00:00Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and to each of you, thank you for being here.
00:05Ms. Helm, I thank you for weighing in and working with us as we developed the romance scam bill
00:13that we've been moving forward with at Commerce Committee.
00:18I appreciate your input on that.
00:20You know, one of the things we realized was the entry point for a lot of these scams
00:26and these financial crimes are the dating apps, and especially the dating apps for seniors.
00:36And so when you talk about an entry point, that seems to have been it.
00:42But what we have learned, and Mr. Chairman alluded to this in his opening,
00:49these are really transnational organizations.
00:53And pardon me, this is a big business.
00:58And I know U.S. consumers lost, the estimate is $1.3 billion last year in these scams.
01:08But that is what is reported.
01:10And we know many of these don't get reported because of embarrassment or they figured it out.
01:17But they've already lost several thousand dollars in the process.
01:22And as we were working on our legislation, what we found is that some of these sophisticated transnational criminal organizations
01:33will actually promise people that they will get them to another country, many times the U.S., for high-paying jobs.
01:45But what actually happens is it's a form of human trafficking tied to it.
01:51They're brought here, and then they're placed in what are called fraud dens.
01:57And in these fraud dens, they work the Internet, they work the phones, and they create these relationships.
02:06And then they are scamming people out of hundreds of millions of dollars every year
02:15and telling these individuals that they were going to bring to the U.S.
02:21and people that they're trafficking that they have to work out their debt.
02:26So that's how they keep them in these dens.
02:28But, Mr. Fenta, I want you to speak for a minute about these transnational organizations
02:37and what we know about them and their underpinning as it relates to these crimes.
02:46Thank you, Senator.
02:48These TAC, transnational criminal crime groups, they're not really any different than the Mexican cartels,
02:54the TAC East groups doing cyber crimes.
03:00They're configured relatively similarly, particularly in the way they launder the money.
03:04So one thing that we noticed doing elder fraud investigations
03:07is that a lot of the money that we were tracing through these accounts
03:10was also in the same accounts with proceeds from narcotic sales, human trafficking, all kinds of other crimes.
03:17So it's not necessarily about the crime as much as the criminal groups.
03:23So we have the sophistication in our government and in our private industry to do these investigations
03:31if we coordinate them and work them together to have more effect.
03:35I think it's more a function of us choosing how to do that as opposed to letting the crooks choose
03:43because they're plenty sophisticated.
03:45We need to be at that same level.
03:46Yes, and I think, and you alluded to this earlier, as we have worked on the Kids Online Safety Act
03:52and worked with industry and worked with parents, we've seen some of this skill set develop
04:00and it could be transferred over.
04:05Mr. Burku, I want to ask you, and thank you for the work you've done on tracing the illegal phone calls,
04:13the robocalls and those things.
04:15Talk a little bit about traceback and give me an example of where traceback and or a cross-sector collaboration
04:28has led to a criminal conviction and to unraveling part of this network.
04:35Yeah, thank you for the question.
04:38I think we'd love to see more of our work lead to criminal convictions.
04:41That's where we just really think that needs to be a priority.
04:44Where a lot of our work, so we trace the calls.
04:46We get examples from illegal calls, referrals from law enforcement, data we source ourselves,
04:50working with the financial institutions, tech companies, others, and we'll trace that back to the source.
04:55And basically, we see eight to ten different voice service providers touch that call along the way.
05:00So that's why we need traceback to find out where it really came from, who made the call.
05:04So that's the traceback effort.
05:06It's been very successful in civil enforcement where we'd love to see it amped up as in the criminal side.
05:10Okay, let me ask you this.
05:11With Wi-Fi calling, have you been able to follow any on Wi-Fi calling?
05:18And if someone's using a VPN, does that obstruct your work?
05:24So for us, yeah, our focus, if it hits the public telephone network, we trace it back.
05:30If it's purely over the top, like a WhatsApp call, that would be outside the scope of what we do.
05:36Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
05:37Senator Whitehouse.
05:39Thanks very much.
05:41I just want to flag for any Rhode Islanders who might be listening that
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