Scams & Cons

Fear gets your attention. It throws you off-kilter. It corrupts your judgement. 

You recover quickly when surprised by a spider. The impact is greater if you awaken in the night and see a stranger standing at the foot of your bed. 

In this episode, we tell you how scammers use fear to get us to do things that interfere with our ability to reason and recognize the scam for what it is.

The basics of romance scams haven't changed all that much. Find someone who is lonely, gain their trust and affection, then bleed them dry of all the money and assets they have.

In this update to season one's story, we tell you how scammers are using new techniques and technology to make their efforts more effective and dangerous.

Why would a good scammer give up their trade just because they are in prison where those skills could be used to escape?

If they are bold enough, they wouldn't.

This is the tale of the Maze Prison Break. Maze is a prison within a prison within a military base. It took a lot of planning and a lot of cons, but they got out. We'll tell you how.

Nearly all scams are impersonation scams. They need you to believe they are someone else in order to get you to hand over your money.

In this episode, we tell you about some of the new ways scammers are using impersonation techniques to rob you and why it's only going to get worse in the future.

In our last episode, I told you about social engineering -- how a con artist's patter can convince you to do anything. But sometimes props are needed to make that tale seem more real.

In this episode we talk about the devices and distractions tricksters use to keep you from noticing your money is slipping from your fingers. 

We're ready to go back to school with Scams & Cons classes that begin Sept. 11.

Enjoy the long weekend, then it's back to the fun!

It's time for our summer break so I can prepare new episodes for season 9. Listen in as I give you the details and respond to some listener notes.

Have a great summer and make some time away from the news to have some fun. You deserve it!

If you bought tickets to a pop-up taco museum restaurant in San Antonio, you got scammed. If someone wants to hook you up with a priest who does exorcisms, beware. But we begin with the story of a brand new scam called call merging. It involves merging your phone call with a scammer and a bank’s two-factor authentication system, stealing your secret code.

More than 60 hotels are conned by a man who dirtied rooms with roaches and condoms, and scammers are showing up at people’s doors to collect money they say they are owed. And I want to tell you the tale of a gambit that I can't call a con, but it's a great way to lose your money.

We're all vulnerable to scams, but we don't have to be willing victims. Today I'm doing something I should have done a long time ago -- tell you just what to do to thwart scammers.

A new scam is moving across the country that can capture the information on your credit card's chips, plus Minnesota legislators are considering a law that would reimburse victims of scams.

What some of you may remember as the Scopes Monkey Trial is a scam. If you don’t know about the trial, you may know about the movie, “Inherit the Wind,” which – and I’m being charitable here – took poetic license with the truth. Today, as we near the 100th anniversary of the trial, I tell you why.

Scopes 100 Celebration

Alabama leads the nation in losses from online scams and a Massachusetts butcher shop owner says he was scammed out of $60,000 of meat. Plus, we'll update you on the Frye Festival scheduled for Mexico, but who knows where in that country it will be?

There are con artists who have pulled off major cons. What they do is so ballsy, it’s hard to believe anyone would fall for them. Yet, in the annals of history, they live on.

Today on Scams And Cons, we'll tell you their stories.

We'll tell you the story of con artists who preyed on the elderly with home remodeling scams. One was  brazen enough to outright tell the homeowner what needed to be done and begin work.