Priscila Barbosa: The Rideshare Robinhood

Scamfluencers

Wondery

Society & Culture

4.1 • 7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Priscila Barbosa moves to Boston from Brazil in 2018, she sets out to pay off her debts and send money back home by driving for rideshare platforms like Uber and Lyft. Eventually, she decides her cut isn’t enough, and she rallies other undocumented immigrants to create one of the most lucrative illicit rideshare rings in Beantown. But this millennial #girlboss learns that suspicious groupchats and Instagrams flaunting her cozy new lifestyle will hurt her chances of staying one step ahead of Silicon Valley and the feds. Eventually, Priscilla’s free ride delivers her to a final destination: jail.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to scam fluencers early and ad-free right now.
0:04.7	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondry app or Apple Podcasts.
0:10.0	Sarah, we all get what feels like a million spam messages each week with offers that always sound too good to be true. And they usually are.
0:23.3	Have you ever fallen victim to one of these scams? No, I haven't actually, but a friend of mine was
0:29.6	expecting a package and she just happened to get one that was specifically about U.S. Customs.
0:35.3	And mindlessly, you know, she was like walking and like put in her
0:37.9	credit card information. Instantly, she got a fraud alert for like $2,500. Yikes. It was crazy how
0:45.3	quickly it happened. I felt for one once when I was like 22 when they were like first starting to
0:51.1	happen and I have never fallen for once since. I'm so afraid of them.
0:55.1	No, they are really, really scary.
0:57.6	Well, these scamming operations are growing really fast.
1:01.0	They target anyone in any language all around the world.
1:04.7	But the truth is, the person on the other side of that message might be trapped inside a giant
1:09.2	scam factory where they're forced to scam
1:11.6	others against their will. Yeah, it is awful. Many have been lured into compounds in Southeast Asia by the
1:18.3	promise of an amazing job. Only, they wind up sitting in front of a computer for 12 to 14 hours a day,
1:25.0	forced to scam victims, or risk being tortured or even killed.
1:29.7	You and I both recently listened to Scam Factory, which tells the story of the people behind
1:34.1	these messages.
1:35.3	It's an incredible firsthand account of one family's journey into a scam compound, and their
1:40.6	quest to try and escape.
1:42.3	The series takes you inside a scam factory and shows the sophisticated recruitment tactics
	...

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