who is profiting from scam texts – and can we stop them?
kill switch
Kaleidoscope
4.7 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If it feels like you’re getting more scammy texts in the past few years, you’re not imagining it. Scam texts have exploded since 2020, and the operation behind them has become a massively lucrative industry. Dexter talks to Eric Priezkalns, a self-proclaimed ‘troublemaker’ in the telecommunications world and founder of the website Commsrisk, about the new technology that’s making scam texts easier than ever, what some of the weirder, long-game schemes are after, who’s behind these operations, and if there’s anything we can do to stop them.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read:
- Eric’s website Commsrisk: https://commsrisk.com/
- Eric’s article on Huang, the boy sold to a Myanmar scam compound: https://commsrisk.com/17-year-old-chinese-girl-accused-of-selling-boyfriend-into-myanmar-scam-compound-slavery/
- How to turn off 2g for android: https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/cellular-security/toggle-2g
Listen + Watch:
- Labi Siffre - Bless the Telephone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpy2O6fYiTk
- A Tribe Called Quest - Skypager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYc50S23pQY
- kill switch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8oh6zDRg1zgHkyOfikoeQS7cafAytstv&si=zrCE7MYWVBgmpWqi
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:14.4 | Let me read you the last text I got. |
| 0:16.4 | Great opportunity up ahead. |
| 0:18.2 | A stock is about to go up 60%. |
| 0:20.1 | Would you like a trading signal? |
| 0:22.2 | Here's another one that I got earlier. Hi, Jennifer. What's the news? That's all it says. |
| 0:27.6 | I get these all the time. You probably do too. Maybe they even call you Jennifer. And it seems no matter what |
| 0:33.3 | I do, these things keep coming in. So scams themselves aren't new, but technology is definitely |
| 0:40.3 | adding to it. What's changed is that now people are using computers to do the communications, |
| 0:47.8 | to create the communications, where previously they would have literally had to press buttons on a phone. |
| 0:56.9 | It opens up the floodgates in terms of the volume of messages that you can create |
| 1:03.4 | and a number of people that you can hurt around the world. |
| 1:07.6 | Eric Prescott has been in the telecommunications business for a long time. |
| 1:11.3 | He's worked at T-Mobile, at Sky, at WorldCom, and that's just some of the places. |
| 1:16.3 | In 2006, he founded a site called CombsRisk, and he left the corporate world. |
| 1:21.0 | CombsRisk reports on the telecom industry, and specifically the crimes that are associated with it, |
| 1:26.5 | including the influx of scam texts. |
| 1:29.0 | He says that scams via text have risen over the last decade, as technology has made them easier |
| 1:33.6 | to send en masse. |
| 1:35.4 | And then you had the pandemic, and criminals couldn't commit some of the crimes they'd previously |
| 1:39.7 | committed before, so that became an accelerant for those changes. |
... |
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