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. In this episode of Stolen, 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 ended up doing the investigative work law enforcement couldn't, or wouldn't.

Don walks through the grooming process, the moment a single click handed scammers full access to his crypto wallet, and how he chased his stolen money through Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and Gemini. He and Erin dig into what happened next: Don obtained records identifying two Chinese nationals — then spent years trying to get the US Secret Service and police in China, Singapore, and Laos to act on the evidence he'd gathered.

Erin also reflects on what Don's case — and others like it — reveal about a fraud crisis and the challenges of law enforcement as it continues to grow.

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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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" changed the course of his career.

Patrick walks through the moment-by-moment terror of the scam call, why AI-powered voice cloning is making these attacks more personal and harder to detect, and what he learned mapping out the criminal ecosystems behind them. He and Erin dig into the structural failures enabling fraud at scale — under-resourced law enforcement, telecom systems built to connect calls (not verify them), payment rails that make stolen money nearly impossible to trace, and social media platforms with little incentive to intervene.

Patrick's response wasn't just to write about it — his book, Dark Side of the Boom: How Scammers Hijack the AI Revolution, breaks down the "five families of fraud." He also co-founded Savi Security, building consumer tools like Scamwise (a free scam-checking tool) and an in-call AI assistant that gives people a second opinion during a live phone call.

Chapters:

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Episode notes: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

Episode Sponsors

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, Biocatch and Scamnetic.

Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back.

Episode 63: Erin West and researcher Paul Raffile spent six days on the ground investigating the criminal network behind sextortion.

TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses psychological manipulation, sextortion, teen suicide, and animal cruelty. If you’re struggling, the 988 Lifeline Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24x7 by call, chat, or text.

What they found:

• A scam that has been linked to over 60 teen suicides worldwide.

• A ritual performed to "charm" a real US target

• A room full of masked scammers who freely discussed their tactics

• A real scammer they tracked down and confronted

This episode is the debrief: the investigation, the fear, the breakthroughs, and what it actually takes to hold these criminals accountable from 6,000 miles away.

1. Don't pay

2. Screenshot everything

3. Block the account

4. Report it to NCMEC's CyberTipline and IC3.gov.

Use "Take It Down" (takeitdown.ncmec.org) to help prevent images from circulating.

Episode Sponsors  

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

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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.

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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 moves from the origins of Southeast Asian scam compounds to how generative AI is transforming everything from romance scams to "digital arrest" extortion schemes, and closes with McKenna's prediction that fraud-fighting careers are about to boom, not disappear.

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back.

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 drained over multiple trips to her bank.

By the time it was over, Anola had lost $850,000 — and her job. She joins former prosecutor Erin West to explain how it happened, why she refuses to fit the "little old lady" scam-victim stereotype, and how she's turned her story into testimony before the Utah legislature and her own podcast, Romance Scam Rebellion.

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

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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 anti-trafficking posters hung for show, the karaoke night with a criminal gang, and the moment she realized the scammers behind the keyboards were as trapped as the victims they targeted.

Mariana van Zeller and Erin West are two women who've walked the same ground investigating transnational organized crime, money laundering, and the journalism crisis that's keeping the world's largest modern enslavement operation in the dark.

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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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 — built over months on Facebook Messenger and dressed up in legitimate terms like “automated market making” — finally succeeded. In his conversation with Stolen, he traces his methodical research, the moment the scheme unraveled, and the maze of law-enforcement dead ends that followed.

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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Episode Sponsors  

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

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Episode 57: A scammer can counterfeit your face, your voice, and your documents. What they can't fake is where your phone actually goes. That's the solution André Ferraz built. The founder of Incognia joins Erin to explain how physical-world behavior — precise to eight feet, accurate enough to tell one apartment from another in a high-rise — became a living identity that AI can't counterfeit.

They get into the tradecraft it defeats: wiping an iPhone in 30 seconds to spin up a new identity, one fraudster opening 60,000 accounts in a single week, hundreds of devices running out of one room. André also walks through Incognia's 2026 report on mule account handovers and why the people laundering scam money will share their location, then spoof it — only to get caught operating from sanctioned countries.

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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Episode Sponsors 

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Episode 56: What happens when a romance scam survivor sits down with the scientist who can explain exactly what was done to her?

Last week you heard Kirsty's story. This week, Erin brings her together with Dr. Martina Dove, a fraud psychology expert, to review the scam, step by step. The verdict is unsettling: Today's scammers don't simply mirror you. They study you, find the wounds you've spent years hiding, and use them as the way in.

Kirsty had survived 16 years of coercive control; the scammer turned that history into a weapon. Dr. Dove provides a clear-eyed look at how manipulation actually works, why intelligence is no protection, and why the people around a victim matter more than anyone wants to admit.

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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Episode Sponsors  

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

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Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back.