Seize and Desist podcast

S&D E5 - Awareness to action: fighting the global pig butchering crisis

Author
Lo Furneaux
Marketing - Associate

Build confidence in managing virtual assets

“This is a massive romance investment scam that is bleeding the world of it’s money.”

On the 27th February 2024, Asset Reality’s co-founder and CEO Aidan Larkin had the opportunity to sit down with Erin West to explore the real-world consequences of cyber-enabled crimes like pig butchering.

In this eye-opening conversation, Erin exposes the industrial-scale of pig butchering sweatshops, revealing how even the 'scammers' themselves are often victims of trafficking.

Erin and Aidan discuss why a unified global response and drastic policy reforms are the only way to confront this escalating crisis effectively and highlight Operation Shamrock’s plan to #Educate the global public, #Seize the illicit proceeds and #Disrupt the activities of criminal networks.

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Timestamps

04:00 | Erin West's background as a prosecutor and her mission to combat pig butchering

07:00 | The REACT task force and its role in investigating high-tech crimes

13:00 | Underestimating the emotional toll on victims of financial fraud

19:00 | Examples of transnational organized crime in Southeast Asia

27:00 | Operation Shamrock’s efforts to educate, seize, and disrupt cybercriminals

34:00 | Erin West explains how hackers use SIM swaps to gain access to financial accounts

38:00 | The dangers of crypto and the importance of authenticator tools for security

40:00 | The power of raising awareness through media coverage and public attention

45:00 | Why a unified global response is the only way to combat pig butchering scams

52:00 | Erin’s advice for potential victims of fraud

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Resources Mentioned

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About our Guest‍

Erin West is one of the leading voices in transnational organised crime prevention and a passionate advocate for the rights of victims of financial crimes, particularly those affected by pig butchering. 

As the Deputy District Attorney in Santa Clara County in the state of California, she collaborates with detectives and prosecutors as part of the REACT taskforce to investigate and address cyber-enabled crimes. Erin is on a mission to improve the practical support available for the most affected vulnerable victims through her latest initiative, Operation Shamrock.

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Disclaimer

Our podcasts are for informational purposes only. They are not intended to provide legal, tax, financial, and/or investment advice. Listeners must consult their own advisors before making decisions on the topics discussed.

Asset Reality has no responsibility or liability for any decision made or any other acts or omissions in connection with your use of this material.

The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Views and opinions expressed by Asset Reality employees are those of the employees and do not necessarily reflect the views of the company. 

Asset Reality does not guarantee or warrant the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, suitability or validity of the information in any particular podcast and will not be responsible for any claim attributable to errors, omissions, or other inaccuracies of any part of such material. 

Unless stated otherwise, reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by Asset Reality. 

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Transcription

Speaker: Aidan Larkin

We've got these inconsistencies of spectacularly innovative initiatives versus like zero. 

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Speaker: Erin West

For some reason, when it's someone getting their money stolen, we deprioritize it and we don't think it's a big deal. We need to stop being concerned about putting people on handcuffs and we need to start being concerned about our population and what our population needs and demands. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Give us the scary Erin version. 

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Speaker: Erin West

The entire place is scam sweatshops, where people are not allowed to leave. Certainly a worldwide crisis. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Are the big players doing enough? 

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Speaker: Erin West

A month ago, I would've said no. Everybody could do better. I don't think anybody's taking this seriously enough. Let's team up and figure out how to do that. Let's stop existing in silos. This is something that we really need to raise the worldwide consciousness about. 

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Speaker: Lo Furneaux

Hiya. This is Lo Furneaux, one of the producers behind Seize and Desist, the first podcast dedicated to the seized asset industry. On the twenty seventh of February this year, Asset Reality's co-founder and CEO, Aidan Larkin, had the opportunity to sit down with Erin West, a lightning rod in the financial crime prevention space. She's a passionate advocate for the rights of vulnerable victims and is on a mission to address the real world consequences of cyber enabled crimes and improve the practical support available for those most affected, especially when it comes to pig butchering. Erin and Aidan discuss why drastic policy changes are needed to educate people worldwide, seize the proceeds of these heinous crimes, and disrupt the activities of industrial scale slave scamming operations. Thank you for listening. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Erin West. How are you? 

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Speaker: Erin West

I'm good. I'm good. I'm excited to be here on your new podcast. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

We were sort of thinking of how we even come up with this sort of format and how we address it and how we address this topic, and we thought that the best way we could kick things off was to sort of just get around all of the people in the sector that make up the sector that are sort of our lifetimes to sort of coexist on LinkedIn. And I know that a lot of the people that we interact with on LinkedIn, there's this recognized list of sort of all stars and people that take up a lot of the column inches, and you're very much in that sort of top tier of people. So thank you very much for taking the time to join us, and discuss. 

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Speaker: Erin West

Oh, I'm delighted to be here. I'm glad you consider me on the all star team. That's a nice place to be. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Listen, I'll and with a name like Erin, with my natural sort of Irish lineage, like, what could I possibly do? I think that how we frame this is that we all sort of acknowledge that there is a global problem in asset recovery. And one of our sort of missions is to try and sort of figure out, like, what the heck does that actually mean? Asset recovery dot com, I believe, and sorry to send the web traffic this way, but I think asset recovery dot com is literally a, like, vehicle recovery or a data recovery, you know, hard drive company. Asset recovery in some other parts of the world is, is vehicle recovery. Like, even the very fact that the industry is ill defined is one of the reasons why we sort of exist because if you can't, what's the quote? If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. You can't manage, you can't measure. And I think that lack of sort of definition is one of the big issues that we have in asset recovery. And whilst everyone that knows you know that you occupy a very, a very particular niche, I purposely wanna zoom out a little bit, and will get to your sort of, your area of expertise. But I think that you interest me more for your overall context, in the asset recovery sector because it's not just about that niche, and it's about this whole life cycle of asset recovery and going after the bad guys. You know, getting assets back, getting money back to victims very much hits that entire life cycle that we're sort of fascinated with. Could you give us a bit of your background? Because people know Erin on LinkedIn, but I'm sure they may not know how Erin got to this stage right now and how you sort of and how you're coping with newfound fame as well. 

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Speaker: Erin West

I am a prosecutor with Santa Clara County in the state of California, and I've been a prosecutor for twenty five years. I've done all kinds of different crime from, I spent a long time in sexual assault. I spent a long time doing hate crimes, and I found myself really in victim centered crime where I was really concerned about, particularly with sexual assault, like, how victims are devastated in that realm. And hate crimes, victims are personally attacked in that realm. And I've got teenage boys now, but when they were babies and I was doing this sexual assault work, I thought, you know, I'd really like to do something that's less traumatic and crippling with with little kids at home. So I asked to go to the high-tech team because I thought that would be, I thought that would be just, a lot less heavy victim centric. And eight years ago, I moved to REACT, and that is our high-tech task force that we have in Santa Clara County. And so I work right in the mix with detectives who are specially trained on cell phone forensics and cryptocurrency recovery and computer forensics. They do high-tech crime. And when I went there, I didn't, you know, I was a great Facebooker. Like I'm not a computer woman at all, but I think that's a really interesting point about this, that you don't have to be a computer expert to get into this space. You don't, I think this space can be intimidating, and I think people like to make it feel intimidating and unknowable. And so I love to be, someone who, who really just appreciates technology and what can be done with it and then also has found herself really concerned about people who are getting victimized by it, whether whether it's sextortion or, particularly what I'm working on now, which is pig butchering victims. I've really become passionate about the system and how we can make the system better for everyone involved. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

So you literally have just sort of talked yourself into a long term career at Asset Reality because this is literally why we, this is literally some of our, like, side bites we're actually using in launching this podcast, because it does go back to that. Like, there is, we have to admit that the sector is filled with this, and this is not a crypto or digital asset thing. This is all new technology. This is always the niche. There's always that sort of guy or girl or person in the office that, you know, owns a little niche and no one else gets in and they don't want, like, let's be honest, they also sometimes don't want to share it and they want it to be their thing. And they're the blockchain person or they're the forensic person or they're the sort of specialist. And I'm sure we had this back in the days of, like, Sherlock Holmes in sort of handwriting analysis, and this will continue to happen. What for those, we're hoping that we'll have quite an international bread if our sort of LinkedIn, sort of demographic is anything to go by. We hit most continents. So just to delay this sort of table for people as we think about this, when you talk about the React task force, let's say, use a local example in the UK. You've got your prosecutors in the crime prosecution service, and you've got police, sort of doing their thing and taking the cases. And then you also have regional sort of organized crime units. So a task force that have multifunction agencies. Is that what React is where you have this combination? Or is it investigators and detective within the prosecutor's office? Or is this emerging of sort of police and prosecutor effectively? 

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Speaker: Erin West

You know, I'm glad you asked because I think there's a lot of confusion generally. I talk about a lot of things. I talk about my crypto coalition. I talk about React. I talk about Operation Shamrock. But what React is, I think, is a great model for what could be. So in, in the late nineties, the California legislature recognized a need for really a booming tech crime potential that this is how that digitally people were getting victimized. And so they recognized we need to put some money and some effort into building some talent, which I think is exactly where we find ourselves on February twenty seventh 2024 is we need to, as a world, put resources into creating a talent pool that can address the issues and make this space safe. So what they did is they created five task forces across the state of California, and React is one of them. Most of the others use that money to do forensics and in technical work, but React uses it to be an investigative body. And so React is made up with of local detectives. We have a secret service partner, which really allows us to have an international footprint from a local agency, which is unusual. And then we have two prosecutors that are embedded with it. And so it's a really I think it's a smart replicable model where we have analysts who are experts in tracing the blockchain. We have detectives who are also quite adept and world leaders at how to use the blockchain as an investigative tool. And then we have prosecutors who are passionate about this and want to understand they also understand that we are not in a space anymore where the goal is as much putting people in custody as it is helping our victims. And I think that's what you and I have in common is that the recognition that we've got a worldwide problem that Santa Clara County cannot be expected to be putting handcuffs on members of the triad that are operating in Southeast Asia. But what we can do is learn how to help the victims that come through our door and trace their assets and determine whether or not they're recoverable. So I'm speaking in, Washington DC next month at the Fusion Center conference, and I think that that's a great opportunity to discuss the what if. And I'm a big fan of, but what if we could? And what if we could arm fusion centers, which are the exact reason we created these fusion centers? If you're not familiar with the fusion center… 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

I was gonna say what are they? 

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Speaker: Erin West

So fusion centers were developed after 9/11. There was a, an understanding that we need to share information, and we need to share talent. And if you think about it, it doesn't make sense to train a blockchain expert in every small town across the United States. That's not a good use of resources. So what if we trained analysts in each of the eighty fusion centers across the United States and so people could rely on that source as someone who could help them trace assets. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

And they're up to date in their experience and they're working more cases and yeah. 

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Speaker: Erin West

Yeah. You're exactly saying the right things that, like, is it reasonable to expect that you know, I think Southern California has something like seventy five agencies within Los Angeles. Like, is it reasonable that each of those agencies should have an expert in investigating the blockchain? That just doesn't even make good sense. What makes good economic sense is to have a couple of people who are up to date, trained, ready, and, and can do that work quickly. It's like when you ask your husband to build you a bookcase and it's gonna take him forever, but if you hire someone who builds bookcases every day, it's gonna get handled. I'm not trying to make any suggestions about anybody's marriage, but perhaps you just wanna hire the bookcase maker to get it done. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Or perhaps you pay the bookcase maker and they run off with your money and that'll be more akin to our world. You don't even get a bookcase. Look but I like that concept that you hit on and it is definitely that part that we're very much aligned on. There seems to be in the my own background was the same, was investigating sort of, you know, tax fraud and a lot of the people sort of were in the criminal tax space, those that the we call it the Al Capone effect. You know, those criminals that you couldn't really get that initial offense on and there was always another way to go after them. A lot of those cases were fraudsters. I've never met in all my days, someone that doesn't want their stuff back. It's that old analogy of your house has just been burgled and or you someone stolen your purse or your wallet, and the officer comes back to you and says, yeah. We caught him. Well, where's my stuff? Oh, don't worry about that. But we've successfully arrested and prosecuted him. There of course, there are crime types when that is the main aim. Is it a case that we haven't caught up? I mean, it's almost like the cynic in me when I sort of from the outside looking in now, when I see how some government agencies I mean, some we have, you know, as you've just described, multi agency task forces. We have combinations and skill sets. We've seen pockets of this around the world where there's, like, shining examples of good practice, and then we've seen others where just nothing is done. And the UK is a good example where we've got these inconsistencies of spectacularly innovative initiatives versus, like, zero, just nothing moving. Do you think some of that is attributed to what you said that fear? And, again, it's something we're very much aligned on where it just seems too difficult. It doesn't seem like it's gonna be an easy win. It's not, you know, the big cash grab. It's not the seizing the guns or seizing the drugs, and it's gonna get you, you know, reelected as a sort of policing crime commissioner or as a mayor. One of my dear friends, who I'll not name, who's in the United Nations, talks about that. If it bleeds, it leads, and it's a case of if it doesn't tick those boxes. Like, in the UK, we can count on one hand how many standalone money laundering investigations there have been. And all of these things are the undercurrent that I sort of think are the reasons that we're not effective in going after a lot of these pure fraud cases, which as you say, can be the most tragic because they are the most lonely individual victim cases. And you just get millions of people in small batches that collectively, for some reason, aren't adding up to something that needs bigger piece of attention? What do you think is it that keeps governments on the sidelines? Is it knowledge, resources, or combination? 

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Speaker: Erin West

It's so funny. I took down some notes as you were talking because I have a lot of different thoughts about this. First, I think we need to understand the level of devastation to a victim who has lost all of their money. I think we prioritize, like, people who are beaten in bars or people who have their car stolen. We understand that. But for some reason, when it's someone getting their money stolen, we deprioritize it, and we don't think it's a big deal. And I think we are underestimating the emotional toll this takes on people, particularly when it comes to pig butchering in that World Health Organization just did a study and said that loneliness is actually a health problem. So these are some of the people that we're starting with, that they're already lonely and experiencing this, and then something terrible happens to them and they're not getting heard. So I wanna start off by saying that this is a different way of looking at things. We need to stop being concerned about putting people in handcuffs, and we need to start being concerned about our population and what our population needs and demands. The second thing that you brought up is why isn't this happening? And one of the most difficult groups of people I teach to are chiefs of police. My topics are always, I want you guys to leave knowing two things. I need you to leave knowing that crypto is how bad guys move money, and it's not that complicated. It's very easy to let a million roadblocks stop you from doing this work. I think that there are so many of the roadblocks. One of them, like, I just don't know what this is. I don't have time to learn it. I'm not gonna do it. There is what you brought up in terms of it seems complicated. I don't wanna do something that's complicated. There's the resources issue. Like, I don't have a body to do that. I don't have a tool to do that. There's a million reasons why they don't want to do this, and so we have to give them reasons why we can defeat all of these if we talk them through. And you can see that it's this is how bad guys move money, and if we don't get on top of it, we're just letting them walk away with these things. But I think the most important comment you made is the one that I'd most like to address, and that is what is happening on a national level in terms of the investigation of some of these major crimes? And I think I don't think I know that what I'm seeing is exactly what you've described in that it's too big. It's too big. It's too massive. And I think that some of the federal agencies haven't adjusted their priorities to the times, and their priorities continue to be statistics of seizures and arrests. We need to look more heavily at the seizures and the potential there and what could be done. And I think we need to realize that we are facing an unprecedented level of transnational organized crime that at the in the moment is showing up as pig butchering, but will continue to morph as we get more AI and more ability of these scammers to do more sophisticated work. They're gonna turn to malware as a service. They are going to infect the rest of the world, and that's why we need to get a handle on it, and we need to embrace something that's really hard. And we need to start walking forward one step at a time toward taking a run at it. And that's just not happening right now. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

And, like, you've hit on that point. So just to stick with that thread for a minute. I mean, give us in your experience then, like, a real world example of this or your sort of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You're, you're sort of future gazing. Where does this go to if we don't? Give us the scary, Erin version. If we don't get a hold of this, if we imagine that people are saying this crypto stuff is really, really difficult, bar those big counterterrorism and terrorist financing in those cases where we absolutely have to do something, if we don't really get stuck into trying to understand this and demystify it, and your earlier point that we often echo, you don't have to be a mechanic to seize a car. There's gonna be a gemologist that seize a diamond. And I think we'll talk about in a moment the ROI and all of this, I think, is one of the ways we sort of encourage the horses to water. But what is the what is the sort of, the sort of scary version that if we don't also whilst the crypto is difficult, but AI plus malware plus turning the other way is, you know, just a terrifying sort of future that we are not, you know, exaggerating when we say what this could look like. Because I know that there will be some people, and I've been in those rooms and those briefings when, you know, you do have the sort of senior officers, you know, sort of brushing it off. And just say, that's not really for us here. Like, surely that's a Manhattan problem. That is a sort of Wall Street problem. 

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Speaker: Erin West

I'm glad you asked me this question because this is something that we really need to raise the worldwide consciousness about, and that is what is happening with transnational organized crime. And so what we've seen in Southeast Asia as the starting point of this in 2017, Chinese organized crime started building casino towers in Cambodia. And when COVID hit and people weren't traveling and filling those casino towers, they pivoted and they turned them into scam sweatshops, and that was the beginning of it. And what we have seen happen since then and what you can see quite clearly when you look at Google Earth is the massive infrastructure of compounds all over Southeast Asia. So if you look at Cambodia alone, you've got something like in Srihanuk Villal, Cambodia, this former backpacker paradise on the on the coast is now littered with something like a hundred and thirty seven casinos who are, one, fronts for money laundering, and two, host to scam factories where people are being held in captivity. They're essentially, people have been human trafficked in believing that they're coming there to do any other type of work like graphic design or travel or whatever, and being forced to do the scamming. So that's what's happening in Cambodia, and that's happening with the tacit understanding, by Cambodian leadership. But what concerns me even more than that are the actual physical compounds that are being built all over the Myanmar, Thailand border where this is being done on an industrial scale. So we're seeing the entire place is a prison where people are not allowed to leave. They're guarded by men with AK forty sevens, and they're required to do the scamming work. And so I when Initially started working on this, I was sounding the alarm about pig butchering. Like everybody, we gotta understand pig butchering. We have to understand that this is a massive romance investment scam that is bleeding the world of its money, and all of the money is coming into the hands of bad actors. But when I started to do deeper dives on it, it became clear to me that the problem was even bigger than that. And that was that we are now seeing a very entrenched, well funded, well organized operation that is currently doing pig butchering. And they've been doing it with very little to no friction from any other body, that nobody is slowing them down. And they've had five years to dig in, to build this, and to build expertise. And now we are seeing what could happen with AI, and we're seeing what can happen with deep fakes. And we have example after example of how people are confused and misled by those. But what happens when they start doing that on an industrial scale? We can't educate people fast enough. And what it does is we end up losing our trust in anything electronic. You literally will not be able to trust anything that comes your way because they're so good at replicating fake. And when we think of this on a big scale, we need to think of the wealth transfer into the hands of bad actors. We need to think of the instability of large pieces of this world. And we need to realize that this is a national security crisis for the United States, but it's certainly a worldwide crisis in terms of people committing suicide from the financial aspect, from people being human trafficked and trying to jump out windows and being beaten and treated horribly, it's a massive problem that we that nobody has a handle on and we're woefully, woefully behind. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

It's something that and I think for those that maybe don't know that this isn't just a new crypto issue. I was actually actually one of our mutual friends in UNODC. I was in Bangkok before Christmas speaking at a conference, and this is obviously sort of top of the agenda. But it's worth remembering that this is part of that wider fraud piece. No fraudsters will go where there is the biggest widest possible audience and the least likelihood of getting caught with a high ROI. And, like, I can remember as long as twenty years ago, you know, people traveling off to the Indonesias of the world, to the Thailands of the world, you know, pursuing a sales job in inverted commas, and they would basically be working in the equivalent sort of sweatshop factories where they were selling dodgy investment scams. The infrastructure that allowed the Madooffs and the sweatshops of the world has just got upgraded. It's gone digital, and it's gone truly viral. I also remember way back in my early sort of career being involved and then working with police who were investigating, like, publishing scams. And I remember people having their minds blown thinking that there was a call center with a hundred people and they have of all things, the scammers were selling fake advertisements in police magazines that were inside the police station. So, of course, you could never get to see these as a business, but it was like, no. Advertise your services to police and this will be distributed across all of the forces in the UK. And I think that people sort of probably just don't comprehend the scale and it's the reason why crypto is that. It's like the dangerous dog. It's one person's dangerous dog and someone else's very well trained pet that will solve all problems and as a guide to as seeing eye dog. Because we've seen this now where I was fortunate enough to be involved in the UK's version of those like illicit finance hearings just last couple of weeks ago in the US. I spoke at the national security ransomware version of that back in the UK and it was the same thing. We were doing the same message trying to implore people saying, look, this is only going to get worse for victims, easier for fraudsters and scammers. And it takes us back to this, like, what tool do we have against this? Yes. We've got asset recovery as a tool, but I was using the example the other day, and I think I said it on LinkedIn. And I hope people realize that was my sort of cliched quote from Armageddon. I think in Armageddon, they use it when they're talking about stopping the comet coming towards them or the meteor, and they're saying maybe we could fire something at it. And he uses the example of it's like shooting a BB gun at a freight train. And if we think the existing infrastructure that recovers only one percent of people's assets, you know illicit finance sort of intercepts illicit finance globally. That one percent stat a lot of people forget is pre 2015. It's the last time it was measured. So before we even think that no asset recovery is underperforming against sort of no digital asset and crypto fraud, that wasn't even included before all of this. But I think that I'm I'm very bullish about the outcome of sort of crypto asset recovery because I think that it actually has a blueprint, and we're seeing these billion dollar seizures and it will be the billion dollar seizures that might lead police chiefs and politicians to investing in the sort of infrastructure that you've just described that we need and we'll get people interested. You know, nothing like a billion dollar seizure to get you reelected. Again, so I'm hoping that that could be a direction of travel, but one methodology that I think you deserve sort of particular credit for is that awareness is another thing. You know, this demystification, if that's a correct use of the language, that people will realize we're not saying it's easy, but we're also saying not understanding it shouldn't be a reason. Your fundamentals and this should be if a victim comes to you and says, I was, you know, ripped off in some complicated investment scam, ninety nine percent of place, I hope, wouldn't say, well, I don't really understand employee meet benefit trusts, you know, and St. Kitts. They would just say it's a finance scam. You know, we'll bring in someone that can understand that you're a victim, you've been duped or robbed, we want to help you, and we wanna get there. But the tool you've used I think spectacularly well is awareness. And did I see that you've actually even hit sort of John Oliver levels recently. Are you sort of trying to, like, hopefully, I don't wanna say you're trying to shame people into action, but you do such a spectacular job. Like, most people in our world know who you are or the work of the React Task Force. And I often say to myself, how is, like, one team and one prosecutor in one sort of state and one regional area, like, doing this globally? And wouldn't it be interesting if we had twenty of you, forty of you, a hundred of you doing this? Is that the goal to try and just, you know, capture public imagination, capture the awareness, you know, get that sort of level of interest so that people just can't ignore it anymore? 

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Speaker: Erin West

Yeah. I think that I've said it that we need to raise the consciousness. The White House needs to understand how big this threat is, and I need to figure out and I've been crafting a way to get the attention there. When I first started talking about this threat, I talked about educate, seize, disrupt. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

And these are like the tenants of, sort of, of Operation Shamrock? 

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Speaker: Erin West

I created this thing called Operation Shamrock. It's funny you use the BB3 freight train example because I always say that I'm throwing eggs at a skyscraper. Like, right? And I hope their windows are starting to get messy because I've been throwing a lot of eggs. So when I created Operation Sharemark, I thought, okay. If we are not going to arrest our way out of this, which is what I've been told on repeat from above. Okay. So what can we do? So then it came to me when I started thinking of all the things that we could do, that we could educate, we could seize, and we could disrupt. And so those are, those continue to be, my goals. And so last year, I really focused on the education piece, and I focused on it in two ways. One, I need to educate local law enforcement to be ready when somebody comes through the door and know what to ask a victim for and to figure out what to do with that information. And so I started the Crypto Coalition, and that was, I realized there were other people in pockets of the United States doing this work. There was some great stuff coming out of Manhattan that's now moved to Brooklyn and continues in Manhattan. There was some great work in Queens. There was a lone guy in Minnesota who wanted to help his victims and figured out how to use public blockchain access to figure things out. So I figured there's people that are doing this work. So let's corral them. Let's empower them. Let's learn from each other. Let's not recreate the wheel. Let's do webinars, and let's create a bank of documents that people can use. We don't have to recreate the wheel. So I spent a lot of time doing that, and that's been great. We're up to fifteen hundred members now. We have international members of that that has made our world easier to navigate. So that was one piece. The second piece is, is this education. It's an awareness. It's a knowing that there is this threat out there and we have to be so aware anytime anything comes to us unsolicited electronically, we need to assume that it is a scam before we assume anything else. That anytime someone reaches out on LinkedIn, anytime you get a text, anytime that someone makes an offer on something that you have on Facebook Marketplace, you need to assume that it's a scam until proven otherwise because there's just too many out there. And, unfortunately, this is what I was talking about earlier that we lose trust in our fellow person because that's where we find ourselves. So the John Oliver thing to me was such a win because it was an opportunity to get this information out in front of a demographic that we haven't been able to reach before. And I always talk about it on my LinkedIn. I'm like, you need to tell your hairdresser. You need to tell your kid's soccer coach. You need to tell your cousin because those are the people that don't know this. Like, me on you've talked about our, you know, our LinkedIn family, our LinkedIn gang, and we're a great gang, but we all know. Like, I already know what Aidan Larkin's gonna say about asset recovery. You know what Erin West is gonna say. And so we've gotta figure out how to broaden that. And so that's my awareness piece. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

I think that sadly for a little time yet anyway, it's almost still in the too difficult box that I'm not expecting some politician to put their name to it. I'm not expecting someone to campaign against it. I mean, again, fraud, as we talk about now. I don't know the US stats, but certainly in the UK, it's no. It is the biggest, you know, fraud, crime type that affects everybody. And, again, there's the famous statistic that I always get wrong. It's something like I'll generalize, but it's something like, you know, the crime that affects forty percent of people Yep. Has one percent of resources dedicated to it. Wow. And I say the same to my parents and my family, to everybody. No one will get offended if you say no to something if it's genuine. And I'm in the same camp now that it's like I just treat everything with suspicion because we don't have the safety nets anymore, we don't have the guide rails and I do want to talk about the slightly sensitive issue, and I hit sound bites on this topic. I've been quoted before, and it can often sound like I'm being insensitive when I talk about personal accountability. And I don't mean I'm, I wouldn't be horrible enough to say sort of no told you so or how stupid were you, and I can't believe you fell for that. And I know that some victims have faced that sort of victim shaming, which is deplorable. But I guess that I often sit back and sometimes sort of wince and then get frustrated because you can just see a lot of the telltale signs. Now this is to be absolutely clear. I am separating this from those heavily socially engineered sort of romance scams that know purposely just rip people apart from the inside out and sort of get under people's skin and target the most vulnerable. I'm on about those other cases that we've seen that affect a lot of people, affect businesses as well, where it is just that, well, I was involved in crypto and I was involved in these assets and I really didn't know what I was doing, downloaded a bunch of programs, sent my money off and no, what do you mean I can't get it back type of thing. And I think that that's almost that low hanging fruit bond that I think we're sort of in agreement on from an awareness point of view that we could just wipe that out. And if we could sort of wipe that out, then we would have more resources, you know, that we have. Because I've met so many cases and so many victims that when you're in this space, you know, people coming to me saying, I did this and I was using this particular hardware wallet and I did this thing and I wasn't sure about this, this, and this, and you're how much are we talking about here? Oh, like, two hundred thousand dollars. You were using an asset category that you didn't know about. You wouldn't do this with a painting. You wouldn't walk into an art gallery and go, oh, there's a pop up art gallery, you know, in the middle of a town somewhere and I just gave this guy some money and he didn't turn up with my painting. It shouldn't be a task force responsibility. This should be the governmental responsibility. We bring in seat belt laws. We do ad campaigns. Governments should be doing awareness campaign. We've seen various pockets of this. Are you aware of many sort of any initiatives that are trying I know a lot, and a lot of people will know about where you report the IC3’s of the world, action fraud in the UK. Are you aware of anything given your involvement in this space of anything like on the horizon or is it still very much it's going to be down to the practitioners like yourselves that there's no cavalry arriving anytime soon? Or are you gonna tell me, nope, there's a big thing coming in the summer that we're all aware of, we're all very excited about, or, unfortunately, is it a case of we gotta we gotta bunker down for some time yet? 

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Speaker: Erin West

I wish I could tell you that. I wish I could tell you that there was something big coming. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Because with crypto going up, I say all of this that with the prices going up and crypto going up in value so much, I only see it getting brutal. I only see it getting worse, before it gets better.

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Speaker: Erin West

It’s only going to get worse. Yes, and what else will feed into that is then we're gonna see more SIM swaps. That is, an easy way to steal crypto, and our React task force really got its start in the crypto world by investigating SIM swap cases. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Give us the quick 101 on SIM swaps for the for the for those that don't and also also elaborate for me on those that don't realize, like, how easy this entire house of cards can come down. So I've got two FA. I've got all of these things. And I know it's only when I say to people, you know that the if that guy over there does this thing, like, everything is done. They're like, I didn't realize that. 

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Speaker: Erin West

Yeah. I think, again, like, this is an opportunity for some basic education that can really help people. So I got a new phone over the weekend. And when I got the new phone, it just moved the SIM card over to mine. So that's a legitimate SIM swap. What we want is we want the traffic to stop going to my old phone and to go to my new phone. Right? That's a SIM swap. Millions of them happen legitimately every day. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

So just to be clear, this is the phone company basically redirecting and sort of putting you onto a different device. 

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Speaker: Erin West

Yeah. Exactly. So instead of my phone calls and my texts going to my purple phone, which I don't see at the moment, they're now going to this new iPhone. So what was happening was gangs of, it's not even gangs, a small community of hackers, really gamers turned hackers, had figured out that you could steal people's Twitter handles and Instagram handles by SIM swapping them. And here's how you do it. You and I are gamers. We don't know each other in real life. I know you as, whatever, you know, whatever your moniker is, and you know me as my moniker, but we've got a business going together where we are targeting people like our friend, Lo, who's producing this. And we know that Lo, has a lot of crypto because back in 2018, she would talk about it all the time. She'd hashtag this, hashtag that on Twitter. And so we realized we can defeat her two factor authentication. Now let me break that down to how this goes. Lo goes to sleep on a Friday night like a normal person. You and I are up. We have a friend at AT&T, or we're social engineering AT&T, but likely we have someone on the inside at AT&T who would promise to cut in on the deal. You call that friend and you say, please redirect the traffic coming from Lo's phone to the device that Erin is holding, and here's the new SIM card number. So there's no physical transfer. There's direct that traffic... 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Like call forwarding. 

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Speaker: Erin West

Call forwarding. That's exactly it. Lo still has everything on her phone, but she doesn't have any cell service. I've got the cell service. And I now go to Lo Furneaux at gmail.com because I've already researched it and do “forgot password” and the code is going to come to the device I'm holding, not her. I'm gonna give you the code. You're gonna type it in, and now we're gonna lock her out of her Gmail. And we're gonna go through all her social media and do that too, and now we own all of her accounts. But most importantly, and when this was rising back in 2017/2018, along with the rise in the value of Bitcoin, was SIM swaps because we then go to where she holds her money, and we lock her out of those accounts. Or we go through her iCloud account, and we find her seed phrase, which is basically the keys to where her money is, and we take that. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Like your PIN number on a or it's just yeah. Your secret password or your PIN number on a piece of paper. And people don't realize again, AI and all of the wonderful things we talk about allows us to just lift your iPhone, type in the word recovery, and you will literally type in the word ledger. And it will weed through your sixty thousand photographs and all of your lovely cat and dog pictures, and it will find and I think that people didn't realize that I've had so many people that have I do all of these things. I protect my devices. I do all of that. I'm like, great. What if in the jurisdiction that you live, I've got somebody in the phone company? And, I cut them in and they redirect your phone, and that's it. It's as simple as that. Then you throw that into foreign jurisdictions where you might have jurisdictions that don't have the same, where it's even easier to socially engineer because they're not as alive to it. And, again, these are not new problems. This is like buying the red Ferrari, parking the red Ferrari outside. Everyone knows the red FerrarIs outside your house. They just gotta get a copy of your keys. But I guess what people sometimes haven't woken up to is the fact that everything that makes crypto good also makes it so dangerous as well, and it's that always on 24/7 sort of public sort of ownership piece. How do you get away from that? Is the answer lie then in the likes of the authenticator tools and the using those instead of using sort of the two factor authentication via text? 

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Speaker: Erin West

Yeah. I think so. I think you cannot use your phone as a recovery, for any two factor authentication. You have to use an authenticator app, and that is probably the safest way right now. I mean, there's no saving you. If AT&T or Verizon or T Mobile move that traffic, you will lose service to your phone. That can and will happen. What you wanna make sure is that you've shored up that a scammer cannot get access to anything that is valuable to you. And so you need to think of what are the most valuable accounts that you have access to and make sure they are shored up with a very serious password and a two factor authentication that is done with an authenticator. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

And it's easy for people to think that this is just crypto, but then when you get access to that, you can download a new banking app. You can empty someone's bank accounts as well. That is sort of is the scary version, but I think you'd rightly mentioned that a lot of this lies in awareness. I actually, I was at an Interpol thing six, seven months ago as part of the new global coalition in the fight against financial crime, which again is a coming together public and private sector to try and look at these issues. And I listened to a fascinating talk from Cecile who sort of, unfortunately, sort of shot to fame at the Tinder Swindler. And she sort of laid out and she very much sort of like yourself has sort of taken on this mantle of, you know, raising awareness. I think that, frankly, it is a very modern twenty first sort of century way to look at it, but I think, actually, you know, literally getting on the Netflix and sort of, you know, is there any plans or is there anything in the in the in the sort of offing from your point of view to get this onto a wider demographic? And the reason I give you this example is I don't know if you've tracked in the UK, but one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history has recently been the post office scandal and the very fast version of this and I encourage people to go and go and look it up. Just Google post office UK, where our government owned postal service that also distributes welfare payments as well as selling stamps. The people that basically operate these franchises and get a bunch of government money and give it out as welfare and pension payments, The IT system just just screwed up and every week people were being told you know you're ten thousand pounds short on your balance, you must have stolen it. And literally hundreds of postmasters, these people, were convicted using proceeds of crime legislation, had their assets seized, were made bankrupt, were locked up, some committed suicide, no pariahs in their community, and it has all since turned out after fifteen years of campaigning that it was the IT error that was known to the post office and known to the IT company. 

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Speaker: Erin West

Oh my god. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

I'm not even gonna say allegedly because there's not public inquiry into a lot of this. And I'm sure there was a couple of cases in there where someone has possibly, you know, human nature, I'm sure something has went wrong. But, basically, there was people that have had their convictions quashed. They've had compensation. The case continues, but the reason I raised this and think it's very similar, and it's also just horrible that asset recovery legislation was used against these people on bad data, basically. Yeah. But it took a television series, a serialization of the story to actually get it talked about in parliament. So there was already a public inquiry that, you know, came and came and went. Didn't really get any newspaper coverage but when a bunch of famous people who everybody knows who are in Game of Thrones and all of the other series, when they did the like the four part series and people were like, are you kidding me? This actually took place. It got spoke about in parliament that week, and now two or three months later, we are all I think it's Mr. Bates versus the post office is the TV show. And now we actually have a refreshed public inquiry. We actually have a task force that has been set up. Do you think that that's the only way that we really get the big impact you need is that if you have your own Tinder Swindler moment, I can barely say that, or your post office moment. Thank you. Is that the plan? Truly, producers must be bugging you all the time for a show on this. And if you can't say, I love even more if you can't say if something is properly in the works. Is that a sort of another part of the awareness strategy? 

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Speaker: Erin West

One hundred percent. I think that it was on last week tonight with John Oliver this week, and it he did a fantastic twenty minute segment and I loved it because I got to work with the producers on it. It sounded just like the messaging that I've been given on this. And I think that is step one of getting this in front of a whole new set of eyes, because I was watching John Oliver talk about pig butchering, and it's exactly the same way I do that. Like, first, do you know about this text? Oh, that's a big scam, and people are losing millions of dollars. And, oh, did you know that it's actually slaves that are driving this whole thing? 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

So let's just quickly zoom in on that. People forget that. I know we mentioned it earlier on, but I don't think people realize that many times, the people that are actually carrying out the scams are human trafficking victims themselves. So you just have this compounded sort of misery cycle. 

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Speaker: Erin West

Yeah. So that is, I think, a really key part that blew my mind when I first started hearing about this. Like, the first piece of this is awful enough. But when you find out that the people on the other side of the keyboard are actually human trafficked and required to do this work, UN has set a estimate of people in captivity between Cambodia and Myanmar at two hundred and twenty five thousand people that are doing this work. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

In 2024. Yeah. 

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Speaker: Erin West

Right? So this is a world crisis. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm just here to tell you that it's way out of control. And, yes, it's a big problem. And sometimes big problems, we just need to keep shooting that BB gun and keep throwing eggs until something sticks. Sticks. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Point. And I think you rightly hit on it earlier on. Things are getting very bad from a trust perspective. We just saw that horrific sort of AI. Was it the twenty five million dollars lost by a sort of CFO? The entire Zoom call was constructed. What's the antidote to this? Because there's a great book, Malcolm Gladwell's, I think it's Talking to Strangers, where he talks about the fact that society has to exist on trust. If I go to Starbucks and ask for a coffee, I can't, like, test it because I don't think it's actually coffee. Like, where do you draw the line? But until obviously lawmakers and regulators and things sort of do it, it's all sort of down to initiatives like Operation Shamrock. I will also be hung, drawn, and quartered if I don't ask. Why Operation Shamrock? Where did that name come from? 

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Speaker: Erin West

Oh, sure. Yes. So I spend a lot of time thinking about this and trying to fake trying to tease out what would help and what wouldn't help. And I kept coming back to these three things that matter to me, educate, seize, and disrupt. And it was very clear, like, it's three things. I can put everything that I want under those under those three pillars. And it was around March of last year, and I thought…

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

I know where this is going. 

‍

Speaker: Erin West

I thought, you know what I need to do? I need to blow this up. I need to call it something so that it's more than just Erin West talking about stuff. It's like, no, this is a thing. It's Shamrock. It's three. It's not four. It's three. It's three leaves. And those are my educate, seize, disrupt. It's no more than a word that people like shamrocks. Shamrocks are lucky. The color green is pretty and feels clean and good and it's a triumvirate. And the concept is that, you know, with Operation Shamrock, this is not my thing. This is like a world thing that anybody can do any part of this and slap a Shamrock on it and call it a day. That please go educate. Please seize money. Please disrupt things. There's a million ways to disrupt this, and it's gonna take all of us. It's not just a law enforcement problem. It's not just a social media problem. It's not just a diplomacy problem. All of us need to work together to make a difference here, and that's what Shamrock's all about. And we're coming up on the one year. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Any big plans? 

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Speaker: Erin West

Oh, yes. I've got big stuff coming. I've got big stuff coming, and I cannot wait to tell you all about it. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Yeah. So, let's say for me, the logical thing in my brain was, Erin, your name literally means Ireland. West. West Coast of Ireland. St. Patrick's. I was like, it's a Shamrock. Of course, it's a Shamrock. No. Very good. I do like that, and I like that sense of sort of creating a movement. I've taken up a ton of your time. There's a couple of things I wanted just to sort of wrap up on effectively, and then we'll let you go and get back to your work. We talked about the sort of this asset recovery sort of strategy and there's this sort of vicious cycle right now. My personal sort of opinion is the fact that one of the big selling points of this is its effectiveness on the ROI. I mean, we talk about in regular asset recovery cases, regular fraud cases, Bernie Madoff, twenty years from sort of start to finish and required legislation to be created to sort of compensate victims, where we've seen crypto cases where, you know, a billion dollars is seized and the whole case is wrapped up within sort of twelve or twenty four months. Do you subscribe to the sort of the vein of thought that actually the sheer volume, it shouldn't have to be incentivized by a practical world if police chiefs and politicians realize they can recover billions into their economy? You know, by tackling these cases and taking these gangs down that the sheer ROI that on one side benefits the fraudsters might be the tipping point that actually will lead agencies to go, we kinda need to get ourselves upskilled in this. We need to get the tools and the training. We need to understand what these cases are and start attacking them because we can't wait for legislation. That might just take too long unless there's some serious terrorist attack, you know, that is really blatantly We've seen crypto dragged into a lot of terrorist financing conversations, but I think unless there's something world jarring, I don't think there's gonna be emergency legislation around crypto fraud as much as I would love it. What do you think is going to be that tipping point if you were to guess that this time next year, we're not having to talk about no initiatives by sort of folks like yourselves working tirelessly, that there's just momentum now and movement. Is it the new FATF focus on asset recovery? What do you think it could be? 

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Speaker: Erin West

That is a tough one because I would like to think that so, I mean, if we think of where we were a year ago, I had eighty five people show up at my Crypto Coalition meeting, and today we're at fifteen hundred. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Wow. 

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Speaker: Erin West

It's incremental growth. We have more and more officers aware of the problem and looking to do it. But I think that when we look at what the problem is today, it's great that we have local law enforcement ready to help people to walk through their doors. But when we look at what we really have, we are facing a massive enemy and, making small recoveries like reacts, one off recoveries is not going to move the needle to stopping this problem. So I think what we need are sharp, innovative minds that can figure out how to go after the big seizures and ultimately break that down and get it to victims and show that it can be done and be done in a relatively reasonable time frame. That's what's going to move all this forward is proof of concept and showing that it can be done. And we did that on a local level. We showed that you could you can make seizures and you can get it back to victims, but, unfortunately, that's just not working anymore because the bad guys are moving their money too quickly. I really believe the evidence is out there to make these seizures. Meta has a ton of data. LinkedIn has a ton of data. Match has a ton of data. Binance has a ton of data. That's what Operation Shamrock is about, and that's what you're gonna see dropping on March seventeenth is that we've built this private public coalition, and we are going to work together, and we're gonna make some moves and get this done. But it's a big lift. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Are the big players doing enough in the private sector? The big, the messes of the world, the dating sites, the… 

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Speaker: Erin West

A month ago, I would have said no. A month ago, I would have said there's a lot of work to be done here, and I'm not seeing enough effort. On really, on behalf of anyone. Like, I don't wanna limit it to social media because social media has a big part, but…

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Yeah, it's one part of it. 

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Speaker: Erin West

The law enforcement, I'd like to see bigger movements there. I think that and I'm pretty transparent about that. I think everybody could do better. I don't think anybody's taking this seriously enough. Certainly when we look at how these bad guys are meeting their victims, it's happening on social media and we've got to figure out a better way to stop allowing that connection to happen, that guy to victim. Let's team up and figure out how to do that. Let's stop existing in silos. And I think that you're going to see more of that. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Is policy and regulation the answer? 

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Speaker: Erin West

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. You know, the problem is we are looking at state law to make some of these seizures and state law is not California state law is not set up for me to even if I find a big pot to seize that all. And, New York, same problem. So where we've got some go getter local prosecutors, we don't have the law to support it, and so we need to look into that as well. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Yeah and I think people need to be realistic about the time frames around those things. We've got to work with what we've got. And as we've been saying sort of since the dawn of time we've been saying that, you know, if you can seize a car you can seize crypto. I often get asked, no I need to change my legislation and implement all these policies to go after these cases. No you don't. It's great to refine it, but if you have a 1960 definition of property, tangible, intangible, like, you can go get these cases and you don't always need an analytic tool. If someone reports a fraud and they've, you know, got an associated asset, people often forget that, oh, we've traced it and we've lost the trail, but they've got a bank account or a house or maybe there's other things. I think it's it's, my cofounder Nick Ferno says there's no such thing as crypto crime. 

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Speaker: Erin West

One hundred percent.

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

People get laser focused on their crypto cases, their fraud cases with this particular asset category. Well, I will give you, as we give all guests, the magic wand. Like, what do you, you've mentioned your sort of three tenants, of operation Shamrock. If you have that sort of billboard that everyone drives past, all the most important people in the world will see.

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Speaker: Erin West

You know, I would just say, like, do not make any investments with people you have not met in person. I mean it’s really as easy as that with pig butchering. And I get it, I totally get manipulation and all of that. But if you knew that from the outset of like, just never make an investment in any kind of asset that you don't really understand. I'm super empathetic to victims, but also, like, if you don't understand it personally, then you shouldn't be putting your money into it. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

And we said this is like the modern art. I tell people, don't think of them as crypto. Think of them as start up companies. Right. Who's who's behind them? Oh, they're offshore. They have no office, and I don't know who's behind it. Wonderful. Maybe pass on that one and maybe go buy something, like, Apple stock or buy something. Like, if you really wanna invest your money in something, then do that. It is threading that sort of needle around accountability. There's nothing worse when someone's a victim, but if it could have been avoided. It'll make your life a little bit easier if we remove those people from the pool and you have to concentrate on those really difficult cases. Erin, look, thank you so much for joining me today. I think that Simon Sinek sort of sums it up best when he talks about, you know, to get people sort of motivated, you've gotta create a movement. And I think there's not not many people I can think of in the world right now that created a movement in the way you have done for such a noble cause. So heartfelt thank you for what you're doing and sort of keep up the good work. We're obsessed with sort of trying to repair asset recovery. And the more people we have, like your good self, sort of banging a drum and throwing eggs. I'll bring my BB gun. You bring your eggs. And we will keep doing this. And I'm looking forward to the grand reveal, on the one year anniversary. Thank you to you and all the guys for what you're doing, and the best of luck with Operation Shamrock going forward. 

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Speaker: Erin West

Thank you so much. 

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Speaker Lo Furneaux

We're incredibly grateful to Erin West for sharing her invaluable insights with us. Keep an eye on her LinkedIn to learn more about Operation Shamrock's new initiatives and all of her exciting updates.

Next time, Aidan will be joined by Amanda Wick, who will be breaking down the pros and cons of civil forfeiture, the use of cryptocurrency in terrorist financing, and why this industry needs an association for women in cryptocurrency. Thanks to Amanda's extensive experience across both the public and private sector, from her position as the senior investigative counsel for the House of Representatives in America and the chief of legal affairs at Chainalysis to the senior policy adviser at FinCEN and now the founder of the Association for Women in cryptocurrency, Amanda Wick offers unique insights that you won't find anywhere else. You won't want to miss it. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please like and subscribe to the Seize and Desist podcast on your preferred platform. Leave a comment to share what you found enlightening and any suggestions that you may have for future guests you'd like to hear from. Our exploration into the world of asset recovery has only just begun. The views and opinions expressed by our guests are their own. Season to assist is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide legal, tax, financial, and or investment advice. Seize and Desist is brought to you by Asset Reality. 

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