What happens when a romance scam survivor sits down with the scientist who can explain exactly what was done to her? Last week you heard Kirsty's story. This week, Erin brings her together with Dr. Martina Dove, a fraud psychology expert, to take it apart piece by piece. The verdict is unsettling: today's scammers don't simply mirror you. They study you, find the wounds you've spent years hiding, and use them as the way in. Kirsty had survived sixteen years of coercive control — and the scammer turned that history into a weapon. A clear-eyed look at how manipulation actually works, why intelligence is no protection, and why the people around a victim matter more than anyone wants to admit.

In this deeply moving episode, Erin West speaks with Kirsty Guest — a single mother of four from the UK — about the romance fraud and psychological manipulation that upended life as she knew it.

Kirsty’s story is not a cautionary tale about carelessness. She is a businesswoman, a devoted parent, and a survivor of domestic abuse. And she was deliberately targeted by a criminal who studied her vulnerabilities and exploited them with the patience and precision of a professional.

If her story sounds familiar — whether it happened to you, someone you love, or someone you work with — know that you are not alone. It was not your fault.

“Targets of fraud need to know that they feel they are safe, that they are not alone, and that someone will listen without saying, “How could you fall for such a thing?” — Kirsty Guest

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

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Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back.

Episode 54: Keven Hendricks, a 20-year law enforcement veteran, pulls back the curtain on the dark web and the connections with cybercrime and drug sales.

“Cryptocurrency, whether you like it or not, is a means of moving wealth that is being used by bad guys.” — Keven Hendricks

Erin West sits down with Keven Hendricks — 20-year law enforcement veteran, former task force officer with both the FBI and DEA, and expert in dark web investigations, cryptocurrency, and privacy coins. What started as a crash course in Bitcoin and illicit online markets in 2014 became a career-defining passion. Keven has spent the years since pushing law enforcement to catch up to the criminals it is trying to stop.

1. The dark web isn’t what you think — and that misunderstanding is deadly.
2. Prosecutors and chiefs are the missing link in fighting cybercrime.
3. Overdose deaths are crime scenes, not medical events.
4. Pull the thread far enough and the crimes are all connected.

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

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Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back.

Episode 53: Who knew that creating a deepfake video that merged Will Smith and Cardi B into one person would become a viral success? Who knew that the creator of that video would now be focused on stopping the criminal use of the same technology?

Now you can be anybody you want to be. You can be Beyoncé at a concert. You can be skydiving as an alligator. — Carl Bogan on the simplicity of deepfake technology

Carl Bogan joins Erin to talk about the evolution of deepfakes — from his pioneering viral video to today’s need to protect businesses and consumers from video impersonation in scams and fraud.

Carl is the visual effects pioneer who created the original viral deepfake in 2019 and has since seen his invention weaponized at scale. What began as a technical experiment to solve a startup's content problem became a two-decade reckoning with tech that’s now available to anyone with a phone and an internet connection.

You don’t give a baby a knife. We’re a bunch of babies running around with knives. — Carl Bogan

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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Episode Sponsors

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back.

Erin West and AARP's Kathy Stokes flip the script on the 50th episode of Stolen.

It’s not about risky behavior. It’s that the scams are coming at us in every possible communication channel. We can’t avoid it. — Kathy Stokes, AARP

Episode 50: Erin and Kathy dig into one of the most overlooked dimensions of the scam epidemic: the language we use — and the harm it causes. AARP’s Fraud Watch Network handles roughly 100,000 calls a year from victims and their families, and works to shift how the public, media, and policymakers talk about people who have been targeted by financial crime.

It is a systemic failure. When we can all agree on that, then we can all be doing a hell of a lot more than we're doing right now.‍ — Kathy Stokes, AARP

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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Episode Sponsors

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back.

Episode 52: UK survivor-turned-advocate Anna Rowe breaks down the brain chemistry behind romance fraud — cortisol, dopamine, trauma bonds — and why victims blame themselves instead of the criminals manipulating them.

You don’t see anything wrong. All the red flags appear beige because of what’s going on in your body. — Anna Rowe, co-founder LoveSaid.org

From the dopamine flood of love bombing to the cortisol spikes of intermittent reinforcement, Anna outlines the biological and emotional mechanisms that leave victims compliant, confused, and blaming themselves.

Anna and Erin also tackle the systemic failures that prevent victims from healing, including the lack of training for banking staff, victim-blaming media headlines, and law enforcement’s slow adoption of trauma-informed language.

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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Episode Sponsors

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back.

Episode 51: Erin West sits down with Dr. David Maimon, a Georgia State University professor and cybercrime researcher for SentiLink, to dig into what the data tells us about online fraud, where it’s headed, how scammers select victims, and why our approaches to stopping them may need to change.

Current trends are alarming:

• A dramatic rise in home equity line of credit (HELOC) account fraud targeting homeowners with high credit scores
• Increasingly sophisticated AI-powered deepfakes and voice cloning used to build fake relationships at scale
• The looming threat of agentic AI supercharging scam compound operations within the next 18 months

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

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Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back.

Episode 49: BioCatch's Sharell Barshishat joins Erin West to dive deep into the fascinating (and alarming) intersection of banking, fraud, and technology.

Sharell breaks down how tech is changing the fraud-fighting playbook for banking. From spotting bots at account opening to detecting a pig butchering victim’s hesitation mid-transfer, Sharell explains how technology can read what people do — not just who they are — to identify fraud in real time.

He and Erin also discuss why stopping scams requires a unified approach across sectors, from banks to social media to government. From Telegram discussions to behavioral biometrics, the stakes have never been higher. ‍

• AI is accelerating the fraud threat landscape — fast.

• Behavior never lies, even when people do.

• Fraud travels on a highway of mule accounts.

• Australian banks show what’s possible with political will.

• Scams are a banking problem, not just a victim problem.

Episode notes and video: https://operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬

Subscribe to Stolen for straight truth, survivor-centered storytelling, and bold conversations about the scamdemic and the people fighting back.