| | | | | |  Carlos Buelvas | | IN THIS ISSUE | Roller-skating is here to stay | Smishing scams infiltrate the workplace | A Pulitzer Prize winner takes on Brew Questionnaire | | | | "I'm getting closer to the light."—Serena Williams, shortly before announcing her retirement "Same answer."—Donald Trump, repeatedly invoking his right against self-incrimination during a deposition in New York "I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter."—Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a statement Thursday about the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago | | |  —Sherry Qin | | | Francesco Carta fotografo / Getty Images Two days after Jack Appleby joined Morning Brew as a creator, he received the following text: "Hello Jack, I'm in a conference right now, can't talk on the phone but let me know if you got my text. Thanks." It was signed "Austin Rief" and, in case you didn't know, he's the CEO of Morning Brew. Appleby wasn't the only Morning Brew employee to get the text—dozens more reported receiving similar ones. If someone responded to the text, the sender would usually ask for gift cards, promising to pay them back later. The texts weren't actually from Rief. Morning Brew, like so many workplaces across the country, had been a victim of a smishing scam. (Rief eventually sent a companywide Slack message letting everyone officially know that he wasn't sketchily asking his employees for gift cards or cash.) A combination of SMS and phishing, smishing uses compelling text messages to trick recipients into sending money or personal information. It's not just Morning Brew: The numbers of targeted companies and people are staggering. A report from Proofpoint showed that smishing attacks more than doubled in the US in 2021. Data from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shows that 378,119 fraud reports were filed in 2021 involving text messages. Of those thousands of reports, consumers lost a total of $131 million to smishing texts with a median loss of $900. (Many scams go unreported to the FTC.) "Once you hand over the gift card number and PIN, the money is gone," Ari Lazarus, a consumer education specialist with the FTC, wrote in a consumer alert last year. Luckily, Morning Brew employees didn't lose any cash. These fraud schemes come in different varieties. Some claim to be the IRS while others might ask for Netflix payment info. Covid-19 scams, in which fraudsters offer bogus treatments or tests in exchange for personal information, were another common trick in 2021. But like all scams, smishing had to evolve. Now smishers are pretending to be people you know and trust, like your boss. With more employees using their personal phones for work purposes, many smishing attacks to your personal line have a workplace component. Data breaches of users' personal information, from your name and job information to phone number, have been a long-running concern. In 2020, a cybersecurity company found that hackers had sold over 186 million voters' identifying information. In April 2021, over 500 million Facebook users' phone numbers were leaked on a hacker forum for free. The best way to avoid falling for such smishing scams is to pause before clicking on any links or responding to an unusual text. "Verify who is sending you that information. It's very easy to do. If you're getting unsolicited texts, do what I do: Delete them," Aaron Rouse, an FBI special agent in Las Vegas, said. In the meantime, if you get a text from your boss (or our boss) asking for a gift card, you should probably ignore it. —Sherry Qin | | | This week we recommend a lesson from seven-time Grand Slam singles winner Venus Williams, who is on YouTube to walk you through the mechanics of a basic tennis serve and provide helpful cues to remember before hitting the court. Tennis enjoyed a boost during the pandemic, and several of us here at Morning Brew got the racket bug pretty bad. While the ground strokes are relatively simple, learning how to serve can be daunting. (If you want to skip to when Williams actually serves, that happens at 12:04, but that's no way to learn.) Williams's instruction is so good that it makes it a little easier to fantasize about one day going pro. Or at least getting the first serve over the net.
—Ashwin Rodrigues
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Unsurprisingly, demand is through the roof, but you can skip the waitlist with today's special link. | | | | Carlos Buelvas Waiting at New York's LaGuardia Airport falls somewhere between purgatory and hell for most people, but not for Melody Olivera. Instead of sitting in a dingy airport chair before her flight, Olivera whipped out eight wheels and attached them, four to each of her pristine white sneakers. She looks almost tranquil in a chaotic landscape filled with stressed out travelers as she roller skates. She shuffle-steps and backward twists her way through the airport, looking undisturbed in her own blissful world as travelers walked past. Olivera's TikTok of the skate went viral, racking up about 20 million views. There's a calming quality to her effortless spins to soothing music. It embodies the escapist vibes of roller-skating many skating influencers cultivated over the past tumultuous years. Olivera, who identifies as Afro-Latina, is one of the countless people who took up roller-skating to get through the early days of the Covid pandemic, when social media fueled the mainstream resurgence of roller-skating. Skaters cruised down city streets, giving off a palpable feeling of freedom and joy that resonated with many trapped inside, where they experienced an existential dread so deep they resorted to bingeing Tiger King. They laced up pastel-colored skates or brightly colored or checkered ones sometimes embellished with holographic designs or with whimsical clouds. Pop-colored laces set off whimsical designs. Some skates even lit up. All together it created skating's new aesthetic, a blend of the playful and sweet that was visually irresistible on Instagram's grid or TikTok's scroll. Roller skates were so sought after that as people scrambled for toilet paper and hand sanitizer, another shortage hit, disrupting the roller-skating supply chain. Skate companies built to cater to niche markets sold out of nearly every size and color, and the skates couldn't easily be found on Amazon or eBay, either. Matt Hill, head of Australia-based Impala Skates, said that roller-skating had been growing in popularity since 2017, but that the combined forces of the pandemic and TikTok "really just put fuel on an already cranking fire." Between March and August of 2020, sales of Moxi skates, a brand that captured the joyous vibe, cost upwards of $300, a surge of 1,000%. That surge marked the reversal of a long trend: From 2006 to 2017, the number of people in the US who roller-skated consistently fell, dropping from 19.9 million to 11.6 million. Now, the roller skate shortage has come to an end, but some of the excitement built by pandemic-era influencers may be waning. "Barely worn" skates are listed by the dozens on Facebook, eBay, and Craigslist. The lure of rolling down the street to JLo's "Jenny from the Block" or doing somersaults through the skate park likely turned out to be too challenging for those whose skating looked more like a newborn foal and less like Olivera's smooth spins. But even if pandemic skaters abandon their hobby, skating is here to stay. It's showing up in ads for major brands and new, high-end rinks are being built across the country. That trend has overshadowed what roller-skating represents to Black skaters, who have never lost interest as skating trends ebbed nationally. They have instead maintained a radical devotion to it in the face of segregation, racist rink rules, and financial troubles affecting their rinks. This commitment to skating isn't so much a competitive sport, like roller derby or roller hockey; it's a lifestyle about joy and style and expression. For some, putting on wheels blurs into the spiritual. It's a subculture where Black skaters have made their own traditions and perfected them over decades. And that's not something that easily translates over a viral TikTok or with the purchase of a pair of pastel pink skates. For the most dedicated, it's a community—built on music, positivity, and above all else, vibes. Continue reading this story on the rise of roller-skating by Amanda Hoover. | | | Linda Maraniss David Maraniss is an associate editor at the Washington Post and a best-selling author of biographies of Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi, and Bill Clinton. If that wasn't enough to make his parents proud, he's also been a finalist for three Pulitzer Prizes and has won two: the 1993 National Reporting Prize for his coverage of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton and, with the staff of the Washington Post, the 2008 Breaking News Reporting Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. His latest book, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, tells the riveting story of one of America's greatest athletes. Thorpe, the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal, had to navigate racism and discrimination even as he won glory for his country. It's available now. What's the best advice you ever received? In writing: Robert Caro's research advice to "turn every page"—looking at archival materials can be exhausting and seem boring until you stumble across an unexpected piece of gold. In life: my father's admonition to try to walk in the other person's shoes. What's the most embarrassing song you'll admit to liking publicly? "Dancing Queen"? "Heart and Soul"? The one song I can play on the piano with my grandchildren. What fictional person do you wish were real? President Josiah Bartlet. Or Dave (from the movie Dave). Which real person do you wish were fictional? Trump, though I'd never read or watch. How would you explain TikTok to your great-grandparents? Someone needs to explain it to me first. Or not. What always makes you laugh? The Big Lebowski. Or Jonathan Winters and Peter Sellers. If you were given a billboard in Times Square, what would you put on it? Vote like democracy is on the ballot. It is. Or: Green Bay Packers—Super Bowl Champions.
—Interview by Rohan Anthony | | | | | | A collab we're nuts about: Bestselling sneaker brand Cariuma teamed up with Peanuts for 7 limited-edition designs featuring everyone's fave characters. Plus, they just restocked the comfy and versatile OCA Low Canvas style that comes in 15+ colors. Save 20% with code MBAUG20 before they sell out. | | | | We played Subway Surfers for three weeks, and we never felt more alive! But while escaping the clutches of the inspector and his dog, we found that major publishers are buying ads in mobile games to juice up traffic, which is considered a deceptive practice in the industry. Of the 365 ads we were served, 124 were articles from 26 different publishers that wanted us to read articles like "20-Minute Bodyweight Strength Workout for Runners." [Marketing Brew] Our Chief Happiness Officer is depressed, and we commiserate. [Morning Brew] Rent the Runway's post-pandemic survival plan: Jenn Hyman, CEO and co-founder of Rent the Runway, joined Business Casual to talk about how the company emerged from the pandemic as a broader and stronger business while making major changes that have paved the way for the company's long-term profitability. [Business Casual] Where's the (vegetarian) beef? As grocery shoppers continue to have their budgets pinched, they're swapping out premium plant-based proteins for something a little less pricey. That's bad news for vegetarian brands like Beyond Meat that have slashed revenue estimates, cut costs, and even laid off employees. [Retail Brew] Handle with care: As the monkeypox outbreak accelerates, HR might be on the front line in the battle against monkeypox misinformation. Experts say that employers, and HR in particular, need to brace for workplace impacts and educate their workers even before a case comes into the workplace. [HR Brew] The best thing we read this week: Sure, millennials gave us avocado toast, but they also Goop-ified wellness. It looks like we can thank Gen Z for the death of woo-woo wellness. RIP, charcoal cheese and CBD butt balm. But please let us keep our beautiful avocados. [LA Times] Elevate your everyday carry: Check out GQ's "go-to brand for premium lifestyle accessories" and save up to 30% on watches, sunglasses, and more during their 8th anniversary sale.* *This is sponsored advertising content. | | | | | | | ✢ A Note From Masterworks See important Regulation A disclosures. |  | Written by Rohan Anthony, Stassa Edwards, Amanda Hoover, Sherry Qin, Ashwin Rodrigues, and Holly Van Leuven Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here WANT MORE BREW? Industry news, with a sense of humor → - CFO Brew: your go-to source for global finance insights
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