Libsyn Directory

Money Laundering

Release Date: 02/18/2026

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

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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...

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

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 News, The Sunday Times, and other major outlets, and he is also the creator of The Lazarus Heist, the hit podcast and book series exploring North Korea’s global hacking operations. His latest book, Rinsed, examines how technology has transformed the world of money laundering.

We talk about how modern criminal networks are structured, why scams now rely on patience and psychology rather than speed, and how money laundering functions as a service industry that quietly supports fraud at scale. The conversation also explores why victims are sometimes unknowingly used to move stolen funds, how urgency is weaponized to override judgment, and why slowing down remains one of the most effective defenses people have.

Show Notes:

[01:08] Geoff shares his background and why the organized crime + technology overlap is where he’s spent his career.
[02:52] Why longer-form work (books, podcasts) is often the only way to explain complex crimes that don’t fit into a quick news segment.
[03:56] Old-school enforcement was violence; modern crime groups often can’t use that when partners are anonymous and overseas.
[04:23] The trust networks holding global crime together can be more fragile than people assume.
[05:06] The strange “trust inside crime” dynamic especially in ransomware, where criminals must appear “reliable.”
[06:18] Competition today looks more like corporate rivalry than street violence, especially in ransomware affiliate ecosystems.
[07:41] Do these groups evolve from traditional cartels or arise from new tech-native criminals? Geoff says it depends on the region.
[09:58] The skill split of elite coders builds ransomware, while newer recruits use social engineering to get initial access.
[11:34] Money laundering adapts fast with crypto, game currencies, NFTs while the core “service business” model stays the same.
[12:46] The “cost” of laundering: fees can be extreme for newcomers, and lower for experienced players with connections.
[13:53] A disturbing case where victims are daisy-chained to launder money and reinforce the romance-scam illusion.
[15:12] Why money mules are treated as disposable and how many don’t realize the seriousness until law enforcement shows up.
[16:48] The tactic of letting victims withdraw a little money to make a platform feel legitimate and why it works so well.
[18:09] Geoff connects today’s tactics to classic con mechanics (“putting the mark on the send”) and the psychology behind it.
[19:22] Geoff describes seeing an “escalator scam” firsthand: small payouts early, then pressure to pay to “unlock” higher earnings.
[21:51] The scary shift is that scams now look polished and patient, stretching across multiple channels and weeks (or longer).
[23:12] The more we “self-custody” money and identity online, the more security responsibility shifts onto individuals.
[24:32] A major crypto seizure case raises a messy question when seized assets grow in value, who gets the upside?
[28:46] Geoff’s practical defense: slow down on anything money-related, create space, and don’t let urgency steer decisions.
[31:17] Why today’s scammers play the long game of months of relationship-building can lead to life-changing losses.
[34:29] Repeat victimization: recovery scams and fake “investigators” often target people right after they’ve been hit.
[36:08] “Traceable” doesn’t mean “recoverable,” why freezing and returning stolen crypto is legally and logistically hard.
[38:44] UK reimbursement changes shift liability between sending and receiving banks but there are tradeoffs and open questions.
[41:28] Geoff reacts to US payment quirks (card taken away, tip written in pen) and why it still surprises outsiders.
[45:11] Closing advice is to learn from other people’s stories and run “what would I do?” scenarios before a crisis hits.

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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