The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1346: David Maimon | Going Undercover in the Fraud Underworld

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Romance scams, deepfakes, Medicare fraud: Professor David Maimon explains how organized the crooks have gotten, and how to stop being low-hanging fruit.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1346What We Discuss with Dr. David Maimon:Why fraud stopped being a guy in a hoodie. It's a full industry with a supply chain, where identity thieves, forgers, account openers, and launderers each run a specialty. David explains how consumers reported $12.5 billion in losses last year, and that's just the part people admitted to.How the dark web turned crime into a self-serve buffet. Stolen identities run $7 to $10, a license, ID, and passport bundle goes for $150, and compromised bank accounts ship with money-back guarantees. Getting there is as easy as pasting a URL from Google into the Tor browser.What AI quietly changed about the whole game. Fake faces, cloned voices, deepfake documents, and synthetic identities built from scratch have collapsed the cost of looking legit. David warns that agentic AI can now open accounts and build a paper trail around a person who never existed.Why you're not getting hacked so much as played. The con shifted from cracking passwords to working people. Romance scammers hunt for high credit scores and home equity, coaxing victims into opening accounts and draining their own loans, while kids get blackmailed into laundering stolen checks.How slowing down quietly beats the scammers. David's best defense costs nothing. Pause before clicking, verify through a separate channel, and treat urgency as the red flag it is. Freeze your credit and your kids', add identity protection, and check your statements as often as the crooks do.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: The Cybersecurity Tapes: Listen here: thecybersecuritytapes.comProgressive Insurance: Free online quote: progressive.comMarathon Rewards: Sign up today: marathonrewards.comAG1: Welcome kit: drinkag1.com/jordanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional Russian chess grandmaster, four-star general rocket scientist or real-life pirate. Apparently, they still exist. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking to Dr. David Maimon, criminologist, fraud expert, and a guy known as the undercover professor, which sounds a little bit like a CBS procedural

where the professor actually has a burner phone and a telegram login. David doesn't just study fraud from some safe little academic perch while sipping bad campus coffee. He goes undercover in the digital sewer system where identity thieves, document forgers, money launderers, AI scammers,

and synthetic identity goblins all hang out, compare notes and apparently run crime like it's a SaaS startup with worse ethics and better margins. The dark web is what we're talking about, of course. And this is the scary part. Fraud is no longer one. guy in a hoodie hacking the mainframe or whatever. It's a whole industry. A supply chain,

fraud as a service, someone steals the data, somebody builds the fake identity, somebody opens the account, someone launders the money, somebody on LinkedIn is probably calling it entrepreneurship. We'll talk about fake businesses in California, Medicare fraud using stolen identities, AI generated faces and documents, voice clones, deep fakes, tax scams, and why the bad guys are organized while the rest of us are still using our dog's name and birthday as a password. So if you've ever thought I'm too smart to get scammed, congratulations. That sentence is basically a scammer's favorite aphrodisiac. Here we go with Dr. David Maimon. I don't even know where to begin with this interview because we're looking at the dark web right now, which we'll get into on the show,

and I'm looking at all kinds of stuff that I've seen bits of, but the last time I used the dark web was probably Silk Road days. And that was just curiosity. I was like, oh, what's Tor? My friend's like, oh, let's use Tor and look at Silk Road. And there were like, hitman ads. that were fake, as it turns out, from the FBI, Honeypots, there was people selling heroin and little bricks or whatever, selling Coke, mushrooms, LSD. How old was Silk Road, like 20 years? Yeah, I mean, we're looking at 2011, something.

Okay, so I was out of law school, and I was already working as a lawyer, but I was curious about this stuff, and I was in this tangentially cybersecurity, doing social engineering talks at DefCon and stuff around, probably around that time. So I was interested in it, but I didn't buy anything. What I should have done is kept a bunch of Bitcoin.

Anybody who was on the Silk Road and has their 30 bucks from 2011 Bitcoin is now a millionaire, but whatever. Tell us who you are because when you pitched me, I was like a fraud professor. That's a pretty cool thing to study. I don't know. It makes sense people study fraud, but usually those people are criminals. Yeah, you 100% correct. And so some of us should be on the good side, right, and try to understand it. Yeah.

Because if you follow some of the stats we have out there, it's really staggering at this point. lose so much money to fraud. 12.5 billion was the total fraud loss. Last year was that $1.5 billion. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is like what they've reported and calculated is fraud reported. I mean, we're not talking about fraud losses that the banks have,

we're not. This is just people. Oh my God. This is consumer fraud? Consumers fraud. These are just individuals. And most of the reports are associated with investment scams and online romance fraud. So folks who tried to build rapport with someone online. Yeah, we've covered this. Oh, I'm in an

accident and I need $100 because my purse got stolen from the crash site and I can't get my medication and I'm in surgery in Indonesia but I'm really an architect from Great Britain who's highly, and you get these people who should know better but it's such a slow drip that they get conned. So you have the scam compounds on there. I won't say we broke the story but the journalist who broke the story who came on our show and talked about how they went to the scam compounds in there's like a city that's basically a it's just a scam city and it's got compounds that are prisons and these people get conned into fake jobs. It's called Kings Lions.

Yeah. Yeah, it's Kings Lions Casino. And then during the pandemic, they couldn't do gambling anymore. So they turned it into a scam compound. And then they realized it was more profitable to just be an international scam company than it was to be a casino in the middle of the jungle. 100%. What I do is something very similar to the journalist who was on the show.

I try to spend as much time as possible with fraudsters out there. Online. Online. Right. Offline as well. Really? You know, we're getting into more news. more offline, simply because we see a lot of it happening right now, and there's physical

representation of the fraud. Like, I mean, we work a really cool story right now, which I can't really break at this point, but there's physical representation of the fraud. Synthetic and stolen identities in the heart of Burbank. So Burbank, California. Burbank, California, yeah. Basically, L.A. slash Hollywood. That's the airport I fly into when I go there at Burbank.

Yes. So, yeah, I spent a lot of time with these fraudsters online, trying to understand what is that they do, download the information that they put out there to my... computers simply try to make sense out of the online fraud ecosystem. And I've been doing this for like 10 years almost, running experiments, collecting data, and it's a fascinating ecosystem to be in. The more I research fraud and talk to people like you, the more I realize it is an ecosystem. It's a system. It's not a bunch of isolated crimes. The tiny frauds are isolated crimes. Somebody passing a check, they printed at CVS or whatever, and bring it to a bank and getting

50 bucks from a bank teller that feels sorry for somebody, and then they get jumped for check kiting or whatever the heck it's called. But when the gangs that are doing this, like the stuff you just showed me on the dark web, which we'll talk about in a moment or in a few minutes and maybe even try to show some on camera, that's industrial fraud. 24 years ago, I was in Ukraine.

I hate to pick on Ukraine because it's being invaded right now, but I was in Ukraine, and I remember meeting up with gangsters and fraudsters there because I was interested in that stuff for various reasons. I'll say as a journalist because I want to save my reputation. But there was so much credit carding, and I remember seeing guys being like, oh yeah, credit card fraud is our big thing right now.

I was thinking like, okay, they steal a number from a restaurant or something and then they go out and they buy stuff with it in town. No, these guys had stacks of plastic cards that didn't have numbers or names pressed into them yet. You know, your card, it's pressed in there with the machine. They had the blanks. And I was like, oh, yeah, I guess these must exist, right? The companies have these. And I'm thinking, where did you get a bunch of visa blanks with holograms? They're not fake.

These are real. They had holograms, everything. And they had some machine, I guess, back at their. their gangster HQ, where they could say like, oh, you're Jordan Harbinger, okay, here's the number. We're going to generate for you that we stole from this other guy who's not you. And they press it in there. And you could just go around. And this is before the internet reconciled all the charges in real time, right?

So you just go around with that for maybe months or even years until the card expired. Because by the time they reconcile the charge and it doesn't work, it doesn't matter anymore. That was crazy state of the art back then, right? We'll be on that point. It certainly looks like it from the dark web, man. It's the darknet. It's telegram, but it's also Facebook. It's also Instagram. It's also TikTok. It's all over the place at this point. It's really all over the place. We have supply chains of all types of illicit commodities. Folks are essentially using social media to support. That makes sense. AI deep fakes and identity fraud and stuff like that. So all right. So you're like the undercover professor. That's one of your nicknames because you don't just research fraud. You're infiltrating the organization. How does that work? Because I assume are you pretending to be someone else? are you like, hey, I'm a fraud researcher. Do you want to stroke your ego and talk about how smart you are for a few? I don't want to say that I'm pretending to be someone else. I just have my

aliases. Okay. Isn't that what pretending to be someone else is? You have your aliases, right? And you have sock puppets. Those sock puppets essentially allow you to connect to all those platforms that the criminals spend a lot of time in. If you're meeting someone in person, you tell them who you are or not? It really depends on the goal of the mission, right? lot of the stuff that I'm doing out there is just for me to understand what's going on out there. Obviously, not everything that I do can go on print because I need to have ethic review committee sort of look at all my studies and there's an issue of human rights and subject sort of rights. I mean, exposing criminals is legal, so.

But you can't really do that, right? I mean, you can't really do that as a professor. You can't really do that conducting an academic research, right? And to be honest, I'm not trying to expose criminals at this point. I'm just trying to understand what is that they do. and trying to understand the modest operandi and simply make sure that we're all aware of it in order to protect and prevent.

Yeah, you're not a law enforcement. I'm not. And it's really important to emphasize it because even the criminals think I'm trying to get them arrested and I'm not. All I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make sure that we are aware of what they do in order for us to prevent and mitigate. My friend Mariana Van Zeller does a show Trafficked

where she meets with cartel hitmen. They'd love to talk about what they do. I don't know what it is. Human nature. Yeah, I mean, so when we infiltrate, trade to those groups, we started doing this seven years ago. There weren't too many people who were doing that. It was just the beginning of telegram and criminals using telegram for all kind of purposes. We got lucky in that sense because we have very old aliases that are part of those groups for a long

period of time. We don't need any vetting. We're just there. So we are seeing what these guys are putting out there because we're part of the group. We don't have to really talk to anyone. You don't really have to sort of post or purchase or do anything. It's just there. And you see, what is it? It's like think about it like an Instagram or TikTok. You know what internet relay chat is? Remember that? Yeah, yeah, of course. Like IRC, I'd be sitting in pound freak, which is like a phone hacking thing.

And I would just be in there for literally years. And occasionally I would say like, hey, does anybody know how you take an NEC 300 cell phone and just wipe it? I can't find the instruction manual. And somebody would be like, hold these buttons down. And that would be like the only thing I said for four months. So that's exactly what we're trying to do. I'm not engaging too much with folks on those platforms simply because I don't want to get in trouble. right and I don't want them to flag

because yeah you need to use specific jargon when you're over there yeah get what you need hello fellow kids I would like to make some crimes I have some really cool stories about there I actually have one of my students in the past he was tasked with finding something for us out there all we ask them to do is just try and infiltrate

find more and more and more channels simply be patient wait for these guys to talk about it he went in starting talking to people like I mean I'm looking for that so they realized quickly that this guy is either a police officer or a researcher or you just blocked them. So you need to know what you're doing when you're there, right? I mean, so that's essentially where we spend a lot of time with thousands of channels like that. I remember those relays. What we're seeing on Telegram right now is mind-boggling respect to people

exposing their modus operandi on any type of fraud you can imagine. Mail theft. I flagged that issue in 2021 simply because the criminals were posting so many checks out there and we're talking about this modus up horrenda and how to do it. Telegram for people don't know, by the way. I should have said this It's basically WhatsApp, but it was a Russian app, which is now coincidentally, I believe, banned in Russia because they can't look at all the messages. Right. I've got friends that live in Russia and Belarus, and they say things like, oh, this app doesn't work for us anymore. And I'm like, oh, because that means the government can't look at it. And then I'm thinking, okay, so the app that you're talking to me on right now, no problem, which means they can look at it, probably.

So not that there's anything on there. I don't want anybody to see, but it is a little disconcerting when, oh, we don't want you to use this. It's like, oh, but this one's fine. I thought this was also end-to-end encrypted. So what's the deal? So there's a lot going on, right? We know that once they arrested Aduro, the CEO, we started to see. Yeah, so we started to see less activity in terms of criminals using it, but there's still a lot

going on. But the point I'm trying to make is that the criminals really like to talk about what they do. We're talking about a supply chain, and we're talking about them having access to a lot of checks and bank accounts and identities they need to sell in order to make money. and so that's why they're using it. Is it advertising? Like are they saying, look at this stack of checks that you could buy for me? It is advertising.

It's bragging. It's making sure that they get a reputation in the ecosystem for what they do. It's all of the above. Okay. I'm on the fence about talking about all these things so specifically, but here's the thing. We're not creating criminals and we're not going to teach people how to do things. But I will say some of the sites just so people who are curious can go look. There was one that was called the Lid Depot.

I don't really understand what that means, but they were selling fake license plates for cars, fake registrations, I think, all kinds of fake car documents. Where are businesses like this located? Are they overseas or are they in the U.S. operating and they just don't get caught? So the business you just mentioned is located here in the United States, right? I'm not really sure whether it's New Jersey or Miami. We're trying to figure out. If you made me guess, those are one of the top, two of the top ways. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, this operation is homemade, right? I mean, You hear folks speaking and talking to each other on the videos they post out there and realize these are Americans.

There's a lot going on on the Russian side, on the Chinese side, on North Korean side, on North Korean size as well. North Korea. We see a lot of identities that the North Korean are taking right now and then using AI in order to manufacture fake driver licenses and then get positions here in the United States. So this I've seen, this is funny because this is a little off topic, but I've seen, there's a video that someone sent me. There was a guy who was doing an interview, a job interview.

Yeah. The person who said he was Chinese, but he turned out to be North Korea. and he stole the whole code base, and then he just vanished. And so now North Korea is going to sell that to the competition or start a competing company in China with the code base of this startup. And the test, I don't know if you saw this, the test was, they were like, I just want to make sure you're not North Korean like the last guy. Say Kim Jong-un is a fat pig.

And the guy goes, what? And he's like, say Kim Jong-un is a fat pig, and you got the job. And the guy was like, oh, ha-ha-ha-ha. And he's like, no, do it. And the guy just goes, Kim Jong-un. And they're like, what? Couldn't hear you. Do it louder.

And he just disconnect. And they were like, okay, I guess that guy was North Korean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, with the deep fakes and the AIs that are going on right now, I mean, there are also tests of trying to break the image. They tell it to wave. Oh, yeah. Wave three fingers.

That doesn't work anymore. Right. I mean, you know, some of the things that we're doing right now, we actually are able to swap faces quite easily and wave fingers, driver licenses, whatever you want in front of the images. Somebody did send me that. They go, all right, I just want to make sure one thing can you wave in front of your face? And the guy wouldn't do it, wouldn't do it, waved up here, waved over here. they're like, do it in front of your face, does it down here, and they're like, wave in front of your face or we're hanging up.

And he just was like, he just goes, and then hangs up. And I was like, wow. But now you can wave your hand in front of a face and a picture will stay. It's unbelievable. So why deep fake? Because you're trying to pretend to be a completely fake person. Either you're stealing someone's identity or you're building a completely new persona out there and you want to use it in the context of job applications, open new bank accounts, take clones. There's so many things that you can do with an identity.

Think about it. We use our identities for pretty much everything nowadays. For the job interview thing, it's always strange. I mean, these guys are committed when they're getting a job in a company and they're going to work there for several months long enough to get access to the codebase and then steal the code base. I mean, that could take years of infiltrating. So it's not only the code base.

They're actually getting paid for that. And that helps the regime. The regime. I don't know if you had a chance to look through some of the indictments out there, but there are at least two. And you see how much money these guys make. 30 employees each make $100,000 a year, that's a lot of money for the regime to support their goals. So that's what we're seeing at this point. If you basically have an enslaved population,

which North Korea does, you can either have that guy as a taxi driver making single-digit dollars per day, not generating any foreign revenue, currency revenue, or you can have them working abroad remotely and making tens of thousands of dollars a year, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year depending on their skill set. And they're very talented. At the end of the day, many of the of the operations we are familiar with, they were using stolen identities, stolen American identities, people from here in California. I mean, we've seen a lot of California driver licenses being used in that sense. We're seeing them manufacturing, completely fabricated identities and getting a job. Yeah, when you get an email, like, you'll never guess there's this Asian dude named Jordan Harbinger

coding in my company. We just hired him. In one of the cases, we looked closely into, they were actually using a female name, and they had a male person taking the position for her. mind-boggling to see that. No one knows Jordan Harbinger's a guy unless you know who I am. Yeah, it could be anybody. Happens all the time. I'll be like sitting somewhere in a seating arrangement and I go, I think they might have thought that I was a woman because it'll be like all the men are

on the left side of the room and it's me and a hundred women on the right side. It doesn't happen with David. Yeah. Yeah. It's got to be really hard to take down a business like the Lid Depot selling these fake plates. Their website's not registered anywhere. It's on the dark web and they mail something to you. so you'd really have to triangulate them sending the packages out or something.

And even that is complicated. We know that they will not send it from the post office close to the facility. They will drive 100 mile and they will send it from there. Yeah, they ship once a month when the dude drives down to his house in Florida. It's a real challenge for law enforcement and this is something that we're dealing with right now. This kind of stuff, fake plates, fake passports. This is the kind of stuff in a movie where someone's like, hey, Tom, I need a fake passport. And they go to the vacuum cleaner store and the guy gives them,

a fake identity, like breaking bad, but this is real. This is real life. We're seeing thousands of those documents being used on a daily basis, right? So it's really scary, to be honest. Look, if you're signing up for credit cards and stuff, that's one thing, but getting a fake passport, you're a real serious criminal if you need a fake passport. You're fleeing bail, you're fleeing parole, you've done something really bad where you need to leave the country and you're not allowed to. I mean, that's serious. You've done something really wrong. It depends, because you can use the passports to onboard as well with a bank. That's true. Isn't it just easier to get a fake driver's license, the fake U.S. passport?

It is, and it costs less, but folks are still trying to get the passport as well. How much are fake passport? It depends on what you're looking at. I mean, you want to have the picture, do you want to have the actual document? I want the real document in my hand so that I could maybe use it to cross-border. It depends where you're getting the passport from. You can get a passport for between $500 to $1,500, right? I mean, it's not that bad.

That is way cheaper than I thought. Yeah. Are you kidding? These are the prices that we're seeing on some of the market. it's out there. So a really good fake US passport is $1,500? Yeah, between $500 to $1,500. It really depends on the vendor. It depends on the

quality. It depends on where you're getting it from. The Chinese are amazing. Sure, but holy cow, I really thought there'd be a zero on the end of those numbers. No, no, not at all. Oh my goodness. Can you get passports from other countries? Like, can I get like a, I don't know, Luxembourg You could, for sure. I mean, I've been doing this for a long period of time.

I talk about eras in some of my work. started with a dark net where there were markets out there where you have the silk road as you mentioned and essentially the criminals were selling everything on those markets like drugs and weapons and identities and passport and whatever but then after a few years folks realized that law enforcement take down those markets and so what they will need to do is they will just open their own shops and so they started opening shops for passports right i don't know if i have it on this computer but we actually have a lot of screenshots of those shops selling passports for all countries out there If I remember back then it was 800 euros because it was, I think, a European actor,

selling passports to any country that you can imagine, right? I mean, there was like a menu and you could have just pick your passport. And then get it delivered, right, to your home. We'll be right back after a quick word from the only people in today's episode, not actively selling your social security number in a telegram group. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell and AMD. Dell Technologies has just dropped the Cybersecurity tapes, which is a new podcast series that dives into today's biggest cybersecurity challenges.

And I know that sounds a little bit technical, but this is a really good format to teach cybersecurity because it's story-based. So on a recent episode, Gemini, which is a chat bot that's like a customer service bot, it starts leaking corporate secrets. And there's a lot of plot twists in there, which they did pretty well, in my opinion. Maria, of course, is a seasoned security pro, seen it all. She runs her own consulting gig. She knows how to untangle tech messes.

And then they put her skills to the test. And I know that it's like, okay, there's a lot of stories. about cybersecurity. But reading articles about this stuff is not really the greatest way to learn this. I love the fact that they've got like a story-based format here that teaches important lessons. And it's not just a story. They're really packed with insights and tips to handle your own cybersecurity nightmares. So instead of throwing facts and figures at you, it uses real-life scenarios and characters, which makes it easier and way more interesting, frankly, to understand the risks and how they can impact us. So while you're listening to this drama unfold,

you're learning crucial info and how to protect yourself in the digital world at the same time. the next episode of the Cybersecurity tapes on platforms like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and if you got a cybersecurity horror story of your own, you can drop a review, and your story might inspire their next episode. This episode is also sponsored by Progressive. You're listening to this podcast, so I know you got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive, save over $900 on average. They make it super simple. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions. You'll get a quick quote with coverage options tailored to your choices. Plus, you'll see which discounts you might qualify for, like the online.

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keep the show going strong. Thank you for your support. Now, back to David Maimon. It would be kind of cool to have a novelty fake North Korean passport or diplomatic passport. I assume that it's a felony for me to even have a foreign country's fake passport for any purpose at all if it looks even remotely real. I'm not sure about that. I mean, I'm sure that you're not allowed to use it. Of course, you're not allowed to use it. I don't know. It's too expensive to be a joke, but there is a world in which I want five passports that'll have my face on them and then hide them around the house and my wife finds them.

and she's like, who are you? Make an interesting conversation. That's right. Yeah. That would have been, oh, God, when I was dating, I would have loved to have had something like that. They're in a drawer and I'm like, hey, can you go grab a knife from the end? And then she's like, oh, my God, he's a spy.

I would have definitely done that. You can have it with driver licenses. You can have it with so many driver licenses. And the driver licenses that you get from China right now are like $200. It's nothing, man. And the quality is impeccable. Forget about the driver licenses we use in her to get into a bar when we were 16. No.

They have the holograms on that. They have them watermark on them. It's unbelievable. They're putting it on the right cards. It's just unbelievable. I got to look up the statute of limitations, but I'm going to assume that it's been up for a while. In the 90s, I used to make these fake driver's licenses

because what I would do is I would go and get all of the expired licenses that I could, my own, my parents, old licenses, and it was Michigan, so they had this raised laminate, and it was hard. And it said Michigan had the state seal on it. What you could do is on the back, you could just cut it really slightly with a super sharp razor, pull the original license out. No one had Photoshop. No one had photo printers.

So I had Photoshop and a photo printer. And I would just make an exact replica, change the birthdays, and slide it back into the laminate. And then I would heat it up really, really hot. And the laminate would just sort of stick to the photo thing with this little cut in it. If you bent it, it would crack open, but nobody's going to do that to your license.

And so I remember showing it to my friend's dad who was a judge, and he was like, hang on. So he called his buddy over. like the chief of police and he goes, check this out. And he was like, where did you get this? And I go, I shouldn't tell you this, but I made it. And he's like, I'm taking this home. Don't ever do that again. And I was like, okay, I didn't tell him I had made 20 already from my buddies. So why did you do that? And I'm curious. Why, just to see if I could do it. I didn't even use it for anything.

My friends went and bought beer with it once. For me, all of this stuff is can I do it? Not then I want to use it for something illegal. I shouldn't say I never used it. I think I went to Canada once and bought beer with it because I wasn't old enough to look 21, but I was old enough to look 19, which is the drinking age there. So I go to like Windsor and buy beer and be like, you worked. It was like a dumb kid doing something. So I'm lucky because I definitely could have gotten arrested and they would have been like, oh, you're getting hit with a felony because you just manufactured 20 of these and now somebody went out there and did something real bad with it. And so it was a dumb, idiotic kid thing to do. But I just wanted the challenge. It was so easy to do it in the past,

still easy to do it nowadays with all the tools you have, with the AIs, with the Photoshop you mention, and there are some other tools that are out there. If you engage and you have the bowls to do that, then you can make a lot of money. And so that's what we're seeing out there. And then the supply chain out there on Telegram, on the darknet, supports you selling in marketing, your skills. Like, you know how to make those driver licenses. I need to open a new bank account because I want to deposit a stolen check. So let's do business. And so those skills now are very sought after and there's an ecosystem which will allow you to advertise your skill and make money out of it. Unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of kids doing that, a lot of kids wanting to do that.

Because I don't know if you're seeing, you're seeing on Instagram and telling them a lot of folks who are spreading. You know, what's spreading is? I mean, it spread money on their arms. So they take 100 bills, like stacks of 100 bills, and then they spread them all over their arms or their foot or whatever, right? And everybody wants to do that. They don't really know that you can buy the fake notes. And you shouldn't buy fake notes and use them, but they want to make money. And so they want in the ecosystem.

They want to be able to get those driver licenses and open bank accounts and deposit those checks and engage in first-party fraud, which is essentially returning something to the store and get reimbursed for that. It's just sad, right? That's pathetic. I'm actually really glad that none of this stuff really existed in this sort of easy to access industrial form that it did in the 90s because I would have been super interested in that.

You swap Sims. That's what you do right now. Yeah, I mean, this was you had to program an analog phone with somebody else's serial number and phone number. And you had to get that by diving into a dumpster at a cell phone store. And then you could program the phone and make free phone calls. You could also change the phones into test mode and listen to people's phone calls and something like that.

That was cool. That was a technological challenge I really enjoyed. I would have been really interested in this. But it's probably really difficult, especially for a young person to go, cool, I just made a bunch of fake checks. I should test one. Oh, it worked. Well, I'm done with that.

That's what I did with my license, right? But if you just got $1,000 from a bank, why would I not get $100,000 from a bunch of banks? 100%. And then, unfortunately, folks are not really aware of the potential repercussions of their... I would never think, oh, I'm going to get arrested and thrown in actual jail. I would have been like, oh, I'll just give the money back. How about the banks not banking you anymore and you're not being able to get... That's a consequence.

So banks, yeah, I guess it makes sense. Banks ban people for life? If they see that you engage in first party fraud, they don't want to do business with you. I never thought about that. you have a lot of banks in this country for sure. I don't think they share information. So banks will not tell the other banks that this guy was engaged. You're taking potential responsibility, right, of folks not wanting to work with you.

What do you do if you're 17 or 18 and you do that and then you're 38 and you're like, hey, I've been a lawyer for 12 years. Can I get a bank account? Do they change their mind at all? It's like too bad, but how? That's a great question. I mean, I don't know the answer for that. But you don't want to be in that position.

Folks need to understand the consequence of their behavior. We were all kids, but I don't think many of us were involved in fraud. I think that we're seeing more and more kids now wanting in the fraud ecosystem because it's easy money. It's easy money. Man, I would imagine some of the stuff that companies you know are working on. If they're using AI to create fraud, they're going to use AI to crack down on it, and I would imagine.

But the question is whether that is the answer, right? Whether you need to fight fire with more fire. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe not. Right. We'll see. Tell me about Medicare fraud. This is identity theft at its core, right?

They're just pretending to be a person. and eligible for Medicare? Well, it depends, right? I mean, so Medicare is really interesting because you can create fake companies and then start taking folks' identities, stealing identities, or even sort of work with people, and then essentially charge the government

with services you never really provided. So this is essentially what Medicare fraud is, Medicare and Medicaid. Is this what happens when there's a couple older people in my family and they'll say, I got a bill for this thing and we're like, oh, did she just forget she had that procedure because she's 89? Unfortunately, yeah, we see a lot of it.

as we actually see people selling victims' identities along with their Medicaid and Medicare numbers for those companies to charge them. And I had a conversation with someone over that offering to sell Medicaid numbers for folks who live in Florida, for Floridians, for $10 an identity. So you get the source to create a number, date of birth address, and the Medicaid number for $10. And if you buy in bulk, you can get a really good price. They're willing to give you $7 an identity. So you take all those identities and then you essentially charge them, right? And you charge the government with providing services to them, sending medical equipment to these individuals.

Obviously, it never happened. And so that's where you start to see a lot of the victims complaining about getting all those bills, right, and all those unfamiliar charges on their statement. That is essentially what Medicare. And I can tell you that I travel around the country, try to find those facilities. And often case, a couple of months ago, I was in Marina Del Rey. Yeah, in California, in L.A., basically. So there was supposed to be like a facility, and we know for sure there are charged the government. The last five years or so, I went there, there was nothing there. There was just a building. It was a FedEx office.

I went into the FedEx office, asked, are you familiar with this company? And said, no. And you would expect a company that charges $17 million to the government should get some mail, right, from FedEx, right? That is right across the street. Nobody knew what I was talking about. Went into the leasing office. Nobody really even wanted to answer. Of course, there's no.

this is a residential building. There's no medical sort of facility here. So $17 million for a non-existent business in Marina Del Rey. And this is just one business. Traveling across the country, Florida, Ohio, we try to track those businesses and I don't really get in trouble, right? But for doing this with the bad guys, so much Medicare fraud in this country. It's just shame. And so they're making a lot of money doing this because this is $17 million, one fake business. Why not have 20 fake businesses? That's right. And that's what they're doing. Yeah. That's essentially what they're doing. I hope now there will be more scrutiny. I know that there's more scrutiny right now on Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Hopefully that will continue. We'll be able to flag more of it and we'll be able to prevent more of it because at the end of the day, it's our money. Yeah. Taxpayers money. That's the thing. That needs to go to real people, not real businesses and not completely bogus organizations.

What's the scale of this? Tens of billions? We're talking on billions of dollars, yeah, for sure. So you could do something with that money. You could do a lot of things with that money. Oh my gosh, yeah. And they get this information. I assume the Medicaid, the Social Security. This is data breach stuff, right? This is when, oh, such and such company got hacked and you go, I don't use Equifax. Yes, you do. And your info is in there. And, oh, they lost how many identities? $350,000.

Oh, okay. Well, what are the odds that's me? That's a lot, but it's not a lot, right? Okay, whatever. No, there's 350,000 fake Medicare patients that they can use to feed this business for a decade. So you definitely have the data coming from data breaches. but if you look at some of the scams going on right now, they're trying to collect those numbers and those identities with regular scam.

So I will send you a postcard for a home, and I will let you know that something happened with your Medicaid service. You need to enroll from scratch, and then I will send you to a website or send you a text to sort of enroll, and then you will provide me all the information. So it's not only a day-of-release. That would totally work on me if I got a postcard. I feel like I would fall for that.

And we have a lot of examples for that. Postcards coming from Medicare or Medicaid, where you have to go to a specific one. website or talk to a specific person to provide her information and you're going to make sure that you're still eligible for benefits, you immediately call. You want to make sure that you're still eligible. You give away all your information. I feel like I got to text my parents from you. And now someone has all your information. I'm literally looking for my phone to text my parents right now. Hey, don't do anything like. Luckily, my dad's always like, hey, can you help me do this?

I got to go to this website and do this thing. And there have been a couple of times where we're like, that does not sound like something you need to do. My dad's gotten scanned before the printer stopped working, which is an old person's worst nightmare because they had no idea how to hook this thing back up, especially if it's wireless. I don't know how to bring it back up either. I guess I'm more. He may be. So he Googles HP printer support. And the first result in Google was a scam.

It was an ad bought by a company. He calls them. They're like, you need to install this thing, team viewer on your computer. He does it. Then he's like, what are you doing? And the guy's like, oh, I'm looking for your printer drivers. My dad ripped the cord of the computer out of the wall because he finally was like, wait a minute. And then he took a computer to Apple who basically locked it down because they're like,

we're going to get rid of Team Viewer. all this remote access stuff that they had you set up. But I had to change my bank passwords, and he had to change his bank passwords, because it's like the guy was probably looking for a note file where you keep your passwords or something like that to steal your money. And my dad was like, I just don't understand how the first result in Google was a scam.

And I'm like, that's because Google doesn't give a crap if an advertiser is a scam company. They just don't. They don't police this. It's all around us. And the fraudsters are clever. They're nimble. They adjust quickly,

and they take advantage of it. vulnerabilities and opportunities. And it's all over the place. That's why I think it's extremely important to study fraud and expose those fraudulent activities that these guys are involved in. It's tough to fight it, right? Because my dad goes, all right, next time

I talk to a person who has that accent on the phone, I'm going to know it's a scam. And I'm like, Dad, you can't say that every person with a Filipino or Indian accent on the support line is a scammer because that's every single person on every single support line at every company in America. But once he instill this suspicion of people...

Now he's suspicious about a lot of things. So you can ask questions. Once people are more vigilant about that, they look around and look for the signals and then they will disconnect, right? Yeah. Now he just asks us, is this how you do that? And I'm like, that is good. And that's amazing. How often do these guys get caught doing this fake businesses or the Medicare fraud?

Because it's just got to be so hard to police this kind of. Part of the problem, right? The probability of detection and punishment is so damn low. And the criminals know that. And they continue to do it. That's part of the problem, unfortunately. I feel bad for the scam victims. I mean, after we're losing tax dollars, but I really feel bad for the people whose identities get stolen.

There was a segment you were on that I watched where, I don't know, it was like a Dutch guy who lives in the Netherlands. And I think he went to college here or something in the United States. And it screwed up his credit score. He flew back here to try to straighten things out because otherwise he can never come back here without getting probably arrested for whatever happened. So he has to come back, maybe retain a lawyer, go straighten things out with banks. And he's like, this is not something I wanted to spend money in time and mental health doing, but I want to be able to visit people in the United States at some point in my life and not have a criminal record or whatever.

But think about our kids. You know, I have like a 19 years old. And if someone takes her social security number and start using it, she will not know till she's, what, 25. Yeah, she's going to try to buy a car and they're going to be like, what about the last five cars you defaulted on? Think about the consequences for her, right? And so we hear of many kids like my daughter, who, their identity being stolen and being used in the context of bust out operations, meaning...

What's that? So, Bastard is when you have someone's identity. You open a bank account, then you apply for credit, and then you accumulate more and more credit, until you get to the maximum credit, and then you simply run away with $100,000. I see. Once you do that, someone will have to pay the bill, usually the banks, but they will first reach out to the real people and ask them, is this you? Why aren't you paying the loan you just took from us?

And that obviously will have an impact on their credit score, and it's a lot. It's a big deal, right? And it takes years for these guys to recover from this event. So we're talking about former legal immigrants. We're talking about adolescents and youth. We're talking about children. Think about it. Yeah.

Newborn. You've got to lock your kids' credit with the credit bureaus, right? As soon as they get born. That's what we're seeing. One of the things that I'm seeing on the dark net is infants. Social Security numbers being offered for sale. Walk yourself through that process, man, infants. So you have...

But it's a good one because if you don't want to be discovered for a decade and change, buy a baby's credit. 100%. It's a dormant identity. You sit on it, and I have some really cool story to tell about this. It's still very early stages and we investigate. But we know of criminals using those babies' identities for a long period of time. It's mind-brily how much money you can steal.

You can build a whole life around those identities. And nobody will know, right? Former show guest Jack Barski, he's a former Soviet spy. And one of the ways that he pretended to be an American was he just found a dead kid's identity. I think the KGB did it for him, but he found a dead kid's identity and got documents and basically became the adult version of this baby that died around the time that he was actually born. So it was approximately the same age. And he said, yeah, I mean, and the baby was Jack Barski. The guy's real name is he's got a German name. He just became this fake dead

and he still uses that name, which is a little creepy actually now that I think about it. Unfortunately, folks are definitely using those baby's identities and they live their whole life with those identities. Yeah. Wow. Every time I cover stuff like this, whether it's fraud or rampant, organized shoplifting, somebody in the comments inevitably says, who cares? It's a big company. The bank eventually pays for it. You're mildly inconvenience. The corporations don't care about us. Why should we care about them? I would love for you to respond to these idiots. Yeah. Eventually, we will pay the bill, right? I mean, because it doesn't really matter if we're dealing with the banks or a retailer. If they're losing

money, they don't want to lose all this money. They will roll the expenses on us. So we definitely want to make sure that they're not losing money in order for us not to lose money. People complain about the prices going up. Yeah, when you have thousands of dollars in fraud every single day, they just raise the price on the goods that honest people pay for so that they can stay in business. And also think about friction, right? I mean, criminals or the fraudsters who, at the end of the day, make our lives, the normative people life, more complicated with the banks. Because if the banks or the retailers do not trust us, they will make, you know, a lot of obstacles to get things from that. This is why I got to freaking wait and push a button to get deodorant

at CVS because some idiots stole all of it for the last six years, and now I've got to have a permission. So they're ruining it for everyone. Before we continue spielunking through this fraud swamp, I guess you don't really spilunk in swamps, don't at me on that. Let's hear from the brands keeping this show free legally, which is apparently an important distinction today. We'll be right back.

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Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. We're happy to surface codes for you. It really is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to David Maimon. I guess the clearest example is TSA. I used to be able to walk through a metal detector to make sure I didn't have a gun on an airplane, and that was it. Now I've got to take off my shoes into all this crazy stuff

and be there an hour early because they have to have security for the 0.0001% of people want to blow up a plane. Same thing with fraud. The reason we even have all of this nonsense, this tax on our time, sanity, and funds is because of this exact thing. That's exactly right, yeah. So fraud is an industry now and not a crime. They're not loan hackers, right? It's a supply chain looking at it. It's identity thieves.

Then there's document forgers to give me fake documents for that identity. Then maybe, I don't know, somebody who presents well enough to go open an account and they open accounts all day, and then, I don't know, what, money launderers or something thereafter. The roles seem like they're specialized, at least looking at the telegram and the other things like that. Yeah, so you definitely have the suppliers. You have the hackers. We'll get to you all the identities. We're talking about an identity theft supply chain, right? Identity theft and synthetic identities. Synthetic identities are completely bogus identities. So we're not talking about babies or real people identities. We're talking about me coming up with a completely new

identity, bogus identity, and using it to create bank accounts, get credit score, take loans. Why not just steal a real identity if it exists and it's so easy? You can definitely do that as well. With synthetic identities, though, you have more leverage. No, you're not competing with anyone else on the identity. It's just you. And so if I steal your identity, then both you and I are using the identity. So I may be maxing. You may be locking your credit score, right, your credit lines and I won't be able to take any loans under your name. With the same, you know, synthetic identities, I'm controlling it. So I will build the identity in such a way that will allow me

to open a bank account. I see. So this is a fully backstop. Exactly. And that will lead to the bustout. And so when we talk about the supply chain, we know that there are suppliers of both the stolen and synthetic identities. We know that there are a lot of producers out there who will help you with the documents. And we talked about the documents a little bit. But not only the driver licenses and the passport, we're talking about utility bills. We're talking about if you don't want to use your face, we will be able to find someone who will be willing to give away their face for you to use when you were involved with the bank. Now with AI, you don't even need that because you just create the faces out of scratch and the producers will help you with that as well. But you definitely have that service.

So then you have the distributors, folks out there on Telegram, on Darknet, selling the service, selling the identity, helping you getting the credit score you really need in order to take the loan. And then customers all over the place, right? I mean, so the supply chain is out there, is available, fairly easy to access on Telegram. The Darknet is very simple. I know folks don't like when I say that, but all you have to have is just Tor browser on your computer and then know the right URL.

You can get some of those documents. And you get the URL. Well, I know, Google or Telegram? From Google, yeah. There's a website called Tor Taxi. Tor Taxi. And Tor Taxi will give you all the names and URLs of all the live markets. So all you have to do is just copy from Google, paste on Tor, and then get to the market.

Wow. So it's as simple as pasting from one browser to another way. 100%. That's exactly what it is. Wow. Yeah. Tor Taxi, yeah. Tor Taxi, right?

Access to all the markets, all the live markets. That's where you can buy drugs, I assume. Yes. Then you have some of the forums. A lot of hackers and folks are interested in hacking will be on the forums, but a lot of fraudsters will be there as well. XSS is a Russian one. All you have to do is just copy and paste.

to the tour. Can we look at Drug Hub? Everybody knows what drugs are. Yeah, let's see. Yeah. All right, let's go here. So now we're using Tor. Okay. Wow, and you just boom, paste it. Now, let's see what we get. And the thing with Thor is that it's slow. Yeah, it's slow, yeah. Very slow. Because it's encrypted, right? It's encrypted. It's encrypted, and the encryption takes time, right? And it runs it through a different algorithm. So the way Tor works, can you give us like a 10 second overview of Tor and why it works. It's not just a special web browser. It's a special way of looking at the internet. Right. I mean, it's a special way to communicate with server. I mean, so usually on the regular internet, your computer will connect to a server, right? I mean, the traffic will be encrypted,

but people will know where you're communicating from and where you communicate in too. In Tor, it's very difficult to tell. And that's why you have an increased level of anonymity. That's why the criminals really like using this website for their operation. And I know people are going to say, why do internet service providers allow Tor to be used? And the answer is Tor was invented, what, by the U.S. Navy? Yes, it was, yeah. And the reason was so that they could use it, correct? You know, to make sure that the traffic is not being exposed and we have special agents here.

We need to allow everybody to sort of use it. So the more traffic that is on tour, the harder it is that somebody under their watch is using it to talk to the CIA or whatever. Let's look at BlackBet. Yeah, we have it ready. So BlackBet is one of those websites which allow you to actually buy. right, identities and bank accounts and we can just browse through what we have here. So what are you in the mood for man? When do you want to buy? Yeah, let's see. Let me get a fake identity for sure. Okay. And probably a bank account that already has money in it so I don't look like a broke-ass loser.

So in that sense, to be clear respect to whether you want someone real bank account, like a compromised bank account, because you can get that or you can get a bank account someone created and has some money in it for the bank account to be used as a drop account, or sort of a muleka. So let's start with, you said driver licenses. Yeah, yeah, why not? Or passport, if it's just as easy.

I want to see if I can get a foreign passport, land borders without getting caught. This is one of the things I really wanted to do, you know? Like, I wanted to buy a passport and then hopefully with TSA permission or DHA's permission, try and figure out whether they will be able to flag it. That was one of my questions is,

look, I assume that when I have to scan it, it goes into a database and goes, this is not a real passport. But does it do that or does it go? This number, it passes the checksum that's in our computer, just let the guy go. It's a great question. We don't have the answer to that. Remember old credit cards?

You could type it into a machine. And if it didn't have the internet, it would just say, this is a valid number because it's formatted properly. So that's what they did in the 90s, right? You'd go buy a pizza and they would go, this is real. And then they'd find out on Friday when they called the bank and reconciled all the numbers manually that that one was not real. But they didn't find out for five or seven days.

I think it was called a check sum. It was like, do the numbers do something algorithmically that makes sense? Yeah. If so, this is a real number. I agree. So there are ways to discover that you're dealing with a fake passport, but I want to see whether folks actually are doing it. I think it would be extremely interesting.

Same. Red team means. Because what happens if you go, hey, this won't scan, and they go, oh, you know what? It's bent. Oh, okay. I want to see what happens. Yeah, I would love to try it. So here, I mean, here you see driver licenses, ID plus passport,

and so you can get all that for $150, right? Wait, hold on. What am I getting bulk documents? You're getting driver license plus ID plus passport front or some both side. Digital images thereof. Okay. You get those for $150. What about printed documents that look legit, like forgeries?

Maybe I'm no slouch and I'm an international drug dealer. I can afford to pay $20 grand for a really good passport. But you don't need to pay $20,000. That's what's shocking to me is that it's a tenth of the price. You don't need to pay. That's a me just blows my mind. Yeah, so let's look at bank accounts, right? We talked about bank accounts.

Okay, so maybe you want to describe what you've seen here because it's very intuitive. I mean, you don't have to be an expert. It is. No, this is not something where I'm reading something that looks like Greek, right? I'm still on BlackBet. They're advertising their telegram channel where you can probably get tech support or whatever. And what's really funny is at the top it says, okay, banks with online access, Octo Session, that probably means some kind of security protocol.

And this is important to be eligible for a refund due to. an invalid account, you must provide a continuous video recording from the moment of purchase to the moment of logging into the account. Without this video, no refund will be issued. So basically, they're offering like a money-back guarantee if the thing doesn't work. You have a refund if it doesn't work. They're like, hey, look, we might be scamming for a living, but we're not scamming you. It's all about customer service. So why do they want a continuous video to make sure that you didn't give the account to someone else? To make sure that you purchase it, right? Then you're actually sort of trying to log in, right? And that it's actually you're doing

this. I see. Okay. And so if you if we scroll down right? Yeah, look, first result, Bank of America balance, sorry, $545. I don't know what extra is. It's something of an URL. I'm going to show you what an extra means. So you can just open it. Okay. And then maybe you want to. Yeah. And then it says Bank of America business, online access, octo browser session with cookies. And then when it was added, right? And then you can see today. And then you see the price. Yeah, the cart, 56 bucks. And then if you look at the extra, this is the link we just clicked on, and you see, you actually see the compromised bank account. Ah, okay. So that's just to prove that it exists. That approved that you actually have access. Okay. You can take control. And what does it mean octo session with cookies? What is that?

It's essentially the actual sort of remote desktop protocol that will allow it to connect to the bank account from the victim's computers. Oh, so they were going to give you a way to make it look like you're connected using a different bypass security. Ah, okay. Because otherwise it's going to try and text to the person. So It just makes it look like you're logging in from a verified browser. That's my understanding of this. I see. Geez, I can't even do that on my own browser with my own accounts. You don't need to, right?

Because it comes with the cookies, right? Oh, my gosh. And then there's Chase. I mean, as we scroll down, and these are all like 50 bucks. Well, I mean, it really depends on the balance. I mean, you see here. Oh, I see. Price of the accounts are higher.

Why is that higher? The balance on the account will be higher, right? I mean, it's 8,2004. So wait a minute. If I'm logging into a bank account that has an $8,000 balance, but I bought it for $500, Can I just drain these all day and make money? Or is that tricky? If you know what you're doing, then yes, right?

I mean, you need to be very careful about what you do. So you're not going to drain $8,000 immediately, right? I need to be very strategic about it. You need to look at the spending patterns on the account. And then you need to insert spending that will be similar to what you're seeing out there. And then, yeah, I mean, maybe not drain it completely, but use it for all kind of purposes, right? I don't think that you'll be able to drain it because that will raise a huge red flag. You're going to use it for all kind of purposes.

You will start paying your electric bill. You will start sending some money to, I don't know, friends, buy gift cards, Zell some money to people. But you're not going to drain all $8,000 immediately. But if I'm paying $500, if I remove $500 from it using Zell to a friend of mine who's a money mule, it's free. You will be able to do that. But again, there's a high probability that the bank will be flagging you if you do that immediately. You need to be strategic about this.

I don't have the patience for this. It really depends how much you invest. and how much you get, the price is very... What is look up info? Does that mean I can find information about a person? About the person, yeah. That individual, yeah. Can people find information about me using this?

Or anyone? Lookup info, it will give you information about the victim, the actual victim. If someone took over your bank account... Oh, I see, I see. And they will be able to look information about you. What is Jabber? Email and Jabber. Jabbar is like a text message application.

I see, okay. So you can contact them using... Over Jabber, yeah. I see, okay. And see, that's part of the reason what people... People don't like working with a dark net, and I like Telegram instead, because it's so damn slow. This is quite so. Telegram, you just, what, you DM the person whose channel you're in and say, like, hey, I'm interested in a pack of checks.

Yeah, and it's easy to scroll here. I want to show you. I mean, if we've done that, I'll show you telegram. I don't know if you've seen Telegram. Oh, yeah, I use Telegram. Not for this, obviously. But have you seen illicit commodities being offered for some? Oh, yeah.

Usually the stuff I've used Telegram for that would be considered, not illicit, really, but I was following Hamas in there. Okay, yeah, that's not illegal. That's not illegal. I'll show you some. They put their uncensored footage in there because I was like, I want to see if this is really is real. This is like October 8 or something. Yeah.

I did that. But I've seen people selling things in there that are like credit cards or identities, but it was amateur hour. I mean, they were idiots from another country that were not professional. So Telegram channels that we spend a lot of time and you can buy drugs, you can buy weapons. We see more and more of those channels where illicit commodities are being offered for sale being blocked. But still, there's a lot going on.

People add me to stuff like this without my permission sometimes, thinking that I'm interested in. I don't know if it's this that they're adding you. There's like investment scam ones that I've added to, but then there's other ones where as soon as I joined one that was for, it was for some sort of like SIM card thing that was illegal that I was trying to check out and investigate. I got auto added to, hey, you want to launder small amounts of money, you know, stupid stuff, like check, kiting checks. It was just amateur nonsense where the people could have to sell.

Those checks in the past? Not like what you're showing me right now. I'm looking at a check for $5,000 that somebody had stolen. Yeah. These are corporate checks. Yeah, and you see the dates on them. Yeah, $1,800. It's a construction company.

It's signed by somebody. I mean, this is a real. That's a real check. It's a real check. Yep. Iowa State Bank, construction LLC. I don't want to say the full name of the company because... Yeah, no, we don't want to say it.

But you see all these checks are being offered for sale, right? So you can just buy the actual check. Yeah. We'll be right back. after this because apparently fraud as a service has a better revenue model than podcasting, and I refuse to let criminals out-monetize me. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want.

Like, all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel, right in one spot, and turn real-time reporting into big-time operations. opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. Our newsletter, WebitWiser, is making quite a splash. A lot of people are angry and a lot of people are unhinged, but most of you are positive when you read this thing and you let me know by hitting reply. It's an under two-minute read just about every Wednesday. It'll affect your psychology or relationships

and your decisions, hopefully in a good way. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to check it out. It really is a great companion to the show, Jordan Harbinger.com, slash news. is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with David Maimon. So my dad, his tax check, his payment got stolen, is $30,000. They took the check and they deposited it into Navy Federal Credit Union. And so my thought was, are these the dumbest criminals in the world? Because the name, of course, is attached to the Navy Federal Credit Union bank account. Well, it depends, right? If it's a real person. It depends on so many things. First of all, it depends whether they maybe found a victim, a scam victim.

like a kid, and they told them, listen, help us here, deposit this check in your bank account, right? We're going to give you $200 just for that, send us the rest of the money. Yeah. If that's the case, the kid's evictors. You have two victims. We have your father, and then the kid, if they're using CPNs, and this is what we're looking at right now, right? I mean, we're looking at credit profile numbers.

So this is what we're seeing here. These are the bogus identities, that they have credit reports. You see the age of the fake people, see when they were added, and you see how much you can buy it. So if they use that, then they don't give a crap. I just figured Navy Federal, don't you have to be an armed forces member to use that? Or you can anybody... Well, I mean, you can fake everything, right? I mean, it's not that thing about it was...

He got his money back almost immediately. He was like, how come they haven't got my taxes? Oh, it got deposited. And they were like, oh, boom, fraud. The credit union... I mean, it was deposited into his account that wasn't the IRS. Like, how do you deposit an IRS check into a personal bank account? That one's on the credit union.

Come on, guys. Again, I can't really comment on the credit union. I can tell you that this is very... common and we're seeing this all over the pace. I mean, what we're looking at right now is a compromised account? Yeah, if this is key bank, some kind of free account, six grand in there, says FDIC insured, available balances of yesterday, $6,100. And they actually showed you... Oh, it looks like on May 11th, the person deposited that in there. So it seems something very similar to what we've just talked about, right? It seems like someone has used this bank account to deposit this check, right? And now they're

bragging about the fact that they have the $6,000 and then it will run away with it. So again, this is very popular on Telegram. That's a nice fat check there, 14,000. Yeah, and you see the date, right? I mean, it's all. Person's handwriting needs work, yeah. But they're renovating their basement and wine cellar. Come on, Stephen.

We see all that, right? I mean, and this is offered for sale, right? So you can just buy that check. Yeah, we can buy a check right now. We're not going to do that, obviously. No, sir. Not from my kitchen. Yeah, right.

I really want to know if I can get a diplomatic passport and not just a regular passport. Because that's much harder to get. And also, that's the kind of thing where you get pulled over in, I don't know, Panama and you pull out your diplomatic passport and they just let you go without a bribe because they don't want any trouble. Once you're on the right market, you can get whatever you want, right? This is really interesting. I mean, this is telegram. So this channel is a channel that helped recruit people to the scam compounds in Cambodia.

I see this. Yeah, I was going to ask you about this. Okay, yeah, I've seen similar. So this is global recruitment, high paying job. It looks like that was what the Philippines flag up there. Oh, Laos, Thailand, hiring. Oh, hiring Filipinos. Yeah. Okay, so it is. Philippines. Customers service staff, hours, noon to midnight, four days off per month, half day, part-time on Saturday, Sunday, salary options, a thousand plus 500 U.S.D, whatever that means. And then you have all these people wanting to get the job.

So she's interviewing for this position, maybe? So she's from Pakistan and she thinks she's interviewing for what now? I'm still confused about. What do these women think they're applying for? I think they're, I don't want to say that they know they're applying for the scam compound. The jobs that they're advertising are modeling, right? That other one was customer service. This is a modeling gig. Yeah, they're all modeling gig. I mean, you just need to sit to a computer and talk to people.

That's the way they sell. And that's essentially all the scam compounds are doing, right? I see. Anyone HR agent who can arrange the above required? Because this is Chinese global recruitment high paying jobs. That immediately is scary. Yeah. Yeah.

This is Dubai support services. Yeah. So you see the location, Cambodia. you see the salaries. Hiring Indonesian male and female in Cambodia. Salary, work location, interest in a candidate. So that just screams,

we're going to lock you in a scam compound for the next three years. Maybe to us, right? Because we know what this is. These people just see a job. So again, bank accounts, more bank accounts for sale. And this one,

I mean, you see the balance. You see the octo transfer, as we said earlier. Logging access. You get the gender. You get the state where they leave, date of birth.

No phone. Yeah. No phone number. And then you can even get a security question, which is really cool. That's great. Right? I suppose it's great if you're in the market. Yeah, sure.

Okay. So any sort of banks, any sort of checks. And then there's a lid depot where you can get fake license plates and everything like that. There you go. I mean, there's some driver licenses for sale if you want. Oh, yeah. And let's see what they do here. Oh, that's showing that you can scan it.

Wait, you can scan it? That's what they say. Many of the driver licenses, yeah. But it doesn't show up in the computer as the actual... I don't know what they show. I've seen a lot of... images and all the videos of these guys here. There's Donald Trump on a driver's on Missouri driver's license.

Yeah. All of those driver licenses will scan. A lot of the passports will scan. I've seen a lot of the passports which are being scanned and all the information of the individual on the computer on the passport pops up on the computer. So the biometric idea or whatever it's called works, the scan works, and it contains the data. But it won't necessarily check out if they use a database to reconcile.

Yeah. It's scan and it will show up the names. And that's old already. I mean, we're talking about 2003. We've seen those videos, right? Wow. Yeah. So we've seen the driver licenses.

So these are the drop bank accounts we're talking about. So the draw bank accounts, I'm taking someone else's identity or a bogus identity. I go to the bank. I open the bank account. And then now I have a drop account, like a mule account, to sell. And so if you see what, you know, the picture right now is a smartphone with a zero balance on the bank account that is open on it. And then a credit card or debit card.

A debit card, yeah. Plastic card. And essentially, the criminals are selling that. for you to use in your fraudulent operation. So you have a stolen check and you want to deposit a stolen check. You have an account to deposit in it. I see. That's what they're selling here.

And of course, you're getting the identity, you're getting sometimes even the phone they use to open the bank account with. That's what you're seeing on the screen right now. I see. So I just buy a bunch of bank accounts, a bunch of cards to go along with it. I buy a bunch of stolen checks. I deposit stolen checks in several of the accounts. I wait for a few of them to clear.

I withdraw that money and I just vanish. It's a very simplistic way to do it. I mean, you have to sit on this bank. accounts a little bit because you need to know when the bank will have less scrutiny on those bank accounts. You will wait on them and then you will buy the checks, deposit and disappear. So maybe you use it for a few weeks or a few months to like, I don't know, buy packs of gum and ride the subway? So this guy, yeah, exactly, 100%.

Here they're showing you the identity of the person that they use to open the bank account. David Smile. Yeah. And we see it on the bank account website. Oh, I see. That's why they show the website. Yeah, just to sell like, hey, this is real. So more driver licenses.

Yeah. These are cloned. Oh, yeah. So it looks real. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Oh, yeah. This is a passport, right?

I mean, or driver license, what is it? Real ID kind of identification document. Yeah. Oh, it's New York State. New York driver's license. Oh, see, I see. There's no photo on it. That's just the blank.

That's right. And so it just shows you how it looks at ID. But you see, it's the right piece of material. Yeah. You just need to print on it. That's got to be Chinese because who's making something that advanced here. That's an industrial project to make those kinds of blanks. So the detection gap on this, how far in advance are fraudsters?

Are they 12 months ahead of defenses, six months ahead of defenses, five years ahead of defenses? Very difficult to say. I mean, I think that usually there are 10 steps ahead of us. The industry is constantly trying to keep up with these guys. The problem is that these guys are smart, and then they find vulnerabilities in a new technology and keep going. So very difficult for me to quantify the exact time gap. Some people say 18 months, other people say two years, other expert believes.

we're a year. But it really depends on the actor. If you're talking to a nation state, for example, who's trying to defraud us, then the gap is huge there, right? But if you're looking at someone from New Jersey right now selling titles, I don't know, like whether we can't really keep up with that gap quite quickly. Do you know Christo Grosiev? Does that name Ring a Bell?

No. From Bellingcat. So basically he uncovered this Russian spy ring because he looked at the passports that they had and he ran the numbers and they were all part of the same series. So Russia was basically creating these fake. passports, but they all had consecutive numbers, something along those lines. And I just thought, wow, what a move. But at the end of the day, they were making real identities for these people, but they just screwed up the numbering and made it really obvious. This will be... They won't do that

again. The odd bowl, exactly. So Frosters are really, really sophisticated at this point in the nation state, who are essentially using the same ecosystem I'm showing you right now. You have all those services being offered out there. You don't need to reinvent the wheels of speaking. Look, banks use static checks, fragmented data, not just banks, any institutions. And fraudsters, obviously, they're using coordinated networks and reused infrastructure. And the systems are just going to detect the fraud after the damage is done. There are a lot of solutions out there. We just need to make sure that we keep up with the fraudsters because they're constantly advancing.

They're using AI. They're using machine learning. They know what they're doing. And we need to make sure that we are keeping up with them. Is it a tech problem or an incentives problem for these institutions to clamp down on this stuff? Again, I mean, you're talking to humans, right? And the fraudsters really know what they're doing. in the tech, it takes time to come up with better technology quite quickly. It's just a huge challenge.

We're talking about bureaucracy and in those organizations as well. It takes time to deploy and implement. The criminals are very fast and they're agile. And once you disrupt them, they will be able to come up at you from a different angle. It's a very difficult game to play. It is, yeah. Something that's important to note is it's not just grandma getting scammed and targeted now, right? Because young people can participate unknowingly because of social engineering. But you mentioned before if they found a victim at Navy Federal and they said, hey man, deposit this check and we'll give you $200. You hear about this online. Like a kid thinks he's talking to a girl. He sends her a nude. She turns out to be a dude who goes, hey, look, I'm going to expose these if you don't

take this check and deposit it in your bank account. That's all I want. I'll go away after that. And the kid freaks out and goes, fine. All I got to do is deposit a check into the bank and then Zellu 5,000 bucks. Fine. Make it stop. So then they catch that kid and then he just tells what happen because he's going to go to jail for check fraud and then says, yeah, sorry, mom, police, I got this guy who did this thing to me. And then what are you going to do? The poor kids are victim too. And then the bank just eats that 30K. Again, the fraudsters are very sophisticated. I mean, I can tell you, one of the things that we're seeing right now going back to an online roman scam and the sort of new trend in online romance scam. And folks are essentially hooking up

with people, like older folks online, they look for specific profile of individuals. So they will look for individual credit score of 750 and above. They will look for people who own homes with at least $50,000 to a million dollars in equity. Then they will team up with them. They will hook up with them on some of the dating apps, Facebook, Twitter, whatever. They will build a relationship with them. They will coerce them to open bank accounts using their own name. And then they will coerce them to take home equity lines loans and then funnel the money to those accounts. This is where we at right now. And so when you're talking about the victims, the journey there is just so sad. I mean, it will be very patient. They know exactly what they're doing. The ammo is very clear.

They look for a specific victim to work. And at the end of the day, those individuals will be losing a lot of money. So you have the kids, you have the older folks. Everybody is susceptible to this people. Yeah. Yeah. So this is shifting from hackers stealing something by cracking your password to people being manipulating and giving them a bunch of the money. What do you think is the most likely way, somebody listening gets scammed in the next 12 months, romance scam, some kind of identity fraud, what do you think? I think identity theft. Yeah. I think that's the major thing that we're experiencing in our country. All our identities are out there. We hear about data breaches every day and the criminals have access to it. Now with agentic AI, they can bring it to the next

level, so of speaking, because you have all these identities, all you have to do is just feed the identity in an agentic AI tool. And then the tool will allow it to simply create those bank accounts, create those social media accounts and build the facade around them quite easily without you even doing anything. So that's what we're going to be looking at. That is insane. So what are three things people do each day that you think make them easy targets? Is there any sort of specific actions that people are taking or not taking that make them low-hanging fruit? We're all out there, right? I mean, on our smartphone, on our iPads, we're looking to connect, we're looking to consume things. We're reading things that we're not really sure about, but then

we're taking actions on them. I think one of the important thing people should do is when they consume all the material when they get the email, when they read something on the internet, they should pause a little bit, right? Think about what is that you read. Try to make sense out of it and only then take an action. Our attention span is so short at this point and we just want to click on things. That is one of the things that makes us extremely vulnerable to all these types of fraud that just discussed. What's a behavior change maybe that can dramatically lower your risk? Slow down, man. Slow down. I'm not good at that. We need to slow down and think about things that we're getting over our mail. Does it make sense for us to click on this?

Does it make sense for us? Just because you got a postcard. Don't go to the website on the postcard. Yeah. I mean, everything, don't trust. In cybersecurity, it is a concept of zero trust. I think we should all try and adopt it in the context of fraud because fraudsters are out there and they're trying to drain our wallets. They're doing a very good job, unfortunately, and during the last five years, we need to slow down, right, and think about what is that we get. Don't click on stuff. Don't send stuff. Don't disclose your information. Be more aware of, what's going on out there and protect your identity. You mentioned the agentic AI.

Is this essentially a bot that can, what, open bank accounts for you? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's a very sophisticated box. Even nowadays, we can use agentic AI to do all kinds of things for you. You can have the agentic AI call the bank and start negotiating your rates with them. You can have your agent do everything for you. In the context of my work as a professor and my students, we're able to show that you can

program those agentic AI to create accounts, to create bank accounts, to create retailer accounts fairly quickly. You can pace the time and make sure that it's not like a bot which will just bombard the bank or the retailer with requests. I mean, she can pace it. You can just feed it with identities. If you're thinking about bogus identities, then you don't even need to feed any identity. You just tell the tool to create it. And then build a facade around it. We talked about it. When you have a synthetic identity, you want to make sure that the synthetic identity has some public record around it. So you want to have a Best Buy account. You want to have an Auto Depot account. You want to make sure that you have a treadline associated with that. It takes time to do that. That's essentially

what you buy when you buy the identities online. The tool will be able to do that for you quite quickly and get it to the next level. So fascinating stuff. It's not that we're getting hacked. It's that we're getting played, really. Whether you know it or not, right? You're already out there. Everything is out there for them to grab and work with. So is there a point. where verifying identity online just stops working? I mean, if you've got like a fake face and a fake voice and a fake backstop, how do you verify that somebody's real online? That's a great question. I'm a sociologist in training. My pages in sociology. And I remember at the time, we're talking about Gemenshaft and Gazelshaft, community and society. When we were a community, we all knew each other.

And so when you went to the bank to try to get a loan or open a bank account, the banker knew who you were, right? I mean, so if you asked for a million dollars, right? Yeah, you totally papered my house in 97. I'm not giving to a million. Only half a million. So they knew who you were. But now we're society. I mean, we can't know everyone, right? But we need to find a way to touch each other as many times as possible in order to verify our identities. So solutions out there should have that in mind. You need to have solution that take into consideration where you were. When did you apply to a specific bank account with which telephone number, from which address, from which IP address have you tried to apply? you know, take into consideration all these historical signals before you actually upload all the driver licenses and the selfies and the liveness test, just to take a look at whether the information you're using

in order to try and onboard is someone that we've seen in the past. If it's not, if someone is using your identity from a telephone number we've never seen, it'll be like a huge red flag. So those solutions need to take into consideration those historical signals, and that's, in my mind, the way to verify focus identities nowadays. All right, so what's something that you personally

do that most people would find paranoid, but you think it's justified. I don't use the mail anymore. At all, like the postal mail. Only UPS every now and then, and only if I need to ship things for some of the operations. Okay. But I don't use the mail anymore. You just don't send anything in the mail. I don't send checks to pay my bills, right?

And that is because I'm really paranoid about the mail theft. I mean, looking at those stacks of checks, I will never use a check again. That's ridiculous. Like, there were thousands and thousands of checks in that one stack, that one image had where the guy just said, hey, I'm selling checks. 100%. I check my bank account quite often because of what I just showed you. Yeah, me too. I mean, how does that guy even steal that many checks?

He has to work in a place where they collect them, or is he just running around Manhattan opening mailboxes? It depends, right? Could be an insider having access to the behind the scenes and then getting all our envelopes, or they rob the mail carrier for the arrow key, which opens hundreds of mailboxes across the city, and then simply go at night. with a car and simply collect the mail. And that's how you're going to get all these checks.

Yeah, that's just brazen as hell. Man, if someone ignores everything else that we have just said, what is the one thing that you would like them to remember? I think that folks need to be aware of the fact that their identities are out there and they need to have protection. That's the most important thing. What kind of protection can we have, though? So folks needs to have an identity to have a protection plan on their identities.

If someone is using your identity, there are companies out there which will allow it to Like life lock kind of like? Like life lock. Exactly, yeah. So make sure you have that. I think it's important for you to freeze your credit. Yeah. That essentially means that folks will not be able to take new loans under your name. It doesn't mean that it will not be able to open new bank accounts. So it's important for you to also go to websites, early warning or check system and ask for an annual report of all your bank accounts you have under your name just to see that you identify everything. These are the major thing that I think folks need to be aware and be vigilant because, again, our identities are out there and the criminals are using our identities to engage in all kinds of, fraud, we need to make sure that we get the signals. David, my mom, thank you so much.

Really interesting slash terrifying episode. Thank you so much for having me. And I really appreciate you doing the homework. Oh, yeah, no, that's kind of how this show goes. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to check out, here's a trailer of our interview with Jack Barski,

former KGB spy, who posed as an American in a truer-than-life version of a Hollywood movie. This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union, secretly becoming a real American. We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture. I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport control, so a young person that really feels good because I never liked rules. How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? to call you home. Can you take us through that?

They called me back as an emergency departure. They've done this in the past. We've called back an agent, and as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are jailed or even executed. I was stalling the Soviets, and then one day they sent one of their resident agents, and he said to me, you've got to come home or else you're dead. It was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell them that I'm not returning.

I will not betray any secrets, and please give the money on my account to my German family. Wow. Tell us how you got caught, because the story is just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past. I was stopped on the other side of a toll gate. It was a state trooper. Just like to check your license and registration. And could you step out of the car? I step out of the car.

I still am not having a clue what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, somebody approaching me from the back. The fellow introduced himself. Joe Riley FBI, and he showed me this badge, we would like to talk with you. The first question I asked, am I under arrest? And the answer was no. Then I said, what took you so long? For more from Jack Barski, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI and what happened

after that, check out episode 285 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Big thank you to Dr. David Maimon for taking us inside a fraud economy that is way more organized, scalable, and professionally disgusting than much. most people realize. And by the way, y'all, I did actually get my fake passport and, wow, does this thing look real? I'd post a photo, but it's so realistic. That just seems like a bad idea. I kind of feel the need to say that I may or may not be setting something fictional right now, and I'm not in possession of a fake U.S. passport. Anyway, it's complete with an AI video of me doing identity checks, moving my head and face around. This is all created based on photos of me,

which means it can be made for anybody. The big takeaway here, You're probably not getting hacked by some genius super villain in a hoodie. You're getting played by systems designed to weaponize urgency, trust, fear, greed, loneliness, convenience, basically the entire human operating system. And the bad guys don't need to be brilliant anymore, really at all. AI has lowered the bar. The dark web sells everything they need. Fake IDs, fake faces, fake voices, synthetic identities, fake businesses.

Really, the whole criminal buffet is now self-serve. So protect your identity. Freeze your credit. freeze your kids credit, be suspicious of urgency, don't trust random links. Well, that's the 90s called. They want their tips back. Verify through another channel. And remember, if somebody online is making you panic, rush, hide something, send money, or just confirm this one little code, you are not in a conversation, you are on the menu. All things, Dr. David Maimon on the website and the show notes, advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support

the show on the deals page, Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six-minute networking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show has created an association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Tata Sadalowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. And it's occurred to me that a lot of them are remote and many of them I've never met. And now I'm wondering if they're even real. We'll find out someday. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest

compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in the dark web, fraud, identity theft, or just cybercrime in general, definitely share this episode with him. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Everything Everywhere Daily. You've heard the phrase, learn something new every day. Sounds nice, but do you actively do it? That's where Everything Everywhere Daily comes in. This podcast makes it effortless just 10 minutes a day. You'll walk away with a fascinating fact, a slice of history, a science gem. It's no wonder the show has climbed up to the top as the number one history

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