Bob Sullivan’s podcast projects

Bob is currently the host of AARP’s The Perfect Scam podcast. Listeners ride along weekly as scam victims and professional con artists tell their stories. A 2023 Webby award winner

Debugger is a podcast about technology and democracy, produced with help from Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

Breach is a deep-dive audio documentary that investigates history’s biggest hackers. Bob is co-host with Alia Tavakolian of Spoke Media. Season 1 uncovers the role of Russia in the massive Yahoo hack; Season 2 examines the comedy of errors that led to the Equifax breach. Sponsored by Carbonite. A Shorty Award finalist.

No Place to Hide is a 6-episode miniseries examining the state of privacy in America, from abusive digital police tactics to abusive romantic partners who hunt down victims through cyberspace. Bob co-hosts with Spoke Media’s Alia Tavakolian. Part fiction, part non-fiction. Sponsored by Intel.

“So, Bob?” is a weekly investigation of the unintended consequences of technology.

LATEST EPISODES

Podcast: How to detect fake anything in a zero trust world – my conversation with Avivah Litan

June 18, 2020 Bob Sullivan 0

Fake News is stoking violence and helping destroy our democracy. Fake pills make people sick and can even kill them. Fake foods, like fake olive oil, or mislabeled fish, rip consumers off and steal profits from honest companies. The world is becoming overrun by fake everything, says Avivah Litan, renowned [Keep reading]

Podcast: How blockchain, and the ‘Internet of Value,’ can fight exploitation and racism

June 15, 2020 Bob Sullivan 8

Too often, people who do the work don’t get paid for that work, or earn only a fraction of the money extracted by institutional layers — middlemen — shoe-horned between producer and consumer. The cook is the least-paid worker at a restaurant chain; the musician or painter gets pennies on [Keep reading]

Where is my puppy??!! As online shopping surges during Covid, so does online fraud

June 8, 2020 Bob Sullivan 0

Americans are shopping online at record levels — thanks to Covid-19…and with all that flurry of activity, criminals have flocked to e-commerce, too. Julie Ferguson, CEO of the Merchant Risk Council, talked to me recently about why online credit card fraud and other kinds of fraud seem to be spreading [Keep reading]

PODCAST: Inside a cybercrime gang that’s stealing millions from U.S. unemployment benefits

May 26, 2020 Bob Sullivan 0

Scattered Canary sounds a bit like bad band name from high school, but it’s really the name given to a highly organized cybercrime game base in Nigeria that’s managed to steal millions of dollars from state unemployment systems, according to my guest — Armen Najarian is Chief Identity Officer [Keep reading]

After 40 years, What’s CNN good for? The Lisa Napoli ‘Up All Night’ interview

May 20, 2020 Bob Sullivan 0

k Once upon a time, Americans waited until dinnertime to find out what happened in the world that day. Then, Ted Turner had a crazy itch to scratch and everything changed. Not for the better, I’d argue. For starters, people now tune to TV news — and to the Internet [Keep reading]

Podcast: ‘This is heartbreaking’ – unemployment ID theft victims in red tape nightmare

May 18, 2020 Bob Sullivan 3

Imagine applying for unemployment benefits only to be denied because…you are already receiving them. Or getting a letter saying you’ve applied for unemployment when you still have a job. It’s happening to ID theft victims around the country as organized crime rings exploit a “perfect storm” that matches a [Keep reading]

Podcast: Will someone — or some country — steal the Covid-19 vaccine?

May 14, 2020 Bob Sullivan 1

“We are being robbed…our intellectual property is all the U.S. has left, and we are being fleeced of it.” The news was easily lost in the Covid-19 fray, but earlier this year, U.S. authorities blamed China for what many consider the most important data heist in history — the hack [Keep reading]

VIDEO: This is All I Got — the Lauren Sandler interview

May 14, 2020 Bob Sullivan 0

What’s it like have a baby – to start a family — while living in a homeless shelter? Author Lauren Sandler lets us know by taking us on a painstakingly reported journey through a young mother’s life, from the birth of her son through his first birthday. Readers ride along [Keep reading]

Podcast: A booby-trapped infection map, fake cures, sick kids — a conversation about ‘golden age of scams’

May 7, 2020 Bob Sullivan 0

We are living through the golden age of scams right now, so I’m going to do an ongoing series about coronavirus crimes. First up: My conversation with Grace Brombach, who just wrote a report on scams(PDF) for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. You can hear my conversation with Brombach [Keep reading]

No Place to Hide podcast ep. 1: When privacy is a matter of life and death

May 6, 2020 Bob Sullivan 3

Amy Boyer, I sometimes say, was the first person murdered by the Internet. Twenty years ago this fall, she was gunned down in cold blood by stalker Liam Youens. He found Amy by hiring a data broker, and told everyone about that on his website. “It’s actually obscene what you [Keep reading]

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