Assaf Kipnis spent years hunting financially motivated bad actors on Meta's e-crime team and in Google's Ads Trust & Safety org.

He now runs KTLYST Labs, where he's building the threat intelligence tooling he always wished existed inside big platforms. We get into the practical realities of scam fighting — what's actually changed in the AI era, what hasn't, and why so much of the industry's effort gets aimed at the wrong targets.

About the guest:

Assaf Kipnis is the founder of KTLYST Labs. Previously: Meta e-crime, Google Ads Trust & Safety, ElevenLabs, LinkedIn threat intel.

What We Cover:

• Why AI isn't reinventing scams — it's just adding a more convincing final layer to playbooks that have existed for years.
• The asymmetry problem: bad actors run conferences, sell each other tools, and share playbooks on Telegram, while defenders can't share findings across teams at the same company.
• A case study in what actually works — how changing product, policy, and operations together pushed a misinformation-for-profit ring off the platform in a week.
• Why "accounts taken down" is a near-useless metric, and the "learned futility" it creates inside big trust & safety orgs.
• The Swiss cheese model of abuse prevention, and why chasing a single silver-bullet solution keeps companies chasing their tail.
• Where regulation has teeth (banking) and where it's mostly performative (social media), plus the cross-platform gap no one is addressing.
• How AI is changing investigative work — compressing a week of open-source research into two hours — and why that makes entry-level talent pipelines a real concern.

Episode Highlights:

00:00 Intro

01:06 Professional Background and Career Journey ‎

03:47 AI's Role in Scaling Rather Than Changing Scams ‎

07:05 Adversary Collaboration vs. Defender Silos ‎

09:02 The Frame Rate Discovery Example ‎

10:26 KTLYST Labs and Operationalizing Threat Intelligence ‎

12:40 AI's Impact on Investigation Work ‎

15:15 Career Entry Points and AI's Impact on Junior Roles ‎

20:38 The NextTag Affiliate Program Attack ‎

23:00 The Misinformation Campaign Investigation ‎

27:52 The Limitations of Location-Based Solutions ‎

30:30 The Futility of Single-Solution Thinking ‎

33:47 The Reality of Platform Defense Goals ‎

34:50 Government Regulation and Enforcement Challenges ‎

40:31 The Problem with Takedown Metrics ‎

Links:

Assaf Kipnis

KTLYST Labs

Rob Leathern