Voice Phishing Is Not Someone Else’s Problem
This discussion began with a very concrete case of harm. The nephew of Daos, one of the participants in the broadcast, had actually fallen victim to voice phishing and suffered a major loss. He managed to get out before the situation became even worse, and I was asked, “What should we do to avoid falling for voice phishing?” I do not think this is merely a request for practical information. Avoiding voice phishing is not very different from avoiding a cult. Everyone knows such schemes are suspicious. Yet when people are suddenly frightened and confused—or, conversely, when an offer sounds irresistible—they can fall for it in an instant.
Voice phishing is not a matter of age or education. Anyone can be deceived. I can be deceived too. The confidence that “I am naturally suspicious, so I will never be fooled” may itself become a danger. Scammers do not give us time to think. They claim that a family member has been injured or that we are implicated in a crime, then pressure us to send money immediately. Or they touch our desire by promising to multiply the money we send.
The first condition for avoiding voice phishing is not the belief that “I will never be fooled,” but the recognition that “I too can be fooled at any time.”
The World Is Full of Lies
As the word phishing suggests, this is fishing. A baited line is cast at many people, and someone eventually bites. Before telephones existed, scammers met people and did the same thing face to face. Telephones and the internet removed spatial limits, allowing scammers to cast their lines continually at an entire population. It has therefore become even harder for any individual to guarantee that they will never once be caught.
But we should not confine our view to voice phishing. Voice phishing is not the only fraud. The world is full of lies. There are lies in books and in politicians’ words, and there are lies in broadcasts, newspapers, and YouTube. Friends and relatives can lie too. The Bible, Buddhist scriptures, textbooks, professors, and teachers are not exceptions. Some people lie maliciously. Others do not know they are wrong and present their guesses as facts.
We must be able to question anything at any time. When critical thinking forms the foundation, the probability of being deceived goes down.
I am not claiming that there is a method that guarantees we will never be deceived. We can, however, reduce the damage and increase the chance that even after being drawn in we will stop and ask, “Could this be a lie?” The starting point is the question, the doubt, and the suspicion. This does not mean distrusting everyone without reason. It means refusing to confirm a message as fact before checking it.
The Two Things Scammers Exploit: Fear and Gain
Scammers commonly use two kinds of bait. The first is a frightening and disorienting situation: a family member has been injured or kidnapped, someone has become involved in a crime, a tax or fine must be paid, or the police and prosecution are investigating. They create urgency and tell the target not to inform anyone else or call the police. The second is a story that appears profitable: an offer to replace a high-interest loan, multiply an investment, or provide an exceptional opportunity.
In both cases, the core is money and isolation. They demand money and tell the target not to speak to anyone. That is where we must stop. No matter how urgent the situation sounds, hang up. Contact the police, prosecutors, bank, or family through an official number that you find independently, not one supplied by the caller. Do not try to solve the problem alone; speak first with someone you trust. What scammers dislike most is a target who gains time, speaks to other people, and cross-checks the facts.
If someone frightens you or promises a large gain, demands money, and tells you not to inform anyone else, stop immediately and verify the claim.
Practical Rules for Preventing Voice Phishing
During the broadcast, we looked up practical prevention guidelines. Be suspicious of anyone impersonating a government or investigative agency and demanding a transfer or delivery of cash; anyone sending an alleged police or prosecution document through a messenger app; or anyone offering a low-interest loan while demanding repayment of an existing loan or an advance payment. Do not believe a claim that a bank employee will come personally to collect cash.
Never click a link sent by someone impersonating an investigative or financial institution who tells you to install an app. The same applies to unknown internet addresses, notices for purchases you never made, and requests for the PIN number of a gift certificate or Google gift card. Once a malicious app is installed, information can be stolen from the phone, money can disappear from an account, or a loan can be taken out without the owner knowing. Artificial intelligence can now imitate the voices of family members and celebrities, so even “It sounded exactly like them” can no longer serve as verification.
If a caller says that a family member has been injured or kidnapped, it is even more important not to decide alone. Call 112, contact the family member separately, and ask people around you for help. There is no need to be ashamed of having been victimized. Too many lines are being cast, and they are increasingly sophisticated. Hiding the loss out of shame can eliminate the chance to recover from it and prevent further harm.
Does Doubting Everything Include Doubting Oneself?
One viewer described his own experience. He had been certain that he was naturally suspicious, but initially sent a small amount he was willing to lose. When the arrangement seemed to work, he trusted his own judgment that “this is not a scam,” sent larger amounts, and eventually lost all the money he had saved. He then asked: “People often say I should trust no one but myself. Does that mean I should not trust myself either? If I must doubt everything, what should I believe?”
When I say “everything,” the self is included. Did a victim send money without making any judgment? People in cults also make judgments of their own. The issue is not whether one judges, but whether one can question and verify one’s judgment again. We project our experience onto the world. Because I do not deceive others, I guess that others will not deceive me. I hear a gentle voice and see a respectable appearance and conclude that the person must be good. The moment I confirm that guess as fact, I can be hooked.
It is not enough to question other people’s words. I must also question my experience, emotions, thoughts, judgments, and the certainty that “I know.”
People believe, “I will be happy when I have a girlfriend,” “I will be happy when I marry,” or “I will be happy when I have a child.” They decide that they are unhappy because a particular condition is missing. Who has deceived me in this case? Often the images and concepts in my own mind deceive me. Buddhism therefore begins by examining the colored glasses I wear, reconsidering my concepts, experience, and judgment, and asking again whether they are really true.
Liberation Means Escaping Delusion and Inverted Fantasy
Buddhism sees human beings as already caught in delusion. The Sermon on the Mount makes a similar point through the image of trying to remove a speck from another person’s eye while a beam remains in one’s own. What standard do I take to be truth? What am I captured by? I need to recognize the colored glasses over my own eyes.
If Buddhism is a religion of liberation, what are we liberated from? This is not a mysterious transcendence of birth, aging, illness, and death. It is liberation from delusion and inverted fantasy—recognizing that we are dreaming, thinking falsely, and seeing reality upside down, then looking at reality directly. This is why practicing Buddhism can make a person relatively wiser. Someone who has never questioned their own thought or explored what they pursue and why they suffer is likely to become trapped in certainty when a crisis arrives.
Liberation is not becoming a transcendent being. It is repeatedly escaping the delusions I have grasped as facts.
I once spoke of my sorrow over the deaths of politicians I had admired, including Roh Hoe-chan, Park Won-soon, and Roh Moo-hyun. Young people need an education that asks deeply, “What am I pursuing? What am I? Where did my suffering come from?” Yet schools tell students to believe and memorize the textbook, then reproduce it on an exam. They even memorize the false story that Socrates said, “A bad law is still the law,” without questioning it. I strongly criticize Korean public education as a slave-training system that produces one percent successful fascists and ninety-nine percent failed fascists.
Inner Reflection and Criticism of the External World Are Connected
Calling inner reflection the central point of Buddhism does not mean that we should never question the external world. The standards in my mind were formed through continual contact with parents, friends, schools, society, broadcasts, dramas, books, scriptures, and politicians. Through the contact of body, nature, and society, we learn language and concepts, likes and dislikes, good and evil, and right and wrong. Studying myself is therefore connected to studying the world that made me.
Yet some people teach that Buddhism means not thinking, not distinguishing, entering absorption, and remaining in a thoughtless state. They call mystical experiences, relics, supernatural powers, visions of past lives, and the disappearance of everything in deep absorption enlightenment. I call that superstition. Meditation can make the mind somewhat more comfortable, but wisdom does not arise simply because thought disappears. Such practice does not create even a speck of wisdom.
Wisdom does not arise from the absence of thought. It arises from the question mark, observation, and reflection—from questioning, observing, and thinking in terms of dependent origination.
Even to avoid voice phishing, we must question, observe, and reflect. A claim does not become fact because someone shouts it in the voice of scientific truth. We need to examine whether I am trapped in a strange delusion, whether another person is lying maliciously, or whether that person has mistaken a guess for truth. Thinking through dependent origination is scientific thinking that investigates causes and conditions. Wisdom emerges through the three elements of doubt, observation, and reflection.
Wakefulness Is the State of Being Able to Turn Back and Question
There is no need to feel excessive shame after being deceived. I too have spent my life being fooled by one thing or another, and I may still be fooled somewhere. It is difficult to become a human being who is perfectly immune to every lie. What matters is the habit of observing a thought, judgment, or emotion when it arises, asking “Is that really so?” and then reflecting. This is what I call wakefulness.
Being awake is not merely the physiological state of having one’s eyes open. It is the state of being able to observe and question. After loudly asserting something, can I turn back and ask, “Is it really true? Could it be otherwise?” Can I turn the mirror-light that was directed only outward back inward and illuminate my own thought again? Without that question, Buddhism ceases to be Buddhism.
An awakened person is not someone who can never be deceived, but someone who can notice the possibility of being deceived and question again.
Individual Caution Is Not Enough: Government and Telecom Responsibility
Voice phishing today uses telephone and financial networks to target an entire population. In the past, a scammer had to approach a person directly and invest time. Now bait can be cast at everyone with a telephone. We therefore cannot place all responsibility on the victim by asking only, “Why were you fooled?” Government, telecommunications companies, and banks must cooperate to block scam lines and money flows and reduce the harm.
Telecommunications is national infrastructure with a public character. Even if telecom companies incur a loss, they should cooperate with the government to eradicate voice phishing. The broadcast also mentioned President Lee Jae-myung’s statement that telecom companies and banks would be held responsible. I said that no president can make every policy match my wishes, and I may criticize future mistakes, but so far I can give a relatively high score to a president who continually discusses problems that directly affect people’s lives with officials and makes judgments about them.
Voice phishing is not caused only by individual foolishness. The telecommunications, financial, and administrative systems that enable fraud must also be criticized and reformed.
Education and Society That Suppress Questions Cultivate Superstition
I introduced the claim that German education makes critical education fundamental and that teachers tell students, “Do not believe me.” Students are expected to question, present, debate, and continue thinking about a problem. If that description is accurate, it is a point where the destination of Buddhism meets the basic education of a modern society. A society that blocks questions and requires only memorized answers is neither scientific, Buddhist, nor modern.
The Sermon on the Mount also contains the basis of critical reflection in the instruction to remove the beam from one’s own eye first. Yet people believe in Jehovah’s violence and judgment rather than Jesus’s teaching, and in Buddhism they grasp fortune-telling, prophecy, mystical power, souls, hell, heaven, relics, and supernatural abilities instead of questioning and wisdom. Even presidents, prime ministers, and generals consult fortune-tellers, while religious orders sell the authority of supposed enlightenment. Superstition fills society because education does not teach criticism and authority prevents questions.
Whether the authority is a president, legislator, judge, supreme patriarch, or the Buddha, it must be possible to place every authority and institution under the knife of criticism. This is not an invitation to attack someone because we dislike them. If public authority commits wrongdoing, a democratic system must make it possible to remove and correct it. A society that suppresses questions is one to which modernity has not yet arrived; it is a society filled with fascists.
Religious Power That Sells Enlightenment as Fraud Must Be Cut Off
If we stop at insulting an individual, we miss the conditions behind the problem. Because society allowed superstition and failed to criticize it, individuals also found it difficult to recognize it as superstition. It has not been very long since I myself came to recognize such beliefs clearly as superstition. But if a person with public authority claims enlightenment without being enlightened, behaves like a Buddha without being one, and makes all kinds of pronouncements, that is fraud committed with the commodity of enlightenment.
I called for the revocation of the monastic status of Jinje, the former supreme patriarch of the Jogye Order. If he sat in the highest position and exercised authority for ten years while claiming enlightenment, the order must verify the claim even belatedly and cut away the falsehood. Otherwise, the whole Jogye Order will find it difficult to avoid the criticism that it is a group of scammers. The same applies to promoting material found in Seongcheol’s cremated remains as a mysterious relic and proof of extraordinary practice before the entire country. The assertion that long practice produces luminous substances in a corpse is not observation and reflection but superstition.
If religious power’s lies are neither criticized nor held responsible, the same fraud and superstition will return under different names.
Education must change too. People who favor competition, discrimination, and hierarchy will dislike a system in which everyone can receive comparable education and ask questions. Change will therefore meet resistance. Yet in a society transformed by artificial intelligence, the existing system based only on ownership and competition cannot continue unchanged. The original question about avoiding voice phishing thus does not end with an individual telephone. It expands into the question of how we examine our judgment, education, religion, politics, economy, and society as a whole.
People fail to recognize a cult as a cult because they have had no opportunity to think critically. So do not believe; question. Observe and verify both the voices outside and the voice inside your own mind. Do not fall into another delusion—the ambition to become a person who can never be deceived. Admit that you may be deceived, and become someone who can always ask again.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.