The big business of roller-skating
Together with [Masterworks]( [August 14, 2022]( | [View Online]( | [Sign Up]( | [Shop]( Carlos Buelvas IN THIS ISSUE Roller-skating is here to stay Smishing scams infiltrate the workplace A Pulitzer Prize winner takes on Brew Questionnaire  VIBE CHECK  # âIâm getting closer to the light.ââ[Serena Williams](, shortly before announcing her retirement âSame answer.ââDonald Trump, [repeatedly invoking]( his right against self-incrimination during a deposition in New York âI personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter.ââAttorney General Merrick Garland, in a [statement]( Thursday about the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago  GREAT DEBATE  # [null] âSherry Qin  GROUP CHAT  [Gone smishing: Scams move to the workplace](
[All the fish are the same color except one who is rebelling](Francesco Carta fotografo / Getty Images Two days after Jack Appleby joined Morning Brew as a creator, he received the following text: âHello Jack, Iâm in a conference right now, canât talk on the phone but let me know if you got my text. Thanks.â It was signed âAustin Riefâ and, in case you didnât know, heâs the CEO of Morning Brew. Appleby wasnât the only Morning Brew employee to get the textâdozens 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 werenât 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 wasnât 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. Itâs 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.) âOnce you hand over the gift card number and PIN, the money is gone,â Ari Lazarus, a consumer education specialist with the FTC, [wrote]( in a consumer alert last year. Luckily, Morning Brew employees didnât 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 usersâ 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 votersâ identifying information. In April 2021, [over 500 million]( Facebook usersâ 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. âVerify who is sending you that information. Itâs very easy to do. If youâre getting unsolicited texts, do what I do: Delete them,â 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. âSherry Qin mailto:?subject=Check%20out%20this%20story%20from%20Morning%20Brew%21&body=Gone%20smishing%3A%20Scams%20move%20to%20the%20workplace%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.morningbrew.com%2Fdaily%2Fstories%2F2022%2F08%2F11%2Fgone-smishing-scams-have-moved-to-the-workplace%3Futm_campaign%3Dmb%26utm_medium%3Dnewsletter%26utm_source%3Dmorning_brew%0A%0AWant%20more%20great%20content%3F%20Subscribe%20to%20Sunday%20Edition%20%E2%80%94%20Delivering%20the%20latest%20business%20news%20from%20Wall%20St.%20to%20Silicon%20Valley%20daily.%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.morningbrew.com%2Fdaily%2Fr%2F%3Fkid%3D4904f90a%26utm_source%3Demail_share%0A  REC ROOM  # 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 thatâs no way to learn.) Williamsâs 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. âAshwin Rodrigues  TOGETHER WITH MASTERWORKS 26.8% returns during a full-blown recession? Pretty, pretty, prett-ay good. Youâve probably been hit with some pretty, pretty, prett-ay *brutal* spots this yearâ¦like the marketâs worst first-half in over 50 years. OR paying $1.50 for a âdollarâ slice . OR every pundit from Wall Street to Margaritaville arguing about the definition of ârecession.â Oy vey⦠No need to fussânow you can access a market thatâs outpaced nearly every major asset class, including equities, gold, crypto, AND real estate, during high inflation. Just head over to Masterworks, an investing platform thatâs delivered serious results. Their 5 exits to date have generated a 26.8% avg net annualized return! Unsurprisingly, demand is through the roof, but you can [skip the waitlist with todayâs special link](.  LONG READ  [Roller-skatingâs irresistible joy goes mainstream](
[Roller-skatingâs irresistible joy goes mainstream ](Carlos Buelvas Waiting at New Yorkâs 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. Oliveraâs TikTok of the skate went viral, racking up about 20 million views. Thereâs 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 skatingâs new aesthetic, a blend of the playful and sweet that was visually irresistible on Instagramâs grid or TikTokâs 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 couldnât 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 âreally just put fuel on an already cranking fire.â 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. âBarely wornâ skates are listed by the dozens on Facebook, eBay, and Craigslist. The lure of rolling down the street to JLoâs â[Jenny from the Block](â 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 Oliveraâs smooth spins. But even if pandemic skaters abandon their hobby, skating is here to stay. Itâs 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 isnât so much a competitive sport, like roller derby or roller hockey; itâs a lifestyle about joy and style and expression. For some, putting on wheels blurs into the spiritual. Itâs a subculture where Black skaters have made their own traditions and perfected them over decades. And thatâs not something that easily translates over a viral TikTok or with the purchase of a pair of pastel pink skates. For the most dedicated, itâs a communityâbuilt on music, positivity, and above all else, vibes. [Continue reading this story on the rise of roller-skating by Amanda Hoover](. mailto:?subject=Check%20out%20this%20story%20from%20Morning%20Brew%21&body=Roller-skating%E2%80%99s%20irresistible%20joy%20goes%20mainstream%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.morningbrew.com%2Fdaily%2Fstories%2F2022%2F08%2F12%2Froller-skating-s-irresistible-joy-goes-mainstream%3Futm_campaign%3Dmb%26utm_medium%3Dnewsletter%26utm_source%3Dmorning_brew%0A%0AWant%20more%20great%20content%3F%20Subscribe%20to%20Sunday%20Edition%20%E2%80%94%20Delivering%20the%20latest%20business%20news%20from%20Wall%20St.%20to%20Silicon%20Valley%20daily.%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.morningbrew.com%2Fdaily%2Fr%2F%3Fkid%3D4904f90a%26utm_source%3Demail_share%0A Â Q&A Â [Brew Questionnaire with David Maraniss](
[Brew Questionnaire with David Maraniss](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 wasnât enough to make his parents proud, heâs 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 Americaâs 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. Itâs available [now](. Whatâs the best advice you ever received? In writing: Robert Caroâs research advice to âturn every pageââlooking at archival materials can be exhausting and seem boring until you stumble across an unexpected piece of gold. In life: my fatherâs admonition to try to walk in the other personâs shoes. Whatâs the most embarrassing song youâll admit to liking publicly? âDancing Queenâ? âHeart and Soulâ? 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 Iâd 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 PackersâSuper Bowl Champions. âInterview by Rohan Anthony mailto:?subject=Check%20out%20this%20story%20from%20Morning%20Brew%21&body=Brew%20Questionnaire%20with%20David%20Maraniss%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.morningbrew.com%2Fdaily%2Fstories%2F2022%2F08%2F09%2Fbrew-questionnaire-with-david-maraniss%3Futm_campaign%3Dmb%26utm_medium%3Dnewsletter%26utm_source%3Dmorning_brew%0A%0AWant%20more%20great%20content%3F%20Subscribe%20to%20Sunday%20Edition%20%E2%80%94%20Delivering%20the%20latest%20business%20news%20from%20Wall%20St.%20to%20Silicon%20Valley%20daily.%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.morningbrew.com%2Fdaily%2Fr%2F%3Fkid%3D4904f90a%26utm_source%3Demail_share%0A  TOGETHER WITH CARIUMA [Cariuma]( A collab weâre nuts about: Bestselling sneaker brand Cariuma teamed up with Peanuts for 7 limited-edition designs featuring everyoneâs 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](.  BREW'S BEST  # 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 â20-Minute Bodyweight Strength Workout for Runners.â [[Marketing Brew](] Our Chief Happiness Officer is depressed, and we commiserate. [[Morning Brew](] Rent the Runwayâs 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 companyâs long-term profitability. [[Business Casual](] Whereâs the (vegetarian) beef? As grocery shoppers continue to have their budgets pinched, theyâre swapping out premium plant-based proteins for something a little less pricey. Thatâs 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 GQâs âgo-to brand for premium lifestyle accessoriesâ and [save up to 30% on watches, sunglasses, and more during their 8th anniversary sale](.* *This is sponsored advertising content.  THE END  # [null]  ⢠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 â - [CFO Brew](: your go-to source for global finance insights
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