Becky Holmes loves DMing with scammers. When it comes to romance scammers, she will do whatever it takes, pursuing them to the great delight of her fans on social media. From flings with A-listers to the lantern-jawed soldier with a heart of gold, Becky’s on a mission to unravel the weird world of online swindler love.  We talked to Holmes in this week’s episode about her strange predilection for scamming scammers and her new book, Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud. The Tinfoild Swan has some not to be missed advice for parents on a very serious ..read more

Erin West is the Deputy District Attorney in Santa Clara County, California and the founder of Project Shamrock. Whether she’s prosecuting eye-popping SIM-swap money grabs or large-scale pig butchering operations out of business, her stories and experience can help you stay safer.   And if you don’t scare so easily because you’re feeling really good about your cyber defenses, may we recommend this week’s Tinfoil Swan, which is designed to make you worry (and maybe shore up your defenses.) “What the Hack with Adam Levin” is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you like it, con ..read more

No one’s too smart for a well-designed scam. Case in point, neuroscientist, triathlete Carina who thought the finance bro she met on Bumble was the one for her, but the only real thing was the money she lost.  This week’s Tin Foil Swan dives into the sunk cost fallacy and the role it plays in scams. The post Carina Follows Her Heart Into a Crypto Scam appeared first on Adam Levin ..read more

No one is immune from being scammed. Just ask Tarah Wheeler, founder and CEO of Red Queen Dynamics, a company that specializes in keeping people scam-free. While onboarding a new hire, a process she put in place stopped a scammer despite a serious cyber misstep.  Check out the episode for an object lesson in how even the cyber-savviest among us can still fall prey to internet-based skullduggery, and what you can do to stay safe no matter how distracting your worklife may be. This week’s Tin Foil Swan explores why hostile nation-states invest in misinformation and disinformation. (Spoiler ..read more

It’s no secret the internet doesn’t always bring out the best in people. The relative anonymity and global sprawl of digital life make it the ideal environment for scams, trolling and other kinds of bad behavior online.  I host a podcast about cybersecurity, and was pondering how to put the issues we all face in our digital lives in a memorable form, and here’s what I came up with: The Seven Digital Sins: Pride: Thinking you’re safe. According to the FTC, U.S. citizens reported roughly $10 billion in losses to cybercrime in 2023, up $1 billion from the year before; far more scams probabl ..read more

You encounter the love of your life online, never meeting them in person. Or you get an email about an inheritance from a distant relative you didn’t know existed. Maybe it’s an attractive gig at a company you’ve never heard of before.  Whatever the initial beat of this crime, when you go to meet your one true love, show up to collect your inheritance or start your first day of work, there’s another step for an unforeseen reason. Also, whoever you meet wonders if you wouldn’t mind delivering a suitcase or package at the final destination since you’re going there anyway. With love/money/ga ..read more

Every part of life that comes in contact with the Internet is tracked, packed and sold to a a seemingly infinite network of data brokers. Caitlin Sarian AKA Cybersecurity Girl joined us this week to discuss why scrubbing your information is trickier than it sounds and what you can do about it.  In this week’s Tin Foil Swan, we revisit the nightmare of automobile data collection and how a Florida man is trying to fight it. “What the Hack with Adam Levin” is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you like it, consider rating us on your favorite podcast service or writing a r ..read more

A decades-old image format can be used to hack five of the most widely-used AI platforms, according to security researchers. In a recently published paper, a team of computer scientists showed how ASCII art can be used in a new exploit. ASCII art is text-based graphics dating back to the pre-World Wide Web internet (example below). Researchers found it can be used to override safety guardrails for AI-based GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude and Llama2 and deliver potentially dangerous payloads. The study showed that the AI platforms could be prompted to deliver information about illegal activitie ..read more

Think you’re too savvy to get scammed? Author and activist Cory Doctorow explains how we’re all one muffaletta and a malfunctioning jet door away from falling prey to the most basic of cons. He joins us this week to talk about that and to fill us in about his new book, “The Bezzle.” From Ponzi schemes and multi-layer marketing to for-profit prisons, Doctorow takes us on a talking tour of the Golden Age of scams and all things grift-related where Amway and hamburger smuggling operations shed new light on digital cartels and the kaleidoscope of fraud everywhere online. This week’s Tin Foil Swan ..read more

Presley Rhodes makes a living posting what she calls “the subtle art of the thirst trap.” Popular on Instagram, she uses that platform to draw her most parched followers to OnlyFans where she can get paid. But what happens when a scammer buys access to those images? Nothing good. To hear what happened (and try to figure it out) we talked to someone who was scammed, someone who came to the rescue (former White House CIO and What the Hack guest Theresa Payton) and a United States Secret Service agent working in South Africa to catch the bad guys. “What the Hack with Adam Levin” is available wher ..read more