Wired to Trust
Easy Prey
It’s easy to think scams only work when someone misses something obvious. In reality, most of them don’t look obvious at the start. They show up as normal situations with just enough friction to notice, but not enough to stop. That small gap is where people tend to move forward instead of stepping back. My guest today is Tali Sharot, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies how we form beliefs and make decisions. She’s known for her research on the neural basis of human optimism, and her work has been published in leading journals. In her books, The Optimism Bias and The Science of...
info_outline
Intimate Partner Fraud
Easy Prey
Most scams leave a digital trail. A fake email, a spoofed number, a fraudulent website. You can trace them, report them, sometimes even reverse them. But what happens when the scam has no digital trail at all, because it isn't happening on a screen? What happens when the con is standing right in front of you, making you laugh, meeting your friends, and planning a future with you? My guest today is Tracy Hall. She's an author, keynote speaker, and senior marketing executive with over 25 years at some of the world's most recognizable tech companies including eBay, Virgin, GoDaddy, and...
info_outline
Identity without Passwords
Easy Prey
Every day, employees at hotels, restaurants, and resorts across the country are doing exactly what they were hired to do: being warm, responsive, and eager to help. It's what makes hospitality work. It's also what makes hospitality one of the most targeted industries in cybersecurity. When your entire workforce is trained to say yes, teaching them to be suspicious is an uphill battle. The smarter solution might be to take the target off their backs entirely. Jasson Casey is the co-founder and CEO of Beyond Identity, a company built around one idea: making identity-based attacks impossible....
info_outline
When Cybercrime Gets Personal
Easy Prey
Most security breaches don't begin with sophisticated code or elaborate technical exploits. They begin with a phone call, a convincing email, or someone at a help desk who just wanted to be helpful. The human layer is often the weakest link, and the criminals who understand that are the ones causing the most damage. My guest today is May Chen-Contino. She's the CEO of Unit 221B, a threat disruption company that delivers actionable intelligence to enterprises, law enforcement, and government agencies. Her background spans cybersecurity, fintech, and SaaS leadership at companies like PayPal and...
info_outline
Stopping Phone Scams
Easy Prey
Phone scams get dismissed as background noise or just annoying interruptions and unknown numbers with robotic voices we learn to ignore. But behind that noise is an industry built on psychology, automation, and staggering profitability. My guest today is Alex Quilici. He’s an engineer, entrepreneur, and the CEO of YouMail, a company focused on protecting consumers and businesses from unwanted and fraudulent calls. Alex has spent years analyzing how robocalls and scam campaigns are designed, how they evolve, and why they continue to work despite better technology and increased awareness. What...
info_outline
Stolen Identity - Stolen Peace
Easy Prey
Identity theft gets talked about a lot, but usually in the abstract: freeze your credit, watch your statements, don't click suspicious links. What doesn't get talked about nearly enough is what it actually feels like when someone isn't just using your card number, but is actively living as you. My guest today is Brooklyn Lyons. She's 25, recently married, and by her own admission, had no particular expertise in fraud or cybersecurity before October of 2024. That changed when her car window was smashed in a parking lot, and her work bag, laptop, wallet, driver's license, and everything...
info_outline
Inside Modern Fraud
Easy Prey
Fraud doesn’t always announce itself with obvious warning signs. Quite often, it shows up wrapped inside something that feels routine — a purchase you’ve made before, a link that looks legitimate, a message that arrives at just the wrong moment. Nothing feels suspicious, so your guard stays down. By the time questions start forming, the transaction is already done. My guest today is Iremar Brayner. He’s spent more than 15 years working in fraud prevention and risk management across payments, retail, ride-hailing, fintech, and digital marketplaces. In his role at G2A, he leads fraud...
info_outline
Money Laundering
Easy Prey
Organized crime is often imagined as something violent, chaotic, and obvious. But today, it looks far more polished than that. It operates like a multinational business, spread across borders, built on trust networks, specialization, and efficiency rather than brute force. This episode looks at how modern scams, fraud, and money laundering actually work and why they’re so hard to spot before serious damage is done. My guest is Geoff White, an investigative journalist who has spent decades covering organized crime, cybercrime, and financial fraud. His reporting has appeared on BBC News, Sky...
info_outline
Critical Infrastructure Risks
Easy Prey
Most cybersecurity conversations focus on stolen data, breached accounts, and attacks that live entirely on screens. This episode looks at a far more consequential threat: what happens when cyberattacks target the physical systems that keep society running. Power, water, transportation, and manufacturing. When those systems fail, the consequences aren’t just digital. They’re immediate, visible, and sometimes dangerous. My guest is Lesley Carhart, Technical Director of Incident Response at Dragos, a cybersecurity firm focused exclusively on protecting critical infrastructure. Lesley...
info_outline
Familial Identity Theft
Easy Prey
Identity theft is usually framed as an external threat. Hackers, data breaches, anonymous criminals operating somewhere far away. This episode looks at a much harder reality to face: identity theft that happens inside families, often quietly, over many years, and without immediate detection. The damage isn’t just financial. It reshapes trust, relationships, and a person’s sense of stability long before anyone realizes what’s happening. My guest is Axton Betz-Hamilton, an associate professor of financial counseling and planning whose research focuses on familial and child identity theft....
info_outlineFinding a solution to stop spam calls to you, your family, or your business isn’t easy. We may not win this war, but we don’t want the government making this decision for us. We can make it more manageable in the meantime.
Today’s guest is Aaron Foss. After winning the FTC Robocall Challenge in 2013, Aaron started Nomorobo. Since then, Nomorobo has stopped billions and billions of unwanted robocalls and spam texts from reaching our phones, and it was acquired by Applause group in August 2023. Aaron has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and countless other media outlets. He has testified in front of Congress, not once, not twice, but three times.
Show Notes:
- [1:14] - Aaron shares his background as a serial entrepreneur in the intersection of technology and business.
- [3:57] - At the beginning, Aaron didn’t even know what a robocall was.
- [6:47] - Robocalls have this negative connotation. They can actually be good. But there are many that are unwanted.
- [8:13] - There are different types of robocalls and there is a differentiation between spam and scam calls.
- [10:08] - Aaron explains why spam emails are easier to block than robocalls.
- [12:20] - There are some robocalls that are necessary and helpful for some people. That is one reason why not all robocalls can be blocked.
- [13:40] - Not answering the phone is not a plausible solution.
- [15:50] - Nomorobo is basically a series of bots talking to other bots.
- [16:50] - Aaron describes caller ID and how spoofing a number is possible.
- [19:42] - This is such a big problem because the barrier of entry is low.
- [21:08] - It is amazing that we can call anyone in the world. But that also means that scammers can, too.
- [22:53] - This is a complicated problem, and the future solution is a combination of government regulation, companies like Nomorobo, and AI.
- [26:29] - We are never going to win the war, but we can keep it manageable.
- [29:45] - What is the role of the carriers when it comes to robocalls?
- [31:47] - Keeping scammers on the phone does not make the problem go away.
- [33:52] - Some scams are seasonal and some are evergreen, like Medicare calls.
- [36:26] - Aaron explains the different ways these scams can be done and the range of damage they can do.
- [39:56] - At best, this is an annoyance. But there are people in our lives that are vulnerable and less protected.
- [44:42] - Sometimes, Nomorobo users have to turn it off for specific reasons and specific calls they’re waiting for.
- [47:56] - This problem is an example of “death by a thousand papercuts.”
- [49:30] - There are some red flags and things you might notice if you answer robocalls that could indicate that they are scams.
- [50:46] - This seems like an easy problem to solve, but it is far more complicated than most people think.
- [52:00] - Aaron describes what it was like to testify in front of Congress.
- [56:43] - Listen and educate yourself. Talk to other people about these things.
Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.