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No One Is Coming
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EP 05 Season 1

THE URGENCY TRAP

September 9, 2026

Pos 34.0522° N / 118.2437° W Status: documented

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The Signal

What happens when a con artist hijacks your survival instincts?

Act I

THE URGENCY TRAP

How scammers turn fear, trust and personal information into action.

Act II

This Is Not New

From ancient fraud to a fake doctor with a radio tower, the con has always followed the technology.

Act III

The Con Becomes an Industry

Modern scams operate like global businesses—with departments, training and customer service.

Act IV

The Other George

AI can reproduce the language, branding and even the voice of someone you trust.

Act V

There’s One Born Every Minute

Scam victims aren’t a special class of gullible people—and shame only helps the scammer.

Act VI

Stop the Clock

Hang up. Step away. Then verify the story through a source the scammer did not give you.

The takeaway

You don’t have to outsmart the scammer. You only have to stop letting them control the clock.

Brett Johnson (opens in a new tab)

Former Cybercriminal Turned Security Expert

Once dubbed “The Original Internet Godfather” by the Secret Service, he now helps organizations and individuals defend themselves against modern fraud.

anglerphish.com

Jorij Abraham (opens in a new tab)

Managing Director, Global Anti-Scam Alliance

Leads an alliance of more than 120 governments, law-enforcement agencies and private-sector organizations working together to protect consumers from scams.

gasa.org

Sources & experts

What to do when something isn’t right.

The Urgency Trap

Cold Open — You Have Been Notified

ANGELA LOPEZ: Attention, this is an urgent legal message intended for Lance Still. This call is pertaining to case file number 2024-185911. My name is Angela Lopez and I’m calling with County PSV out of Los Angeles County. This call is notification that attempts will be made to issue certified legal documents to property address Los Angeles, California that will require your signature. You need to contact the legal firm that’s handling your case immediately. Failing to contact the legal firm may result in legal proceedings to take place without your knowledge. Lance Still, you need to contact the legal firm immediately as this is a time sensitive matter. You have been notified.

LANCE STILL: On the morning of February 29th, 2024, I received that voicemail. The caller seemed to know a lot about me. She made it sound like she was calling from the LA County Sheriff’s Department. And of course, the very official sounding, you have been notified. A couple of hours later, I got an email from my ex-husband, which as you can imagine is always delightful. He had gotten a call too.

LANCE’S EX-HUSBAND (EMAIL): Posing as you, I said that there has been no previous notification about this. They say that a person with your social security number made payments on it for years and then it went into delinquency. If indeed you ever had a Citibank visa, then there’s something wrong. I suppose it’s possible that you’ve been the victim of identity theft by a person who got a card in your name. Or if it is legit and they can put a lien on the Tennessee house, that would be really unpleasant. If you do want to call these guys back for whatever reason, here’s their number and the guy I spoke with is Joseph.

LANCE STILL: My ex actually got on the phone with them. Long enough to get considerably more of the story. According to the callers, there was a visa that I had allegedly stopped paying in 2020 and now with interest, the balance had grown to $15,000. I had no such account, but they knew a lot about me. They knew about a property we had owned together and they were threatening to put a lien on it. The next morning, Angela Lopez called again. My case had been red flagged. The threats were getting more serious. The pressure was going up. So here’s the question. You get the first voicemail, then someone connected to you gets pulled into it. The people calling you have your cell phone number, your home address, your social security number, your ex-husband’s phone number, and information about your finances. They’ve already shown you that they’re willing to just keep calling and now they’re escalating.

LANCE STILL: So what would you do next? I’m Lance Still and this is No One is Coming. Today, scams, social engineering, and the fake emergency is designed to get you moving before you stop to think.

Act I — The Urgency Trap

LANCE STILL: Your brain is probably going to start running through a lot of possibilities. You can ask whether any of this made legal sense. You can be aware that you don’t have that credit card account. But the people calling me didn’t need to win an argument about consumer debt. They needed to get me to do something. And that puts us in the world of social engineering. Jenny Radcliffe is a burglar for hire. Jenny gets invited in and paid by large, serious companies that want to know whether a stranger could talk, charm, or bluff their way past the people protecting things that matter. She is known as the people hacker. She has spent years walking into places she was never supposed to get into, not by forcing a door, but by convincing the person on the other side to open it. Her job is to find the human weakness in a security system.

LANCE STILL: Before someone less ethical does.

JENNY RADCLIFFE: Social engineering is the human part of every security scam or breach. So what that’s about is how we persuade people to do things that is not in their interest to do. So that could be something like clicking on a link, a bad link in an email, a phishing email. It can also be some of the strange calls that we get. There are scam calls or even text messages. So all of those things, those scripts that criminals use to scam us, to con us, that is all social engineering. It’s such a huge part of every scam, right? If every time there’s a security breach, even if you hear about a big company and they’ve had a cyber attack, social engineering is always or very nearly always part of it because we still need someone to either make a mistake or to be persuaded to do something or to forget to update the system or something like that.

LANCE STILL: One of the shortcuts we use to decide whether someone is legitimate is also becoming one of the least reliable. They know things about me, so they must be who they say they are. Eva Velasquez is the CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, the only national nonprofit in the United States dedicated specifically to helping victims of identity theft and fraud. Her team works directly with people trying to figure out what happened, what was exposed, and what to do next. It was amazing to me how much information they just had. Tell me about that. How does that work?

EVA VELASQUEZ: Speaking to one of the things that we’re seeing more and more often, and look, it’s phishing, whether it’s by email or it’s the scam phone call, when they have a little bit of information about you, it legitimizes the interaction. That’s kind of what we have always used in the back, even if you’re not thinking about it. In the back of your mind, you’re going, well, it has to be my bank because they have my name and my phone number. They know my address. Maybe they have partial account number. Well, we have the last four as XYZ. Can you verify the rest? To your point about, well, they had all of this data about me. That used to mean something, and we have to stop using that as the litmus test. It really is a shift in our thinking. It’s just much more scalable now, and the data is a lot more robust.

EVA VELASQUEZ: It’s not as scant. Maybe I have your first name and your cell phone number, but now I’m going to have this dossier about you that makes it sound like I should have that information, so you should talk to me.

LANCE STILL: Knowing things about you can make the interaction feel legitimate enough to continue. But information alone doesn’t get them the money. At some point, the person on the other end has to get you to do something. Brett Johnson knows scams from the inside. The United States Secret Service called him the original internet godfather. Before he was advising companies, law enforcement, and consumers on fraud, he was building the machinery criminals use to find one another, trade information, and do business online. He created Shadowcrew, one of the first organized cybercrime communities. It was a precursor to the darknet markets that followed, and eventually landed on the United States most wanted list. He was convicted of 39 felonies and served time in a federal prison. Now he helps people protect themselves from the kind of person he used to be.

BRETT JOHNSON: So tell me about this. So while you’re telling me that story, what I’m wondering is what would it take to get you to trust me? If I would have called and not pretended to be a sheriff’s officer, that weak script that that woman was using. But I call and I say that I am a doctor’s office. Now this is a scam that actually took place about three years ago. I said that I was a doctor’s office and that I needed you to go down to the local lab and get a cancer test because some of the lab indicators looking at your file indicates you might have this rare form of cancer. Look, the only thing you need to do is go down to this lab, you know, get the test free of charge and you’ll be fine. And to prove that to you, of course, I’ve spoofed the phone call with the doctor’s office.

BRETT JOHNSON: I’ve also got some of your medical records and I’m quoting back stuff to you that is HIPAA protected. All right, because honestly, HIPAA doesn’t matter. It’s shit. Right. I put that stuff back to you. It’s physical files in a medical office. Like that, like, right. Right. Like there’s breaking points there. Is that enough? I’ve caused, I’ve instituted fear. So I’ve got you emotionally charged. I’ve told you that it’s completely free. I’ve given you a legitimate lab name and you’re actually going to go to a lab and actually going to conduct this test and it’s going to be free for you. So where does the scam come in? That lab test is about $25,000. They would partner with a lab and they would say what we’ll do is because the government’s paying or Medicare is paying for these tests, I’ll get people to come in, take the test.

BRETT JOHNSON: You charge Medicare. You keep X amount of dollars and I keep X amount of dollars. Everyone works out just fine.

LANCE STILL: The word cancer can take you from skeptical to scared before you’ve had time to decide whether any of this makes sense. And that’s where urgency becomes useful to the criminal.

JENNY RADCLIFFE: So the idea is to create rapport, give a plausible story and go with what they feed me. When we are going into businesses, we might, we’ll be playing a role. So I might be there pretending that I’m delivering something or I might be there, you know, saying that I have a meeting or I might be measuring an office for drapes or carpet. And I think there’s a couple of things that happen is that, and I know you, you know, we’re going to talk about this, but I don’t look very threatening when I was in the U.S. You know, I’m a polite English lady. Sure. I get more and more English the more I need. Oh, thank you. That’s so kind of you, you know.

LANCE STILL: Right. Here’s the key to my house, Jenny. Thank you for being so sweet.

JENNY RADCLIFFE: I didn’t realize I wasn’t meant to be here. Right. You know, and I mean, people are nice, right? And they want to help. One of the things is we play on people’s natural helpfulness. They need to be polite. There’s always urgency in there as well. So we try and make people rush a little bit so they don’t think too carefully. Sure. But we also have got a lot of research behind it. I will know before I go into a business, really as much as anyone can find out without actually working there. Because if I give you time to think, you’re going to question the authenticity of me as the scammer. If I give you time to think, you’ve got time to say to your friend in the office or to your husband or wife or whatever, does this seem, this seems wrong?

JENNY RADCLIFFE: What does this sound like to you? So what we try and do is say, well, you know, this is urgent. So a lot of the time when those emails go into businesses, it’ll say, you know, this is an emergency. You know, if we don’t pay this money now, we’ll lose the client.

BRETT JOHNSON: You can train somebody and educate them at a very rational level. But where I attack someone is at an emotional level. I’m trying to get you to set reason and logic to the side, react emotionally. And what that means is, is that you can understand whatever you want to rationally. That doesn’t mean that you understand it emotionally.

LANCE STILL: When something feels urgent or threatening, your nervous system prioritizes speed. Adrenaline heightens awareness and narrows your attention around the apparent threat. Cortisol helps sustain that response. It’s useful if there’s a real physical threat in front of you, because that’s not the moment for weighing every possible interpretation. But push that system hard enough and the prefrontal functions we rely on for working memory, inhibition, and weighing options start to go offline. That makes it harder to do the things that protect you in a scam. Hold multiple facts in your head, notice contradictions, and remember that you could check the story somewhere else. Scammers make sure there’s always an action right in front of you. They create the problem, raise the pressure, then hand you the solution. Click this link, move this money, call this number. At that point, following the instructions can feel like the fastest way to make the anxiety stop.

JENNY RADCLIFFE: So we try and trigger the part of the brain that responds to emotional stimulus, because then all people want to do is act. When your brain’s got that red emotional kind of fog, we just want to do something to stop the anxiety. So all of your phishing emails, your scam calls, everything, usually there’s a problem, you need to fix it quickly, and then they will tell you how to fix it, which is usually give them money or give them information, and that’s how it works. So urgency is a huge part of being scammed.

LANCE STILL: But not every scammer wants to rush you. Some of them have all the time in the world. And then, you know, we have the urgency, but then there’s also the longer con, right, of building the confidence with a small ask.

JENNY RADCLIFFE: Psychologically, if we do a small favor for someone, once we’ve done that favor, in our mind, it clicks that that’s the person I help, so they can build on that, because once you do one thing for someone, you kind of will do something else for them. It’s called the foot in the door technique. So you just dip your toe into it and just, and again, it’s just establishing that familiarity, that relationship, which will then be exploited later on.

LANCE STILL: So there are at least two ways in. Make you scared enough to move before you think, or comfortable enough that moving feels natural. Either way, they need your trust. And that part is not new. Long before anyone had a social security number to steal, there were people who were very, very good at getting other people to hand things over willingly.

Act II — This Is Not New

LANCE STILL: The first written account of a scam was recorded 4,000 years ago on a clay tablet in Mesopotamia. A copper merchant took payment for high quality goods. But what the buyer actually received was described as an inferior metal that turned green, like moldy bread. Pretty much as soon as human beings figured out trade, credit, and property, someone else figured out there might be money in lying about all three. The technology changes, but the basic proposition has been remarkably durable. Convince someone that something is true long enough to get what you want from them. Before phishing emails, there were forged letters. Before spoofed caller ID, there were borrowed uniforms, official-looking seals, and people who simply looked like they belonged. But for most of that history, the con had one fairly significant limitation. The con artist usually had to be in the room.

LANCE STILL: Pope Brock wrote the book, Charlatan, about John Brinkley, a pretend doctor who in 1923 figured out how to use the newest technology to bring a small town con to the entire country. Brinkley was a pioneer of marketing and new media. Unfortunately, he was also a pioneer of ripping people off.

POPE BROCK: Well, he was a hustler with no conscience. I mean, we can take that as a given. And he was operating in a context in which glands were already part of the conversation, principally in Europe. But there were legitimate researches being done that the insertion of monkey glands into the human body would rejuvenate it and help to put decades on your life and do this, that, and the other. So it had this sort of haze of respectability as an idea. The goat version, which was Brinkley’s idea, came about because he was stuck in this little town and this farmer named Stitsworth came in complaining that he couldn’t get it up. And according to this story that they both told, they were standing in Brinkley’s office kind of gazing out the window and there’s a goat out there in the field. And Stitsworth says, I wish I had goat nuts.

POPE BROCK: And that was Brinkley’s million dollar idea. And a year later, Stitsworth’s wife had a baby. So he was off to the races.

LANCE STILL: And then Brinkley found radio. You’re again listening to the voice of Dr. J.R. Brinkley of the Brinkley hospitals. He had seen what newspaper magnate Harry Chandler was doing with one of the country’s early commercial stations in Los Angeles. Brinkley raced back to Kansas, got a license, put up a tower, and got on the air while radio sets were only beginning to make their way into American homes. I have some information that I want to give you free of charge. Suddenly, the man running a clinic in a tiny Kansas town could be in thousands of rooms at once.

POPE BROCK: People, particularly out in the middle of the country, they weren’t bound together by anything. It was just they had farmhouse, farmhouse, farmhouse, farmhouse, you know. So there was no way for reports of failure to reach them on any kind of regular basis. On his radio show, he was a brilliant talker. He wouldn’t just jump on the air and try to sell you something. He would nestle up to the microphone, start talking about the golden days of childhood and this, that, and the other. And people were there in their farmhouses, isolated people, a lot of them. And he became what they thought was their best friend.

JOHN R. BRINKLEY (ARCHIVAL): I love little memories that spring up along life’s way, like violets on a riverbank. They give a breath of sweetness to the hardest day. Small blades of grass gathered on the lawn make a happy nest for the robin.

POPE BROCK: By the late 20s, he came up with this thing called medical question box. People would write in their problems and he would select some of these postcards and essentially cure people over the air. The way he made this make money for himself was to come up with a line of products. Lotions and creams and what not. None of which did anything. All of which he said were secret formula. None of them had names. They just had numbers. That’s how secret they were. So if you’ve got da, da, da, you go to your nearest pharmacy and get two bottles of number 51 and a jar of number 36. Stay on it for two years and you’ll be fine. So he was selling hand over fist. Right. And the pharmacists loved him because they were making a pile.

LANCE STILL: By then, Brinkley had the pitch down. Make the problem feel immediate. Make the first step easy. And give people a reason not to wait.

JOHN R. BRINKLEY (ARCHIVAL): At this season of the year, ladies and gentlemen, I feel that it’s important you listen to the announcement that I’m making at this time. I trust you will take advantage of this offer before it may be withdrawn without any advance notice whatever. For a limited time, those of you, ladies and gentlemen, who would like to have a chemical and microscopic analysis of the excretion from your kidneys may do so for the small expense of two dollars and have the entire transaction by correspondence without the necessity of leaving your home.

LANCE STILL: For a while, all of this made Brinkley rich and famous. It also eventually attracted the attention of the American Medical Association. In particular, Dr. Morris Fishbein, one of the country’s most relentless crusaders against medical quackery. Fishbein spent years trying to take away the two things Brinkley needed most, his medical license and his radio license. At Brinkley’s 1930 medical license hearing in Kansas, evidence emerged that at least 42 people had died on the operating table at his clinic. And that’s not counting those who died later from complications. He lost both licenses. Most people would call that the end of the story. Instead, Brinkley moved to Texas, built an even more powerful radio station just across the border in Mexico, and did better than ever, reaching audiences across half the country with no one left to regulate him. It took almost a decade and a mistake of his own making to actually bring him down.

LANCE STILL: In 1939, Brinkley sued Fishbein for libel. The trial dragged every detail of his operation into open court. He lost. Brinkley was a very bad guy, but he did have an incredible work ethic. He had to build all of that himself, the persona, the audience, the sales pitch, and the distribution. The modern version of this is much easier to assemble. You don’t have to be especially charismatic, technically skilled, or even particularly good at the scam itself.

EVA VELASQUEZ: The bad guys had to walk the walk. They had to look the part. They had to show up in person. It was really mostly being done in real life, in the community. And now you don’t need to do any of that. If you have a little bit of seed money, a credit card, you can go on the black market and buy whatever data you need, whatever software you need. You don’t have to have any skills or acumen to commit scams anymore.

Act III — The Con Becomes an Industry

LANCE STILL: In 2025, Americans reported nearly $16 billion in fraud losses to the FTC. Globally, one major survey found that more than half of adults had encountered a scam in the previous year, and nearly one in four had lost money. And those are only the people who had reported it.

BRETT JOHNSON: So if you look at cybercrime as a whole right now, it’s the third largest economy on the planet, $10 trillion. You’ve got the United States, you’ve got China, then you’ve got cybercrime. At the same time, we’re seeing just exactly what you’re talking about. We’re seeing kind of this shift from criminals being somewhat technically skilled to not being technically skilled at all. The problem with that is that you can go to Telegram, you can buy a tutorial for as low as $15. So $15, say a storm comes through the Gulf Coast, wipes out another city. $15 will buy you a tutorial so that you know which questions to answer and how to answer them so that you get that $42,000 FEMA grant. That’s $15. You can take live instruction classes anywhere from $300 to $3,000 where a master fraudster takes you by that virtual hand, walks you through a crime, and it comes with a guarantee.

BRETT JOHNSON: If you don’t make money by the end of the program, I’ll refund you your tuition. And they mean it because, again, cybercrime, third largest economy, which means customer service matters. If that particular vendor doesn’t provide excellent customer service, customers will find another one.

LANCE STILL: If you want to see what that collaboration looks like when it moves off a message board and into the physical world, Jorij Abraham spends his time looking at scams at industrial scale. He’s the managing director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, which brings together more than 120 governments, law enforcement agencies, banks, telecom companies, and technology platforms that are all seeing different pieces of the same problem.

JORIJ ABRAHAM: They’re like companies. I’ve spoken to several people who have rounded up scam compounds across the globe. And if they enter such a building, there’s a finance department where they specialize in moneymule accounts and laundering the money. There are departments called UK, America, Australia, where they focus on specific target groups. They often specialize in specific tasks. So there are people who are only focused on connecting to people for the first interaction. Thanks for your call. They’re speaking with Luke. Can we help you? And then they hand over to somebody who’s better at the social engineering part to manipulate that person. Because they specialize, they’re getting very, very good at the job. Many of these calls nowadays are basically done from factories. In one building, there can be over 1,000 people doing these scams continuously.

LANCE STILL: Some of these operations are built around hundreds or even thousands of people working long shifts assigned to specific markets and specific stages of the scam. And often the people inside these compounds are not there by choice. They’ve been trafficked or coerced into doing the scamming themselves.

JORIJ ABRAHAM: Scamming has become a professional industry. I mean, there are many stories about the scam compounds in Southeast Asia where people are unfortunately being forced to scam for 12 hours or more per day. It has become a professional industry. And to be clear, it’s not only scam compounds in Asia. I mean, there are now criminal syndicates in every country. They set up shop in one country, but they don’t scam in that country. They scam across the border because that makes it very difficult for law enforcement to actually apprehend the scammers.

LANCE STILL: Modern scam organizations increasingly mirror legitimate companies, not just in the way they’re structured, but in how they approach reaching their marks.

EVA VELASQUEZ: For the listeners, what we’re really talking about are the hooks, the social engineering hooks that the bad guys are using. And there are many of them, but they are based in what works. It’s the efficacy of these hooks that make the bad guys use them. They are masters of A-B testing when something doesn’t work. They give it up and they move on to the next thing. So when they find something that’s really sticky, they use it.

Act IV — The Other George

LANCE STILL: For years, one of the best defenses against a scam was that the scam itself usually gave something away. The email was badly written, the logo looked wrong, the caller sounded off. The story had a seam somewhere. And if you noticed it, you had a chance to stop it. The new problem is not simply that scammers know more about us. It’s that they’re getting much better at reproducing the things we used to decide that something was real. The language of a company, the tone of a message, the sound of a familiar voice.

EVA VELASQUEZ: You know, we used to train people on what to look for. Grammar mistakes, language syntax that was out of place. But now with AI, it has gotten to the point where these phishing emails, they don’t have any grammatical errors. They look like they are written by native English speakers. The logo placement is perfect. But even the syntax, not just of the English language, but the way a particular company communicates with their customers. There’s a vibe, right? You can tell when it’s your bank contacting you. You can tell when it’s a company that you know, you know what it looks and feels like. And vibe is kind of the best way I can describe that. Well, AI has made it very easy for the bad guys to say, replicate not only the logo placement, the branding colors and all of that, but the feel.

EVA VELASQUEZ: That would take a lot of time to do, right? And a lot of brain power. Well, now that’s all been outsourced to AI.

LANCE STILL: A familiar voice has always carried its own kind of proof. You know what your child sounds like, your partner, your boss. Hearing them can short circuit the question of whether the person on the other end is really who they say they are.

EVA VELASQUEZ: So the scalability of these schemes is what’s grown exponentially. And it’s not that expensive. Voice cloning and deep fakes. Couple of years ago, we kind of went, how are they going to scale this? It’s very expensive to do those things currently. Well, now it’s cheap. It doesn’t cost them anything. And they don’t need much, three seconds of audio to clone a voice.

LANCE STILL: Most of us do not hear a familiar voice and ask for proof of identity. We recognize it and move on. And if that voice is frightened and asking for help, we move fast. In a world where two-factor authentication and pass keys are becoming the gold standard, Jenny Radcliffe has a very lo-fi solution for proving that the person on the other end really is your person.

JENNY RADCLIFFE: If you do get one of those calls that’s off a family member or a colleague or a friend and they’re in an emergency situation, you need to have a safe word or phrase that that person knows because AI can find out a lot about us online. It needs to be something that only your family would know, right? So in our house, the example I always give is, what does dad order for takeout on a Friday? Because it’s an unusual thing and you couldn’t guess it. Even if you could see the order, you wouldn’t know which was dad’s, right? There’s a word and if that word is texted or said or anything, that means this is an emergency, come and get me. I would use as if for anything else, it’s the only thing, but everybody knows that’s the word.

LANCE STILL: A safe word works because it settles the question before the emotional stakes build. Once you’ve invested time in someone, being told the truth might stop functioning as verification. It becomes a claim competing against a reality you can’t emotionally afford to leave.

JORIJ ABRAHAM: A few years ago, I was called by an elderly lady, I guess maybe 80 years old from Norway. She asked, is this Jorij Abraham? I said, yes, this is Jorij Abraham. Okay, you have approached me online offering me to help recover my money. I said, no, I haven’t. I cannot help you recover your money, but law enforcement can. She told me that she has been in contact with me for a year, not romantically, just helping her invest and she lost 800,000 euros, which is maybe 900,000 US dollars. But now the scammer who was using my name said, okay, I’m going to help you recover the money. And I told her, ma’am, you reached out to me. You know that I’m Jorij Abraham and the other person is really not Jorij Abraham. Can you please contact your police office or talk to your friends and family?

JORIJ ABRAHAM: And she ended the call with, let me talk to the other George and get back to you. She really believed that the other George was helping her recover the money and I could not convince her and I tried to reach out several times, but I did not know her name. I could not reach out to her family, but I’m very afraid that she lost more than the 800,000 euros, which is already a gigantic amount.

LANCE STILL: It would be so easy to hear a story like that woman in Norway and decide the explanation is age, loneliness, isolation, some vulnerability that belongs to someone else. But assuming you’re above being scammed doesn’t make you safe. It actually can set you up for a bigger fall.

BRETT JOHNSON: This kid, I think he was 19 years old when he committed the crime. His name is Malone Lam from Singapore. He comes to the United States. When he comes to the United States, I told you that most people, most criminals now are going towards social engineering. Well, he builds himself through discord. He builds himself a nice social engineering group. And what they do is one of the targets, one of the potential victims is a cybersecurity CEO. A guy that should know everything that needs to be known. A guy that is so confident that he knows everything that he actually has a blind spot. And that’s the problem. People who think they can’t be hit. Those are the types of victims that I would love to get because I know you’ve got a blind spot someplace. So Malone’s team, they start by sending out Google alerts.

BRETT JOHNSON: And you’ve seen that too. You get that Google alert. Someone’s trying to log into your machine from, in this case, it was from Russia. Now, the first time you get that, when I get it, I don’t pay any attention to that at all. But Malone’s team sends this CEO these alerts out for a week, two weeks on the regular. Enough where, man, something might be happening. At the end of that, this CEO gets a call from Google. Someone’s trying to log into your system. What’s going on? The end result was this guy, the Google person, which isn’t from Google, says, we’re going to send you a one-time code. We need you to repeat that back to us on the phone. So the attacker triggers the one-time code. The victim tells the attacker what the code is. The attacker then is able to go in and take over the CEO’s email account.

BRETT JOHNSON: Shut him down. So shuts him down, then accesses his Coinbase wallet. And now this guy, cybersecurity genius that he was, didn’t keep any of his Bitcoin in a cold wallet. It was all in a hot wallet on Coinbase. How much? $230 million. Yeah, and they stole it all.

LANCE STILL: A cybersecurity CEO can lose $230 million and we still reach for the same explanation. They must have been careless. It’s a hard moment for any human. And we don’t make it better because of a lack of empathy

EVA VELASQUEZ: and how we as a society both say, well, that would never happen to me, which is a nice way for you to comfort yourself, but it’s flat out wrong. And by saying, you know, they must have done something. And the bottom line is, I think how we talk to, but also how we talk about victimization, matters. And when we say things like duped or even fell for, the reality is you were lied to and you believe that lie. What person has never had that experience? What person has never believed a lie that someone told them? But for some reason with scams, we go, oh, you must be unsavvy. You must be careless. That may or may not be true.

Act V — There’s One Born Every Minute

LANCE STILL: There’s a sucker born every minute is one of those lines everyone knows and everyone attributes to P.T. Barnum. The problem is Barnum probably never said it, which feels on brand. The other problem is that if you take current global scam victim estimates and do the math, it’s actually closer to 2,500 people every minute. The idea that scam victims are some special class of gullible person, people who are careless, naive or somehow built differently from the rest of us doesn’t really align with reality. This happens to people, a lot of people. And if it happens to you, the most useful thing you can do is stop arguing with the version of reality you wish you were still in. Someone gets a call, they realize after they’ve revealed all of their information that they’ve been scammed. They start having a bad feeling.

LANCE STILL: What do they do? What’s the next thing they should do?

EVA VELASQUEZ: Well, this is where it sounds like should be one universal answer to that question, but I have to tell you, the victims of scams and the scams themselves, it’s not this one homogeneous group. It really depends on when did this revelation occur? When did that person realize what happened to them? That’s going to indicate the next most important step. What did you provide? What did you self-compromise? So if you were talking minutes between disengaging from the interaction and you shared money, I want you to go to the source of wherever that money was. You gave them a credit card, I want you to call your credit card company. You wired or zelled money, I want you to call your bank. You Venmo’d the money, I want you to get in touch with Venmo. There is a small chance if it’s really immediately after the transaction that you may be able to stop it.

EVA VELASQUEZ: And I say a small chance because it depends on how payments are made. Scammers love to set it up so that that is like handing them cash. And I don’t think people realize that. Instant payments really means just that. It is out of your account, it is gone.

LANCE STILL: Money may be the most obvious loss, but it might not be the only one. Maybe you gave them enough information to open accounts in your name. Maybe you reused a password they now have. Maybe the person on the phone talked to you through changing a security setting or gave themselves access to an account.

EVA VELASQUEZ: So there are things that individuals can do and we can focus on those things. And you talked about freezing your credit. My top three action items, freeze your credit, upgrade your password game. I want you using unique passwords across all of your digital accounts and then enable multi-factor authentication on those accounts. If pass keys are available and they are becoming more and more ubiquitous, which is great, opt for a pass key.

LANCE STILL: Once you’ve dealt with the immediate damage, there’s another thing that matters. Tell someone what happened.

JORIJ ABRAHAM: Talk to friends and family and then report because we know that globally roughly about seven to 10 percent of the people are reporting scams. And the only part who loves that is the scammer because if we don’t share those scam attempts, law enforcement cannot protect people. So that’s basically our advice. Take time, talk to friends and family and if it’s a scam, please do report.

LANCE STILL: Reporting can mean speaking to the bank, the payment platform, or whatever company is being impersonated. In the United States, the FTC or the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Silence is where embarrassment gets expensive. It can keep you from asking for help when something might still be recoverable. It keeps everyone else from learning what just happened to you. Because one of the best things you can do with that experience is to use it to help the next person. Talk about it with friends and family. Your story can be the heads up that keeps the same thing from happening to someone you care about.

EVA VELASQUEZ: That’s not a person who’s not savvy or careless. It was right moment, right time, right spoof, busy. And that’s happening day in and day out. So we need less blame, more inclusion, more adaptability, like you said, adaptability of the mindset. Okay, that happened. Now I’m going to take care of it. I’m going to seek the help I need to take care of it. And now I’m also going to remind my friends to watch out for that because it can happen to anybody.

LANCE STILL: That’s actually a nice way to phrase it. People need some ego preservation, but if you said to a friend, hey, this thing happened to me and I want you to be on the lookout for it, it does put you in a different position because yes, something happened to you, but now you’re using that to help others.

EVA VELASQUEZ: And you’re not treating it as a shameful event. You’re treating it as an event. If you get a flat tire on the road, do you say, oh my God, I can’t tell anybody that this happened to me. This must be all about me. I’m terrible. I drove through that construction site. No, you say, hey, guys, there’s construction on the main street that we always really watch out for the nails. And there’s no shame in that conversation. And I think we need to normalize that when it comes to scams and fraud. The bad guys love operating in the shadows, so let’s shine a light on it, not let them.

Act VI — Stop the Clock

LANCE STILL: By now, there should be one thing about scams that feels familiar. The story may change. It may be a bank, a sheriff, a relative in trouble. The person on the other end may frighten you or spend months earning your confidence. But eventually, they need something from you. And once they reach that moment, controlling the pace becomes the entire goal. Because every minute you stay inside the interaction is another minute in which the scammer gets to decide what information you hear, what problem you’re solving, and what your choices appear to be. They can answer the objection before you have fully formed it. They can explain away the thing that feels strange. You don’t have to become better at recognizing every possible scam. You don’t have to outsmart the person calling you. You can interrupt the conditions they need. Jenny Radcliffe’s version of this is extremely British.

JENNY RADCLIFFE: You hear something suspicious, you take five minutes and you make a cup of tea and you drink the cup of tea before you do anything. And that cup of tea and moving away from the situation just lets that fog disappear and your logical brain will kick in and then you’ll know whether it’s genuine.

LANCE STILL: Five minutes gives your nervous system a chance to calm down and your judgment a chance to come back online.

BRETT JOHNSON: So what I’m thinking is while you’re in that rational state of mind, you determine what those borders are that should not be crossed. Are you taking financial advice from someone you met on social media? That’s probably a bad idea. Are you buying over $500 in gift cards? That’s probably a bad idea. Are you sending X amount of dollars to someone online that you’ve never met? So you sit down while you’re in that rational state of mind and you figure out what those boundaries are.

LANCE STILL: And sometimes the first step is simply giving yourself permission to end the conversation.

EVA VELASQUEZ: I want you to be skeptical. And I give you permission to be rude. And you don’t have to engage with everything that comes in. And if you do decide to engage, I want you to go to the source. This is particularly important for my seniors and my polite people. I give you permission to be rude because if you try to be polite and say, well, I’m hanging up now or no, they are shameless and will try to keep you on the phone. Just hang up. And if on the off chance it actually was your bank trying to get in touch with you and you say, I’m going to verify this, your bank is not going to start yelling at you. You’re their customer. They want to retain you as a customer.

LANCE STILL: Scammers know you may try to verify the story. So often they may try to give you the proof themselves. A website, a number, an email address.

BRETT JOHNSON: So, you know, hanging up and calling back is extremely important. Verifying through a secondary outside channel. So a lot of the time you’ll see a crypto scam, romance scam, medical scam, whatever that is. You’ll see that scam going on and the criminal will give you a way to verify who they are in channel. You know, you can look up this website. No, that’s not what you do. You verify it outside of whatever that person is saying and outside of the platform that you’re on.

LANCE STILL: Hang up. Make the tea. Take a deep breath. Talk to someone, then find the bank, the company, or the government office and start again from a source you trust. If the problem is real, it will still be there when you verify it. And a legitimate institution or someone who actually knows and cares about you is not going to punish you for checking.

Ending

ANGELA LOPEZ: You need to contact the legal firm immediately as this is a time-sensitive matter. You have been notified.

LANCE STILL: So back to Angela Lopez. I knew immediately that it was a scam. What bothered me was how much they knew about me. My address, my social security number, my ex-husband’s phone number, and how quickly they were willing to escalate once they had someone engaging with them. So I checked the things I could actually check. My credit was already frozen. I checked my credit report. There was no mystery Citibank account. I called the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. I reported the scam to the FTC. And I told my ex-husband to stop talking to people who claimed to be collecting debts in my name and stop pretending to be me. When I told Eva what I had done, we got to one of the things that made the whole story fall apart for me. What was funny, though, was she escalated the next day and became more threatening.

LANCE STILL: And I just, you know, and I reported it. I called the Sheriff’s Department. I emailed the FTC. The Sheriff’s Department and I had a good laugh because you don’t go to jail for owing money anymore. It’s not Victorian England.

EVA VELASQUEZ: We got rid of those pesky debtors’ prisons and from someone who worked in law enforcement for 21 years, if we’re coming to get you, we’re not calling you first. We just show up. If it’s valid, we just show up. A hundred percent.

LANCE STILL: And that was actually my joke with the Sheriff, too. It’s like, well, I didn’t know you gave advanced warnings so I could just, you know, like bail.

EVA VELASQUEZ: So I can flee. Yes.

LANCE STILL: Thanks for the warning. If something feels wrong, stop. Don’t engage. Check what you can independently. If money is moved, contact the bank or payment provider immediately. Freeze your credit. Check your credit reports. Change compromised passwords. Turn on multi-factor authentication. Report what happened. And tell someone. Because one of the most consistent things I heard from everyone I spoke to was that scammers benefit when the person on the other end becomes isolated, either while the scam is happening or afterward, when embarrassment makes them reluctant to tell anyone.

JORIJ ABRAHAM: I think the most important message is everybody gets scammed and it will happen to you. Don’t be ashamed because it does happen to everybody and it’s not your fault. It’s the criminal doing it. My recommendation is if it happens to you, talk to friends. I mean, they will probably say it happened to me, too. And if somebody comes to you, help him or her as best as you can.

LANCE STILL: There are places you can go for help, too. The Identity Theft Resource Center works directly with people dealing with identity theft and fraud. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance runs scam.org. It’s a place you can check suspicious messages and scams, report them, and find help. We’ve put all of that, along with other resources from this episode, in the show notes at nooneiscomingpodcast.com. And there is one last thing about John Brinkley that feels worth coming back to because almost everything he was doing a hundred years ago is still very recognizable. Build a relationship with the audience. Learn what frightens them and what they want. Manufacture need. Make the solution seem easy. And then create the feeling that waiting means losing something. Watch what gets a response and do more of that. If Brinkley had not been a reprehensible human being whose medical practices actually killed people, parts of what he pioneered would probably be taught today as marketing innovation.

LANCE STILL: And that overlap matters. Fraud is not marketing. Marketing is not fraud. But they operate the same way on the human nervous system. Urgency works whether the person telling you to act is stealing your bank account or offering free shipping for the next 20 minutes. American consumer debt reached 19 trillion dollars at the end of 2025. Fraud is an enormous business. But persuading us to buy things, often before we had much time to think about whether we actually need them, is considerably bigger. Which means Jenny’s cup of tea has uses beyond scams. Before you send the money, before you click the link, before you buy the thing, give yourself five minutes. No one is coming. But you could sit down and have a cup of tea. Out.