First the news: Episode 2 of Shell Game is out! Get it here, get it wherever you get them. This week: Me and My Scammer.

I’ve spent a perhaps unhealthy portion of my career reporting on con artists, scammers, and other purveyors of the darks arts of fraud and deception. I’ve covered a fake prince who worked as an FBI informant, Instagram influencers who were secret scam kings, and—in my last big podcast, Persona—a French-Israeli scammer who conned Europe’s wealthiest families out of tens of million dollars… over the phone. Technology and globalization have combined with old-fashioned hustle to create a golden age of scamming that we are unlucky enough to be living in.

So it made sense that as soon as I got my AI voice agent trained up by talking to corporate customer service, I would send it into the murky depths of rip offs and cons. (The show is called Shell Game, after all.)

I wanted to know how spammers and scammers would respond, if they found themselves trying to swindle an enthusiastic AI version of me. I wanted to know how they were using these technologies themselves. And above all I wanted to know what would happen if one of their AIs tried to scam mine. But first I had to find them. How did I do it? Give it a listen.

Thanks to everyone has listened to, supported, and spread the word about this completely independent, self-funded show. After just the first episode, because of you we cracked the top 10 technology podcasts on Apple. We’re aiming higher, so please keep listening and spreading the word!

Evan