Those of us who use AI a lot are used to ChatGPT saying, “Hey, Julia, that’s a great idea,” or “Tony, that’s a fantastic idea.”

I could say literally anything, and AI may say, “Wow, that’s an interesting point of view,” because it is trained to help.

It doesn’t always have the filter of, “Am I helping too much?” It is artificial intelligence at the end of the day, and people tend to forget that.

For somebody older, especially someone experiencing cognitive decline, it can be harder to separate that, especially if it is in the voice of her grandson.

That makes it easier for scammers to tailor scams to people using AI.

At the end of the day, we all want to be told we are right. We all want to be told we are smart. That is human.

If AI gives us that reflection of ourselves, it can be hard to separate from it.

Julia:
I wonder whether one day, while we are all in the digital era now, we will go back to banking halls rather than banking on the internet or on the app.

Maybe that would help reestablish trust and bring back human connection.

Tony:
Reestablish trust and human connection.

That is powerful because it is something we all crave.

This has also come up in conversations about what will happen to traditional financial planners. The thought is that the ones who provide concierge-level service and have a real human relationship are the ones who are going to thrive.

That is it for all of us: to have a true human connection.

And that is the line with scammers. They try to establish a connection.

If you can recognize not only the establishment of a human connection, but why that connection is being made, that matters.

What is the purpose? Is it love bombing, or is someone genuinely looking for a friend?

Sometimes that line can be hard to see.

That gets back to what we started with: recognizing persuasive tactics.

They are out there. They are being used all the time. Are they being used for good or bad? What are they nudging us toward?

Julia, where can people learn more about you and JFourth Solutions?

Julia:
JFourth Solutions has a website, and I put a lot of blog posts there.

I’m also really active on LinkedIn.

I recently published a book called Chronicles of the Technosaurus. It is a book to encourage people who are in mid-career and want to pivot from traditional finance into digital and blockchain.

If I can do it, so can everybody else.

It is a small, fun book to share my journey in becoming a technosaurus.

Tony:
I love the title.

For everybody watching and listening, there will be links in the show notes.

I also want to give a strong shout-out to your LinkedIn newsletter. It is always thought-provoking and innovative.

For people who want to keep up on different ways of thinking about persuasion, scams, and how financial literacy, financial inclusion, and fighting financial crime are connected, I would strongly urge you to subscribe.

Julia, thanks for joining me again on Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

Julia:
Thanks for having me again, Tony.

I thought I would explain why the newsletter is called The Fourth Perspective.

It is because we have the regulatory perspective, the institutional perspective, and the technology perspective.

The fourth perspective is the human.

Tony:
Definitely.

For people watching, Julia and I did an earlier episode where we explored that more deeply, so there will be a link to my other episode with Julia in the show notes.

Thank you, as always, for tuning in to this episode of Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

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