In a special Valentine’s Day episode, we look at the evolution of romance scams. They aren’t just about bilking lonely people out of their life savings anymore – scammers have diversified, and they’re making victims accomplices in a roster of cyber crimes from email scams and check fraud to money laundering.

54. Miss Lonelyhearts and the money mules

The podcast that tells true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. We take listeners into the world of cyber and intelligence without all the techie jargon. 
Every Tuesday and Friday, former NPR investigations correspondent Dina Temple-Raston and the team draw back the curtain on ransomware attacks, mysterious hackers, and the people who are trying to stop them.

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Oren Etzioni used to be one of those AI optimists. Now, not so much. In fact, he’s so worried about AI-manipulated content, he created a non-profit, TrueMedia.org, to help ordinary people sort AI fact from fiction.

135. Mic Drop: Oren Etzioni has a way to help us sort fact from AI fiction

US adversaries are on a propaganda offensive around the world. Earlier this month, the Council on Foreign Relations in DC convened a discussion about the changing landscape of disinformation campaigns with James Rubin, special envoy at the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, Jon Bateman from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. CLICK HERE moderated the conversation, and here are some highlights.

134. Are autocrats winning the disinformation war?

When the Hoover Institution’s director of war gaming, Jackie Schneider, started organizing war simulations more than a decade ago, she assumed that participants would respond to cyber attacks the same way they responded to traditional weapons of war – but it turns out that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

133. Mic Drop: A surprising thing about war games and cyber attacks and why the military can’t trust AI

When North Korea hacked Alejandro Caceres, he expected the U.S. government to rush to his defense. When they just shrugged, he took matters into his own hands.

132. Meet the guy who single-handedly took down North Korea’s Internet.

On the battlefields of Ukraine, Russia has become very adapt at electronic warfare — both jamming GPS satellites and spoofing satellite signals. We explain how it works and its ripple effects beyond the front lines.

54. Miss Lonelyhearts and the money mules

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