What this is
Six interactive case files. Each one dramatizes a scam pattern that has cost Connecticut residents real money this year. You play the protagonist — a parent at the kitchen desk, a retired engineer scrolling Facebook, a working dad chasing a used Bronco, a 67-year-old with a clean driving record, a romance hopeful in a widow’s support group, a mother who answers the midnight call from her son — and you decide what they do under pressure. The decisions matter. There is no easy way out.
The episodes are about twelve minutes each. The lessons are about thirty seconds. The hope is that you remember them at two in the morning when a stranger is reading off a badge number on the phone.
Who's behind it
Better Business Bureau Serving Connecticut — an independent nonprofit at the desk in Cromwell that has been the place Connecticut residents call when something feels wrong since 1928. Jeanette, the host you hear opening each case file, is a composite drawn from BBB CT intake specialists. The phone number she reads is the real one: 860-740-4500. The line is open.
Production note: Every protagonist is a composite. Every scam pattern is verified against real cases that BBB CT, the FTC, the FBI IC3, and the CT State Attorney General have logged this year. Names, ages, and identifying details are fictional. Outcomes — including dollar losses, recovery rates, and emotional aftermath — are calibrated to match the typical real-world result.
What BBB Accreditation means
Not every business is a BBB Accredited Business. The ones that are have committed to a published standard — honest advertising, responsiveness when a customer complains, transparency about pricing and terms, and accountability to BBB Connecticut when those commitments slip. It is an opt-in tier. A company chooses it, and the choice means something.
That commitment is what sits underneath the scam-recovery work in these case files. When someone in one of these stories calls a bank’s fraud line and gets a real human who acts fast, that is the standard at work. When a complaint actually moves, that is the standard at work. The cases are dramatized; the standard is real.
If you are deciding where to spend money — on a contractor, a moving company, an auto shop, an insurance broker — checking whether a business is BBB Accredited is the cheapest five seconds of due diligence available to you in Connecticut. Start at bbb.org/ct.
Accessibility
Read mode (a first-class viewing mode). Every case file has a full text transcript at /ep/[episode-id]/read showing every scene caption, every decision, every outcome. About four minutes to read versus twelve to listen. No audio required. No JS required. This isn’t a fallback — it’s the right mode for noisy environments, busy days, Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, screen-reader users, and anyone who prefers to skim. The audio player has a “Read instead” pill in its header that opens this view in a new tab from any scene; the landing footer links straight in.
Mute toggle. The flame icon in the corner of the player mutes audio and disables auto-advance. With audio off, the held silence renders Jeanette's outcome line as a typewritten caption so you don't miss the emotional landing — or the phone number she reads.
Reduced motion. Honors prefers-reduced-motion. Animations are disabled or held static when you've requested it.
Keyboard navigation. All interactive elements are reachable by Tab, activatable by Enter or Space. Focus states are visible. The audio transport bar accepts arrow-key scrub and space-bar pause.
Contrast. Text on the cream parchment outcome card passes WCAG AA against both the lightest and darkest regions of the paper gradient (6.5:1 and 4.8:1 respectively for the faded ink color).
Do Not Track. If your browser sends a DNT signal, we don't log any of your activity — not the decisions you make, not the outcomes you reach, not the shares. The campfire visit counter still updates because it's anonymous and aggregated.
Need an accommodation we haven't built yet? Email info@bbbcorgi.org and we will sort it out.
About the institutional names
The case files reference some real Connecticut institutions that are public-good entities — CT State Police, CT State Attorney General, FBI IC3 (ic3.gov), FTC, Hartford Hospital, Northeastern University — because naming them accurately is in the public interest.
For private businesses (banks, grocery chains, aerospace manufacturers) the case files use fictional CT-feel names: Constitution Bank, Yankee Mart, Whitfield Aerospace. These exist nowhere except inside this universe. If you happen to know a real-world institution by a similar name, the resemblance is coincidental.
About the AI-synthesized voices
Yes — the voices you hear in these case files were generated with the same kind of AI tools the scammers use. We disclose this because the scammers do not. The difference is consent: every voice cast in this product was either a licensed stock voice from ElevenLabs’ approved library or contributed with explicit permission. No one was cloned without their knowledge. No public figure was imitated. No real victim was re-voiced.
Episode Six (“The Voice”) is explicitly about voice cloning, and we wrestled with whether to render it at all. We decided yes: the most credible way to show a 64-year-old widow how convincing this technology has become is to let the listener hear it for themselves. Refusing to use the tools the scammers use, and then asking people to defend themselves against those tools, would have been the worse failure.
Scene illustrations are AI-generated (Black Forest Labs FLUX) from prompts that describe the moment, not real people. They are intentionally painterly rather than photo-real so that no viewer mistakes them for documentary photographs of real residents.
How to verify what you’re hearing
We are rolling out C2PA Content Credentials signing on every voice file on this site — a cryptographic provenance manifest embedded in the audio itself, so any consumer can verify, independently of us, who produced the file, that it was AI-synthesized, and that we have not authorized its use as AI-training data. The rollout is in progress; not every MP3 carries a manifest yet.
To verify any file once it’s signed: download the MP3 from the player (or right-click the audio element → Save), then drag it onto contentcredentials.org/verify. You should see a manifest naming Better Business Bureau, Connecticut as the producer, ElevenLabs as the synthesis model, and the IPTC digitalSourceType of trainedAlgorithmicMedia — the same code Adobe Firefly, OpenAI, and other generative tools use. Episode Six will carry an additional SpecialAnnouncement assertion marking it as an instructional demonstration of voice cloning.
Initial signing will use the C2PA test certificate (bundled with the c2patool toolchain). Manifests will be readable and cryptographically verifiable, but a verifier will display “not on the trust list” until we upgrade to a production cert from a C2PA trust-list authority. We will note here when that happens.
Content notes
These case files dramatize real harm: stolen retirement savings, manipulated grief, fear, and shame. If you or someone you love has been scammed, the line is open at 860-740-4500. You can also report to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov or to the FBI at ic3.gov. You are not the first. You will not be the last.