Stolen Podcast with Erin West

Episode 75: Marc Grens talks about leaving the industry he helped to build after seeing companies consistently sacrificing customer safety for profit.
A couple of years went by, and we sat in the room and said, ‘Anybody who does over X dollars in a small amount of time is probably a scam victim.’ — Marc Grens, Chaintrax Cyber
For nearly a decade, Grens ran one of the earliest and largest crypto ATM companies in the country — an industry built, in his words, on an “underbanked” story that never matched reality. In this candid conversation with Erin West, Marc exposes the backstory of an industry he helped build and eventually left.
Not one customer has ever raised their hand — when Indiana banned it, when Tennessee banned it, when Minnesota banned it, — and said, ‘You ruined my life.’ — Marc Grens
 
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We tell people to stop and verify, but what can they actually check? Scammers can fake a financial advisor’s credentials, buy top sponsored search results, and build a Facebook group with 3,000 members and a 4.7-star rating.
Aleks Ring, a longtime Operation Shamrock volunteer who works with scam victims every day, explains why the slogans fall short.
In this quick take, she talks about:
Why fear and hope shut down good judgment
Why romance scams are the hardest to break
What real collaboration between banks, tech, and law enforcement would look like

Episode 74: What happens when you stop talking about victims and start listening to them?
April DeValkenaere, a former banker, cop, and white-collar investigator; therapist Cathy Wilson; and Kathy Waters of Advocating Against Romance Scammers built a symposium to find out, with a survivor seated in working group to tell the experts whether their fixes would actually have helped.
We talk about victim-blaming language in the therapy room and at the police counter, a survivor’s idea to run scam warnings in the middle of Jeopardy, and how human connection — the very thing scammers weaponize — may be the only way to break the spell.

Episode 73: Hieu Ngo’s path to a career as a cybercrime investigator is anything but typical. From 2005 to 2012, Hieu was a hacker. He stole U.S. identities and resold them on the dark web. In 2012, a U.S. Secret Service investigation lured him from Vietnam to Guam, where he was arrested and eventually sentenced to serve time in a U.S. federal prison. Hieu tells Erin West about the investigation, his incarceration, and how a letter at the sentencing hearing changed the direction of his life.
Get the episode notes on the web: www.operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen
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Episode 72: Brian Mason of the Edmonton Police Service shares how live scam intelligence and public-private partnerships can stop scams in progress.
Erin West talks with Detective Brian Mason of the Edmonton Police Service, a leading expert in cybercrime and large-scale scam investigations in Canada. Injured in the line of duty in 2019, Mason turned to the one crime he believed was never fully investigated: fraud. He now leads a team focused on transnational organized crime, money laundering, and the networks behind scams.
The footprints, the fingerprints; everything is there. The data trail is there. We can find those digital pieces. — Brian Mason, Edmonton Police Service
Get the episode notes and video version of the podcast on our website.
 
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Episode 71: Transnational organized crime expert Jason Tower explains why crackdowns on scam compounds aren’t stopping scams, just moving them from one region in Asia to another.
The Myanmar military targeted 3 hubs in a border area that has 43. So there’s a lot of choices. And so Myanmar military went about demolishing KK Park. — Jason Tower, Global Initiative against Organized Crime
When Congress wants to understand the criminal empires behind scams, they call Jason Tower. Jason is a source for many news outlets worldwide. He is a leading expert, specifically what’s happening in Myanmar and new activity in South Asia. 
Erin West and Jason Tower meet to talk about his new report, “Criminal Convergence? Chinese-origin scam syndicates and their reach into South Asia.”  (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal). Jason traces how the industry follows a predictable pattern: When a country cracks down on organized criminal operations — as the Philippines did with offshore gaming operators or POGOs — the syndicates simply relocate to wherever regulation is weakest.
>> Watch the video version and get the episode notes.
Episode Sponsors  
Thank you to our Stolen podcast sponsors, ‪BioCatch and Scamnetic.‬
 

Episode 70: Mike Bliss didn’t know much about crypto fraud when he met his first victim in August 2025. With coaching from experienced peers, he now investigates fraud cases and helps other officers.
She said, ‘I just lost $15,000.’ She was distraught; she didn’t know what to do. And quite honestly, I didn’t know what to do. — Mike Bliss, Crypto Coalition
Erin West talks with Mike Bliss, a patrol officer in Fairway, Kansas, who dove headfirst into crypto fraud investigation after a single case pulled him in. In August 2025, a 27-year-old victim told Bliss she'd lost $15,000 through a crypto ATM — a concept he initially dismissed as untraceable “fake money.”
But the case intrigued him. He posted a message on a listserv and was lucky enough to connect with Tom Alber, known as “US Crypto Cop.” Alber drove out to Fairway in the middle of the night shift, walked Mike through tracing the funds, and introduced him to Operation Shamrock’s Crypto Coalition, a global network of law enforcement crypto investigators and analysts.
 
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.‬

Episode 69: Iowa has found a way to stop elder financial fraud on the very first transaction — before the money is gone. Matt Mortvedt and Jessica McGraw of the Iowa Insurance Division join Erin West to break down their "detect, deploy, disrupt" playbook. They explain how they reach victims early, seize scam websites and the crypto wallets behind them, curb crypto ATMs, and treat every scam victim as the victim of a serious crime. It is a blueprint that any state could copy.
 
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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 68: Susan Ralston outlines the evolution of fraud and why she considers it a human, emotional crime whose victims deserve empathy over judgement.
Erin West meets with Tower Federal Credit Union VP and COO to talk about changing the fraud conversation to focus on empathy. Susan’s career started at a grocery store cash register and evolved into decades of frontline fraud-fighting experience.
We need to put our banker hats down and be human. — Susan Ralston, Tower Federal Credit Union
Susan traces the transformation of fraud from small-town check washing to organized, transnational scam operations that exploded after COVID-19. She explains why considers she fraud to be a fundamentally human, emotional issue. And she shares how her team trains credit-union staff to spot red flags, avoid judgment, and slow suspicious transactions before it’s too late to help the member.
The victimization isn’t just money. It’s trust, it’s loved ones, it’s people’s dreams that are being taken away. — Susan Ralston, TFCU
 
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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 67: How an assignment with the DEA led to Detective Scott Simons becoming one of the nation’s go-to crypto tracers and the investigative lead for Operation Shamrock’s Crypto Coalition.
The Greenfield, Wisconsin officer's career took an unusual turn in 2015 when he opened one of the earliest cyber drug-trafficking cases in the history of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Simons taught himself to trace cryptocurrency and navigate the dark web to investigate cases that spanned Miami, Argentina, and Albania.
Scott’s self-taught expertise now anchors his role leading Operation Shamrock’s law enforcement triage team, where he has personally worked on or overseen hundreds of crypto fraud cases. Erin West and Scott trace his path from beat cop to one of the country’s most trusted resources for tracing stolen crypto.
Watch the video of the episode on the Operation Shamrock website.
 
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.