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_outlineFraud usually gets talked about in numbers like how much money was stolen, how many people were affected, how many cases got filed. But behind every one of those numbers is a person who’s been blindsided, manipulated, or left trying to rebuild trust in others and in themselves. This episode shifts the focus back to those human stories and the fight to protect them. My guest, Freddie Massimi, has spent more than a decade helping scam victims find both financial and emotional recovery, bringing empathy and understanding to a field that too often feels cold and procedural.
As a certified financial crimes investigator and program manager at The Knoble, Freddie has made it his mission to bridge the gap between institutions and individuals. He shares the heartbreaking and hopeful moments that define his work including one phone call that saved a life. Along with how that experience changed the way he thinks about what true fraud prevention really means.
Freddie also opens up about The Knoble’s Post-Scam Victimization Guide, a collaborative, trauma-informed resource designed to help victims regain control of their lives and prevent re-victimization. From crypto scams to romance cons, he explains how these schemes keep evolving, why empathy is still one of the best tools we have, and how every fraud fighter can make a difference simply by listening and responding with humanity.
Show Notes:
- [00:40] Freddie shares his background as a certified financial crimes investigator and program manager at The Knoble.
- [01:40] A look back at Freddie’s early path into criminal justice and how empathy shaped his fraud-fighting approach.
- [03:07] The story of a Tennessee widow who lost $300,000 in a pig-butchering crypto scam.
- [04:30] Freddie’s emotional account of saving a victim’s life and how it reframed his mission to protect others.
- [07:42] The rise of collaborative fraud-fighter networks and Freddie’s work leading The Knoble’s post-scam initiatives.
- [08:11] How The Knoble unites financial institutions, law enforcement, and NGOs to address “human crime.”
- [08:58] Development of the Post-Scam Victimization Guide, a trauma-informed resource for banks and fraud teams.
- [10:39] How financial crime has evolved from simple check scams to complex digital exploitation and trafficking.
- [13:01] The need for faster, more transparent information sharing between banks and law enforcement.
- [14:04] What makes the Post-Scam Guide different including actionable steps, empathy-driven language, and real-world tools.
- [15:00] Sextortion cases, Gavin’s Law, and how shame and silence compound the harm.
- [18:30] Practical tools in the guide, including hotline numbers, QR codes, and scripts for supporting victims.
- [20:20] How to talk to romance scam victims with compassion including using questions that spark reality checks, not judgment.
- [22:00] Why shame keeps scams underreported and how trauma-informed communication changes outcomes.
- [23:19] The role of technology in scams: remote access, malware, and how scammers exploit smartphones and computers.
- [24:36] Shoutout to Kitboga for his cybersecurity tools and awareness campaigns against scam call centers.
- [25:22] Why elderly victims remain the most vulnerable and how education can empower prevention.
- [27:24] The double victimization cycle like when scammers return pretending to recover lost money.
- [30:00] Freddie’s real-world example of helping a victim secure their accounts and recover identity.
- [32:50] How banks can adjust fraud detection systems to catch hidden patterns of exploitation.
- [34:30] Spotting red flags in gift card purchases and why speaking up can literally save lives.
- [36:31] Freddie’s advice for anyone who suspects they’re being scammed: stop all contact and secure your accounts.
- [37:06] The importance of documenting everything and reporting through IC3.gov and law enforcement.
- [38:30] Emotional recovery and community support are just as vital as financial recovery.
- [41:00] The biggest mistake victims make after being scammed is staying silent out of shame or fear.
- [41:40] Freddie’s story about protecting his own grandmother from IRS and WhatsApp scams.
- [43:00] Common text-message scams and why you should never reply, even with “wrong number.”
- [44:48] How to access The Knoble’s free, vetted Post-Scam Victimization Guide.
- [45:30] Where to connect with Freddie and The Knoble’s wider fraud-fighter network.
Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.