She Spent 20 Years Inside Cartels, Scam Factories & Black Markets. Investigative Journalist Mariana van Zeller On The $12 Billion Industry Stealing From Americans & Why Everybody Is Scammable

What really happens inside the world’s most dangerous underground economies? And why do the people running them trust a journalist enough to talk? Mariana van Zeller — Emmy- and Peabody Award–winning investigative journalist, host and executive producer of Trafficked on National Geographic, and host of The Hidden Third podcast — has spent years embedded with scammers, smugglers, cartel members, assassins, and black-market power brokers. In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, she pulls back the curtain on the shadow systems that quietly shape the global economy. Mariana breaks down the difference between the black market vs. the grey market, why understanding these hidden economies is the only way to create real change, and how she manages to gain access to some of the most secretive and dangerous players in the world. She explains how empathy, not judgment, is often the key to getting people labeled “the worst of the worst” to open up, and why many of them speak with her because of something surprisingly simple: a deep human need to be heard and understood. She also addresses critics who say she shouldn’t give criminals a platform, revealing why listening to these voices is essential to exposing the systems behind global crime. We dive into her most harrowing experiences in the field — including the terrifying moment she and her team weren’t sure they would make it out alive, and the time they had to escape a country in the middle of a life-threatening military coup while filming. Mariana also unpacks the current climate in Mexico’s drug war, explaining why violence often escalates when major cartel kingpins are taken down, and the troubling implications of the fact that many of the weapons used by cartels originate in the United States. We get into one of the fastest-growing criminal industries in the world: scams. She breaks down everything you’ve ever wanted to know about romance scams and “pig butchering” operations, including: - Psychological tactics scammers use - Who scammers typically target and why - Massive infrastructure behind modern scam compounds - Why many scammers are actually victims of forced labor themselves - Why victims often stay silent due to shame and stigma Mariana explains why advancing technology, crypto, and AI are making financial scams easier than ever, and why anyone can fall victim — no matter how smart or cautious they are, including the shocking case of a bank CEO who was successfully defrauded. We also explore medical black markets, from organ trafficking to international surrogacy scams, and discuss some of her most intense interviews, from conversations with a suspected Russian sex spy to Anna Delvey, the infamous socialite scammer. Despite spending her career face-to-face with some of the darkest corners of humanity, Mariana reveals something surprising: she still believes deeply in people. In fact, she sometimes finds more hope, honesty, and equality in underground markets than in global governments or legal capitalism. This conversation will change how you think about crime, power, empathy, and the hidden systems shaping our world! Head to https://www. Superpower.com and use code BREAK at checkout for $20 off your membership. After you sign up, they’ll ask how you heard about them, so make sure to mention this podcast to support the show. Mariana van Zeller’s podcast, THE HIDDEN THIRD: https://www.youtube.com/@marianavanzeller Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 01

  Everybody is scamable.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Why are we so gullible?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  I was the victim of a romance scam.

• 1:05Jonathan Cohen?

  No.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  $12 billion were stolen from Americans just on scams alone. Once they drain your money, it doesn't mean that you're no good for them anymore. You become the money launderer, or a drug mule. Black and gray markets make up for a third of the global economy. Sex trafficking, pirates, assassins, they are really good at what they do. No one is born wanting to be a criminal. The lack of opportunities lead people to these lives of crime. We're talking about factories, full with tens of thousands of scammers. We should be blaming the systems.

• 1:36Mayim Bialik?

  Mariana Van Zeller is an investigative journalist gaining unprecedented access to cartel operations, trafficking networks, and black market systems all over the world.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Organ trafficking is a booming industry. I interviewed a funeral director who showed me a pen where inside was a piece of human brain. Most scared I've ever been was with an assassin in South Africa. We spent two, three hours talking. And when I asked him, "But have you realized that what you're doing to other children is exactly what was done to you?" He stopped for a second and says, "I hope that they are really great conversations about the lives we lead and what we choose to do with them."

• 2:19Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 2:20Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 2:21Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to Our Breakdown. Today, we're going to be talking to someone who holds the world's darkest secrets and, for a living, tries to find the humans and the humanity behind what goes on in the hidden third of our economy. Mariana Van Zeller is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning investigative journalist. She's known for her National Geographic show, "Trafficked," with Mariana Van Zeller, the most Emmy-nominated unscripted series in Emmy history. And she has a podcast, "The Hidden Third," where she talks to people who have been victims of romance scams, cyber scams, banking scams, fraud.

• 3:04Mayim Bialik?

  Her career has included gaining unprecedented access to cartel operations, trafficking networks, cybercrime rings, and black market systems all over the world. She's here today to talk about what are the lessons she has learned from speaking to some of the most complicated aspects of the black and gray markets. The stories we're going to hear today are, in many cases, unbelievable. And we all want to think we could never be scammed, it would never happen to us. But what Mariana is going to explain to us is that we are all on a spectrum of vulnerability, and we are all susceptible to the things that matter most to us, whether that's security, money, love.

• 3:46Mayim Bialik?

  We are all, potentially, open to learning more about ourselves from hearing the kinds of stories that Mariana has tackled for decades in her career. It's a pleasure to welcome in person Mariana Van Zeller to The Breakdown.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Break it down. Thank you for having me.

• 4:04Jonathan Cohen?

  This is a different episode than we normally do, but a lot of our episodes revolve around pulling back a curtain of what is happening in the world that a ton of people don't have access to and that really describes most of your work.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 4:20Jonathan Cohen?

  If no one has heard of you, which I find it hard to believe, can you describe a little bit about what you have done for all of these years?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So I've spent the last 20 years of my life reporting as an investigative journalist on black markets. Black and gray markets actually make up for about a third of the global economy. Most people don't know anything about what's happening inside these black markets. We're talking about the drug trade, sex trafficking, scams, the world of assassins, pirates. And I've, yeah, spent the last two decades basically gaining access to these worlds and speaking to the smugglers and the traffickers and the scammers and all of them.

• 5:01Mayim Bialik?

  Many of us have heard of the black market from jokes, from snippets here and there on TV shows, like, oh, buy it on the black market, right? Can you explain for someone who doesn't know, what does the black market encompass and then what is the gray market?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  So the difference between the two is that the black market is everything that's illegal. So if you're buying guns illegally or drugs illegally or scamming people, robbing people, killing people, that's all part of the black market. The gray market is more gray.

• 5:30Jonathan Cohen?

  The connection to taxes is obviously interesting, meaning that in an ideal world, all the money that's being created is sort of above board so that it can contribute to the greater society. But there's also a much bigger implication to people's lives, right? Like, not only are they at risk, for example, of a crypto scam, which we can discuss, or a love scam, which is maybe some of the most compelling emotional content. But if a third of the world's economy is operating in this area, there's no rules, there's no safety, there's no regulation. Can you describe maybe some of the potential impact, even peripherally, if this is how the world is working?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I mean, it's gigantic, right? There's a whole world out there that, like you said, there is no safety, no security. I think a good example, most people don't think about this, but we did an episode about fake medications, fake pharmaceuticals, and how 20 million Americans can't afford their life-saving medication sometimes and have to resort to the black market pharmaceuticals. And that's going to labs that are often in India, where you can order stuff online, or going across the border into Mexico. So we went to both of those countries to understand how this, how the pharmaceuticals, how these fake medications are being made. And the problem is that a lot of them don't actually have the active ingredients that they have.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  And worse than that, a lot of them are mixed in with incredibly dangerous chemicals that American consumers are taking and using and has led to deaths around the world. So it's this sort of, you know, world where there are no real rules, there is no safety, and where it's dangerous for everyone.

• 7:14Mayim Bialik?

  The trust people have in our institutions, especially here, you know, in the United States, is dwindling, right? And in many cases, people don't have trust in pharmaceutical companies, doctors, you know, what we're being told. How do you balance sort of what you do with also the very human need for people to get the care that they want, for example? I mean, I know people who go south of the border, you know, for lots of treatments. How do you sort of balance that? Because obviously, it's important for things to be above board. It's important for things to be verified. It's important for things to be, you know, accounted for.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I certainly don't blame the consumers for doing it. I think the biggest message that I try to weave through in my work all the time is that we shouldn't be blaming the people, we should be blaming the systems. It is because of broken systems that we have undocumented immigrants in this country, right? It is because of broken systems that we have a drug trade and drug epidemic that has killed a million Americans in the last 20 years. You know, these are all issues of, of, of system, yeah, of, where, systems that are failing people. And it's in those situations where ultimately... You either have consumers or the users of those black markets that have to resort to those black markets, or you have the people that are willingly operating in these black markets. No one is born wanting to be a criminal, right?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  You don't wake up one day either and decide, hey, I just want to start trafficking drugs. It is the majority of cases, not always, but the majority of cases, the lack of choices, the lack of opportunities that lead people to these lives of crime. And as long as there's inequality in this world, there is going to be growing violence and the, you know, the booming black markets that exist around us.

• 8:58Mayim Bialik?

  What is it about the vulnerability that you've sort of seen that runs through all of these different kinds of cases that you, you know, that you are involved in?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Whether I'm interviewing a victim or I'm interviewing the perpetrator, I find out that their stories are very similar, that often it's the same, again, broken systems that are led them to that path. I remember interviewing, one of the longest interviews I've ever done, actually, was with an assassin in South Africa. Now, this is not somebody that we obviously do not condone what he does, just don't imagine understanding or connecting to a person who's ultimately killing people, like the worst of the worst thing you can possibly do. And yet, we spent two, three hours talking, and at the end, what he told me, his life story was that he, his parents had been killed when he was eight or nine years old, didn't

• 9:49Speaker 01

  have family that took him over, was on the streets, basically, spent most of his life on the streets, went into the drug trade, eventually became an assassin, started using drugs in order to be able to kill people. And he saw the world as very black and white, right? It was bad people, he was just killing bad people, that's how he moralized it. And he would never, ever touch women or children, only bad men. And when I asked him, but have you realized that what you're doing to other children is exactly what was done to you, right? And he stopped for a second, he says, no, no, I've never even thought of that. At the end of the interview, he came to me and said, look, you were the first person ever that was interested in my life. No one ever asked me, nobody ever wanted to know anything about me, literally.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  No one wanted to know about my life or why I do what I do. And, and he said, I've been wanting to get out of this for a long time. And I'm going to try and find a way out. I'm not saying that it was because of this conversation. But I do think conversations like these are incredibly important. Understanding the problem, understanding the root cause of all these problems, of all these black markets, is the only way that we can prevent them from existing. You know, we can build all the walls, we can spend all the money on law enforcement we want, all the money on the drug trade, on fighting drugs, on the drug war, have done nothing to prevent the drug trade in this country, right? So unless we understand what's at the root of all of these problems, and that starts

• 11:16Speaker 01

  by asking questions, even of the people that we don't agree with, yeah, it's, we're not going to change anything.

• 11:22Mayim Bialik?

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• 12:06Mayim Bialik?

  I can wear them year round because I live in Southern California. They feel like PJs, but it looks like I put a ton of effort in, whether I'm dressing for casual workdays, lazy weekends, or vacation vibes. I'm also obsessed with their sheets, so soft. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work with ethical factories and cut out the middle people, so you pay for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just apparel. Quince brings that same approach to everything they make, from hotel quality bedding to kitchen essentials, and thoughtfully designed furniture. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was My and Be Alex Breakdown.

• 12:51Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show.

• 12:52Jonathan Cohen?

  But for a few things, all of our lives would have been different.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And that doesn't mean that I, again, condone what they do because I do get a lot of shit for this. Like, a lot of people say, "How are you giving these people a platform? Why are you..." They even say that I'm glamorizing crime, which is absolutely untrue. I think that respecting people, treating people with respect, by doing so, you're sort of expecting some humanity back, right? By understanding them, you're really getting at the core of humanity, of what a human being is. And that, for me, has always been important. So when I'm trying to gain access to these worlds, which is the hardest thing we have to do in our job,

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I don't approach people first. It takes years sometimes to even get people to say yes to talking to us. But once we do get to meet with these people, what I say all the time is, "I'm here with empathy. I'm trying to understand why..."

• 13:50Jonathan Cohen?

  What's in it for a drug dealer, a kingpin, someone who is in that world, to let you in at all? Because it's a risk.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. I think it's a few things. First of all, it's ego, right? A lot of these people have never even told their stories, like the assassin in South Africa. I remember one case where we were interviewing a guy who makes counterfeit. He's the best at the best. In Peru, there's a thriving black market for counterfeit dollars. They make dollars, hundred-dollar bills that look exactly like the real thing. And he was sharing with me how he makes it. And he was so proud of the work that he does. And he told me, "Look, my family doesn't even know what I do. And yet, again, I'm the best of the best out there doing this kind of work. And you are giving me an opportunity with a mask and a distorted voice to share what I'm passionate about, what I realize is my true talent in life."

• 14:37Speaker 01

  So I think that ego and wanting to share stories that their families many times don't even know. I think impunity in places like Sinaloa, where there's so much corruption, they don't even see a downside to talking to us. But I do think the third most important reason is really what I talked about, the South African assassin, which is the need that we all have to be understood, right? To connect on a human level. These are the most shunned and stereotyped people in our society. And they really, I think, many times appreciate somebody that comes there and who's genuinely curious about their lives and them. And I think that really helps in getting people to open up.

• 15:18Jonathan Cohen?

  I would love to move into a bit of an overview of some of the scams that many people not know at all or understand. And the ones that jump out to me the most are the romance scams, pig butchering, which is terrifying and there's just like a thick, an entire world that people don't understand is happening because it impacts everything we do online if you start to realize what's happening there. Medical scams also, but before we get to those topics, you spent a lot of time in Mexico. Mexico's kind of on fire in the last few weeks. What insight do you have from the work that you've done on what's happening there now?

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Right, we've spent billions of dollars on this war on drugs that started with President Nixon. And yet, we're, again, millions of people have died, continue dying, both here in America, but also with the violence in Mexico. And there's always this belief by the American, the US government, that if we go after the El Chapos of the world, the El Menchus of the world, the leaders of these cartels, that that is going to stop the drug trade. And in fact, what has been happening again and again, not that I'm saying that we should not go after these people and hold them accountable, we should. But what happens when you take out the head of these cartels is that their violence grows. Why? It's very simple, actually.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  The majority of people, there's usually infighting within the cartel. It happened when El Chapo was apprehended, it's happening right now with El Mencho having been killed. There's infighting within the cartel to who's going to take over, right? And usually, the people that step to the top are the most violent people, because that's how you show power in the underworld, in the black market, in the world of crime, right? And so, again and again, the leader is being replaced by somebody who's more violent, which is why each new generation of new cartels is more violent than the previous one. I mean, if we're talking about CJNG, the Jalisco cartel that El Mencho was the leader of, they used ISIS-type tactics.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  To impose their power and their access to the trade routes up to the United States. I mean, it was, you know, beheading people, hanging them of bridges and roads all over Mexico. It's terrifyingly violent stuff that they do. And, and this is what we, I believe, we're expecting to see more and more of. And let's not forget that the weapons that are, that they use are all coming from the United States. Something like between 70 and 80% of the guns that are found in every crime scene in Mexico, those guns come from the United States. There's only one gun shop in the whole of Mexico, and it's in Mexico City,

• 18:11Speaker 01

  and only authorized buyers can go in and buy the guns. The vast majority of guns are coming from the United States. It's what's called, called the Iron River is the trade of guns from the West to Mexico. And most people don't talk about that, right? We usually just talk about the, the drugs coming north. We don't talk about the guns that they're using to maintain their violence and their power and how those are American.

• 18:36Jonathan Cohen?

  Before we talk about love scams, can you describe a few times where maybe you thought your work was going sideways, that you may have really been in danger?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  I mean, there have been many situations. We've been in, you know, shootouts with the Sinaloa cartel. We've, we've, yeah, I mean, we've been, our phones have been confiscated and taken to, you know, detained, all sorts of things like that have happened. But I think the most scared I've ever been was when we were stuck in a military coup in Niger. We were there to do a story about gold trafficking and how illegal gold trafficking in the country is actually funding groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Spent four years trying to convince Nigel to let us go, that this was, we know, the most dangerous part of the world, but that we were going to be able to do our job safely.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  And finally, they said, okay, you guys can go, but we need a military escort to go out into the mines and film with the miners. And we got a military escort. It was. Four trucks with fifty or forty heavily armed men, soldiers, trained by the United States to protect us. And then, as we were coming back in town after spending overnight camping with the miners, we came back to town, we found out there had been a military coup and that the airport, the borders were closed, the airspace shut down, and that we were stuck in this small town without a way out. And that there was an incoming, possible incoming war, and we were surrounded by the groups that we went there to report on.

• 20:11Mayim Bialik?

  When you say goodbye to your, you know, your husband and kid for this kind of, is there a possibility that you won't come back?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  I don't think it that way, or else I wouldn't do this job, right? I want to survive, and no story is worth a life, obviously. But, uh, but there is risk, and we know there is risk. And my husband has been traveling, not anymore, but we used to travel together. He's a journalist as well. We met at Columbia University Journalism School. So he knows better than anyone what the risks are. But there's also a lot of planning that is put in place to make sure that we're minimizing the risk. But what really scared me about that situation in particular was that there was nothing that we could do. It was the situation was completely out of our control, right? And, and that was terrifying. I'm generally not an anxious person. I sleep, my husband gets very mad at me, actually, because I sleep very well every night, and I can fall asleep anywhere.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  And, and that was the most anxiety-inducing experience of my life.

• 21:09Mayim Bialik?

  And who were you with? Like, what's your crew like?

• 21:11Speaker 01

  We're usually six or seven people. So it's myself, a director, two, three people from our camera team, and a producer. And we also had a fixer from Mali, who's a local journalist, was from the neighboring country, Mali, who was there in Niger with us. And, um, and I was the only woman, by the way, as is often the case, actually. And when I was camping out with the miners, I was the only woman.

• 21:33Mayim Bialik?

  Did you sleep well that night?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  You know, no, because I had horrible diarrhea. Sorry, guys.

• 21:42Mayim Bialik?

  That's nature's way of keeping you vigilant.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  I ate goat the night before with tribespeople and ended up spending my night going to the bathroom in an open bucket, surrounded by men. Please don't clip this part.

• 22:00Jonathan Cohen?

  And did you lose your military escort because they had to go to fight?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  As soon as we landed in town, we found out there had been a military coup. We lost our escort and that was not fun. Immediately started getting calls from my team here in L.A. From National Geographic, who I was working with at the time. And everybody was very worried for us, but there was nothing they could do. It was nine days. Thankfully, it was only nine days. And in the end, what happened was that we had an evacuation company, which is why the work we do is not cheap because we have high insurance rates. We have to hire an evacuation company exactly for situations like this. The evacuation company, we actually made the whole story, the episode we put together. We used part of these calls, us trying to get out because it demonstrates the danger of this part of the world that we were reporting on.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  But we called the evacuation company. They had no plan in place, so there was really nobody who could come and get us out. And meanwhile-

• 22:58Mayim Bialik?

  What'd you do for nine days?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Oh, we kept reporting, actually. We interviewed a human gold trafficker, who was one of the people responsible for getting the gold out of Niger. And he was also a human trafficker, so I asked him if I paid him a little bit of money or a lot of money if he'd get us out of the country. He said, "We were Americans, so we were high-value targets, so no thanks." So he declined our offer. But we also interviewed a former Al Qaeda member during that time. We had to keep doing something because or else we would go mad. But also because we saw it as an opportunity. We believed and hoped that we'd be able to get them out of there alive, even though at some moments it was hard. We wanted to be able to tell the story as much as we could. People were starting to be evacuated.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  We've got the French, the British, the Portuguese, the Spanish being evacuated from the capital, but we couldn't get to the capital. It was too far, it was too dangerous. I mean, there were no flights, we couldn't get there. And so eventually, I went to the airport and there were a few planes. And I was asking the airport manager, "Is there any way, there's any plane coming or leaving? If there is, please let me know." And I showed him a photo of my son. And I said, "Do you have children?" And he said, "I do." We talked about our kids. And I said, "Look," his name was- Kader, said Kader, if by any chance any planes come in or out, please, this is my number, call me. And a few days later, um, nine days later, my team in the US, led by my husband,

• 24:21Speaker 01

  uh, were able to find some crazy pilots with a plane that were willing to come to Niger. They would spend twenty minutes on the ground, they would come at night, twenty minutes on the ground, and we had those twenty minutes to get onto the plane and leave. And the day we arrived at the airport, we were ecstatic, super nervous as well. There is an enormous military presence there, and they don't want us to leave. And Kader was there as well, because he'd found out that there was a plane coming, and he wanted, and he thought about us, and he thought this might be a plan for Mariana. And, uh, he shows up, and he's yelling at the military, and really putting his own life at risk at this point, and telling them you have to let them leave and fighting for us. And goes back and forth. We found out the pilots were Portuguese.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Luck of all luck, so I was able to talk to the pilots myself. And eventually, we got on a plane, and as, I'm the last one, my whole team is on the plane, and I'm the last one running into the plane, and Kader yells my name and says, Mariana, and I look back, and, um, and he says, uh, say happy birthday to your son, because I told him it was my son's birthday. And he says, happy birthday to your son, and so I was leaving on that plane that day. It was just a moment of, um, being super happy, right? But at the same time, just carrying this enormous guilt for all the people that we'd spent time with, and the future of this country that was now in the hands of these mercenaries.

• 25:43Jonathan Cohen?

  The power and optimism that you can find in a human connection, who is putting his life on the line to help you, like, it's, it's really unbelievable.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly why I have enormous positive view of the world, and of human beings, of humanity, not on the systems, not in governments, but in human beings, yeah.

• 26:02Jonathan Cohen?

  There isn't a documentary about crime that Mayim doesn't like.

• 26:05Mayim Bialik?

  I've seen them all.

• 26:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Of course, all the other things we're talking about are widely dangerous, but there's something about love scams and getting someone to just fall in love with you that feels oddly strange and intimate and dangerous. Can you tell us a little bit about what is happening in this world and how really technology has made it so much easier?

• 26:27Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, you're talking to her. I thought you were talking to me. I was gonna do the intro on this section. Go ahead.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  You know what's funny? I should actually, I'm going to talk to you right now, but I should come back because I'm in the middle of doing a project for Nagio, which I can talk a little bit about it, but part of it was that I was the victim of a romance scam.

• 26:45Jonathan Cohen?

  No.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Which is amazing. But yeah, we started reporting on this. So it's so interesting how the scam industry in general has grown. We first pitched the story about scams to Nagio in season one of Traffic in 2019. And I remember our execs there being like, "Scams? That's not a big deal." And it really was not, at the time, a big deal. I mean, they happened, but it wasn't as prevalent as they are right now. I think in 2024, which is the last numbers we have for them, $12 billion, billion dollars were stolen from a member of Americans just on scams alone. And a big part of that are, in fact, romance scams. So yeah, we ended up doing a few stories on scams and then realized that romance scams are really the juiciest, but also the most

• 27:32Speaker 01

  sort of cruel kind of scam out there, in my opinion. We've got people, a lot of time, unfortunately, what we found in our reporting was that there, a lot of these scammers are in West Africa. We actually ended up, I mean, they're all over the world, but the reporting that we did took us to the victims that we spoke to when we tracked down their scammers, a lot of them were in West Africa. And we ended up spending time in Ghana, interviewing...

• 27:59Mayim Bialik?

  And it's an entire industry.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Entire industry.

• 28:01Mayim Bialik?

  Like, people can't imagine it, that there's like rows and rows of people.

• 28:06Jonathan Cohen?

  A lot of people have no clue. Like, if someone is like, what is, like, give us sort of the nuts and bolts, how does it work, and then the industry.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you're out there, you're on social media, or you're on a dating website, or maybe there's just been news that your husband has died. I mean, there are so many ways that these cameras find out about you, and they reach out to you.

• 28:29Mayim Bialik?

  But a dating profile would be the easiest way because it's your contact information. It's everything about you, all the things you like. Right?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  And then they start saying, usually, you know, the typical profile of a romance scammer

• 28:43Speaker 01

  is that they're in the military, oil rigs, and they're very, very wealthy, and they live an adventurous life out there. They start sending you photos. These are usually male scammers, but there are also female scammers. But the male scammer profile is-

• 28:59Mayim Bialik?

  There are also men who pose as female scammers, which is the whole thing.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  And they do like a voice. We filmed with some people doing a female voice, which is insane. And they start sending you photos, and they're usually, you know, this dreamy, the most beautiful handsome-

• 29:15Mayim Bialik?

  They always have gray hair and blue eyes.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  You have ever seen. Right. The best bodies. There are always lots of shots of them without their t-shirts, bare chest, and lots of muscles and the whole thing. And then they start talking to you day and night. And this happened to me as well. Every single day, you're love bombed. And they start slowly, like, "I want to know more about you. So what interests you?" They find common ground. If you're divorced, if your husband died, their wife has died too. If you suffer from depression, turns out they suffer from depression too. They're always trying to find a common ground.

• 29:49Mayim Bialik?

  It's also, there's a long game. This isn't like, oh, they ask you for money on the first date.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Weeks, months, sometimes years go by before they even ask a person for money.

• 29:58Mayim Bialik?

  And it's always something like, "Oh, my account. I had to change the bank and the password."

• 30:03Speaker 01

  And then they start asking for pictures of you. They actually, in many cases, start sending you,

• 30:10Speaker 01

  I know this from firsthand experience, firsthand experience, they start sending you photos that they've made of you and him side by side. And they start sending you photos where they've printed photos of you in their house, and they're showing you how you are all over their world.

• 30:26Mayim Bialik?

  And people fall in love, which this is also a thing I personally don't understand, that people who have never spoken on the phone, never FaceTimed in many cases, they start saying, "I love you." They develop a love relationship.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  100%. He did talk about what he would do to me once he actually got his arms around me, after I sent him all the money he was asking for.

• 30:49Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  They fall in love so deeply that even when they find out it's a scam, even when they find out that the person is not the person they believed.

• 30:58Jonathan Cohen?

  They can't believe it.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  That happens almost always. They stay in love with the new person that has just come up in their life.

• 31:05Mayim Bialik?

  Like, oh, he needed... The fact that he was so desperate that he needed to pretend to be a scammer shows, like, what... He needs my love. Yeah, it's like a whole thing.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I spoke to a woman once who was being scammed for years, and she was deeply in love with this man. This man, when there was no money left, he couldn't drain her of any more money. He said, "Okay, I'm gonna come real, I'm gonna be real with you right now. I'm actually a Nigerian rapper, and I am not the military guy you thought I was, and I'm not American, and I'm a Nigerian rapper. But I am deeply in love with you." And she traveled to Nigeria and married him. This actually happened.

• 31:43Jonathan Cohen?

  So he's developing feelings for her too?

• 31:47Speaker 01

  He thought he could still get something from her.

• 31:50Mayim Bialik?

  We need to be clear, the people who are scamming are often scamming many people.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  They use their victims for lots of different things. Once they drain your money, it doesn't mean that you're no good for them anymore. You still are useful to them.

• 32:03Mayim Bialik?

  You borrow money from other people to give them. That often happens.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Or you become a drug mule, or you become the money launderer for that person. I interviewed a woman who was receiving, no joke, this was recently, receiving thousands of dollars a week from women, female victims all around America that her scammer was victimizing, scamming. And she was receiving all these checks and boxes of money from all these women, putting it into her bank account, and then moving that money to crypto, Bitcoin to... Pay the guy and she was being used as a money launderer, which can also get her in trouble with the law, by the way. But she, in her defense, she had no idea. What her scammer told her was that he had business in the US with all these people. He had had some sort of tax problem and his bank accounts were frozen.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  And so he needed her to do this for him. In order to build our trust and love for each other. And she did it for three years.

• 33:01Mayim Bialik?

  This is the way that that millions of dollars, billions of dollars are are sent.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Billions of dollars.

• 33:07Mayim Bialik?

  Billions of dollars are sent. What happens to that money when it gets there? Meaning, what are the scammers actually raising money for?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Oh, a very luxurious lifestyle. So there's various scales, right? There's the, you know, guys in the internet cafes and the bottom of the scale, which I have also interviewed.

• 33:28Jonathan Cohen?

  And they're freelancers. Those are just like loan operators.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Exactly, freelancers. I remember interviewing a guy who had sort of a den of scammers and he was, he worked with like three or four different people and each one of them has their own job, right? One of them is the guy that goes online and looks for the dating profiles or the social media profiles out there.

• 33:47Mayim Bialik?

  But you gotta keep track of all these different women, too. You gotta like know, oh, this one is this and this one's that. It's like a whole job.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  This is sort of the planner, the producer, right? The organizer that's reaching out and finding people. And then there was the guy who was the, what do they call him? Like the, not the catcher, but hook or something. He was the guy that was really good at talk or the real, he was the romantic one. He was the one who was really good at talking to these women or men and getting them to fall in love. And then there was the guy at the end that was the guy that would come in.

• 34:18Mayim Bialik?

  The closer.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  With a closer. He was like the finisher that came in with the last ask and was the one who like really knew what words to use in order to be able to convince these women or men to send them money. But this guy that I, in this den of scammers, sort of took me to his slum that he grew up in. And he was saying, look, for the longest time, the only way out of the slum was if you were a football player, soccer player. That's all kids wanted to be. Nowadays, the only way out of these slums is if you become a scammer. So ask these kids, and we did. We asked the kids, what do you want to do when you grow up? Half of them put their hands up, were like scammers. Because all the scammers in their town are the ones bringing back.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  The money to their families, but they're also the ones driving luxury cars and going out and, you know, nightclubbing and all that. So this is sort of from the bottom to the middle, but then there's a real big criminal enterprises. And a lot of these are being operated out of Asia, actually, and it's the pig butchering scams that are mixed with romance scams, by the way, because that's how they get people to trust them. It's a mix of romance scam and a financial crypto scam, essentially, where they start communicating with these women or men. A lot of times, in this case, it's actually more male victims. They start having relationships and at some point they start sending photos of themselves traveling around the world, having a luxurious lifestyle, and then they start saying, hey, I got rich because I invest in crypto.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Would you like to invest in crypto too? It is so easy. Go to this website, just put $100 and you put $100. Everything looks so legitimate, by the way. These websites, they have legitimate names, they look totally legitimate.

• 35:57Mayim Bialik?

  And they look legitimate even if you're 30. Like, God bless my mother, she cannot tell when things are illegitimate on the internet. But these are like, like you or I would look at it and be like, that looks like a bank account.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Which is why this is not an elderly scam, actually. The majority of the victims of these pig butchering scams are not the elderly. They're actually people like you and I.

• 36:18Jonathan Cohen?

  So you think that how could they possibly do anything nefarious? I'm logging into Coinbase.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  It's even more than that. Sometimes they are actually legit, like they are websites with companies behind them that are legitimate. What they don't know is that the money, when you're seeing your deposit of $100 go up and up and up, and it looks like you're making bank, it is actually, that part is fake.

• 36:43Mayim Bialik?

  They're hacking into actual systems and investments.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  To convince you that you're making a lot of money. Except when you want to get your money back, there is no money there. And but they come up with more excuses. Oh, you put in $1,000, you've made $100,000, amazing, and now I want my money back. I want to get it out, right? And they say, okay, to get your money back, you just have to pay a fee. And once you're in, and this is the psychology behind scam victims, is that once you're in... Even if they they they sometimes only get you for $10, but once you're in, once you invested even a dollar into one of these scams, they have you. There's something psychologically that happens in a person's mind where at that point, you just want to believe it. It is really hard to admit that you've been scammed.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  You prefer to believe that this is all real and keep pouring money into this.

• 37:33Mayim Bialik?

  Why are we so gullible?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's a great question, but it is not. It is not. Not because we're dumb.

• 37:42Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of the kind of misogynistic read on this is that women are so susceptible and women this, but it's not just women and it's not stupid people.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  A lot of these crypto scams that are bringing in billions of dollars for criminal enterprises in Asia, men are the victims. It is not. They are really good at what they do.

• 38:00Jonathan Cohen?

  To speak to the men versus women, there was the case of the bank CEO.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it blew even my mind, even though I've been reporting on scams for so long. So this was a bank in Kansas, I believe, right? And it was a regional bank that was set up by all these local farmers and hardworking people. It was the bank that everybody trusted in town. And the head of this bank, the CEO, I think, I think he was the CEO of the bank, was one of the most trusted men in the town, right? He would, he was a very important person in the town. And suddenly you got mixed up with one of these crypto scams. And it started like this online, too. Somebody reached out to him. They became friends online. I don't know if this was a romance scam, but this person portrayed themselves as very,

• 38:47Speaker 01

  very, very, very wealthy and having these incredible returns on these investments that they were doing in crypto. This is somebody who's been a banker all their lives, but perhaps did not know a lot about crypto and was interested in learning more about it. And what are some of the businesses? What can I? Can I invest my money into this? And what often happens too is that they will say, they won't immediately say yes. They'll say, I have to check. I'm not sure if the company will allow you to invest the money. So then you feel special, right?

• 39:19Jonathan Cohen?

  There's a scarcity mindset.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yes, and and in this case with the banker was that the poor guy, I actually feel bad for him because he started putting initially his own money into this. And they started asking for more money, but well, in order to be able to unlock the money you've already made, you have to put in more money and then.

• 39:38Jonathan Cohen?

  I think this is where people can get stuck, right? You're like, OK, I have this money. I think I've put a little bit in, it's gotten a return. Why do I have to put money in to get the money out? And like, I don't think they quite understand sort of the snowball effect and how that perpetuates.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's what happens is that they they come up with these excuses. And again, they're very good. They've been crafting and they're becoming more and more professional at what they're doing and asking for money. Right? So their excuses are amazing and incredible, but.

• 40:08Jonathan Cohen?

  Like what?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  It's you have to pay the tax for this country or you have to get insurance.

• 40:13Mayim Bialik?

  The excuses are things that are either unverifiable or to verify them, you would have to do so much research that it's just not worth it. And that's when you convince yourself, and this is the psychology of it. That's when you convince yourself like, I'm being crazy. I'm thinking too much about this. Like, if it's that elaborate for me to figure it out, it's not real.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  So that is the other part that's so interesting is that sometimes they actually send you something. They'll send you money.

• 40:39Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yeah, that's a thing.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  If you're a few thousand dollars out and you're starting to have suspicions, wait, is this real? They they they think there's a much bigger bank of money that I can get. So I'm going to send the victim a thousand dollars now. They're going to believe us. Once that trust is established, then it's.

• 40:58Mayim Bialik?

  And that often happens that the first time they ask for money and you give it, they pay you right back. Like, oh, and that's all part of the scam.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Just like they send the romance victims flowers. They start sending you gifts. They send jewelry sometimes to the romance scammers, victims.

• 41:15Jonathan Cohen?

  So this banker ended up, it was like, I forget how much, it was like 24 or 48 million?

• 41:20Speaker 01

  It was 40 something million dollars that he stole then from the clients, from the customers of the bank, and the bank went down, the bank collapsed.

• 41:30Jonathan Cohen?

  So it's not only that he starts putting his own money in, and then he can't get his own money out, but he's like, I'm gonna double down and I'm just gonna start taking money, embezzling money from the bank in order to unlock, like-

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Because you're in so deep at this point, that admitting that you were a victim of a scam means your life is over.

• 41:49Jonathan Cohen?

  But can you imagine for a moment, you've put in maybe 20 times of insurance and fees, and I just have to unlock, like, the mental gymnastics to be like, oh yeah, this one's gonna work, is unbelievable.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  I spoke to a woman recently, who for over a year thought she was in a relationship with Jon Bon Jovi. She spent so much money, sending money to his manager-

• 42:14Mayim Bialik?

  Oh my god.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Because she thought she was gonna have a face-to-face with Jon Bon Jovi. Because, and Jon Bon Jovi, by the way, sent her, not the real Jon Bon Jovi, but she would get videos that look exactly, because that's the problem with AI now, which is gonna play the role that it is starting to play already in scams. She would get, you know, messages from what looked like Jon Bon Jovi saying, "Good morning, love my lovely, da-da-da, I, you know, and she was, started giving money." And at one point, she realized, this is all fake, this is all a scam, but she thought, what is, what's my life now? I don't have that anymore. Now I go back to just being my lonely self, without any prospect of happiness in this world.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  So I prefer to just believe that this is real. And this speaks to the loneliness epidemic, but I think that that's what happens a lot, even in these crypto scams, where- Admitting that you've been scammed and you've lost all this money is so incredibly depressing that I just want to keep feeding into this and believing for one more day that maybe this is true and maybe it's real.

• 43:22Jonathan Cohen?

  This speaks to like how the love scammers can be on the phone with you, can send you pictures, can even video chat with you. Can you describe some of the complication in the technology that is helping people be pulled through these scams?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, with a lack of complication, the advancement in these technologies that it is helping, right? So with these crypto scams, pig butchering, a really sad fact is that most people don't know, a lot of the people doing the scams in these Southeast Asian compounds, we're talking about factories full with tens of thousands of scammers, people living there day and night. And in many cases, it's forced labor. The majority of people that are stuck there are promised these jobs in the tech and finance industry and they are lured from all over the world to come to Southeast Asia to places like Myanmar and Cambodia. And once they get there, the bosses, the criminal bosses of these operations,

• 44:19Speaker 01

  they take away their passports and they're forced to scam Americans all day long, which is crazy. And as part of this, we did a story about it. Really, they beat them, they torture them, it's horrific. But as part of this whole operation, what we found is that they were using these female models. Because again, a lot of the victims in this case were men in the pig butchering scams. They were using these female models to have these conversations using, they would sit in front of a camera and the camera, the victim thought he was talking to Diana from Arkansas, whatever. This 25-year-old from Arkansas that was living this luxurious life, traveling around the world.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  And in fact, he was talking to, right, a 25-year-old from India, a man who was being tortured to do this. But then, there was a moment where they want to see you face to face, right? So they had these female models that would get in front of a screen and the screen would make you look like the Diana. Diana that he's been talking to and not like the female model like. But she was telling me that the technology was still not advanced enough. Which is why she had to be a woman, she had to gesticulate and act like a woman does. But every if she moved her head too much, it would glitch. And they could see that it's not Diana that they're talking to, but is with this woman. So she had to be very straight and careful with her movements. But now we're not at that stage anymore.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Now we're at a stage where, and it doesn't matter if there's even a person in there at all. They can just put something into their computer and tell them what to do, give them the orders, and it will create a fictitious person that sounds and looks exactly like the person you believe you've been talking to.

• 46:05Jonathan Cohen?

  I think the other thing that some people listening may poke out or pick up on is like, well, you're never in the US? You live this lavish lifestyle, we can never meet in person? We're just gonna constantly kick the can on that?

• 46:19Mayim Bialik?

  No, I mean, there are cases where for years, women, I mean, the stories that I know, women have been strung along and he'll say that he landed, but there was a change in the flight. And I, you can't imagine buying it, but there's so many other touch points and the flowers come and all this thing. But yes, this can go on for years.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  This person is now, it's not, it's not a stranger, right?

• 46:45Mayim Bialik?

  It's your boyfriend.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  People didn't understand, why would I ever send money to a stranger? This was not a stranger. In many ways, I knew, I thought I knew this person better than anyone else in my life. Many of the women that I've spoken to, the actual real victims of these romance scams, yeah, they've spent sometimes years speaking to these guys, years. And yeah, they, like they said, people think I'm ridiculous because I sent money to a stranger. He wasn't a stranger. In many ways, I knew this person better than I almost knew myself.

• 47:11Mayim Bialik?

  And we all want to think that if we were in that position, we wouldn't fall for that.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, but everybody is scamable.

• 47:18Mayim Bialik?

  Can you explain a little bit what is happening with the billions of dollars that circulate related to human bodies?

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's basically two different areas. There's the organ trafficking, right? Which is different from body parts. These were two different episodes we did for Trafficked, my Nadiro show. So, organ trafficking is unfortunately a booming industry because I think it's something like 17 Americans die every day. I believe I might have gotten that wrong, but it was a really high number of Americans die because they are on a waitlist for organs and those organs never show up and they die on that waitlist. And because of that, there's people who resort to the black market, who go to other countries.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  And in our story, it was actually in Mexico and Colombia. We traveled to Mexico and Colombia. And yeah, there was a black market for organs. So, Americans could travel to these countries and procure an organ. Liver, kidney, whatever organ you needed. Cornia, eye corneas, organs that you needed to be able to live. A lot of times from poor people. A lot of reports that were done 20 years ago, I think it's gotten much better. But in India, where there were black market operators that would go out to the poorest of the poorest neighborhoods and towns and procure people and say, "If you give me a kidney, I will pay you $10,000."

• 48:52Speaker 01

  And in many cases, these are people who need that money to survive, you know? And they're willing to give that kidney. In our story, what we found, although we could never fully corroborate that this was happening, we interviewed a guy called El Desvuesador, the D-boner, who apparently works for Cartel del Golfo in Mexico. And he said, and again, we could never corroborate his story, and we made this very transparent in our reporting, where he said they would snatch immigrants who were making their journey through the Darien Gap all the way to the United States. And because if something happens to them, nobody will know, you know? Because they're, you know, oftentimes with no communication, making this very dangerous

• 49:36Speaker 01

  journey all the way to the US. And many people, as we know, disappear while making these journeys. And how they would snatch migrants and basically... Kill them and take their organs, take their organs first and then, and then kill them. It was incredibly horrific and really tragic. So that's the organ trade. It is not, it turns out, Hollywood fabrication. This actually exists. Even I was shocked to the extent to which this exists. But then there's the body parts industry, which is bananas, which I had no idea existed, hadn't even seen in Hollywood either, once we started reporting on it. There's a burgeoning market called the oddities market, where you can go on places like Facebook or other marketplaces

• 50:22Speaker 01

  and buy a skull or buy a piece of bone or buy a, or some of the popular ones, a piece of skin. Inked skin to make wallets. There's people making wallets with, with human skin. Sometimes if the skin has tattoos, it'll go for more money. I interviewed a funeral director who showed me a pen, where inside the pen, it had like this see-through area and inside was a piece of human brain that he had procured online, that he had bought online. So there is, again, a thriving black market for these body parts everywhere. And then there's also the medical establishment.

• 51:05Mayim Bialik?

  Are wombs included in this kind of, you know, renting wombs? Yeah.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Oh, the surrogacy trade, that's another thing as well, yes. But also, you know, doctors all around the world, and in order to be able to train, you need body parts. And, and so that they were procuring was jaws and teeth for dentist practitioners. And, and we filmed in, it's so crazy. We filmed in a cemetery in Mexico City, where they were going and digging for old skulls and jaws of people to sell them on the black market.

• 51:45Jonathan Cohen?

  What does a jaw go for on the black market?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I didn't ask about this jaw at the time. I believe the skull could go anywhere from a thousand to five thousand dollars, sometimes more.

• 51:54Jonathan Cohen?

  I didn't know there was a black market for surrogacy.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Yes, it is allowed. Surrogacy exists in the United States. It's actually allowed. It's not allowed in a lot of countries, but it is in the United States. However, it's prohibitively expensive. So people, it can cost upwards of $200,000, $250,000. There's a lot of people out there that can't have children. And surrogacy is a very viable way for you to have, for people to have children. And so they're traveling to places like the Ukraine before the war and during the war. Actually, it's still happening. And Kenya and India until they close it off. Other parts of the world where surrogacy is allowed and much cheaper.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  But the problem with it in places like Kenya was what happened is because the laws are very sort of gray. There isn't an established rules as what can and cannot be done. And a lot of times it is people, you know, disadvantaged people, poor people who get taken or exploited. And so there were these black market operators that were going up to these women and promising, if you have a child for this couple, you'll make them very happy. We'll also pay you $40,000. Or actually, it costs $40,000 to have a child. They were promised $5,000, $10,000. And there were stories of women who woke up in the hospital without the baby they were carrying and without the $5,000 and were abandoned.

• 53:23Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know if it was Harper's or maybe it was The Atlantic. They did a whole piece on what's happening in some of these places is it's their factories for women who are kept there.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  100%. They're kept in these homes.

• 53:36Mayim Bialik?

  And they're forced to carry children.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:39Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and I was just thinking, especially with the medical stuff. You know, if it's clear that we don't have enough organs in this country, is there not a way for us to establish some sort of system that is not criminal, right? By which people can have access to organs, you know? I mean, I don't know.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that the organ system and the waitlist is completely broken. There have been many people trying to fix it. The problem is the moment you make it a business.

• 54:09Mayim Bialik?

  Like Karl Marx said, that any time you commodify anything, right? Love, sex, that's what happens. I mean, that's, you know. Well, and I think also what this reminded me of, and I don't know if you feel this, like, I don't necessarily believe in Satan. It's not a thing. But in literature, in Western literature, there's this notion of all the times that people can be tempted, right? It's like the devil in Daniel Webster, you know, that the devil is kind of always lurking, right? Always looking to test you. What if this? What if that? And it feels like your business, right? Is encountering situations where kind of good and evil are really hanging in the balances.

• 54:52Mayim Bialik?

  And I think the subtleties that you're picking up on, the hurt people hurt notion, right? Is showing that things that are evil are not, it's not so black and white.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that you say that because I think usually it's easier to find the bad in people, right? And we tend to focus more on that. And I think much of my job throughout these past 20 years has been in the midst of the, you know, most dangerous and most evil corners of the world, trying to find the goodness. Because I do believe there's good and bad in all of us. But it is harder sometimes to find the good in people. And that's always been the challenge for me and what I want to do with my work.

• 55:31Jonathan Cohen?

  Can we talk about exotic pets?

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, tigers. We did an episode on tiger trafficking.

• 55:39Jonathan Cohen?

  Everyone saw the Tiger King back when COVID happened. I think that exploded the idea in people's minds, but there's a lot more pets that are out there.

• 55:49Mayim Bialik?

  But there's also a cuisine aspect to this, right? And there's also medicinal properties. There are certain-

• 55:57Speaker 01

  In Asia, particularly in China, for many years, they believed that tiger bone was really great for your health. And then it's the shark fin soup, which is not medicinal, but it is a luxury item in China. So for big importing banquet, important banquets, and if you're trying to impress somebody, you serve them.

• 56:14Mayim Bialik?

  So is this some of the black market that we're seeing is for both?

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, supposed medicinal and luxury goods. Yes. And we went to a restaurant in New York. It's banned, by the way. Shark fins are banned in the United States, but I went to a restaurant in New York where I ordered shark fin soup and they offered it.

• 56:36Jonathan Cohen?

  Can we touch on honeypots? You recently interviewed a honeypot. Can you describe to people what that is and a little bit about how they operate?

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was really fascinating. So she's a Russian sex spy, or so she says she is.

• 56:52Mayim Bialik?

  Can you explain what a sex spy is?

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's somebody that uses their charm and sexuality to get state secrets or to do the things that the state wants you to do. So in her case, actually, it wasn't so much, she wasn't so much like a CIA agent trying to find secrets, but she was trying to infiltrate, according to her story, infiltrate these drug and criminal groups in Russia in order to get information that she would then give to the government to go after these criminal groups.

• 57:28Mayim Bialik?

  And she was recruited by the government supposedly?

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Yes, recruited by the government. There's been a whole podcast about her whole life, multiple episodes of this podcast were out there. I was fascinated by her story, started looking into her story, had lots of questions about the veracity of her story, and in my podcast, allowed her to tell her story and then confronted her with some of the holes that I'd found in her story and allowed her to give me her answers and allowed my listeners to decide whether they believe her story or not. Do sex spies exist around the world? 100%. Is it possible that she was out there working for the government and using her sexuality and?

• 58:10Mayim Bialik?

  Sex espionage.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, to find these secrets? Absolutely. Was she used by the Russian spy apparatus, intelligence apparatus? Because what we found out is that there's actually a lot of sex workers that are used for the exact same purpose, right? The government will go up to an escort and say, "We will pay you this amount to infiltrate and find, get into this person's house, find out secrets and things about this person." And that happens a lot. I think the part that is still, that I still have questions on is whether she was actually trained by the intelligence services or if, it's not my place to say whether she's saying the truth or not, I think our listeners will hear and decide for themselves.

• 58:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, it is interesting to think, are they just approaching women who are already in this trade and asking them to work for them? Or is there government organizations that are training them to do this?

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Right. And in her interview with us, and with me, she talked about how they trained her in detail of how to perform a blowjob and how to have sex and how to really get what she wants from a man.

• 59:21Mayim Bialik?

  There's a blowjob that gives you information and there's one that doesn't?

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Apparently, apparently one, there is one.

• 59:26Jonathan Cohen?

  You recently had Anna Delvion. I saw the fictionalized version of her life. It came out a few years ago and it was shocking. Tell us a little bit about her story. Obviously, people should listen to the episode on your podcast, but give us a little bit of a primer or teaser.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so she was known as the fake Harris, right? She arrived in New York and she portrayed herself as being part of this millionaire, billionaire family from Germany. And she started basically staying in hotels for free. She's racking up this bill that she wasn't able to pay, convincing her friends to go on these very lavish, luxurious trips that then she would ask their friends to put on their credit card because she couldn't pay. But she actually got in some boardrooms with some bankers and forged documents and convinced them that if they gave her a loan for hundreds of thousands of dollars, that she would be

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  able to pay them back because she had all these documents that proved that she was a Harris of these millions and millions of dollars in Germany, when in fact, all of that was a lie. And she ended up being caught. She did time in prison and she is now out there. She's still with an ankle bracelet, actually. She wears an ankle bracelet because she's on, she has an immigration case going.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  I found her to be one of the hardest guests I've ever interviewed in my entire life. Most of the people that I interview, former sex spies or former cocaine traffickers, people who did horrific crimes and come to my podcast and talk openly about what they did and what they've learned. And the podcast is all about redemption and really trying to learn the consequences that led you to that life. And then what have you done since to try to come out the other way? And redemption, again, being a real big through line. And with her, it was really hard to get her. She didn't want to talk about what her crimes. She portrayed the friends that she traveled with as being losers because they never amounted to anything. And every time I'd ask her questions, she would just say, I don't know,

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  I don't want to talk about that. So at one point, I said, so Hannah, you don't want to talk about your past. You don't want to talk, I'm trying to talk to you about what you're doing now, what you want to do in the future. Even that seems to be hard for you to talk about. I don't understand why you came on my podcast. And she said, I don't know either because you're not paying me. And I was like, I'm not, but I am trying to sort of understand you and you're making it really hard for me. So what began as curiosity on my part to learn more about the Anna Delvey behind the Netflix scripted series turned into somewhat of a, like, argument between us, which made it very uncomfortable. Not a situation that I'm comfortable with at all.

• 1:02:18Mayim Bialik?

  Well, it's got to be hard. Also, you're confronting people, right, about some of their darkest truths. But if they are not ready to sort of come clean, there's going to be all those defenses up, right? Which I would imagine would happen much more with, you know, a cocaine trafficker or an assassin than with someone like her. But that's just, that's the psychology of it, right?

• 1:02:41Jonathan Cohen?

  There were aspects of her character in the fictionalized version that had a lot of similarities to that, like just a refusal to acknowledge that anything was wrong, a deny till you die mentality.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  That's true, and if you go back to some of the interviews that she's given in the past, she has always come across as that, as not somebody that really wants to open up and talk about, you know, and ask, you know, and say sorry to the people that she's caused harm to. But I thought somehow, I thought that this was going to be different. I thought, because I'm not going to come at her with an accusatory tone, I'm just coming at her because I am genuinely curious.

• 1:03:20Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, but I think there's a psychiatric component here also to the kind of elaborateness of that sort of longstanding lie, which makes me very curious also about these scammers that we're talking about, right, who are sitting behind a computer and kind of doing this day in and day out. That's very different than sort of perpetrating, right, a different identity of yourself. I'm not saying it's a dissociative identity disorder, but I'm saying there's a certain amount of dissociation that has to happen from whatever self you used to have, and I think that's going to be very different, you know, it's, I mean, it's sociopathic, you know?

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm not, right, I'm not a doctor, I have no idea. There have been a lot of comments from psychologists and psychoanalysts who have said things like that, you know, after watching the podcast, the episode. I still, even after the uncomfortable situation I have with her, I don't want to vilify her. Everybody has a reason to be, I don't know, I didn't go through what she went through, I have no idea, but what I don't understand is why then come on the podcast if you don't really want to talk? And then it was funny because she went on another podcast after, and she spoke much more with another guy, much more than she did on mine, partly, I think, to show like, it wasn't my fault, it was her, she just didn't know how to interview me, which perhaps is true.

• 1:04:38Mayim Bialik?

  You're constantly witnessing, obviously, terror. You're constantly witnessing, you know, the effects of this kind of warfare. You're also getting a front seat into the hypocrisy and, you know, the absurdity of so much of the theatrics, right?

• 1:04:56Jonathan Cohen?

  It's theater. That's exactly right.

• 1:04:58Mayim Bialik?

  You know, you think about sort of what Nixon was, you know, even trying to do with the war on drugs, and in many cases, it did. It became a war on black people, on brown people, you know? And so what you're seeing is this sort of downstream effect of us sort of grandstanding, right? About, and I'm not just thinking about it in terms of this. I think you probably see that everywhere. How do you, as a human being, deal with kind of living in that hypocrisy that you see in every aspect of this work?

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  I think people look at the work that I do and think, "Boy, she must really have a depressing view of the world." But it's actually so not the case. I think it's just the fact that I'm spending so much time with people that we consider the bad guys, right? But I can still find elements of redemption and relatability with all of them has really actually given me a very positive view of the world. And it's not just me, my team. We spend time with the worst of the worst, right? And we can still connect on a human level. Again, not condoning what they do whatsoever, but the fact that there can still be human connections, then that shows me that these aren't people that are completely irredeemable, right? In many ways, I actually find more hope,

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  more equality in the black market than I do many times in the legal market, as crazy as this is to say.

• 1:06:22Jonathan Cohen?

  I was gonna ask if you wanted to leave the viewers with any, and the audience with any sort of insight from seeing the edges of the one-third of the world that lives in the shadows?

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's this idea of redemption and relatability, right? That even on the edges of our society that we can find, still find people who are redeemable and relatable. And that Is really, I think, the point of the work that I do. And I also hope that they're really great conversation starters for all of us about the lives we lead and what we choose to do with them. You know, we live at a time of epic inequality, unheard of inequality, where 10% of the world lives with under a dollar a day, under the poverty line. And many of the choices they make is because of the lack of opportunities. So we should all look at ourselves in order to what are we doing with the privileges and the opportunities that we've been given in this world.

• 1:07:18Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you so much. And where can people find out all the things, obviously, about the Hidden Third and anything else you're doing?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the podcast is out there on every podcast platform. It's also out there on YouTube. It's called The Hidden Third. And my show on Agio is called Trafficked. You can watch it on Disney Plus or Hulu. And I'm also working on a few other projects.

• 1:07:37Mayim Bialik?

  Amazing. Thank you so much, Mariana.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:07:43Mayim Bialik?

  I just wanted to clarify, I don't tend to sort of demonize, I mean, the Anadeli, that case is incredibly complicated. And I also, I didn't mean to sort of throw out the sociopathic, you know, moniker as a condemnation. What I'm saying is I think that there's a deep pathology to people like that who can lead, it's not even a double life, who can lead a life like that and be so immersed in this story that you create. What I'm interested in is, you know, Mariana's dealing with people who have to do this for a living, or in many cases are forced to do this for a living. What is going on, right, in the manufacturing of this kind of reality?

• 1:08:28Mayim Bialik?

  And, you know, what I've learned from the shows that I've watched is that it's incredibly complicated as a scammer to be keeping track, you know, especially in romance scams of all these different people. You've got to know this one's, like, they learn your family members, they learn everything about you. And there's sort of like files that they keep to keep track because they're often speaking to numerous people at the same time. That's just the, my last note on romance scams. But when I go back to, you know, the beginning of this episode, it's unbelievable, the people that she's encountering, the way that she's encountering them. And also, there is something kind of... Hopeful, right, about her belief that human-to-human contact and really connecting with people

• 1:09:12Mayim Bialik?

  helps us understand some of the systems that have been put in place that get us to these places.

• 1:09:20Jonathan Cohen?

  That's what impacts me the most is thinking about the systems, especially when we talk about the guns going down to Mexico and we, none of the problems that we see are isolated, right? They're all, we're all part of a larger system and so, understanding the influences and how she really does connect with people and once people see some of the impacts or are given an opportunity to find another path, how often they take it.

• 1:09:46Mayim Bialik?

  And I think also, you know, I kept thinking of the word humbling, like how humbling it is for her to do this work and how humbling it is for us to be shown, right, the realities of this. So many people do not want to know about this, really. So many people do not want to think about this, they don't want to go there, it's depressing, it's hard, but I think that there has to be some sort of hope for what this kind of journalism also can teach us, not just about the criminals and the people behind these black and gray markets, but it teaches us about us and where our vulnerability lies.

• 1:10:21Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, and very practically, I think we need to be aware, especially as AI proliferates and some of the scamming technology becomes more sophisticated, people are vulnerable. I was talking with someone locally the other day and I was telling him about pig butchering and this intensity of the scams that are happening and he's like, "Oh yeah, my mom lost $12,000. She's a woman in her 70s, she got a call saying, 'Hey, I'm from this bank, I'm just checking, we need to validate your password.'" She gave them the password.

• 1:10:57Mayim Bialik?

  No!

• 1:10:58Jonathan Cohen?

  And $12,000 was drained from her account.

• 1:11:00Mayim Bialik?

  The thing that I was thinking about, and this is just, you know, because I'm such a Luddite, I was like, "How do you like your internet now, everyone? Are you enjoying it?" Because there weren't these scams 5,000 years ago.

• 1:11:11Jonathan Cohen?

  There were different scams.

• 1:11:12Mayim Bialik?

  So there were different scams, and I was also thinking of that. It's like, this is one of the worst things that AI will change. This is one of the hardest, most painful things that AI will all of a sudden take to a whole other level. And this isn't like, "He's on my spice trade, I don't want him there, I'm gonna make him go on this spice trade." Like, also, I'm not allowed to joke about the woman who learns to perform oral sex?

• 1:11:41Jonathan Cohen?

  I haven't seen the episode.

• 1:11:44Mayim Bialik?

  But I did think about, I did think about every James Bond movie, which also, considering, I mean, my mother was obviously more of the feminist in the house than my father, she would not have supported all the James Bond movies my father dragged us to. But when you think about what those scenarios were...

• 1:12:04Jonathan Cohen?

  They're to lure James.

• 1:12:05Mayim Bialik?

  They're to lure James, and also is such a, again, such like a demonization of women and of, you know, that sort of notion. But that's happening. And this is the lady who investigates it. It's unreal to me.

• 1:12:18Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, I do wonder if there is a secret government program.

• 1:12:23Mayim Bialik?

  If they're teaching remote viewing, they are teaching [BLEEP] jobs.

• 1:12:29Jonathan Cohen?

  For more content like this, exclusive content not released anywhere else, check us out on Substack. We'll be breaking down this episode and hearing all of your opinions. My and Be Alex Breakdown on Substack.

• 1:12:39Mayim Bialik?

  From our breakdowns, the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.