Video Transcript

Public Affairs
Kelly, as Assistant Special Agent in Charge in Seattle, part of your duties, you oversee our Complex Financial Crimes Squad. And when I hear that, I think of Bernie Madoff or Ivan Boesky, I'll age myself. Can you explain a little bit about what our white collar crime program does here?

ASAC Kelly
Well, aside from the very large cases, which are the anomaly, we also do routine white collar cases. And those might be something like a bookkeeper embezzling, a bank employee embezzling funds. And then your typical investment frauds. We see a myriad of those that range from what we call affinity schemes, where someone in a church or social organization solicits investments from their friends and family, claiming high returns also to someone who then poses as an investment firm or a fund manager and solicits money from the broader community. Those are things we see on a routine basis where investors pay money. And those are the kind of crimes that make up the bread and butter of our work. We do see large, large-scale, hundreds of millions of dollar cases out of Seattle as well. So we work both the big and the small cases.

Public Affairs
In another video, we talked about cyber crimes. And it seems like some of those crimes, such as romance scams or business email compromise, may bleed into a white collar crime. Do they work those together or how does that work?

ASAC Kelly
Yes. So we work with our cyber squads all the time. And as you mentioned, there isn't a hard line that defines what is a cyber crime and a financial crime. Often, what our fraudsters take advantage of is the victim's lack of knowledge about a subject matter. An example would be cryptocurrency. Everyone's excited about cryptocurrency. There's people that want to invest in crypto currency, but they don't really understand how it works.

ASAC Kelly
And someone explains it to them. They take a leap of faith and provide them money because they're investing in cryptocurrency. The investor often doesn't understand what that means and willingly hands over money. So we see fraud schemes crossover with cyber crimes. The other issue is intrusions, right? Someone gets your password, someone is able to hack a computer, log into your accounts, and transfer money that way. So there is no hard set line between what our cyber crime squad does and our white collar crime squad does. And often they're working in conjunction on cases. The same can be said with our forensic accountants who support both types of squads.

Public Affairs
So, Kelly, that's a very scary scenario. So what should someone do if they feel they've been a victim of a scam or even worse, maybe an elderly parent or friend has been a victim?

ASAC Kelly
Well, the first thing to do and I always tell people is if you don't understand something, if it doesn't make sense to you, please do not invest to that. When we talk about investments, it's not rocket science. So if you don't understand it, talk to someone you trust, don't invest. The second thing I would say is don't ever give money to someone you haven't met in person. If you live by those two rules, that will help alleviate most of what we see. The other thing to remember is if you have been a victim or a relative or family member has been a victim, the best thing to do is quickly notify the FBI, and you can do that at www.ic3.gov or 1-800-CALL-FBI. We do have a process where we can try to recover funds if we received a notification quickly enough. And that's what I would do because the biggest thing we could do is if we can get on it quickly, that's our best chance at recovering funds.

Public Affairs
It's important information. Thank you.