This week, our hosts Dave Bittner, Joe Carrigan, and Maria Varmazis (also host of the T-Minus Space Daily show) are back sharing the latest in social engineering scams, phishing schemes, and criminal exploits that are making headlines. Our hosts share some follow-up, including a Rick Roll after the last episode. They also highlight a listener note from Evaldas in Lithuania, who explains that companies often use alternate domains for marketing emails to protect their main domain’s reputation—so marking them as spam is actually expected. Joe’s got a story of a billion-dollar AI-fueled scam where criminals impersonate celebrities like Keanu Reeves and Kevin Costner to exploit lonely fans—convincing them to send money, fall in love, and keep the relationship secret, all while Hollywood scrambles to fight back. Maria has the story of how a federal court blocked the FTC’s new “click-to-cancel” rule—meant to make canceling subscriptions easier—due to a procedural misstep, just days before it was set to take effect. Dave shares a story from Reddit about a disturbing extortion scam where a victim received a fake photo of their car outside a strip club—with their real license plate—demanding $1,000 to keep it quiet, raising questions about data scraping and AI manipulation. Our catch of the day comes from the scams subreddit, where a user shares a tale of a scammer promising big returns for investing in gold and diamonds—spoiler alert: it’s all glitter, no gold.
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Resources and links to stories:
- This Is Not Keanu: Inside the Billion-Dollar Celebrity Impersonation Bitcoin Scam
- A ‘click-to-cancel’ rule, intended to make canceling subscriptions easier, is blocked
- [US] Extortion text message with fake strip club photo but real license plate – how did they get my info?
Have a Catch of the Day you'd like to share? Email it to us at hackinghumans@n2k.com.