They Told His Mom They'd Kidnapped Her Daughter (Patrick Coughlin)

Episode 64: When Patrick Coughlin's mother got a call telling her that her daughter had been kidnapped and would be killed unless she paid up, it wasn't real — but it was terrifyingly convincing. In this episode of Stolen, host Erin West sits down with Patrick, a former national security and cybersecurity expert, to unpack how that "grandparent scam" changed the course of his career.

Patrick walks through the moment-by-moment terror of the scam call, why AI-powered voice cloning is making these attacks more personal and harder to detect, and what he learned mapping out the criminal ecosystems behind them. He and Erin dig into the structural failures enabling fraud at scale — under-resourced law enforcement, telecom systems built to connect calls (not verify them), payment rails that make stolen money nearly impossible to trace, and social media platforms with little incentive to intervene.

Patrick's response wasn't just to write about it — his book, Dark Side of the Boom: How Scammers Hijack the AI Revolution, breaks down the "five families of fraud." He also co-founded Savi Security, building consumer tools like Scamwise (a free scam-checking tool) and an in-call AI assistant that gives people a second opinion during a live phone call.

Chapters: 00:00 – Intro 02:33 – Patrick's background in counterterrorism and cybersecurity 03:35 – The call: A fake kidnapping scam 08:01 – Where these scams are coming from 09:03 – The "five families of fraud" by region 11:08 – Why Patrick decided to write the book 14:13 – How the money moves — payment rails and crypto 15:26 – Why telecoms can't verify calls, only connect them 17:09 – Chasing ghosts: why law enforcement struggles to investigate 19:33 – Regulation vs. relationship-building across borders 20:34 – Why law enforcement is exponentially under-resourced 22:29 – Rethinking cybersecurity products for everyday families 25:26 – The mission behind Savi Security 28:03 – Why we don't talk about this the right way 28:34 – A national security issue, not just a consumer one 33:14 – Social media's business incentives 35:15 – Inside Patrick's product: Scamwise and Savi Security 41:15 – Looking ahead: the "deepfake decade" 44:53 – Final thoughts: what real progress would look like

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

Episode Sponsors

Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, Biocatch and Scamnetic. https://www.biocatch.com/ https://scamnetic.com/

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