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
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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....
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Why You Fall For Scams
Easy Prey
Why do smart, capable people fall for scams even when the warning signs seem obvious in hindsight? In this episode, Dan Ariely joins us to examine how intuition often leads us in the wrong direction, especially under stress, uncertainty, or emotional pressure. A renowned behavioral economist, longtime professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, Misbehaving, and Misbelief, Dan has spent decades studying why rational people consistently make choices that don’t serve them. We talk about...
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Mobile Device Threats
Easy Prey
In a world where we’re told to carry our entire lives in our pockets, we’ve reached a strange tipping point where the very devices meant to connect us have become windows into our private lives for those who wish us harm. It’s no longer a matter of looking for the "shady" corners of the internet; today, the threats come from nation-state actors, advanced AI, and even the people we think we’re hiring. We are living in an era where the most sophisticated hackers aren't just trying to break into your phone, they’re trying to move into your business by pretending to be your best...
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Past, Present, and Future of AI agents
Easy Prey
The intersection of AI and cybersecurity is changing faster than anyone expected, and that pace is creating both incredible innovation and brand-new risks we’re only beginning to understand. From deepfake ads that fool even seasoned security professionals to autonomous agents capable of acting on our behalf, the threat landscape looks very different than it did even a year ago. To explore what this evolution means for everyday people and for enterprises trying to keep up, I’m joined by Chris Kirschke, Field CISO at Tuskira and a security leader with more than two decades of experience...
info_outlineIt’s easy to think of fraud prevention as a technical problem with a software solution. But according to Brian Davis, effective fraud defense is just as much about people, trust, and communication as it is about tools and data. With over a decade of experience, Brian has built fraud teams from scratch, shaped company-wide strategy, and helped growing startups shift from reactive to proactive risk management.
Brian is the Head of Fraud at Dodgeball, where he’s helping bring their orchestration platform to market, and the founder of House of Fraud, an invite-only community where top fraud professionals collaborate and share intel. He’s seen firsthand how fraudsters adapt quickly, and how internal misalignment or a lack of education can leave companies vulnerable. His layered approach focuses on understanding how business systems are abused and using that knowledge to design smarter defenses.
In this episode, Brian shares his journey into the fraud space, explains why internal politics often matter more than policy, and offers a real-world breakdown of how fraud teams can gain traction and build trust. Whether you're running a digital subscription business, a fintech platform, or an e-commerce store, this conversation will help you think more clearly about why you’re a target and what you can do to make your organization harder to hit.
Show Notes:
- [00:50] Brian is the head of fraud at Dodgeball Fraud Orchestration Platform.
- [01:15] We learn how Brian noticed something was off about 10 years ago when he was working for an accounting client.
- [02:01] He loved accounting, but as he got his master's degree, he started focusing on entrepreneurship and fraud.
- [02:45] He worked in accounting for a year and then became the first fraud hire of an e-commerce company.
- [03:30] Then he built out teams to help businesses combat fraud.
- [04:07] He's now on the vendor side of fraud prevention, and he does consulting and runs The Fraud Space community.
- [05:18] Brian likes the dynamic aspect of always having to solve a problem. Micro patterns pop up that can be connected to bigger patterns.
- [06:47] Most people are willing to help the fraud department, because it gets them what they want.
- [09:20] Issues that arise when doing a really good job in the fraud department and justifying the expense.
- [11:05] When coming into a new company, the areas where Brian starts looking for fraud.
- [12:04] The first step is to understand how the company makes decisions. He then begins with a surface map. How does a user interact with your site for an outcome?
- [16:29] Where the larger threats are coming from.
- [18:49] Understanding the fraudster's criminal journey and where they choose to attack.
- [25:25] Founders who have previously been hurt by fraud asked more questions.
- [28:20] Behaviors that might actually attract fraud.
- [30:58] How referral programs can attract fraud.
- [40:29] There are many similarities between the different types of fraud and the tools used across multiple industries.
- [41:23] Has Brian ever been the victim of a scam?
- [42:28] A fraud story purchasing sporting tickets through marketplace.
- [49:12] The pitfalls of passwords and password hygiene.
Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.