Stolen Podcast with Erin West
Scams, cryptofraud, investment fraud, celebrity impersonation, romance baiting, sexploitation, crypto ATM fraud, job scams, toll scams, human trafficking... Stolen is a weekly podcast that uncovers the global rise of the transnational scam industry. Stolen investigates the global rise of digital crime — and the people caught in the crossfire. Join host Erin West — prosecutor, cybercrime investigator, global keynote speaker, and your guide into the dark corners of the internet. Hear from law enforcement, cyberfraud experts, and the survivors who’ve lived through the crimes. These are the voices behind the headlines and the crimes that cross borders and boundaries.
Episodes
Episode 75: Marc Grens talks about leaving the industry he helped to build after seeing companies consistently sacrificing customer safety for profit.
A couple of years went by, and we sat in the room and said, ‘Anybody who does over X dollars in a small amount of time is probably a scam victim.’ — Marc Grens, Chaintrax Cyber
For...
We tell people to stop and verify, but what can they actually check? Scammers can fake a financial advisor’s credentials, buy top sponsored search results, and build a Facebook group with 3,000 members and a 4.7-star rating.
Aleks Ring, a longtime Operation Shamrock volunteer who works with scam victims every day, explains why the slogans fall short.
In this quick take, she talks about:
- Why fear and hope shut down good j...
Episode 74: What happens when you stop talking about victims and start listening to them?
April DeValkenaere, a former banker, cop, and white-collar investigator; therapist Cathy Wilson; and Kathy Waters of Advocating Against Romance Scammers built a symposium to find out, with a survivor seated in working group to tell the experts whether their fixes would actually have helped.
We talk about victim-blaming language in the therapy ...
Episode 73: Hieu Ngo’s path to a career as a cybercrime investigator is anything but typical. From 2005 to 2012, Hieu was a hacker. He stole U.S. identities and resold them on the dark web. In 2012, a U.S. Secret Service investigation lured him from Vietnam to Guam, where he was arrested and eventually sentenced to serve time in a U.S. federal prison. Hieu tells Erin West about the investigation, his incarceration, and how a ...
Episode 72: Brian Mason of the Edmonton Police Service shares how live scam intelligence and public-private partnerships can stop scams in progress.
Erin West talks with Detective Brian Mason of the Edmonton Police Service, a leading expert in cybercrime and large-scale scam investigations in Canada. Injured in the line of duty in 2019, Mason turned to the one crime he believed was never fully investigated: ...
Episode 71: Transnational organized crime expert Jason Tower explains why crackdowns on scam compounds aren’t stopping scams, just moving them from one region in Asia to another.
The Myanmar military targeted 3 hubs in a border area that has 43. So there’s a lot of choices. And so Myanmar military went about demolishing KK Park. — Jason Tower, Global Initiative against Organized Crime
When ...
Episode 70: Mike Bliss didn’t know much about crypto fraud when he met his first victim in August 2025. With coaching from experienced peers, he now investigates fraud cases and helps other officers.
She said, ‘I just lost $15,000.’ She was distraught; she didn’t know what to do. And quite honestly, I didn’t know what to do. — Mike Bliss, ...
Episode 69: Iowa has found a way to stop elder financial fraud on the very first transaction — before the money is gone. Matt Mortvedt and Jessica McGraw of the Iowa Insurance Division join Erin West to break down their "detect, deploy, disrupt" playbook. They explain how they reach victims early, seize scam websites and the crypto wallets behind them, curb crypto ATMs, and treat every scam victim as the victim of a serious c...
Episode 68: Susan Ralston outlines the evolution of fraud and why she considers it a human, emotional crime whose victims deserve empathy over judgement.
Erin West meets with Tower Federal Credit Union VP and COO to talk about changing the fraud conversation to focus on empathy. Susan’s career started at a grocery store cash register and evolved into decades of frontline fraud-f...
Episode 67: How an assignment with the DEA led to Detective Scott Simons becoming one of the nation’s go-to crypto tracers and the investigative lead for Operation Shamrock’s Crypto Coalition.
The Greenfield, Wisconsin officer's career took an unusual turn in 2015 when he opened one of the earliest cyber drug-trafficking cases in the history of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Simons taught hims...
Well-known for Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler documentary, Cecilie Fjellhøy joins Erin West to expose the real cost of online fraud — and why justice is still out of reach for victims.
This isn't just a story about one scam. It’s a roadmap of what happens when a f...
Episode 66: Erin West invites 20-year fraud-fighting veteran Lenny Gusel of Feedzai — former Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Robinhood fraud leader — to talk about why banks are the last line of defense against pig butchering scams, not the first.
They dig into behavioral biometrics, why financial institutions can't even share fraud data within their own organizations, and why the real fix isn't more regulation &m...
Episode 65: Don was a retired engineer building his dream home when a Facebook "friend of a friend" request turned into a years-long journey into the world of investment scams. Host Erin West and Don trace how a slow-building pig butchering scam that began in late 2021 cost him $700,000 — and how he did the investigative work law enforcement couldn't, or wouldn't.
Don walks through the grooming process, the moment a single cl...
Episode 64: When Patrick Coughlin's mother got a call telling her that her daughter had been kidnapped and would be killed unless she paid up, it wasn't real — but it was terrifyingly convincing. In this episode of Stolen, host Erin West sits down with Patrick, a former national security and cybersecurity expert, to unpack how that "grandparent scam"...
Episode 62: Host Erin West sits down with Kate Griffin of the Aspen Institute's Financial Security Program to unpack how she brought together 80 organizations — from banks to tech companies to nonprofits — to build the first-ever national blueprint for fighting scams. Kate walks through how the project came together, the four key focus areas the task force identified (data sharing, law enforcement collaboration, consu...
Episode 61: Erin West connects with Frank McKenna, a 30-year fraud-consulting veteran and founder of Point Predictive, who has built four separate industry data consortiums — including efforts that now touch credit card, mortgage, ATM, and auto-lending fraud.
McKenna shares how simple, incremental data-sharing agreements can disrupt fraud rings that are already collaborating freely on platforms like Telegram. The conversation...
Episode 60: Anola Johnson thought LinkedIn was the one platform safe from scammers — professional, vetted, serious. A connection request two days after a work trip to Paris changed that. Over the following months, a charming "oil rig engineer" supposedly stationed in Abu Dhabi convinced her to wire money again and again: $1.4 million to a supplier in Singapore, $180,000 more days later, and a $350,000 home equity loan she dra...
Episode 59: Her heart stopped when Mariana van Zeller climbed into a boat to cross into Myanmar. In this episode of Stolen, Erin West sits down with the National Geographic journalist behind Trafficked to talk about the two minutes that separate Thailand from Shwe Kokko — the gleaming, casino-lit city that a Chinese crime syndicate built on forced labor and pig butchering scams.
Mariana describes the dog-and-pony tour, the an...
Episode 58: Despite his careful research and skepticism, scammers defrauded Syd of $50,000. Next came the challenge of dealing with law enforcement.
Erin West sits down with a former securities industry professional who lost more than $50,000 to a technically sophisticated crypto investment fraud. Syd’s story isn’t one of carelessness; he had identified several earlier scam pitches before one &md...
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