Last year, $12 billion was stolen from Americans through scams alone. A bank CEO lost everything. A woman in love with Jon Bon Jovi found out it wasn’t him — a year later. And the journalist who investigates scams for a living became one of the scammed. Everybody is scammable. Including you.
In this week’s episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, Mayim and Jonathan sit down with Mariana van Zeller — Emmy and Peabody Award-winning investigative journalist, host of Trafficked on National Geographic, and host of The Hidden Third podcast — for a conversation about the black and gray markets that make up a third of the global economy, and what twenty years embedded inside them has taught her about the systems that create both the criminal and the victim.
What she finds, in every dark corner of the black market, is this: no one is born a criminal. No one, not even the worst of humanity, sets out to become one. Cracked healthcare systems, failed immigration policies, and the war on drugs that created the epidemic it claimed to fight, all fuel the scam industry. Mariana van Zeller transforms how we see these “criminal scammers”: the trapped and tortured victims forced to target you.
In this episode, they also explore:
