The Hidden Third

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Jim Cole spent two decades as a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, working child-exploitation cases.

Early in his career, he saw a problem. Investigators were focused on the people making, possessing, and distributing child sexual abuse material. But the children in the images often went unidentified.

Jim helped change that.

In 2010, he founded HSI’s Victim Identification Program from scratch, including the first dedicated Victim Identification Laboratory at HSI’s Cyber Crimes Center. Its purpose was to answer a different question: Who is the child in the image, where are they, and are they still in danger?

Sometimes the answer begins with a clue most people would never notice: a window, a label, a piece of furniture, a blanket, something in the background that can lead investigators to a child.

The program has helped identify and rescue thousands of children around the world, and it continues to operate today. When Jim began tracking victim identifications at HSI in 2011, the agency rescued 262 child victims that year. The following year, after the program’s methods and technology were put in place, that number rose to more than 1,000.

This is not an easy subject for a podcast. But given the scale of this crime, and the people most affected by it, it is an important conversation to watch and share. In 2025, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline received 21.3 million reports of suspected online child sexual exploitation. Those reports contained 61.8 million images, videos, and other files.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Jim takes Mariana back to his early years, from his time in the U.S. Army to becoming a patrol officer and then a detective on a Native American reservation in Oregon, investigating everything from narcotics to violent crime. He explains how a series of seemingly accidental turns led him into the work that would define his career.

Jim tells the story of one victim, abused by her father, whose case changed the course of his career and made him determined to focus on identifying children. He also tells Mariana about the schoolteacher who abused children for years before Jim’s team uncovered what he had done.

They discuss the tactics offenders use to groom children and why the people posing the greatest danger are often not who a child or family expects. They also talk about how artificial intelligence is changing this crime, from the creation of new synthetic abuse material to the ways technology can make it harder for investigators to tell what is real, identify victims, and keep up with the volume of material online.

Jim also reflects on the toll of doing this work for decades, what he has carried with him, and why he continues to fight for children who might otherwise never be rescued.

Jim now serves as Senior Advisor for Cyber Strategy and Child Protection at Our Rescue, a nonprofit whose mission is to end human trafficking and child exploitation. He also co-hosts Unlikely Allies: Inside Our Fight with Sonny Von Cleveland, a previous guest on The Hidden Third.

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Jim Cole spent two decades as a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, working child-exploitation cases.

Early in his career, he saw a problem. Investigators were focused on the people making, possessing, and distributing child sexual abuse material. But the children in the images often went unidentified.

Jim helped change that.

In 2010, he founded HSI’s Victim Identification Program from scratch, including the first dedicated Victim Identification Laboratory at HSI’s Cyber Crimes Center. Its purpose was to answer a different question: Who is the child in the image, where are they, and are they still in danger?

Sometimes the answer begins with a clue most people would never notice: a window, a label, a piece of furniture, a blanket, something in the background that can lead investigators to a child.

The program has helped identify and rescue thousands of children around the world, and it continues to operate today. When Jim began tracking victim identifications at HSI in 2011, the agency rescued 262 child victims that year. The following year, after the program’s methods and technology were put in place, that number rose to more than 1,000.

This is not an easy subject for a podcast. But given the scale of this crime, and the people most affected by it, it is an important conversation to watch and share. In 2025, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline received 21.3 million reports of suspected online child sexual exploitation. Those reports contained 61.8 million images, videos, and other files.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Jim takes Mariana back to his early years, from his time in the U.S. Army to becoming a patrol officer and then a detective on a Native American reservation in Oregon, investigating everything from narcotics to violent crime. He explains how a series of seemingly accidental turns led him into the work that would define his career.

Jim tells the story of one victim, abused by her father, whose case changed the course of his career and made him determined to focus on identifying children. He also tells Mariana about the schoolteacher who abused children for years before Jim’s team uncovered what he had done.

They discuss the tactics offenders use to groom children and why the people posing the greatest danger are often not who a child or family expects. They also talk about how artificial intelligence is changing this crime, from the creation of new synthetic abuse material to the ways technology can make it harder for investigators to tell what is real, identify victims, and keep up with the volume of material online.

Jim also reflects on the toll of doing this work for decades, what he has carried with him, and why he continues to fight for children who might otherwise never be rescued.

Jim now serves as Senior Advisor for Cyber Strategy and Child Protection at Our Rescue, a nonprofit whose mission is to end human trafficking and child exploitation. He also co-hosts Unlikely Allies: Inside Our Fight with Sonny Von Cleveland, a previous guest on The Hidden Third.

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James McGibney is the man who took down Hunter Moore, the "King of Revenge Porn" behind the notorious site Is Anyone Up. He infiltrated Moore's operation, bought the site out from under him for less than $15,000, and turned it into an anti-bullying platform. That story became the hit Netflix documentary The Most Hated Man on the Internet.

But that was more than a decade ago. Today James, a former Marine and cybercrime investigator, is going after something much bigger and much darker.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Mariana Van Zeller sits down with James to talk about his current investigation into two loosely connected online networks called The Com and 764. The Com is a sprawling group of mostly young people, some as young as 15 and 16, who trade stolen data, run crypto scams that have drained hundreds of millions of dollars from ordinary people, swat their enemies, and in some cases prey on underage girls. 764 is the offshoot that has captured the FBI's attention for coercing minors into producing sexual and self-harm content, sometimes pushing them to suicide.

James walks Mariana through how he traced these networks from low-level "script kiddies" all the way up to what he calls the head of the snake in Pakistan. Along the way he uncovered a billionaire's son who allegedly trafficked a 16-year-old girl into Miami and beat her on tape, a teenage girl who laughed on a recorded call as her crypto scam victim killed himself, and a group of young men flashing quarter-million-dollar nights at Miami clubs while underage girls walked past bouncers uncarded.

The conversation moves through the sextortion crisis pushing American teenagers to suicide before their parents ever find out, why crypto scams have quietly surpassed drug trafficking as the most profitable criminal enterprise in the world, and somewhat of a disagreement between Mariana and James over cheaters.com and the question of who the bully actually is when you publicly out someone for cheating. It also goes somewhere personal. James opens up about his own childhood in foster care and about watching his foster sister be sexually abused. He talks about why every case he takes on today, he takes on for her.

There is a lot more in this one. A guy in Texas moving faster than the FBI because subpoenas take months and he doesn't. Living armed, with private security at the house, because that is now the cost of doing this work. An ISIS hit list. More than a thousand death threats sitting in his Instagram inbox right now. And a very simple explanation of why you should never, ever connect to the free Wi-Fi at your hotel.

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Sharon Yitzhaki was 20 years old when she was pulled off a plane at a Bolivian airport. Authorities searched her bag, and the second bag she was carrying, which belonged to her boyfriend. Hidden in the false bottom was 10 kilos of cocaine. She had no idea it was there.

Her boyfriend had abandoned her days earlier, telling her he'd been deported and asking her to meet him back in Amsterdam, where they both lived. Instead, Sharon was sent to Miraflores, one of the most violent women's prisons in the world.

What happened next is one of the wildest true stories I've ever heard on The Hidden Third.

Inside Miraflores, Sharon was beaten, electrocuted, and developed a severe cocaine addiction. She got clean by asking to be locked in solitary confinement for a month. She adopted a one-month-old baby born inside the prison. She fell in love with a cartel leader locked up in the men's prison next door, and ended up running the drug trade inside her own prison. She was finally released through a Papal edict from Pope John Paul II, and then had to flee the country to avoid being sent back to prison.

In this episode, Sharon opens up about betrayal, hope, addiction, motherhood and love behind bars. As well as what happened to the man who betrayed her and to the woman who brutalized her and countless others inside Miraflores.

Her bestselling memoir is now a feature film called 10 Kilos, in theaters now and coming to digital worldwide on September 29, 2026.

WATCH 10 KILOS Movie🎬 Find a theater near you

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Sex trafficking survivor Lurata Lyon was kidnapped twice. First, at 17, by a trafficking network in Bosnia while fleeing the Yugoslav Wars. Then, after escaping, by Serbian paramilitaries who held her captive for six months.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Mariana van Zeller speaks with Lurata Lyon about surviving war, sex trafficking, human trafficking, kidnapping, captivity, trauma, and the long road to rebuilding a life after violence.

Lurata was a teenager when the violence surrounding the breakup of former Yugoslavia forced her to flee her home in Serbia. She made her way to Bosnia, where she was kidnapped by a human trafficking and organ-harvesting network. She escaped. But after returning to her hometown, she was taken a second time by Serbian paramilitary forces.

Held in solitary captivity for six months, Lurata survived abuse, torture, and the constant fear that she would not make it out alive. Her father ultimately arranged for her to be smuggled out of the country in the back of a truck. She arrived in the United Kingdom as a political refugee and began rebuilding her life from scratch.

Today, Lurata Lyon is the author of Unbroken: Surviving Human Trafficking. She is an international speaker, public-speaking and presentation coach, and human trafficking advocate who uses her experience to raise awareness about sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, survivor recovery, resilience, and life after trauma.

Sex trafficking is not rare, and it is not limited to conflict zones. The International Labour Organization estimates that 6.3 million people were living in forced commercial sexual exploitation worldwide in 2021, nearly four out of five of them women and girls. In the United States, the National Human Trafficking Hotline received 50,123 signals in 2021, including calls, texts, online chats, and tips from people seeking help or reporting possible trafficking.

Even though human trafficking is often discussed through statistics, headlines, and criminal cases, Lurata’s story helps us understand the human reality of sex trafficking and survival. It also shows how war, displacement, fear, isolation, and the search for safety can make people vulnerable to exploitation.

#SexTrafficking #HumanTrafficking #SexTraffickingSurvivor #HumanTraffickingSurvivor #HumanTraffickingAwareness #SurvivingSexTrafficking #YugoslavWars #WarSurvivor #PoliticalRefugee #TraumaRecovery #LurataLyon #MarianaVanZeller #TheHiddenThird
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