Libsyn Directory

Child Exploitation Cyber Investigations

Release Date: 05/28/2025

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

Exploiting Trust (Part 2)

Easy Prey

Security failures rarely come from cutting-edge attacks or sophisticated tools. They happen in ordinary moments when someone holds a door, follows an instruction without questioning it, or finds a workaround that makes their day easier. Those small, human decisions are often the real entry points, and they tend to compound over time. This episode picks up the second half of our conversation on exploiting trust with FC Barker, a veteran ethical hacker and physical security expert known for legally breaking into banks, government buildings, and high-security facilities around the world. With...

Exploiting Trust (Part 1)

Easy Prey

Most security failures don’t start with a dramatic breach or a mysterious hacker sitting in a dark room. They usually start quietly. Someone assumes a system is locked down. Someone trusts that a door shouldn’t open, or that a machine “just works,” or that no one would ever think to look there. Over time, those small assumptions stack up, and that’s where things tend to go wrong. Today’s guest is FC Barker, a renowned ethical hacker, social engineer, and global keynote speaker with more than three decades of experience legally breaking into organizations to expose their blind...

Surviving a Ransomware Attack

Easy Prey

A ransomware attack doesn’t always announce itself with flashing warnings and locked screens. Sometimes it starts with a quiet system outage, a few unavailable servers, and a sinking realization days later that the threat actors were already inside. This conversation pulls back the curtain on what really happens when an organization believes it’s dealing with routine failures only to discover it’s facing a full-scale cyber extortion event. My guest today is Zachary Lewis, CIO and CISO for a Midwest university, a 40 Under 40 Business Leader, and a former Nonprofit CISO of the Year....

More Episodes

Technology is a double-edged sword. It can empower us, connect us, and solve problems, but it can also be used to exploit, manipulate, and harm. When it comes to protecting children online, that line gets especially thin. Digital forensics, AI-powered image classification, and global law enforcement collaboration are now essential tools for keeping families safe in a world that moves faster than most of us can keep up.

Debbie Garner knows this world intimately. She’s a retired Special Agent in charge with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and former commander of the state’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. For years she led efforts to track down online predators and bring justice to survivors. These days she’s working in the private sector, serving on the boards of Raven and Revere Technologies, pushing for smarter tech solutions and stronger training to support those still on the front lines.

In this episode we talk about the growing problem of online child exploitation, the reality of underfunded cybercrime units and the ways technology is being used to fight back. Whether you’re a parent, an educator or just someone who cares about kids online, you need to hear this.

Show Notes:

[00:58] Debbie shares her law enforcement background over 30 years. She even worked undercover buying crack!
[02:19] She spent the last 8 years of her career as the Supervisor Special Agent in charge of GBI's Child Exploitation and Computer Crimes Unit.
[02:45] Now that she's retired from law enforcement, she works in the private sector with technology companies.
[05:36] It's become her passion, even in retirement, to help those who are victims of exploitation.
[07:09] Most children are victimized by someone they know. There's also plenty of predators online.
[08:55] There are multiple organizations that work on child exploitation investigations.
[10:53] People in law enforcement do tend to prioritize these types of crimes.
[12:12] We talk about how the investigations begin.
[13:53] Cases have increased from 2400 tips a year to over 30,000.
[15:17] There's never enough technology to keep up with the increase.
[16:41] RAVEN is a lobbying group to request additional funding from Congress.
[18:33] With over 30,000 tips last year Georgia made over 450 arrests.
[22:13] There's now technology that will help find CSAM on phones. There are also some amazing investigations on the dark web.
[25:15] OSINT is helping investigate and it's a collaborative community.
[27:55] Channels to report exploitation. Start with the platform, then National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and law enforcement.
[31:34] Don't put images on the internet. Websites like Take It Down can help with images of underage people and Take It Down can help adults.
[33:43] Always mention if the person is underage when you make a report.
[34:10] Talk to your kids and start early with age appropriate conversations about CSAM.

Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.

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