The Indicator from Planet Money
The Indicator from Planet Money
Episode•October 5, 2025•1 min

Vice Series: The evolving business of crime

Crime doesn’t resemble the old days. A deepfake of your voice can be used to convince a relative you need money. AI bots are capable of colluding in financial markets. There are seemingly countless new strategies of making data breaches more common. This week on The Indicator from Planet Money, we bring you five episodes digging into the evolving business of crime. For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.  To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy

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Transcript

0:03

Rain pounds against the window of Detective Billy Hull's small town office. He rubs his temples and slicks down his whiskey. Crooked cops, bet jobs. It's rough out there.

0:14

They say every crime's got a story and every story's got a sucker.

0:21

Detective Hull, I need your help. I got in too deep with a numbers racket and now I marked the mob's on my tail.

0:30

So the mob's running numbers again, huh?

0:33

Well, hot tamale, could you give me a hand here?

0:36

I've been out of that tune for a while.

0:43

Crime doesn't resemble the old days anymore. Today's crime smells like synthetic drugs, data breaches, deepfakes.

0:56

All right, kid, I can help you. But first I'm going to need to listen to like five podcast episodes

1:03

this coming week. The Indicator from Planet Money brings you a week of episodes on the evolving business of crime.

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