Tell me what's on your mind.

If you bought tickets to a pop-up taco museum restaurant in San Antonio, you got scammed. If someone wants to hook you up with a priest who does exorcisms, beware. But we begin with the story of a brand new scam called call merging. It involves merging your phone call with a scammer and a bank’s two-factor authentication system, stealing your secret code.

Tell me what's on your mind.

More than 60 hotels are conned by a man who dirtied rooms with roaches and condoms, and scammers are showing up at people’s doors to collect money they say they are owed. And I want to tell you the tale of a gambit that I can't call a con, but it's a great way to lose your money.

Tell me what's on your mind.

We're all vulnerable to scams, but we don't have to be willing victims. Today I'm doing something I should have done a long time ago -- tell you just what to do to thwart scammers.

Tell me what's on your mind.

A new scam is moving across the country that can capture the information on your credit card's chips, plus Minnesota legislators are considering a law that would reimburse victims of scams.

Tell me what's on your mind.

What some of you may remember as the Scopes Monkey Trial is a scam. If you don’t know about the trial, you may know about the movie, “Inherit the Wind,” which – and I’m being charitable here – took poetic license with the truth. Today, as we near the 100th anniversary of the trial, I tell you why.

Scopes 100 Celebration

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Alabama leads the nation in losses from online scams and a Massachusetts butcher shop owner says he was scammed out of $60,000 of meat. Plus, we'll update you on the Frye Festival scheduled for Mexico, but who knows where in that country it will be?

Tell me what's on your mind.

There are con artists who have pulled off major cons. What they do is so ballsy, it’s hard to believe anyone would fall for them. Yet, in the annals of history, they live on.

Today on Scams And Cons, we'll tell you their stories.

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We'll tell you the story of con artists who preyed on the elderly with home remodeling scams. One was  brazen enough to outright tell the homeowner what needed to be done and begin work.

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Is this written by me or an AI? Will you hear my voice or an AI voice in this podcast? (Spoiler, you'll hear both)

AI voices and images are so easy to create these days that it's easy to throw someone into a money-gushing panic if they get a phone call from a friend claiming to be in trouble.

The key is not to try and recognize the voice, but to recognize the scam. We'll tell you how and it's not that difficult to learn.

Tell me what's on your mind.

In this week's news, Thailand takes the unusual step of cutting off electricity to 500,000 people to stop scammers and con artists are staging car crashes to collect insurance money.

Plus, Georgia exempts banks from protecting customers from scammers even though they say they want a law requiring them to do so.

Listen at ScamsAndCons.com or wherever you get podcasts.