By any measure you can find, fraud is soaring in the U.S. and around the world. I spent an hour on WHYY radio recently discussing the causes for this, but I can boil it down to one concept: big, uncaring companies have dehumanized customers and employees alike, creating a perfect [Keep reading]
Only an egghead inside a Big Tech company would devise a plan to fight crime that involves charging criminals more to access victims. Behavioral economics, right! When you make 10 percent of your revenue from crime, how else would you try to stop it? Reuters recently reported these stunning facts, [Keep reading]
There’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical of cryptocurrency, and there’s no better skeptic than Molly White, a programmer-turned-publisher who runs the popular newsletter “Citation Needed.” So I was delighted to have her as a guest on The Perfect Scam this week. There’s no bias like confirmation bias, and there’s [Keep reading]
UPDATE 10/31/2025 — With SNAP benefits about to be suspended due to the government shutdown, I checked the “theft scoreboard” to see if there’d been any improvement in this situation. In fact, it’s grown worse. More than $100 million was stolen in the most recent quarter, and the total is [Keep reading]
It’s a dark, cluttered room full of bookshelves, each shelf jam-packed with laptop computers. There are dozens of them humming away, lights flickering. And each one has a Post-It note attached with a single name on it. And there’s a pink purse just hanging off the side of one of [Keep reading]
Deals. I’ve been thinking a lot about this word lately; it’s obviously in the news all the time. But I’m thinking about deals in a much more local sense, because a simple phrase keeps coming up again and again in my research. Bad deals. I think we are surrounded by [Keep reading]
Many years ago, a very smart book editor I worked with (Jill Schwartzman at Dutton now) gently admonished me because I failed to include resources for consumers in my tirades about the mistreatment of consumers. So was born concepts like “Red Tape Tips” I’d include at the end of my [Keep reading]
Finally, crypto ATMs are getting a bit of the attention that they deserve. As host of AARP’s The Perfect Scam podcast, I talk to crime victims every week. A few years ago, a majority had their money stolen via bogus gift card transactions. Today, it feels like almost every person [Keep reading]
Animal shelters stuffed full of abandoned dogs. Musicians earning 0.005 cents per song. It might be easy to blame these things on cold-hearted pet owners or cheap music fans. That’s a distraction. Scratch just beneath the surface and you can clearly see there is a dangerous systemic problem plaguing both [Keep reading]
I’ve called Amy Boyer the first person killed by the Internet…with only a hint of a stretch in my assertion. She was stalked and murdered by someone who tracked her down using a data broker …in 1999. I told her story in a documentary podcast called “No Place to Hide” [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan