Follow the money into the shadows.
Hot Money is a Financial Times investigative series about money moving through the world’s dirtiest corridors. Its seasons trace arms brokers, cocaine networks, encrypted phones, online adult businesses, and intelligence shadows with a patient reporter’s eye for documents, rooms, names, and leverage.
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Hot Money is investigative audio about the hidden economies that sit behind visible scandal. It follows money until the abstraction becomes physical: crates in a cargo plane, servers copied in Canada, luxury cars in New York, computers seized from a family business, financing slides for an adult-industry business. The show’s center of gravity is business investigation, but its reporting keeps crossing borders into true crime, intelligence work, war, technology, and organized crime. It has a cool temperature. Rather than shout about corruption, it builds the scene and lets the structure reveal itself. One episode can begin in a Bosnian weapons factory and end with ammunition treated as another item on a spreadsheet. Another can move from a Dublin safe house to encrypted phones that allow drug bosses to run operations from another country. The adult-industry episodes are equally financial: who controlled content, who could borrow, who could sue, and who benefited when old rules failed to fit new technology. The show is unusually good at showing how ordinary business tools become instruments of darker systems. Stock trades, payment schedules, advisers, servers, and court filings all become plot points. Sources often speak at length, which gives the investigations texture and sometimes discomfort. The narration then steps back to translate what those voices mean. Hot Money is not built around simple villains. It is more interested in incentives, loopholes, leverage, and the useful people who know how to operate between official policy and deniable demand. The result is grave but dryly observant, with an eye for absurd details that make the machinery easier to see. It is best for listeners who want financial journalism with narrative force and who can follow complicated chains across countries, industries, and years.
Made for: For listeners who like true crime with financial architecture, geopolitical stakes, and slow-burn investigative reporting. It suits people who prefer documented systems, source interviews, and moral complexity over sensational case recaps.
What sets it apart: Hot Money stands apart by treating scandal as infrastructure: factories, phones, loans, servers, ownership, and legal pressure. The reporting keeps asking how illicit markets actually function, not just who got caught.
In 2020, the Financial Times exposed a €2 billion fraud at Wirecard, a high-flying German fintech. Many thought that was the end of the story. But for reporter Sam Jones, it was just the beginning. This season on Hot Money: Agent of Chaos, Jones investigates Wirecard’s chief operating officer, who vanished just as Wirecard collapsed. And turned out to also be a Russian spy. From an Ibizan sting operation to an attempted takeover of the Austrian intelligence service, his reporting spirals into a world of warlords, espionage, and disinformation. All in an attempt to answer one question: Who is the real Jan Marsalek? And what does his secret life reveal about the powerful forces he serves?
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Hot Money traces illicit power through the financial arrangements, technologies and commercial infrastructure that keep it operating.
Hot Money follows illicit fortunes by tracing the businesses, technologies and financial arrangements that let them move. Patricia Nilsson and Alex Barker connect a family-run Ohio bulletin board to litigation over digital images and examine the financing pressures behind adult…
A porn lawsuit, an encrypted phone, a covert arms flight: your spreadsheets just developed a body count.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sharp, grounded look at how weapons turn into logistics, finance, and leverage.
The Broker starts in a Bosnian valley at Pretis, where old Cold War machines still hammer glowing steel, then moves through Sarajevo, Virginia Beach, Bulgaria, and the machinery of covert war.
A measured laundering story that turns a Brooklyn meeting into a wider criminal web.
The episode follows a trail from Manhattan to Brooklyn and then outward into a cocaine and laundering network, with Angel's October 2014 meeting at the Waldorf Astoria giving it a clear hinge.
A Dublin arrest opens into a precise story about encrypted crime.
Lower Bagot Street starts with a safe-house tip in Dublin and quickly widens into a story about identity, encrypted phones, and organized crime.
A dry, exact account of how porn, moderation, and the early web collided in Ohio.
Hot Money returns to a suburban shopping plaza in Youngstown, Ohio, and finds the early internet tucked beside a toupee store and a furniture shop.
A cold money story about porn, leverage, and control.
Hot Money frames the porn industry as a story about leverage, desperation, and the people who get to decide what a whole market is worth. It opens in a crowded Las Vegas conference hall, then tracks the money back through bankers, advisers, and a buyer trying to assemble control…
Pretis sits in a narrow valley on the northern edge of Sarajevo.
New York, October 2014.
Dutch police find a murder broker with multiple fake identities hiding in a Dublin safe house linked to the Kinahan cocaine cartel, raising questions about how organised crime and Iranian state-sponsored assassination could intersect.
1993 begins in a Youngstown shopping plaza, a strange place to find the roots of today's platforms.
Hot Money Episode 2 profiles Fabian Tillman, a German software engineer who used financial acrobatics — including staggered payments, misused assets, and eventually a $362 million loan from a syndicate including JP Morgan and Fortress — to build a pornography conglomerate controlling 60-70% of global internet porn traffic.