What the Hack?

Same store, same day, different price. David Dayen takes us on a deep dive into the murky cyberscape of surveillance pricing, we enlist young people to prove it's real, and Grace Gedye lays out a future law that might...

Fictitious discounts. payday markups. AI setting airfares in real time. Investigative reporter Derek Kravitz, Grace Gedye (Consumer Reports) are joined byDavid Dayen to expose the algorithms that decide if you pay more...

Welcome to the infuriating world of surveillance pricing. Chris "the Producer" Parr created a digital nobody to find out whether companies would charge the new him less. What he found was stranger. So how much does what...

Benn Jordan—musician, acoustic scientist, and one of the sharpest minds on surveillance technology—joins 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and the ACLU’s Jay Stanley to trace how surveillance went ambient— and what it means...

A stranger showed up at Anna Nasset's art gallery with a painting called "Marry Me." She said no. He did not get the message — for 15 years. Now Anna trains law enforcement on stalking, because someone has to explain...

Coco Berthmann sold a survival story. Amanda Riley sold a cancer battle. Both were lies that raided communities, wallets, and trust. Journalists Sarah Ganim, Karen Given, and Charlie Webster tell the stories; cognitive...

Fake screenshots. Burner numbers. Forged emails. A stalker who somehow always knew what a 15-year-old was wearing. Blogger Cathy Holman thought she knew everyone in her tiny Wyoming town—so who's been terrorizing her...

Aaron Parnas is the Walter Cronkite of Substack. He has millions of followers who follow him on every platform to get his just-the-facts reporting, but even the most trusted voice on TikTok has some thoughts when it...

Cybercrime expert Gary Warner joins to discuss Nigerian confraternities, the "campus cults" rooted in idealism that morphed into a multi-billion dollar transnational organized crime network. Learn about the "money...

Ethan Merritt is an WTH alum, but the last time he was on the pod he was the target. This time, he asked for it: Find four flags using only publicly viewable data. Social media posts, podcasts, leaked passwords, a...

A teenager rage-hacks a Tetris leaderboard and becomes a millionaire by 18. Now Tal Kollender breaks into companies for a living—and fixes whatever made that possible. We talk about that and Anthropic's Mythos, which is...

Marketing visionary Seth Godin explains how the Internet got hijacked by an attention-stealing spam economy that keeps us in an endless loop of badly targeted marketing. Godin's anti-spam playbook: demand companies earn...

A retired Army Colonel becomes the unwitting face of thousands of romance scams. Bryan Denny has been breaking the hearts of people he's never met for years. What do you do when hundreds of crime rings are using your...

She said her name was Clara Harper from Chase Bank. She argued with a police officer. She needed gift cards. Brian Ward shares the three times his 85-year-old father got scammed — and why the most unsettling thing...

Craig doesn't have Facebook. He's not a gamer. He builds things, fixes things, grows things, has an assortment of antique chainsaws. So why is his name, age, address, and phone number sitting on a website right now...