1346: David Maimon | Going Undercover in the Fraud Underworld

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 JordanHarbinger.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 already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (75 minutes, 17,175 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.