When Cybercrime Gets Personal
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...
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Stopping Phone Scams
Easy Prey
Phone scams get dismissed as background noise or just annoying interruptions and unknown numbers with robotic voices we learn to ignore. But behind that noise is an industry built on psychology, automation, and staggering profitability. My guest today is Alex Quilici. He’s an engineer, entrepreneur, and the CEO of YouMail, a company focused on protecting consumers and businesses from unwanted and fraudulent calls. Alex has spent years analyzing how robocalls and scam campaigns are designed, how they evolve, and why they continue to work despite better technology and increased awareness. What...
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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...
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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....
info_outlineIdentity 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 was gone by morning. What followed wasn't a quick nightmare with a clean ending. It stretched across months, multiple counties, a jail communication system, the dark web, and a wanted fugitive who dyed her hair to look more like the face on a stolen ID. Brooklyn didn't just sit with it. She pulled criminal records, reverse-searched phone numbers, tracked an inmate's transfers across four facilities, identified a suspect on her own, and eventually filed a civil lawsuit without an attorney.
We talk about what it feels like when someone is pretending to be you, not just spending your money, but messaging people as you, signing up for accounts as you, building a life in your name. We also get into the specific steps she took to fight back, the tools she wishes she'd known about sooner, and what recovery actually looks like when the case isn't closed, and the person still hasn't been caught.
Show Notes:
- [1:47] Brooklyn introduces herself as a 25-year-old from Texas with no prior experience in fraud or identity theft.
- [2:13] She describes moving to the DFW area after getting married in June 2024 and being aware of the high rate of car break-ins in the region.
- [3:32] Her car window is smashed overnight, and her work bag is stolen, containing her laptop, wallet, driver's license, and all her cards.
- [4:03] Brooklyn's immediate response is to freeze her credit with all three bureaus and cancel her cards within 10 to 15 minutes.
- [4:57] Despite locking everything down, her cards are maxed out, and a police report is filed with little follow-up from law enforcement.
- [5:12] A period of quiet follows before a letter arrives around Valentine's Day 2025 claiming she rented a U-Haul and never returned it.
- [5:48] Experian alerts her that her driver's license has been found on the dark web, arriving almost simultaneously with the U-Haul letter.
- [7:14] While checking USPS Informed Delivery for a wedding invitation, Brooklyn spots a certified letter from a county jail addressed to her with an inmate's name listed beneath hers.
- [8:28] She contacts the jail and discovers an inmate had listed her as his girlfriend when booked, requesting she pick up his belongings before a prison transfer.
- [9:53] Brooklyn looks up the inmate in the state conviction database and finds a record including identity theft, car burglary, organized crime, and credit card abuse of the elderly.
- [11:58] A jail investigator reveals that the inmate's girlfriend had created an account in Brooklyn's name using her driver's license photo, editing her own appearance to match Brooklyn's features.
- [14:02] Brooklyn traces the same pattern across multiple county jail facilities the inmate passed through, confirming the woman repeated the identity fraud at each one.
- [15:13] A detective confirms the woman has stolen or attempted to use 17 other identities, and that Brooklyn is the only one who has caught on so far.
- [16:52] Four police departments become involved, and Brooklyn begins coordinating with investigators across all of them through a shared email thread.
- [19:22] Pulling her credit report reveals phone numbers tied to the suspect, leading Brooklyn to discover PayPal accounts, Cash App profiles, and a Facebook page created in her name.
- [20:58] Brooklyn uses a PayPal password recovery prompt to identify the first three letters of the suspect's real name.
- [22:03] She requests all jail booking documents containing her name from every county involved and receives text message logs from one department.
- [22:33] Using a birthday and partial name found in the messages, Brooklyn searches mugshots.com and identifies the suspect herself, later getting vague confirmation from investigators.
- [24:38] Chris asks whether the suspect and inmate were in a relationship, and Brooklyn explains they appear to share a child and were trying to manage a custody situation.
- [27:57] Brooklyn investigates whether a Verizon phone number was tied to an account in her name and later finds the suspect's real email embedded in her electricity account profile.
- [29:27] Brooklyn details changing her driver's license four times throughout the ordeal and suspects the woman is using her information for utility accounts to avoid being found.
- [31:02] Two police departments issue arrest warrants for the suspect, but she remains at large and difficult to locate.
- [31:33] Brooklyn files a civil lawsuit on her own without an attorney, drafting the paperwork herself and submitting a known address for the suspect.
- [32:04] She drafts a settlement agreement requiring the suspect to delete all fraudulent accounts, send proof, and return her physical driver's license, emailing it directly to her.
- [33:12] The suspect signs the agreement but does not comply with any of its terms within the deadline Brooklyn set.
- [33:37] Brooklyn files a motion to enforce the settlement agreement, which has since been approved by the court.
- [36:58] Discussion turns to whether the original car break-in was connected to the couple, with Brooklyn expressing frustration that law enforcement never attempted to link the CVS footage to them.
- [38:14] Brooklyn reflects on how the situation became consuming, describing obsessive monitoring of jail systems, court records, and criminal databases at its peak.
- [39:18] She shifts toward healthier monitoring habits, including monthly credit pulls, USPS Informed Delivery checks, and identity protection subscriptions like Aura.
- [40:33] The emotional toll is discussed, including nightmares, anxiety, therapy, and the strange experience of seeing someone try to physically resemble her.
- [43:22] Brooklyn describes seeing light at the end of the tunnel, connecting her recovery to moving out of the area and reclaiming her sense of self.
- [46:13] She reflects on pride in handling most of the case herself and finding closure in knowing the suspect is now aware that Brooklyn knows everything.
- [48:03] Brooklyn expresses empathy for others who may not have the same access to legal knowledge or law enforcement relationships that helped her navigate the process.
- [49:14] Practical tips are shared, including USPS Informed Delivery, e-verify identity freezing, and the IRS identity theft PIN available during tax filing.
Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.