The Scam

A Scam: Technical Vulnerabilities vs. Human Trust in the FBI’s 2024 IC3 Report

Host Michael Slider introduces the Senior Fraud Report episode “A Scam,” using two AI voices, Tammy and Bill, to debate whether 2024 cybercrime is mainly a technical infrastructure problem or a psychological confidence-scam problem, based on the FBI IC3’s newly released 2024 report. The IC3 logged 859,532 complaints and a record $16.6B in losses (up 33%), with Americans 60+ losing $4.8B; investment fraud totaled $6.57B, tech support scams $1.46B, and cryptocurrency-related losses $9.3B. Tammy highlights systemic threats like BEC ($2.77B), ransomware variants, botnets, SIM swapping, and law-enforcement technical wins including the Recovery Asset Team’s 66% success rate freezing $469.1M and LockBit disruption saving over $800M. Bill argues deception dominates (83% of losses, $13.7B), citing Operation Level Up (4,323 victims notified; 76% unaware; 42 suicide interventions), call-center raids (215 arrests, +700%), and the analog gold courier scam ($219M). The episode stresses reporting to ic3.gov, notes California and Texas lead losses (California $2.5B+), and previews a romance scam episode.

00:00 Show Intro Setup
01:39 Vault Heist Metaphor
03:33 IC3 Report Shock
06:04 Tech Threat Case
08:49 Human Exploitation Case
11:07 Human Toll Level Up
12:40 Underreported Ransomware
14:17 Crypto Tool Or Lure
18:13 Fighting Back Tactics
19:57 Call Centers Gold Couriers
24:39 Common Ground Reporting
27:17 Host Wrap Next Week

Creators and Guests

Host

Michael Slider

Retired LAPD detective (30 years) and licensed PI Michael Slider exposes the scams targeting seniors — and shows you how to fight back.

Producer

Michael Slider

Retired LAPD detective (30 years) and licensed PI Michael Slider exposes the scams targeting seniors — and shows you how to fight back.

What is The Senior Fraud Report?

The Senior Fraud Report with Host Michael Slider (Ret. LAPD Detective) helps seniors and their families fight back against the scams that drain victims of billions—breaking down how they work and how to stay protected.

The Scam
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[00:00:00] Tammy: Welcome to the debate. Now, you know, when we conceptualize a massive financial heist, um, our minds usually default to a highly complex technical operation.

[00:00:11] Bill: Right, like a Hollywood movie.

[00:00:13] Tammy: Exactly. We picture a crew of specialists studying architectural blueprints, uh, neutralizing seismic sensors, deploying thermal lances to cut through reinforced steel vaults, you know, bypassing layers of biometric security.

[00:00:28] Mm-hmm. It's fundamentally an engineering problem. You are matching wits against the physical and digital architecture of the bank.

[00:00:36] Bill: It's the classic battle of systems. I mean, the institution builds a 10-ton impenetrable door with a multi-layered cryptographic lock, and the attackers, well, they have to figure out how to isolate the circuits or exploit a flaw in the code to get it open.

[00:00:51] Tammy: Right. But imagine if instead of spending months drilling through the vault floor, the robbers just walked right through the [00:01:00] front doors in broad daylight. Just right through the lobby. Just walked in. Imagine they sat down in the lobby, struck up a deeply engaging conversation with the bank manager, gained their absolute trust over a few weeks, and simply asked the manager to open the vault and hand over the cash.

[00:01:18] Wow. And what if the manager did it willingly, entirely convinced they were executing a sound, highly profitable investment strategy?

[00:01:26] Bill: Which happens, yeah.

[00:01:28] Tammy: Suddenly, the thickness of the vault doors, the complexity of the encryption, the security cameras, none of it matters. The vulnerability isn't in the steel or the software.

[00:01:38] The vulnerability is the human being holding the keys.

[00:01:41] Bill: Which forces us to entirely redefine what a security breach actually looks like in the modern era, you know? If the system worked exactly as designed, but the user was manipulated into subverting it, can we even call that a technical failure?

[00:01:55] Tammy: And that is the exact tension at the heart of the newly released [00:02:00] 2024 Federal Bureau of Investigation Internet Crime Complaint Center annual report.

[00:02:05] Bill: The IC3.

[00:02:07] Tammy: Right, the IC3. And the top line figures in this year's report are frankly staggering. In 2024 alone, the IC3 received eight hundred and fifty-nine thousand five hundred and thirty-two complaints. That's incredible. It translates into a record-breaking sixteen point six billion dollars in total losses.

[00:02:27] That is a thirty-three percent increase from just last year.

[00:02:30] Bill: A thirty-three percent jump? Yeah.

[00:02:32] Tammy: And to give our listeners some historical context here, this marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the IC3. When the center first opened its doors, they were fielding roughly two thousand complaints a month. For the past five years, they have averaged more than two thousand complaints every single day.

[00:02:52] Bill: Every single day. I mean, the scale is almost dizzying. We're, we are talking about an [00:03:00] industrialized global extraction of wealth.

[00:03:02] Tammy: We really are. And combing through this exhaustive data, it raises a profound intellectual disagreement about the fundamental nature of the threat we are currently facing. We have to ask the central question: Is the modern cybercrime epidemic fundamentally a crisis of technical and systemic vulnerability?

[00:03:22] You know, a landscape where sophisticated criminal syndicates target our physical infrastructure, corporate networks, and software architecture.

[00:03:29] Bill: Or has it evolved into overwhelmingly a crisis of psychological exploitation, industrialized confidence scams that deliberately bypass technical firewalls to directly hack human psychology?

[00:03:44] Tammy: Exactly. And today, I will argue that cybercrime remains primarily a systemic, infrastructural, and technical threat. I think the true center of gravity and the greatest risk to our society lies in corporate compromises and critical [00:04:00] infrastructure attacks.

[00:04:01] Bill: And I will argue that the twenty twenty-four data reveals a permanent paradigm shift.

[00:04:06] Cybercrime has matured into predominantly a psychological and demographic epidemic. The most devastating global syndicates have realized a terrifying truth. It is infinitely more profitable and far less resource intensive to hack human vulnerability than it is to brute force a technical network.

[00:04:26] Tammy: Well, let me lay out the foundation of my perspective here.

[00:04:30] When we analyze the IC3 data, the numbers that represent the true foundational threat to our economy are found in the exploitation of technical systems and business infrastructure. Take business email compromise, or BEC.

[00:04:46] Bill: Okay.

[00:04:47] Tammy: Now, if you're listening to this, you might be thinking, "Oh, I know how to spot a fake Nigerian prince email.

[00:04:53] This doesn't apply to me." But that is not what modern BEC is. No,

[00:04:57] Bill: not at all.

[00:04:58] Tammy: These are highly [00:05:00] sophisticated, stealthy intrusions into corporate networks. Attackers will compromise an executive's email account and then quietly sit in the network for months. Just watching? Just watching. They observe the invoice cadences, they study the communication style of the CFO, and then right when a five million dollar vendor payment is due, they alter the routing numbers inside the legitimate threat.

[00:05:24] That technical manipulation accounted for two point seven seven billion dollars in losses this year.

[00:05:31] Bill: But, I mean, even in those BEC cases, the initial point of entry is almost always a human making an error, right? Someone clicking a phishing link or reusing a password across platforms.

[00:05:41] Tammy: Sure, I don't deny that humans interact with the systems, but the execution of the crime relies entirely on exploiting network architecture.

[00:05:49] Furthermore, we are seeing unprecedented technical threats to critical infrastructure, with four thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight complaints filed by vital sectors like energy, water, and [00:06:00] healthcare. Right. The IC3 recognized sixty-seven entirely new ransomware variants in twenty twenty-four alone.

[00:06:08] These are highly complex malicious codes deployed by groups like Akira and LockBit. And even when individuals are targeted, the mechanisms are technical. How so? Well, consider the WarZone RAT malware. It's a remote access Trojan that allowed criminals to secretly bypass operating system defenses to browse a victim's file system, record their keystrokes, and literally watch them through their own webcams.

[00:06:37] Bill: Yeah, that's terrifying.

[00:06:39] Tammy: It is. Or consider SIM swapping, where a hacker manipulates backend telecom systems to reroute your two-factor authentication text to their own device, or the sprawling international botnets, which are networks of millions of hijacked everyday devices working in unison to launch attacks.

[00:06:58] Mm-hmm. These are [00:07:00] highly sophisticated technical threats. You don't defeat a botnet with psychological counseling. You defeat it with systemic network hardening. The root cause is software vulnerability

[00:07:11] Bill: I come at it from a different way. The data clearly shows that criminals are no longer prioritizing hacking networks because, well, they don't have to.

[00:07:20] If we look at the stark financial realities of the 2024 report, the absolute dominance of psychological crimes speaks for itself. In raw volume, maybe. In sheer financial loss too. The losses from investment fraud reached a staggering $6.57 billion. That is more than double the losses of the business email compromises you just highlighted.

[00:07:40] That's true. Furthermore, when you look at the demographic breakdown, the 60-plus age group suffered $4.8 billion in losses alone. They aren't exploiting zero-day software vulnerabilities to steal that money. They are exploiting isolation.

[00:07:54] Tammy: Those numbers represent a very specific and tragic demographic reality, certainly, [00:08:00] but volume of complaints doesn't necessarily equate to structural danger.

[00:08:04] Bill: It's not just a demographic reality, though. It represents a complete shift in methodology. The most destructive crimes operating right now, like cryptocurrency pig butchering, tech support scams, which cost victims $1.46 billion, and massive call center fraud operations, they rely almost entirely on confidence, fear, and manipulation.

[00:08:23] But they use technology to do it. Yes, but the criminal doesn't need to break your encryption. They don't need to deploy a complex remote access Trojan. They just need to manufacture a scenario that makes you feel terrified that your bank account is frozen or greedy for a fake investment return or desperately lonely.

[00:08:39] When the primary attack vector is human emotion, technical firewalls, biometric locks, and network hardening are completely irrelevant.

[00:08:45] Tammy: I'll grant you that the human toll is devastating, but you're missing the blast radius of these crimes. Interpreting the true scale of the damage requires us to look beyond just the raw dollar amounts reported by [00:09:00] individuals.

[00:09:00] Okay, but how? Well, you emphasize the $6.57 billion in investment fraud, but systemic hacks have a societal footprint that a single defrauded individual simply does not.

[00:09:12] Bill: I'm not sure how you can diminish the scale when cyber-enabled fraud constitutes almost 83% of all losses reported to the IC3 in 2024.

[00:09:22] That is $13.7 billion extracted almost entirely through deception. I'm not diminishing it. But to your point about the blast radius, let's talk about the absolute human toll, which goes far beyond a financial metric. The IC3 report highlights a major initiative called Operation Level Up, which targeted cryptocurrency investment fraud.

[00:09:44] Tammy: Right, I read that section.

[00:09:45] Bill: In the course of that operation, they recorded a statistic that is profoundly heartbreaking. Forty-two victims of crypto investment fraud had to be urgently referred to an FBI victim specialist specifically for suicide intervention.

[00:09:58] Tammy: Yeah, that [00:10:00] is undeniably a profound tragedy.

[00:10:03] The psychological devastation there is absolute.

[00:10:06] Bill: It is, and it demonstrates a psychological blast radius that systemic corporate hacks do not reach. When a corporation is hit by business email compromise, it is certainly disruptive, but ultimately it becomes a line item on a quarterly earnings report.

[00:10:19] Tammy: That's a bit reductive.

[00:10:21] Bill: The corporation absorbs the blow, cyber insurance might cover the gap, and the entity survives. When an elderly individual is meticulously drained of their entire life savings, money they need to survive their final years, through a fabricated months-long online relationship, it completely destroys their life.

[00:10:41] It erases their dignity and their will to live. You cannot patch that kind of vulnerability with a software update.

[00:10:48] Tammy: I hear the moral weight of what you are saying, and I do not dismiss that devastation for a second. But I am not convinced by that line of reasoning when we are evaluating the foundational threat to our [00:11:00] society as a whole.

[00:11:01] Why not? Because you are looking at the immediate visible wreckage but ignoring the systemic underreporting of infrastructure attacks. If we rely purely on the IC3's raw numbers, we get a skewed picture of reality. For instance, the report lists ransomware losses at just twelve point four million dollars.

[00:11:21] Which

[00:11:22] Bill: seems almost absurdly low given the massive corporate breaches we see in the headlines every single week.

[00:11:28] Tammy: Precisely. It is artificially vastly low. The IC3 explicitly notes that this twelve point four million figure only represents the direct ransom payments reported to them. It does not include the estimates of lost business, lost time, unearned wages, or the massive multi-million dollar costs of third-party incident response and radiation.

[00:11:50] Bill: Okay, fair point.

[00:11:51] Tammy: Corporate entities often operate in a state of silence. They fear shareholder panic, they fear reputational damage, and they fear class action lawsuits, so they do [00:12:00] not report the true loss amount to the FBI directly through the IC3 portal. But think about the actual consequences.

[00:12:06] Bill: What kind of consequences?

[00:12:08] Tammy: Well, when a ransomware variant like RansomHub or Fog infiltrates a municipal water treatment facility or locks down a major hospital's patient database, it poses an existential risk. If a hospital's diagnostic network goes offline, surgeries are canceled, ambulances are diverted, and lives are at immediate physical risk.

[00:12:31] Bill: Right.

[00:12:32] Tammy: That is a technical failure with catastrophic societal implications that transcends the tragedy of individual fraud.

[00:12:39] Bill: I acknowledge the severity of taking a hospital offline, but isn't the real proof of this psychological shift found in the very tool you consider their greatest technical weapon?

[00:12:48] I'm talking about cryptocurrency.

[00:12:50] Tammy: The financial engine that allows this entire global ecosystem to function.

[00:12:54] Bill: Exactly. But how are we actually defining its role here? Do you see it primarily as a technical [00:13:00] tool or a psychological catalyst?

[00:13:01] Tammy: It is unequivocally a technical tool. I mean, the 2024 report shows nine point three billion dollars in losses tied specifically to cryptocurrency descriptors.

[00:13:13] Right. The only reason global cybercrime has been able to scale to sixteen point six billion dollars is because crypto provides a systemic technical laundering mechanism. It enables syndicates to completely evade the traditional regulated financial system. But- Let me just finish this point. Before blockchain technology, moving millions of illicit dollars across international borders was incredibly arduous.

[00:13:42] Criminals had to rely on complex networks of shell companies, smurfing operations, and corrupt bankers to avoid triggering anti-money laundering protocols. Now, with a decentralized ledger and a digital wallet, they can move massive funds across the globe in [00:14:00] seconds, completely anonymously.

[00:14:02] Bill: Yes, but-

[00:14:03] Tammy: Without this technical obfuscation, these global scams would collapse under the weight of financial regulation.

[00:14:11] The technology itself is the enabler.

[00:14:14] Bill: I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that. Let me tell you why. You are looking at cryptocurrency strictly as a back end laundering mechanism. But if you look at the actual mechanics of these scams in 2024, cryptocurrency is primarily functioning as the front end psychological lure.

[00:14:30] Tammy: What do you mean? It's just the medium of exchange.

[00:14:32] Bill: No, it is the mystique of the technology that makes it weaponized In that same FBI initiative, Operation Level Up, they notified 4,323 victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud. Do you know what the most revealing statistic from that operation was? What was it?

[00:14:47] 76% of those victims were completely unaware they were even being scammed when the FBI contacted them.

[00:14:53] Tammy: Well, sure, because the scammers hadn't executed the final rug pull yet. The victims still thought they were generating legitimate [00:15:00] returns.

[00:15:00] Bill: Exactly. And why did they believe that? Because the scammers build these incredibly elaborate fictitious web dashboards that show the victim's fake crypto portfolio growing by 20 or 30% a week.

[00:15:14] Right. The victims, generally speaking, do not understand how blockchain actually works, but they watch the news. They hear stories of people getting rich overnight from digital coins. The weapon here wasn't the underlying cryptography of the blockchain. The weapon was the illusion of exclusivity and guaranteed wealth.

[00:15:33] They sell a feeling. Exactly. The criminal uses the sheer complexity of cryptocurrency as a smokescreen to blind the victim. They weaponize FOMO, the fear of missing out. The victim thinks they are finally on the inside of a complex financial revolution, when in reality, they are just handing cash to a con artist.

[00:15:53] It is a psychological play from start to finish.

[00:15:56] Tammy: That's a compelling framing, but I have to push back on the causality there. [00:16:00] The psychological lure only succeeds because the technical infrastructure exists to legitimize it and process it.

[00:16:07] Bill: How so?

[00:16:08] Tammy: If the syndicates didn't have access to sophisticated web development tools to build those convincing dashboards, and more importantly, if they didn't have the actual decentralized networks to ultimately receive, mix, and launder the real funds, the psychological manipulation would hit a dead end.

[00:16:24] Bill: Okay,

[00:16:25] Tammy: but- You can convince someone to give you their money, sure, but if the banking system flags and blocks the transfer, the crime fails And this brings us to a critical juncture. How is law enforcement actually succeeding against this? Right. When we look at the efficacy of interventions in the report, we see that dismantling the technical kill chain is our most effective weapon.

[00:16:49] Bill: You're referring to the IC3 Recovery Asset Team, the RAT.

[00:16:53] Tammy: Yes, exactly. The Recovery Asset Team and their deployment of the financial fraud kill chain. Think of the global [00:17:00] banking system as a digital vascular system. The RAT's job is to apply a tourniquet before the poison reaches the heart. Right. In 2024, they had a 66% success rate, successfully freezing $469.1 million in domestic fraudulent transactions.

[00:17:19] They simply cut the wires. When you intercept a fraudulent ACH payment or a wire transfer before it clears into an adversary's account, you defeat the crime technically.

[00:17:30] Bill: That's a strong track record.

[00:17:31] Tammy: And furthermore, look at the FBI's operations against LockBit, one of the world's most aggressive ransomware variants.

[00:17:38] The FBI didn't just track down the perpetrators, they executed a purely technical victory. They hacked the hackers, acquired thousands of decryption keys, and provided them directly to the victims.

[00:17:49] Bill: Which the report explicitly notes saved those entities from paying over $800 million in combined ransom.

[00:17:56] Precisely.

[00:17:57] Tammy: That is $800 million saved [00:18:00] through technical superiority. We win this conflict by cutting the technical wires, disrupting the botnets, and seizing the digital infrastructure, just like when authorities seized the operational domains for the Warzone RAT malware in Massachusetts. When you break their architecture, you neutralize their ability to operate at scale.

[00:18:19] Bill: Well, that all sounds incredibly effective until you realize what actually happens when you cut those technical wires. You're assuming the attackers just give up when you patch a vulnerability or freeze a bank transfer.

[00:18:29] Tammy: They pivot.

[00:18:30] Bill: They adapt, and the twenty twenty four data proves that they adapt by leaning even heavier into the human element.

[00:18:36] You champion the dismantling of technical infrastructure, but some of the most impactful victories in this report came from disrupting human infrastructure. You're talking about the coordinated raids on the international call centers. Exactly. The report details an unprecedented collaboration between the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Central Bureau of Investigation in India.

[00:18:57] They realized they couldn't just play Whac-A-Mole blocking [00:19:00] IP addresses, so they conducted physical raids on illegal call centers in New Delhi. Right. They enabled over two hundred and fifteen arrests in twenty twenty four, which represents a massive seven hundred percent increase from the previous year.

[00:19:13] These call centers are the human engines responsible for the tech support and government impersonation scams that defraud thousands of Americans daily. You have to arrest the people making the calls. You cannot just patch the software they use.

[00:19:27] Tammy: But again, those massive call centers rely entirely on voice over IP technology, spoofed caller IDs, and complex digital routing to operate seamlessly across the globe.

[00:19:39] The tech enables the human operation.

[00:19:41] Bill: Yes, but look at the ultimate proof of how resilient the human attack vector is when the tech is taken away. When the IC3 recovery asset team gets too good at their jobs, when they successfully freeze those wire transfers and the banks tighten their technical security, what do the syndicates do?

[00:19:58] They find another way. They don't [00:20:00] quit. They introduce the gold courier scam. Oh, man. Which the report notes resulted in a staggering two hundred and nineteen million dollars in losses this past year alone.

[00:20:10] Tammy: Right. And consider the absolute ingenuity of that pivot. The technical financial chains, the SWIFT network, the banking compliance algorithms were becoming too difficult to bypass, so the scammers completely abandoned the digital financial system.

[00:20:25] Bill: They went analog. Totally analog. They manipulate a victim, usually an elderly person isolated at home, convincing them their bank accounts are compromised. They instruct the victim to liquidate their assets and physically buy gold bars or withdraw hard cash. It's unbelievable. And then the criminals literally send a human courier, often an unwitting gig worker, directly to the victim's front porch to pick it up in a shoebox.

[00:20:51] They entirely bypass your impenetrable digital vault. They used pure psychological terror to make a victim hand over precious [00:21:00] metals to a stranger in broad daylight. That proves my thesis. When the software is finally secured, human trust and human fear remain the ultimate unpatchable

[00:21:09] Tammy: vulnerabilities. I see why you emphasize the gold courier phenomenon.

[00:21:14] I mean, the analog nature of it is a visceral and frightening evolution of the crime. However, I maintain that it is an operational outlier compared to the massive systemic flow of funds. An outlier? While the human tragedy is undeniably evident, the vast majority of the data points point back to digital infrastructure.

[00:21:33] We see massive international wire transfers bleeding billions into accounts in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Mexico. We see incredibly sophisticated business email compromise schemes intercepting massive corporate real estate transactions.

[00:21:47] Bill: True.

[00:21:47] Tammy: Like the specific case detailed in Denver, where the IC3 RAT froze a nine hundred fifty-five thousand dollar transfer just seconds before it cleared.

[00:21:56] The overarching narrative of the sixteen point six billion dollar [00:22:00] threat is that dismantling the technical and financial architecture of these cyber syndicates remains the absolute most critical path to mitigating the damage. If we do not secure the digital infrastructure, the sheer global scale of this crime remains entirely unmanageable.

[00:22:14] Bill: And I conclude that while infrastructure matters, the disproportionate impact on our older demographics, over four point eight billion dollars lost by Americans over the age of sixty, proves exactly where the true vulnerability lies. The absolute dominance of relationship-based investment fraud and fear-based tech support scams shows that the core weakness of our modern society is no longer software.

[00:22:38] Tammy: It's the user.

[00:22:39] Bill: The modern cyber criminal is a sociologist and a psychologist first and a coder second. They exploit human trust, they weaponize our isolation, and they use technology merely as a delivery mechanism for age-old confidence games. Until we actively address and protect human vulnerability, our technical patches will only force the criminals to find new, more [00:23:00] devastating ways to manipulate us.

[00:23:01] Tammy: Well, despite our distinct framing of the problem, there is a very clear point of convergence in our analysis today Whether we are dealing with a technical kill chain freezing millions in transit or a human-focused initiative like Operation Level Up intervening to save lives, absolutely none of it functions without centralized intelligence.

[00:23:23] Bill: Absolutely. The invaluable role of the IC3 acting as an intelligence clearinghouse over the last twenty-five years just cannot be overstated.

[00:23:32] Tammy: Every single disruption, every frozen asset, and every international arrest depends entirely on public reporting. The data we are debating today only exists because victims have the courage to come forward.

[00:23:45] Bill: And it's exactly why the report strongly emphasizes that anyone who even suspects they might be a victim must report it to IC3.gov. That raw reporting is the fuel that drives both the sophisticated technical defenses and the physical [00:24:00] law enforcement raids.

[00:24:01] Tammy: It is an incredibly complex threat landscape.

[00:24:05] We are navigating an era where malicious actors are simultaneously targeting critical municipal water systems with advanced ransomware and targeting elderly citizens in their living rooms with analog gold couriers.

[00:24:20] Bill: It's wild.

[00:24:21] Tammy: I highly suggest that our listeners explore the full FBI IC3 twenty twenty-four report themselves.

[00:24:28] It's particularly illuminating to look at the state-by-state data. California and Texas, for instance, lead the nation by far in total losses, with California alone suffering over two point five billion dollars in damages.

[00:24:42] Bill: Yeah, there is a wealth of actionable information in the report that can help you understand the specific mechanisms and threats operating right in your own backyard.

[00:24:49] Tammy: Ultimately, we leave it to you, the listener, to weigh the evidence and decide which vector poses the greater foundational threat to our society. Are we losing ground because our [00:25:00] technical walls are fundamentally too weak, or because the human mind is inherently too trusting? We started today talking about a bank vault.

[00:25:07] Whether the criminals are melting through the steel with malicious code or simply talking the manager into handing over the keys, the vault is wide open. The profound question now is how we secure it. We'll see you next time.