A golden opportunity...for fraud.
About this episode
The episode discusses various social engineering scams and cybercrime trends, including a gold bar scam and a crypto investment scam.
This week, while Dave is out, hosts Maria Varmazis and Joe Carrigan are discussing the latest in social engineering scams, phishing schemes, and criminal exploits that are making headlines. Maria and Joe are joined by friend of the show Michele Kellerman. We start with some follow-up on the chicken coop, where the big news is that the chicks have officially hatched. Maria covers how AI is fueling a growing share of cybercrime in Africa as scammers use increasingly sophisticated digital tools to target victims. Michele looks at a multi-step gold bar scam targeting older New Yorkers, where criminals first compromise victims' devices and information before posing as government or law enforcement officials to steal their money. Joe breaks down the Fun Coffee crypto investment scam, which promised enormous returns before the platform suddenly shut down, leaving victims with more than HK$104 million in reported losses. Our Catch of the Day comes from Reddit, with another scam that proves if an offer sounds too good to be…
People in this episode
Hosts: Maria Varmazis, Joe Carrigan
Guest: Michele Kellerman
Topics covered
- social engineering scams
- phishing schemes
- cybercrime
- AI in cybercrime
- gold bar scam
- crypto investment scam
Keywords
- cybercrime
- social engineering
- phishing
- AI scams
- gold bar scam
- crypto scam
- investment fraud
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: INTERPOL, NYPD, Fun Coffee
Places: Africa, New Yorkers, Hong Kong
More episodes of Hacking Humans
- catfish (noun) [Word Notes]
- Hackers gonna hack back. [OMITB]
- I just want to give you $25 million!
- passkey (noun) [Word Notes]
- 400 episodes and we still have trust issues.
- Objection! That's a scam.
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