Soft Targets
Short cyber thrillers about ordinary people and the technology already in their houses. Every story is built on a real incident, ends with two pages naming the actual cases, agencies, and figures behind the plot, and can be read in one sitting.
Stay on the Line
He is the voice on the phone. Tonight the grandmother talks back.
Daniel Otieno answered a job ad in Nairobi. Eleven weeks later he sits at a desk in a compound on the Myanmar border, a guard on the stairs and razor wire on the roof, working a script that turns his voice into an American grandson in tears. The quota is the quota. The floor manager keeps a list.
Tonight the call goes to Marjorie Bell, seventy-eight, who has already lost a husband and does not intend to lose anything else. She keeps him talking. He should hang up. He does not.
Somewhere between the two of them, a courier is already on the road.
The grandparent scam run from a forced-labor scam compound, with AI voice cloning, as documented by the DOJ, OHCHR, OFAC, and the FBI IC3 Elder Fraud Report.
Grandma, It's Me
A two a.m. call, in a voice she would know anywhere.
Ruth Halloran taught eighth grade for thirty-one years and does not scare easily. Then the phone rings at seven minutes past two and it is her grandson, arrested, crying, begging her not to tell his mother. There is a lawyer on the line who can make it go away by morning. There is a number to wire. There is a clock.
Ruth has the money. What she does not have is any reason to doubt that voice, and the man on the other end of the call knows exactly how long to keep her on it.
The longer she stays on the line, the more he has.
AI voice-clone grandparent scam, per FTC and FBI IC3 data on impersonation fraud against older adults.
Out of Office
She gave the assistant her inbox for one week.
Renee Halvorsen keeps the books at a four-partner CPA firm and has not taken a real vacation in six years. This time she sets up the AI assistant properly: it answers routine mail, drafts the replies, queues payments for her approval. She writes the verification rule herself. Any change to bank details must be confirmed in writing by the person who requested it.
Eight days later there is a client escrow account, a change of bank details, and a confirmation in writing from the person who requested it.
Everyone followed the process. That is the problem.
Business email compromise through an AI email assistant, per FBI IC3 BEC figures and the OWASP LLM Top 10.
Reading order
Same as the numbering. Every story stands alone; the numbers are release order, not a required sequence. Book 0 is the free entry point and shares its attack with Book 1 from the opposite side of the call, so reading them as a pair is the natural start.
More titles follow.