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....
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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_outlineMost of us think of scams as random or isolated or something that just happens to unlucky people. But what if the truth is far more organized, far more disturbing? Behind many of today’s scams is a global web of criminal enterprises, structured like corporations and fueled by technology, data, and billions of stolen dollars.
In this episode, we sit down with Ken Westbrook. Ken spent over three decades in the CIA before retiring, only to return to the fight after his own mother was targeted and lost most of her life savings to a tech support scam. That moment changed everything. He founded Stop Scams Alliance, a nonprofit on a mission to stop scams before they ever reach our devices. His approach? Building bridges between tech companies, banks, telecom, government, and consumer advocates to cut these criminal operations off at the source.
Ken brings a rare blend of intel experience and personal urgency to this issue. He breaks down what’s really going on behind the scenes, why the U.S. is falling behind in this fight, and how other countries are pushing back effectively. If you think this can’t happen to you or someone you love, think again. This conversation is a wake-up call.
Show Notes:
- [00:58] Ken is the founder and CEO of Stop Scams Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to reducing scams in the United States.
- [01:21] They are focused on the left of the boom or before the scam happens.
- [01:43] Ken served for 33 years in the CIA.
- [02:28] We learn how Ken's mother was scammed on Valentine's Day of 2023. He started looking into these scams, and he was horrified.
- [03:19] As a nation, we need to do better to defend ourselves. Ken came out of retirement to do just that.
- [03:32] His board of directors has a lot of government officials who decided to join the fight. We are literally under attack by foreign organized crime, and we're not doing enough to protect ourselves.
- [04:03] 21 million Americans are scammed each year.
- [04:45] The number of scam and fraud victims are increasing.
- [05:15] It's become a business, and the scammers are getting better at what they do.
- [06:36] How Chinese criminal gangs shifted from casinos to scamming operations. People join voluntarily or are sometimes kidnapped.
- [07:24] It's also expanding around the world.
- [10:12] The British government actually has a scam czar. So does Australia. They have a strategy and a fraud policy.
- [12:08] You think you're talking to the IRS or your bank, but you're not.
- [13:45] Having a whitelist for financial advertising. Other countries are finding value in authenticating, maybe the United States should pay attention.
- [15:36] Scammers love to get people on the telephone. In many countries, telecom companies will block spoofing calls from other countries.
- [16:47] We need authenticated text messages in the US.
- [17:42] We have more companies and free enterprise, so it's more complicated in the US.
- [19:35] We need somebody in charge. It's an economic war with transnational organized crime.
- [22:34] Fake investment scams are the number one scam when it comes to losses.
- [27:46] Ken shares what happened in his mom's case. It was a tech support scam. His mom clicked on an obituary site and scareware popped up.
- [30:08] The whole point is to get you to call a fake 1-800 number that you think is Microsoft.
- [30:51] The Phantom hacker was able to look up where she banked by using her phone number. Then they put her in touch with the fake fraud department at the bank.
- [32:11] Then they sent her to Home Depot to buy gift cards and then cashier's checks.
- [33:55] Fortunately the banks intervened, but she still lost a lot of money.
- [36:38] We need to realize that we're being attacked by Chinese cyber criminals.
- [39:38] People under the age of 50 are falling victim to scams more than the elderly people.
- [41:31] The average loss last year of an older person was $83,000. Older people are being targeted because of their demographic.
- [43:31] Criminals micro-target just like advertisers.
- [44:04] We all need to be aware of the threats out there. If you get a call that you're not expecting, always assume it's not legitimate.
- [45:21] Be wary of links.
Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.