Orioles baseball, helicopters, and a $10,000 lesson in cyber risk ⚾

Opening Day always brings fresh optimism to Baltimore — this could be the year, right? 😅 

With baseball back at Camden Yards this week, it feels like a fitting time to revisit a story from an Orioles playoff run — back when October baseball felt especially electric. Garrett Datz , Technology Advisory expert at SC&H, shares a real experience from early in his career — and a reminder that while technology changes, human manipulation tactics don’t. 

It was 1996, the Baltimore Orioles were in the playoffs for first time in over a decade, the dot-com bubble was inflating nicely, and I was just starting my career in Technology at a hot Baltimore ISP (which was a thing at the time). 

That’s when my boss proudly announced he had secured a “can’t-miss” marketing deal: a helicopter hovering directly over center field in Camden Yards during the 7th inning stretch of the first playoff game the next day with our ISP’s name and message on a digital banner.

“Everyone will see this!”  

But I had questions. Questions like: Do they actually let helicopters hover over stadiums during games?  

Actually, that was it. That was my only question, because that alone made no sense at all for so many reasons. I had seen helicopter advertising, but not how this was described. 

But there was no time for questions—only urgency and a great deal not to be missed. 

Funny enough, I had tickets to that game with my friends and to no one’s surprise that night but my boss there was no helicopter over center field or anywhere else. 

He called them on the phone furious, but they said :

“Oh it was too windy and we had mechanical issues, sorry!”

But there was a follow-up offer…if we doubled the payment they would give us another two games, three for two!  My boss was still calling them a month later to a full mailbox out $10,000, until the line got disconnected. Turns out this was a known scam targeting businesses in cities where sports playoffs had been absent for a while...where no one could prove or disprove that it was real or not.  

It was just real enough on paper to work, and it did.  

I tell this story not just because it’s crazy and true, but because urgency, novelty, and blind trust are still the same tactics that social engineers use, they just added e-mail and SMS to the same tried and true methods that have always separated people from what is valuable: Information, access, and money. 

The bottom line 

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. If something feels extremely urgent, slow the process down. And if something makes you second-guess, trust that instinct — and follow a verification process before money, access, or information changes hands. 

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• The $220K payroll mistake no one caught: read this if you have employees in multiple states
• Just when you thought you had a handle on AI, agentic AI enters the chat