This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human. Hey, what's going on? It's Dexter. So we're doing something a little different this week while our team is away for the holiday. We're going to bring you an episode of a podcast called Click Here. It's produced by our friends at Recorded Future News and PRX, and it's all about the people who are making and breaking our digital world. Today's episode follows a hacking group called Illusive Comet.

They don't rely on zero days or ransomware.

They just use charm and zoom.

To fall under their trap, you don't need to be reckless, just polite.

Here's Dina Temple Raston, the host of Click Here with The Story.

Jake Allen used to work behind the velvet ropes in Las Vegas.

Among other things, he worked the cabanas at Planet Hollywood.

And for a while, he thought that life sparkled.

You know, it's funny because when I was going to UNLV, I was in a fraternity there.

And you'd say, yeah, you know, I would love to have a nightclub job because I can continue this type of lifestyle.

But it got a little old.

Once you get into that lifestyle after about a year or two, you're like, man, this kind of sucks.

It wasn't just that he was awake when the rest of his friends were asleep, or that he missed all kinds of milestones in other people's lives.

It was just kind of lonely.

And he worried that he'd never find something as exciting, where he'd be making that kind of money.

Until one day, he was on a Reddit forum and found Ethereum, the cryptocurrency.

So I found Ethereum in 2016 on a Reddit forum called Wall Street Betts.

To Jake, trading Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin,

felt like opening a secret door into a whole new world,

one that was intoxicating, unpredictable,

and full of promise. I was very fascinated by this idea of how it kind of strips power away from a lot of the central authorities. And for me, I was very certain that this was going to be

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