What happens after you get scammed? Can you get your money back?

By Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi,

Jeff Guo, Keith Romer, Willa Rubin

Published May 30, 2024 at 8:53 AM EDT

We are living in a kind of golden age for online fraudsters. As the number of apps and services for storing and sending money has exploded – so too have the schemes that bad actors have cooked up to steal that money. Every year, we hear more and more stories of financial heartbreak. What you don't often hear about is what happens after the scam?

On today's show, we follow one woman who was scammed out of over $800,000 on her quest to get her money back. That journey takes her from the halls of the FBI to the fraud departments of some of the country's biggest financial institutions. And it offers a window into how the systems that are theoretically designed to help the victims of financial cybercrime actually work in practice.

This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Jeff Guo. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Keith Romer. It was engineered by Neal Rauch and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Music: Universal Music Production - "Morning Chorus," "Love Still," and "Blue Wonder."

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Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi is a host and reporter for Planet Money, telling stories that creatively explore and explain the workings of the global economy. He's a sucker for a good supply chain mystery — from toilet paper to foster puppies to specialty pastas. He's drawn to tales of unintended consequences, like the time a well-intentioned chemistry professor unwittingly helped unleash a global market for synthetic drugs, or what happened when the U.S. Patent Office started granting patents on human genes. And he's always on the lookout for economic principles at work in unexpected places, like the tactics comedians use to protect their intellectual property (a.k.a. jokes).

See stories by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

Jeff Guo

Jeff Guo (he/him) is a co-host and reporter for Planet Money, NPR's award-winning podcast that finds creative, entertaining ways to make sense of the complicated forces that move our economy. He joined the team in 2022.

Keith Romer

Keith Romer has been a contributing reporter for Planet Money since 2015. He has reported stories on risk-pooling among poker players, whether it's legal to write a spin-off of the children's book Goodnight Moon and the time one man cornered the American market in onions. Sometimes on the show, he sings.

See stories by Keith Romer

Willa Rubin

Willa Rubin is an associate producer at Planet Money, and she likes telling stories that explore how the economy impacts everyday people. Before joining Planet Money, she helped launch and co-produced Gimlet Media and the Wall Street Journal's podcast "The Journal," a daily news show which has won awards from the New York Press Club and from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. She previously interned at The Indicator from Planet Money. She has a master's degree in journalism from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY and studied politics at Oberlin College. She's a lifelong New Yorker and loves cats.