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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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....
info_outlineWhat happens when the drive to succeed masks deep emotional wounds and addiction? In this episode, Jonathan Schwartz shares a powerful and painfully honest account of how his life unraveled.
Once one of Hollywood’s most trusted financial advisors, Jonathan worked with icons like Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, and Gwyneth Paltrow. On the surface, he had it all. But underneath the success was a secret struggle with gambling and drug addiction that led him to steal millions from the very clients who trusted him most.
His fall from grace was dramatic and public, ending in a prison sentence and the loss of everything he had built. But that wasn’t the end of his story. Today, Jonathan is sober and rebuilding his life with purpose. As Program Director at Altus Rehab, he now helps others find their own way out of addiction and shame. His story is raw, real, and full of hard-earned wisdom for anyone who has ever felt like they couldn’t ask for help.
Show Notes:
- [01:30] Jonathan is a different person from who he was. He grew up in Upstate New York and his father left when he was four. His mom had a lot of stress and took it out on him which created childhood trauma.
- [03:34] Accounting was the subject that he was good at.
- [05:02] Eventually, his cousin gave him a job working in Los Angeles for celebrities.
- [06:33] In 2004, he became a partner in GSO business management. He got a break when Linkin Park was looking for someone in business management. Their success opened up the floodgates.
- [08:37] He began getting more and more A-list clients.
- [09:04] In 2010, he became addicted to gambling.
- [10:01] This eventually led to embezzlement from his celebrity clients. He placed the bet with this bookie everyday for 6 years.
- [13:48] He ended up embezzling about 7 million dollars.
- [14:12] When he stopped gambling he had suicidal ideation.
- [17:05] He always intended to pay the money back.
- [19:37] Jonathan shares a time when the bank wanted to call Alanis.
- [21:03] There was a point when his partners started to notice something wasn't right.
- [22:04] In 2015 he was fired by Alanis, but he continued to give his attention to his A-list clients.
- [24:42] He didn't want to expose anyone to the fact that he was committing crime. He never told a soul.
- [25:07] The dark secret was eating him inside, and he also had to deal with his unresolved trauma.
- [27:12] How Jonathan had to come clean with his wife, because he was scheduled for a lie detector test.
- [28:48] After failing the test, he was facing 23 years in prison. He negotiated a four to six year plea agreement.
- [31:14] He ended up being released early because of COVID.
- [32:11] He struggled to get a job and ended up going back to school, and now he's a marriage and family therapist with an emphasis on addiction and trauma.
- [34:00] In prison he had the opportunity to reflect on his bad decisions and read a lot of books.
- [36:33] He's proud to be sober and a nerd. His trauma is resolved, and he gets to help people in treatment not make the same mistakes that he made.
- [41:34] Celebrities today need to understand not to trust their business manager so quickly and to make sure that they're proactive in their financial affairs and that they're asking for source documents.
- [42:11] Audit your business manager with some level of frequency.
- [48:43] Don't go out and spend all your money. Treat your first dollars as your last dollars.
- [50:56] Jonathan has a book coming out in about 12 months.
Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.