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 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 strategy for one of the world’s largest digital entertainment platforms, where speed, approval rates, and loss prevention are constantly pulling against each other.
We discuss why scams continue to work despite smarter tools, how “friendly fraud” complicates the picture, and why digital goods create very different risk patterns than traditional retail. We also get into automation, AI-driven decisions, and what it really looks like to manage fraud in real time.
Show Notes:
- [1:36] Iremar shares how his career in fraud prevention began, moving from bank customer service into reviewing suspicious transactions.
- [2:45] He explains why he completed law school but chose not to become a lawyer, and how legal training shaped his understanding of fraud psychology.
- [4:10] Fraud is framed as an emotional event, with urgency, financial stress, and excitement often lowering a person’s defenses.
- [6:16] Digital marketplaces attract fraudsters due to low-cost items and products like gift cards that are easy to cash out.
- [7:10] The concept of card testing emerges, where stolen payment details are validated through small purchases.
- [8:05] Iremar discusses the rise of friendly fraud, where legitimate customers dispute transactions after receiving goods.
- [9:30] Major product launches, such as highly anticipated game releases, create predictable spikes in fraud risk.
- [11:05] Marketplace fraud requires managing risk on both sides, verifying sellers while monitoring buyers in real time.
- [12:40] He describes G2A’s shift away from manual review toward fully automated transaction decisioning.
- [14:15] The tension between frictionless customer experience and effective fraud prevention is unpacked.
- [16:05] Automation and AI are positioned as essential tools for scaling fraud defenses without overwhelming operations.
- [18:10] AI’s real impact is discussed: not changing fraud itself, but making attacks faster and more scalable.
- [20:05] Iremar explains why human judgment still plays a critical role alongside AI systems.
- [21:41] Fraud patterns differ across industries, illustrated through examples from ride-hailing platforms.
- [23:10] Abuse of referral and incentive programs reveals how self-referrals became a common fraud tactic.
- [24:40] Identity misuse by drivers highlights risks tied to document verification.
- [25:50] Face recognition and customer reporting become tools for detecting account misuse.
- [27:15] High-value luxury marketplaces introduce entirely different fraud and logistics challenges.
- [29:10] Practical consumer advice: buy from reliable sources, review refund policies, and question unrealistic pricing.
- [30:05] Seller protection strategies focus on accurate product descriptions and shipment tracking.
- [32:05] The most common complaints in marketplaces are items not received and items not as described.
- [33:20] Iremar recounts becoming a fraud victim after a fraudulent airline ticket charge.
- [35:00] A WhatsApp impersonation attempt using his photo targeted his mother.
- [36:10] Verification habits are emphasized as one of the strongest defenses against scams.
- [37:40] The risks of social media and account takeover scenarios are discussed.
- [39:30] Challenges around encouraging broader adoption of two-factor authentication.
- [40:05] Career advice for those interested in fraud prevention as a profession.
Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.