04:10:45 --> 04:10:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so I believe we can start.

04:10:50 --> 04:11:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi everyone, my name is Alexandra Nulika, and today I want to talk to you about Scamatrix, our multi-agent AI system that we use to connect scams that nobody knew were related and hunt the whole fraud chain.

04:11:06 --> 04:11:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay.

04:11:09 --> 04:11:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Is it working?

04:11:11 --> 04:11:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No.

04:11:14 --> 04:11:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, sorry, my clicker is not working.

04:11:23 --> 04:11:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, it's not working.

04:11:30 --> 04:11:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I don't know what to say.

04:11:34 --> 04:11:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay.

04:11:37 --> 04:11:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's a bit.

04:11:39 --> 04:11:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so first let's start by looking at some numbers. So we know that scams reach almost everyone. More than 50% of people have been hit by a scam in the last 12 months, leading up to almost $500 billion lost worldwide.

04:11:54 --> 04:12:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, uh, we know that each month, more than 60 million people are targeted by scam ads online. And when it comes to calls, we know that 1 in 6 calls was unwanted.

04:12:08 --> 04:12:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: These numbers are taken from the GASA Global State of Scams report, and from the Bitdefender Global Scam Intelligence report. Okay, so, uh…

04:12:18 --> 04:12:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We can count all of this. Everyone sees a piece of the puzzle, but we couldn't connect it, or at least not until now.

04:12:28 --> 04:12:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Umm.

04:12:30 --> 04:12:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yep.

04:12:32 --> 04:12:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so let's start with the case file investigation. This is an investigation that our agent team has worked on. We started from a payment of 250 euros or about $290.

04:12:48 --> 04:12:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we only know the name of the platform that the victim invested in and the sum that they lost. This is what we started from.

04:13:02 --> 04:13:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Sorry, the clicker is acting funny.

04:13:13 --> 04:13:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Is there another clicker I can use?

04:13:21 --> 04:13:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No, it's okay.

04:13:25 --> 04:13:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No.

04:13:29 --> 04:13:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, sorry for that. So this is what we started from, one payment and one victim. And with the help of Scamatrix, we ended up uncovering a global operation that was actually active in more than 50 countries.

04:13:44 --> 04:13:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: impersonating more than 50 brands. And we found out that actually the victims were losing various amounts of money.

04:13:53 --> 04:13:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: From 250 euros to 1000 euros.

04:13:57 --> 04:14:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay? First, let's look at the data that Scanmatrix works with.

04:14:05 --> 04:14:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So each month?

04:14:07 --> 04:14:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Scamatrix analyzes more than 1.5 billion signals. A signal can be any relevant point of data, like a malicious email or SMS. And we don't look at them in isolation. We try to form.

04:14:22 --> 04:14:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: campaigns, and we do that. We form millions of campaigns each month from more than 50 platforms and channels.

04:14:29 --> 04:14:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, with the help of Schematrix, we know whether a signal is part of a linked campaign in just a few hours.

04:14:38 --> 04:14:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so now let's meet the team of agents. It is a team of investigators.

04:14:46 --> 04:14:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The first agent is the lead investigator. His job is to talk to all the other agents, which are experts on their domains.

04:14:55 --> 04:15:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, I will now present to you the team of agents. We have the SMS one, which is specialized in SMS campaigns, the email one, the ads one, which analyzes campaigns from multiple platforms, similar to the instant messaging one.

04:15:11 --> 04:15:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, with, uh, campaigns from, uh, social media chat apps.

04:15:15 --> 04:15:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then we have the voice agent, which is a very special agent, because it contains data from our Honeypot voice agent. That is a voice agent that we deploy, and we use to talk to scammers. And, well, how do we do that?

04:15:32 --> 04:15:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: it has a phone number, and we leak the phone number on multiple URLs obtained by clicking on malicious ads or SMS, and then we wait for the scammers to call us. This way, we can extract a lot of information about what the scammers are trying to obtain from their victims.

04:15:49 --> 04:15:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And also we waste their time.

04:15:52 --> 04:16:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay. We also have the Deepfake agent, which is specialized in detecting synthetic media and any brand or public figure impersonations. And lastly, the Linkflow agent, which is an expert on domains and any redirect chains.

04:16:10 --> 04:16:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so, um, all the agents are collaborating, and, uh, whatever relevant data they find, they will add to an evidence graph.

04:16:20 --> 04:16:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The lead investigator has access to it. And also we have the critic agent, which is also an essential one because what it does, it audits the case. It tries to look for any inconsistencies in the data that the other agents are finding and can ask for more clarifications if needed.

04:16:43 --> 04:17:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay. So we'll go through the investigation together and we will reveal the investigation in three parts. We'll uncover together a full walkthrough. So from the first victim interaction to how they ended up doing the payment.

04:17:02 --> 04:17:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Then, we'll see the scale and spread of the operation, and how we ended up discovering that, and some attribution signals, which are some operator fingerprints that we were able to uncover with the help of Scamatrix.

04:17:16 --> 04:17:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so now let's see Scamatrix in action. First, we'll go to the lead investigator and present him with the facts that we know. In this case, the sum paid by the victim and the name of the investment platform.

04:17:32 --> 04:17:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And what the lead will do, will go to all the agents that he thinks are relevant for this task. He can choose to query only some of them or all of them. In this case, he chose to query five agents. They will all search through their data and try to apply any filters or matching keywords to identify any relevant findings.

04:17:54 --> 04:18:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay? So, they will all search through their corpus of data. It might take some different amounts of time for them.

04:18:03 --> 04:18:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, not all agents, uh, can, uh, find, uh, matches all the time. Maybe some of them don't find the campaign with that, uh, that data. And we have the email agent that found something relevant, and the voice agent that is, uh, still, uh, can still search for additional data.

04:18:20 --> 04:18:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay.

04:18:22 --> 04:18:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Let's look at the email agent discoveries in detail. So, the email agent found some activation emails, which are part of a campaign that was promoting this platform, this investment platform.

04:18:38 --> 04:18:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, uh, we also know that the emails contain some payment links to a merchant page. Okay, and also, the email agent stated that the recipients are likely collected through an online lead form.

04:18:52 --> 04:19:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so the email agent found a relevant piece of information that fits in the puzzle, but still, we don't know how did the victim end up receiving this email.

04:19:02 --> 04:19:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, uh, next we will look at, um…

04:19:06 --> 04:19:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the voice agent, um, search, yeah, that's it. Okay, so this is how the inside of a voice agent, uh, search, uh, how it looks like.

04:19:15 --> 04:19:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, the voice agent has a corpus of data that it searches for, in terms of a database or RAG system that is indexed and retrievable by the agent. Then, it will try to look for the scope of the search for any brand mentions or investment keywords.

04:19:34 --> 04:19:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, uh, in this case, he found 11 possible candidates in our, uh, call corpus.

04:19:41 --> 04:19:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And after applying additional filters, maybe removing the calls that had, like, an unclear purpose, or no actual platform mentions, we remain with one viable record.

04:19:53 --> 04:20:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In the right side, you can see how a honeypot call record actually looks like. So, we have, uh, found out the caller number.

04:20:04 --> 04:20:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that, uh, made, uh, a call, uh, the caller country, which is Great Britain.

04:20:11 --> 04:20:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the caller alias. This is how the operator that called our honeypot presented himself when calling. And we can see that the caller actually mentioned the exact platform that we were looking for.

04:20:24 --> 04:20:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, uh, probably the most, uh, important piece of information, we can see that the call source is an ad form, and we can see the URL that, uh…

04:20:34 --> 04:20:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the… our honeypot, uh, leaked, uh, its data on. So, this is the URL that, uh, will be handed back to the lead.

04:20:44 --> 04:20:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then.

04:20:48 --> 04:20:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so, um, after the voice agent will continue their, uh, their search, and, uh…

04:20:56 --> 04:20:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, you can press next.

04:20:59 --> 04:21:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you.

04:21:00 --> 04:21:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, we can look in detail at the response of the voice agent.

04:21:07 --> 04:21:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so this is what the voice agent identified, basically what we previously saw in the Honeypot call record data. And additionally, we can see that the caller actually mentioned some multiple deposit tiers.

04:21:23 --> 04:21:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Which are multiple options that the victims can choose to invest in this platform. OK. And that this URL actually came by clicking on a malicious ad.

04:21:35 --> 04:21:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so this is a task for the ad agent and the lead will query the ad agent. But before doing that, the critic can intervene in any situation like this one. The critic mentions that maybe the Linkflow agent should be asked to trace any domain data behind this redirect URL.

04:21:57 --> 04:22:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so they're both searching in their corpuses of data.

04:22:02 --> 04:22:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we can see that the Linkflow found some additional evidence that this domain that we were searching for was actually registered quite recently, and that the result IP address matches 10 other scam domains.

04:22:19 --> 04:22:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, uh, these are some additional leads that have been discovered by the Linkflow agent.

04:22:26 --> 04:22:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That we can, uh, query for later. And we also see that the ad agent found something relevant.

04:22:32 --> 04:22:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, we look at, uh, the detailed, uh, information that the ad agent surfaced as well.

04:22:39 --> 04:22:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so the ad agent searched through the campaigns that it has access to and found that the redirect URL matches a known scam campaign, which was impersonating a French newspaper and a French website.

04:22:55 --> 04:22:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and a bank, and it presented a scandal.

04:22:59 --> 04:23:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And when the ad agent looked at the Facebook pages which were posting these malicious ads, it found some similar ads posted across 25 other countries in 15… more than 15 languages.

04:23:14 --> 04:23:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: in the course of the few last months. Also, when the agent looked at the tracking parameters embedded inside the URLs obtained by clicking on these ads, we found some fingerprint in.

04:23:29 --> 04:23:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Kirillik, which was matched to 20 other campaigns.

04:23:33 --> 04:23:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so, um…

04:23:37 --> 04:23:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now we have obtained the full trace of the scam campaign. So we know that the victim saw an ad. The first thing that they saw was a malicious ad. They clicked on it. They saw a page.

04:23:52 --> 04:24:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: With a form, a lead collection form, where they inputted their data in order to get more information about the investment campaign.

04:24:01 --> 04:24:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then they received an email with the payment link. And finally, this is how the victim ended up performing the payment.

04:24:11 --> 04:24:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so this is the full traceback, but our investigation does not stop here because as I mentioned, the ad agent found a lot of similar campaigns and the LinkFlow agent as well. So these are some open threads that we continued and went back to the lead investigator and asked him to continue and find any.

04:24:32 --> 04:24:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: relevant campaign data.

04:24:35 --> 04:24:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And this is what we found.

04:24:39 --> 04:24:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We discovered that this was actually part of an operator playbook.

04:24:44 --> 04:24:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The first one is the French ad that we started from and ended up discovering with the help of Scamatrix.

04:24:52 --> 04:25:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then we saw that this is one of the many templates that were deployed in many countries. For instance, like, similar ones in Canada, United Kingdom, or Australia.

04:25:03 --> 04:25:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, uh, this is how we were able to see the…

04:25:08 --> 04:25:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: scale and industrialization of this campaign?

04:25:16 --> 04:25:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so what are some takes from this?

04:25:20 --> 04:25:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We know that scams are becoming a lot more complex. They are no longer isolated events, but they are part of complex chains.

04:25:29 --> 04:25:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, when you see one event, it's just one clue, and in order to form the full picture, you have to look across multiple channels and try to gather and correlate all the data.

04:25:41 --> 04:25:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we can see that you can start from one victim's journey.

04:25:46 --> 04:25:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And actually trace it to a global operation that is active across many other countries.

04:25:56 --> 04:26:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so we used Scamatrix for other investigations. You can read some of them on our BDefender Labs blog. So a lot of interesting investigations were discovered with the help of Scamatrix.

04:26:14 --> 04:26:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, uh, here are other ways we deploy scammatrix. So, first, we try to stay proactive. We have noticed that, uh, scammers are often taking advantage of recurring events, or, uh, like.

04:26:29 --> 04:26:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: tax season, or Black Friday. So, around these events, we have Scamatrix actively search for any campaigns that are mentioning these events, and try to disrupt them before they, uh, scale.

04:26:42 --> 04:26:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Then we use Scamatrix to analyze any emerging campaigns and changes in trends. So we do that. We look on a week to week basis what changes, what are the top brands or public figures impersonated.

04:26:58 --> 04:27:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Then we do correlations. We start from one channel, and then we see what clues we find on other channels. And finally, we use it as an assistant in human investigations. It helps us speed up any search by surfacing a lot of interesting data quite fast.

04:27:21 --> 04:27:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, and now I want to talk about some open challenges that we've had.

04:27:27 --> 04:27:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Of course, these are not necessarily typical to scam detection, but maybe to systems that deploy multi-agents, a lot of agents.

04:27:39 --> 04:27:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: First, you have to coordinate long-running tasks. Each agent is searching through different amounts of data. Some agents may take longer to find what they are looking for, so you have to be careful not to create any bottlenecks.

04:27:54 --> 04:28:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Then, the next challenge we've had is to search through massive datasets fast.

04:28:00 --> 04:28:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So you have to give the agents tools that they can use to search and filter out the information.

04:28:08 --> 04:28:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Then, uh, this brings us to context. So, when an investigation goes on for longer, uh, the context can get cluttered up, so, uh, as more and more information is brought by the agents, you have to summarize and, uh.

04:28:24 --> 04:28:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Only keep what's essential.

04:28:26 --> 04:28:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And finally, you have to know when to stop. Sometimes investigations reveal a lot of data and correlations, so you can start from one domain or one Facebook page and can end up discovering hundreds or thousands of relevant data points.

04:28:44 --> 04:28:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, uh, you have to find that sweet spot between, uh, uh, coming up to a conclusion and continuing to search for more data.

04:28:53 --> 04:29:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so that was my presentation. You can find me at the Bitdefender stand if you want to talk about my presentation or have any questions. And now I'll let the experts talk on the panel about how to use this kind of.

04:29:12 --> 04:29:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Systems.

04:29:22 --> 04:29:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Actually, the expert just left the stage, so… Thank you very much, Alexandra. I just wanted to mention, like, this is, like.

04:29:33 --> 04:29:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: a hugely simplified version of the amount of data, of the amount of work that goes into actually uncovering this kind of scam campaigns. And these kinds of investigations are not just for publishing content.

04:29:50 --> 04:30:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We use this, actually, to expand protection to other potential victims in our ecosystem, so when we find a clue that can uncover a massive campaign, that learning is automatically deployed across the Bitdefender ecosystem.

04:30:09 --> 04:30:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to make sure other people are protected. But we are here at the Global Anti-Scam Summit, and we are talking about many industries that are facing and they are working towards.

04:30:26 --> 04:30:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: fighting scams. And we'll have a conversation about different perspectives and different verticals in terms of scam prevention. And I will invite on the stage with me Bernadette Smith, Chief Customer Officer and Banking Officer for Starling Bank.

04:30:47 --> 04:30:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay.

04:30:48 --> 04:31:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, Jeremy Miller, VP of Product Management at, uh, Allstate Identity Protection. Uh, Kosar Kenning, Vice President of Ecosystem Intelligence and Controls, uh, for, uh, Visa. And, of course.

04:31:03 --> 04:31:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, Jonathan Anastasia, president of Cube AI.

04:31:13 --> 04:31:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you for, uh, joining me. Uh, I think you can… you should, like, pass the microphones, and we will share a microphone together, because I see we don't have enough.

04:31:26 --> 04:31:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you very much for agreeing to join this conversation.

04:31:32 --> 04:31:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I will also have a seat so it won't be awkward.

04:31:35 --> 04:31:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, it is awkward, because everybody's wearing headphones, like, uh, silent disco, but, uh, uh, I hope everybody's hearing us okay.

04:31:43 --> 04:31:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we'll start with the order I placed in my mind before setting this up.

04:31:52 --> 04:31:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And Bernadette.

04:31:56 --> 04:32:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'm actually, I know for sure that, you know, banks and financial institutions actually act on this kind of intelligence. How is, uh, uh, uh, Starling actually, uh, use this kind of intelligence to make sure.

04:32:13 --> 04:32:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: your customers or your partners are protected from this kind of threats.

04:32:18 --> 04:32:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we would definitely use this kind of intelligence in our model development and our agent development. So even if I use the use case that we've all just viewed, and by the way, that was the first time I'd seen it as well. So I'm sort of working through this in my mind, but I'm looking at it from a bank's perspective.

04:32:34 --> 04:32:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In this use case, I would either be banking the fraudster, the victim, or potentially both. And so the variety of data points that I had seen out of this presentation, I could look at the amounts, 250, 500, 1,000 euros. I could look at the name of the investment scam.

04:32:51 --> 04:33:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I can look at some of the originating platforms, the emails, and those are data points I could feed in into the models to enhance the precision to potentially identify fraudsters. Once I pinpoint who those potential fraudsters are, we can do a review of the account. We can look at the references of the payments and try and track those payments using the data.

04:33:09 --> 04:33:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that came out of the use case. From a victim perspective, I would probably look to say, is there anything in their payment reference that would point towards the data that I'd seen in this use case? Are they investing for the first time? So in the United Kingdom, when a customer makes a payment, they have to select the reason for that payment. And in this case, I would anticipate they would select an investment. So if they're investing for the first time, if they're doing a 250.

04:33:33 --> 04:33:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Euro, 500 Euro, 1000 Euro, I could use that to refine the models and precision and try and identify those potential victims of fraud and take corrective action before it's a loss for the customer. So I would think, you know, if I bring that to life, that's probably how I would use those data points, try to use them in true time to identify fraudsters or victims.

04:33:53 --> 04:34:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think and I think that's the most important, you know, try to be as quick as possible and to limit damage because unfortunately there are people that are getting scammed. But if we can take learnings and do something going forward, that matters a lot.

04:34:11 --> 04:34:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, um…

04:34:12 --> 04:34:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Jeremy, you saw in the presentation, we started actually with a victim that actually we knew lost some money. So this is why we wanted to investigate at AIP.

04:34:29 --> 04:34:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Basically, you guys look after a potential scam is happening. How do the first 48 hours look from a victim perspective?

04:34:40 --> 04:34:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, thanks, um… yeah, so at Allstate Identity Protection, we're kind of at the… at the… the far end of things, right? This is after we already know that someone is a victim of a scam.

04:34:50 --> 04:35:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And so oftentimes that can be predicated by some other type of data exposure, like either through a data broker site or social media exposure.

04:35:05 --> 04:35:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: A scammer might be using social engineering to try to get to that user. So our job really is to listen to what's going on with the victim, understand through tools that are made available to us through our partnership with Bitdefender.

04:35:21 --> 04:35:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: as to exactly what happened, and reach out to the organizations to potentially, maybe financial institutions, to maybe stop some of the bleeding that may have happened so far. You know, the quicker you can act, the better to kind of limit that damage.

04:35:40 --> 04:35:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, but, you know, there's the financial toll to that. We take it not even just from the singular scam event. We also try to look at other signals that could indicate.

04:35:50 --> 04:36:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Whether there's been additional account takeover somewhere else, or a new account created with someone's identity, um, you know, what exactly needs to get done to try to notify those people that could have been impacted, um, those institutions that need to know in order to stop that bleeding, um, and that's kind of really…

04:36:08 --> 04:36:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, what, what we're trying, what we're trying to do in the, the, in the chain. So basically, you are continuing the, the, the fight and the investigation, uh, uh, unfortunately in different context than, uh, on this.

04:36:20 --> 04:36:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. That's adding a very interesting perspective because there's a lot of talk about prevention, but everybody sometimes misses that also.

04:36:35 --> 04:36:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, it happens, yeah? A lot of people, uh, are scammed. Uh, we are seeing higher volumes because scam adapt.

04:36:44 --> 04:36:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But through intelligence, hopefully we can make an impact. Kosar, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. You did, it's Kosar. Okay.

04:36:55 --> 04:37:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Great, great. So, I know a lot of people.

04:37:01 --> 04:37:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: A lot of the intelligence some banks use are coming from Visa, and Visa is using a lot of intelligence and is investing actively in detecting scam chains and helping.

04:37:16 --> 04:37:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, customer, uh, uh, being protected. Um…

04:37:21 --> 04:37:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How do you think, uh, um, financial institutions would take example from Visa to better leverage this kind of, uh, intelligence?

04:37:31 --> 04:37:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So I think you can never have enough intelligence, number one. So we're all struggling to get the good intelligence. So at Visa, we started a program called Visa Scam Disruption, and we're able to look at it from an ecosystem perspective, and we're able to see what's happening across the ecosystem.

04:37:48 --> 04:38:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Which has been very helpful to us. Now, when we see what we're doing, our biggest goal is to educate and make sure that the financial institutions are aware of what are the gaps and vulnerabilities that the fraudsters can take advantage of with your configurations, your operational settings. So, I'm really looking at it from a point of view of.

04:38:08 --> 04:38:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: there are so many different angles we can take this conversation, but if I'm thinking about how can financial institutions better help themselves.

04:38:15 --> 04:38:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There are authentication authorization processes that need to be really looked at in detail to make sure that you have the right configurations in place, because those are the things that, you know, the fraudsters are able to, of course, now with Frontier AI, they're able to use the latest.

04:38:32 --> 04:38:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: AI to help with probing, and they're able to find those types of gaps and vulnerabilities. And so it's really incumbent on the institution to make sure that they've gone back, they've looked at, hey, first of all, maybe pen test yourself, see what's out there, what would a fraudster take advantage of?

04:38:48 --> 04:38:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then work to remediate and fix those gaps.

04:38:52 --> 04:39:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you very much. And I think those advices are generally applicable to more industry, not just finance. Thank you for that.

04:39:00 --> 04:39:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Jonathan, so you guys bring a fresh new perspective to scam prevention and scam fighting. Can I quote you on that one? I like that little like blurb. I want to drop that somewhere. That's good, right? Okay, I think we're recording somewhere, so no problem, yeah.

04:39:21 --> 04:39:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, of course, uh, my question is, um.

04:39:27 --> 04:39:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I know it's important to have the right scam intelligence, but how do you make sure you have that, and how do you apply it to your customers or to your partners? I…

04:39:38 --> 04:39:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's a great question. And I just want to step back because, Alexandra, I love the presentation that you just did, utilizing agents in that way. I think everybody should take that like utilizing an Agentic workforce can solve problems for you internally.

04:39:54 --> 04:40:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: To add to that just a little bit, so where Cube AI sits is at the very beginning of the kill chain. We are out there conversing directly with criminals around the world. So when we're sitting there, we're talking, so now imagine that, um…

04:40:11 --> 04:40:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Coaster's playing the role of victim, and I'm the scammer talking to her, and I say, here's a $50,000 loan I want to give you. Uh, it's at 1% interest. Are you excited about that? Coaster says, yes. And then eventually the conversation progresses.

04:40:26 --> 04:40:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And during it, at some point, the scammer will say, well, okay, I need $500, Koser, then we can lock that in. Koser says, okay, where do I send you the money? At this moment, the criminal exposes themself. They give you the payment destination that they can control.

04:40:42 --> 04:41:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now, imagine that entire scenario, but what we use is agents as the role of victim deployed across every public and private domain in the world, operating to the tune of over 50 million conversations a month. From that level of intelligence, you're now using agents to gather up the deterministic payment destination, and that becomes a big difference.

04:41:05 --> 04:41:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: When I go to Starling and I say, Starling, I'm seeing 100, 200, 300 mules sitting in your bank every single month, it's not that many, Bernadette, but it's a few. But when you're sitting there, the difference then becomes we're identifying it on average.

04:41:21 --> 04:41:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: about 90% uplift of what the banks have in terms of where we identify them first, or the bank never identifies them at all. Because go back to the scenario I just said. In that world, there is no transaction necessarily at Starling.

04:41:36 --> 04:41:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There is nothing to see from a behavioral biometric. There is nothing to see from network data. There is nothing to see from a risk indicator, because it is a criminal talking.

04:41:47 --> 04:42:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and simply exposing what they own and control. And that becomes a difference when you start using agents, that you can get well ahead of where the activity even begins. I think that's the opportunity when you start using agents in this way, that that Agentic workforce becomes a force multiplier.

04:42:03 --> 04:42:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's a lot of buzzwords right there, I apologize. It's a lot of buzzwords, but looking on how technology is evolving, you know, Agentic, it was a buzzword, but now it's the norm.

04:42:19 --> 04:42:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um…

04:42:20 --> 04:42:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Models, both closed or open weights, are becoming more and more performant. And on one side, we are having a lot of companies leveraging AI to.

04:42:37 --> 04:42:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: sort through intelligence, and, uh, as Alexandra was, uh, uh, showing us, actually uncover new tactics, new techniques, and so on. Also, you have, uh, um, scammers and, uh, uh, uh, criminal groups leveraging the same technology sometimes, so…

04:42:53 --> 04:43:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Going back to you, Bernadette, how is Starling using AI? Are you guys finding like this is the technology that can make a difference? Yes, we are. So I think if we talk about the context of the United Kingdom and how fraud is evolving and scams are evolving in the United Kingdom.

04:43:15 --> 04:43:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we have a legislated requirement to report fraud. This isn't voluntary on the part of the victims. Banks must report fraud. So we have really good visibility of the size and scale of the problem in the United Kingdom. So if I look at last year.

04:43:30 --> 04:43:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: 1.3 billion was lost to payment fraud in the United Kingdom. That equates in a volumes term of about eight frauds per minute were being committed in the United Kingdom. This is what we now know through the scale of centralized reporting of frauds.

04:43:47 --> 04:44:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What we also know is that there's a responsibility on banks in the United Kingdom to refund the victims of frauds. So any customer who's a victim of fraud, there's a responsibility of the bank to refund them. So we have tried.

04:44:02 --> 04:44:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Many different technologies to put a friction in place for customers. So some of these might be back office models where we're trying to look for behavioral characteristics. We align them to the personal characteristics of the customer, and we try to find anomalies. This happens in real time as the payment's made.

04:44:20 --> 04:44:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It allows us to put friction in place, send messages to the customer, are you sure this looks like a scam? We're pretty confident it's a scam, we're really confident it's a scam, please don't make that payment. What we know from consumer behavior is when you put friction in place in this way.

04:44:37 --> 04:44:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: consumers don't like to be told how to spend their money. So, if we do this in a back-office model, they're just going to say, don't tell me how to spend my money, log a complaint, which we're then going to have to investigate and respond to the complaint, and then we're going to release the payment, the customer will likely be defrauded, and then we're going to refund them the fraud they've been refrauded.

04:44:56 --> 04:45:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Defrauded. So we've now introduced something called scam intelligence, which is a AI agent for each customer. So each customer of the bank in their own app has their own agent. It's a scam intelligent agent. And those customers can upload text messages.

04:45:12 --> 04:45:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: emails, they can upload online advertisements, and the agent will analyze it for the likelihood it's a scam. We know that when customers use this tool, they do their own research and their own analysis and make their own decisions.

04:45:27 --> 04:45:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's increased payment, the abandonment of payments by 300%, comparatively speaking, to back office models. So I think what we are learning from consumer behavior is if you give customers the tools to educate themselves and make their own decisions.

04:45:43 --> 04:45:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: they're more likely to abandon the payment and not proceed with the fraudulent activity and fall victim than if you put friction in place in the back office. Oh, that's a…

04:45:53 --> 04:46:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Very interesting 'cause I still go to conferences and I see a lot of.

04:46:01 --> 04:46:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: people preaching the friction strategy. So very interesting perspective. Thank you very much.

04:46:09 --> 04:46:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Jeremy.

04:46:12 --> 04:46:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, um, I'm not gonna ask you about, you know, leveraging AI, uh, uh, like, I know you guys do, and I know, uh, uh, it is something that, uh, uh, uh, is part of your strategy, but looking at, uh, uh, some of the signals, uh, uh, Alexandra was, uh, uh, showcasing.

04:46:29 --> 04:46:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, if you had those, uh, uh, signals early, which one of them would, would you think would help the most restore, uh, uh, victims' losses or, uh…

04:46:42 --> 04:46:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I mean, I think that the the best recovery case we have is the one that we don't get. And obviously our first preference would be prevention in some way.

04:46:55 --> 04:46:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think that…

04:46:57 --> 04:47:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One of the things that we see in working with victims, and unfortunately in the United States, financial institutions aren't obligated to refund that money. So Allstate Identity Protection, where I am, we actually, through our eligible customers, we offer scam reimbursement if they become a victim of cybercrime.

04:47:19 --> 04:47:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we've seen, we've paid out over almost half a million dollars this year, um, of, of, um, scam losses.

04:47:26 --> 04:47:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: we're seeing it happen, um, but what we're seeing is really around the exploitation of human behavior, right? And so, we know that when people are in a hot moment, whether that be, um, I think something, someone's in danger, um, I really think this is an awesome opportunity and I can make a ton of money.

04:47:45 --> 04:47:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: or, you know, my family's in trouble in some way, I stop thinking rationally.

04:47:51 --> 04:48:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, the scammers know that, and they take advantage of that. So when I think about signals, preventative signals, I think it's gotta be, uh, somehow, to take all of those signals and make it human.

04:48:02 --> 04:48:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And how does that how do those signals?

04:48:05 --> 04:48:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: equate into something that's happening with that individual person that makes them not think rationally in that moment.

04:48:13 --> 04:48:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Because very, very, I mean, we heard it this morning from Marianne, very intelligent woman, professional, medical professional, right? Fell for it, and it persisted over many, many months.

04:48:24 --> 04:48:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We've got to get better at understanding the signals and how they translate into someone's personal human vulnerability.

04:48:33 --> 04:48:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. Spot on. I echo that and I preach with every occasion I get to have this in mind and, you know, in your strategy when thinking about.

04:48:49 --> 04:48:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: becoming a blocker in the fraud chain. Thank you very much.

04:48:56 --> 04:48:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Of course, sir.

04:48:59 --> 04:49:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now, um, I wanted, uh, uh, to see your perspective, uh, and it's, you know, somehow related to your previous answer, uh, in terms of, uh.

04:49:11 --> 04:49:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: insights or patterns you are sharing with other financial institutions or applying directly to your customers? What are scam patterns or trends you are seeing that concern you the most, you know, in the whole AI age or the present?

04:49:27 --> 04:49:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, um, well, first of all, I wanted to say to Bernadette, that was a really interesting, um.

04:49:33 --> 04:49:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: path that you guys are taking, because I actually had the opportunity to listen to a bank's… the head of fraud was like, you have to listen to this recording. And it was the head of fraud talking to a customer.

04:49:45 --> 04:50:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: giving her all the evidence in the world that you are a part of a scam. And this lady was just like, nope, nope, nope, he's my fiance, and no matter what you say, we are in love, and this is happening. And it's just really interesting to see that perspective and what you guys are doing.

04:50:02 --> 04:50:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's really very impressive, and I would love to learn more about it. In terms of what we are seeing for scam trends, I mean, as you all know, AI has really helped to enable scams. Like, the precision, the scalability, just the sophistication of the scams, right? Like, we're seeing…

04:50:23 --> 04:50:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: just a lot more in terms of the social engineering, where people just… they just believe it, and the reach is just incredible. So across the ecosystem, we're just seeing 40% increase in scams. Just from January through June, we saw over… well, we were able to identify $1.6 billion of scams.

04:50:41 --> 04:50:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now that's a 40% increase from the previous month. We've also managed in the same six month period to find 183,000 fake merchants online. And so again, with AI, it's so fast, it's so easy to spin up.

04:50:56 --> 04:51:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: thousands of fake merchant websites, and we do a lot of work in terms of, like, we put the evidence together, we find the crime ring, our main goal is to identify the whole crime ring, take them down, and then turn them over to our law enforcement partner, who then, he works with all the different, uh, three-letter associations and agencies and all the Interpols and whatnot.

04:51:17 --> 04:51:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, uh, he works to take them down, so that's a really big piece of what we do. And the… again, it's just all AI, so we're not seeing new fraud techniques, per se. What we are seeing is what we're calling advanced intrusion, and that is because of all the AI-powered.

04:51:34 --> 04:51:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: capabilities out there. And you do see also now, with the accessibility and low cost, it's, uh, the barrier of entry is very, very low. So you see different things, like that kid in Japan, 12-year-old got turned away from an internet cafe, got really upset about it.

04:51:49 --> 04:52:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: told all his friends, and the 17-year-old of the group went and wrote some ChatGPT code, whatnot, and had never programmed before in his life. But he was able to get the card details for $7.3 million.

04:52:05 --> 04:52:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: internet cafe users. And what did they do with the money once they got the cards? They bought Pokemon cards. So, I mean, it just goes to show you that it's just, it's very young people, they don't need… They don't have Pokemon cards, let's not knock those. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's not a dock, it's not a dock. I mean.

04:52:22 --> 04:52:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, hey, it's an interesting thing to go spend millions and millions of dollars on, right? So it was just really interesting to see that. But again, just shows, like, that barrier of entry is so low. Anybody can become a fraudster, which is the main thing that we're seeing. It's like, the average customer is now a threat.

04:52:40 --> 04:52:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And that's… that… those are some of the trends that we're seeing. We do have our biannual threats report coming out in a couple of weeks, so highly encourage you guys to read it. We've got a lot more detail in it that, um, will help you to understand what's happening out in the world.

04:52:52 --> 04:52:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. That was worrying.

04:52:56 --> 04:52:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Oh.

04:52:57 --> 04:53:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Great answer. And the amount of merchants, that's a really big number. I wasn't expecting that. Okay.

04:53:05 --> 04:53:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, Jonathan, so, uh, going from the, the, the first answer you gave to the previous question, uh, I see that you have a, like, an overview, uh, uh, on multiple verticals, so…

04:53:19 --> 04:53:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um…

04:53:21 --> 04:53:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I was wondering which industry that you work with and provide services and intelligence is moving the best and which industry is moving the slowest in actually countering the scams?

04:53:38 --> 04:53:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's a good question. I think…

04:53:40 --> 04:53:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Not surprisingly, I would say the LLMs, the big companies are moving the fastest that we work with because it's an existential threat to their business if they allow criminals to just use their platforms everywhere they go.

04:53:56 --> 04:54:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That one's very clear. I would say, quickly thereafter, financial institutions around the world are realizing that that's where the money sits. So, whether it's right or not, and I was having a conversation, and I apologized to you the other night, and they were saying that if we just focus and we just put everything on banks.

04:54:14 --> 04:54:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: then nothing else happens. And I think I see that now, and Bernadette will know this well, right? PSR is great in the United Kingdom for what it does, but it's leaving out the platforms and the telcos and everybody else who has a responsibility in that chain. So.

04:54:29 --> 04:54:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think… I think you see that. I think the slower adopters are where they don't necessarily have the budget to build innovative solutions, and those end up also being some of the most vulnerable areas. Now, what's interesting about with AI, and I apologize, just going through where.

04:54:46 --> 04:55:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'm totally pivoting, so bear with me. Like, one of the things is where agents can start working in a unified way to protect, right? And what I mean by that, and there's a little bit of what Alexandra said, a little bit of what Bernadette said, and Koster as well. So just real quick from a show of hands.

04:55:01 --> 04:55:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How many people have built and launched their own agents?

04:55:05 --> 04:55:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Good. Now, how many people have a shared repo and a memory for your agents in your organization?

04:55:13 --> 04:55:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There we go. Now, here's the gap. You have an agent running. That agent is doing specific tasks in that lane that it's operating in.

04:55:23 --> 04:55:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Organizationally, if you built that shared repo where the agents are sharing and storing their memory of what they learned and communicating with each other, the agents then learn themselves. Now imagine a scenario where in the United Kingdom they're standing up the online crime center.

04:55:40 --> 04:55:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: where Starling's agents are all operating, operating in a shared repo, sharing information and learning, that's stripped out any PII or data, anything like that, and then they're sharing that information in a central knowledge hub, so other agents at other institutions can learn.

04:55:56 --> 04:56:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: how to better protect the customers. When we start talking about what technology can do, that, to me, is the future. It's where agents are sharing information when we're offline. And I'm not talking, like, you know, I'm sure most of you read the article this weekend about three civilizations of AI agents going to do something, okay?

04:56:14 --> 04:56:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: there's ways to build controls. But is that opportunity where these lower adopters, and to Koster's point, this isn't any different than cybersecurity 15 years ago, where instead of it being these major, you know, hackers out of Russia or something like that, people are able to spend $50 on the dark web and have a Trojan horse attack.

04:56:31 --> 04:56:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And they can go run it that way. It is becoming decentralized, and that's the main piece. But if we can actually share the Agentic workforce and how they communicate effectively, those lower level people, not lower level, that's the wrong word. I apologize for that. But when it comes to merchants who aren't sitting there focusing on cybersecurity.

04:56:49 --> 04:57:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: or scammers or something like that are the most effective. Imagine being able to protect them from shared knowledge, where then Visa could say, hey, look, to all of the merchants that we're processing transactions for, we can deploy agents for you that are trained on everything at the network level.

04:57:04 --> 04:57:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then that network information gets pushed back to Starling and each individual has the power of the network in their app. That to me is where we start getting really exciting about how technology protects the entire ecosystem and agents can truly be an additive piece for everyone.

04:57:21 --> 04:57:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you very much. That's a good pivot. We're actually coming full circle. We started with Alexandra's agents and we've reached that topic again. We're actually running a little bit off of time.

04:57:37 --> 04:57:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, question and, uh, an invite for, like, a closing idea for all of you. Um…

04:57:46 --> 04:57:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Is, um, AI and, um, actually, um.

04:57:53 --> 04:58:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: employing teams of agents, not just, uh, AI tools, uh, an answer towards, uh, uh, at least curbing the, the amount of scams, uh, uh, people and businesses face?

04:58:07 --> 04:58:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, you know, free answer, doesn't need to relate to anything, personal opinion. So yes, I think it is a big step forward. So if you can imagine what you're having multiple agents do today, I might have had 10 years ago, or even 2 years ago, a team of human beings doing that.

04:58:26 --> 04:58:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But at a significantly higher cost to the organization, significantly slower, higher error rate, and probably less successful than a team of agents. But I would caution to say it's about how those agents are used and what information they have access to. So if I use agents within my own organization using the available, that's only information only available.

04:58:48 --> 04:59:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: in my organization, that limits the success of those agents to those guardrails. But if we look at an example where we have multiple industries and multiple organizations using multiple agents sharing that information, that is a very, very different story.

04:59:08 --> 04:59:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And that then starts to get to the point of fraud at source. So if I think about our experiences, we can deploy all of the agents to prevent and detect fraud, but ultimately, if the fraud's already occurred, the fraudster still has the money, they've walked away with the money, they've been successful, we have customers out of money.

04:59:27 --> 04:59:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, so the fraud just keeps happening, you know, so really, it's got to be a complete ecosystem of agents across multiple industries collaborating, not just to detect and prevent fraud at the time, but actually to stop the fraud from happening at source, and that's where I think efforts.

04:59:44 --> 05:00:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: have to be, um, targeted, because all of us, whatever industry we're in, and operating with our own ecosystem, we're only just dealing with one small part of the problem. It's usually a bit of a band-aid for the problem, but it's not solving the problem. So it has to be a massive collaborative effort.

05:00:01 --> 05:00:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you.

05:00:03 --> 05:00:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I think there's… anything that we know about scammers is they adapt, right? And so if you're not sharing information across…

05:00:11 --> 05:00:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: functionally, and within different sectors, within, you know, different industries, within different countries, you know, just global, they're just going to find a way around those controls. So that's one thing. So, I mean, to answer the question, yes, I do think it's going to be helpful. Second is, I think that there's the…

05:00:29 --> 05:00:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: there's the global complexity, but I also think there's the individual complexity, and I think if you're really going to get.

05:00:35 --> 05:00:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, to the scale of, of personalization.

05:00:39 --> 05:00:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and understand how a particular threat is going to impact me, it's going to impact you, you're going to have to have something more sophisticated than what we have today, and it needs to be shared internally. It needs to have multiple sources.

05:00:55 --> 05:00:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, I think we've got to figure out how to…

05:00:57 --> 05:01:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Marry that with privacy, though. Privacy and compliance, um, and, um…

05:01:03 --> 05:01:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: coming from a very, you know, conservative insurance company at Allstate, I mean, it's extremely important for us to maintain privacy, to maintain confidentiality, and be very careful about data sharing. So it's a big challenge for us. We certainly see the…

05:01:20 --> 05:01:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: benefits in that, uh, and I think that, um, I was in the session earlier, I think that you were on, we were talking about this, um, you know, I think we need to bring them to the table early. Um, I really liked what we were talking about in that other breakout session.

05:01:35 --> 05:01:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, so that they're a part of this process, and bring them to places like this, so they can understand the challenges, uh, more than just, you know, a privacy policy, or more than just, you know, um, the liability of a company and losing people's information. Um, so…

05:01:49 --> 05:01:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. Coming from a company based in Europe, I totally get the privacy concern, so I muted you. Kosar?

05:01:57 --> 05:02:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, so I agree with what's been said before. Um, there's a lot of potential, but I am going to throw one spin on this. I think now it becomes even more important to make sure we have the right governance frameworks in place. Um, what I get really worried about, and what we see introduced all the time, is, yeah, you've just…

05:02:13 --> 05:02:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: included an agent, you could have just hired a bunch of really bad employees, right? So you want to make sure that your agents are doing exactly what you want them to do. We hear so many horror stories of what happened with Alibaba, what happened with, you know, the whole Hugging Face incident. How do we make sure we have the right guardrails around our Agentic AI?

05:02:31 --> 05:02:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How do we make sure that we're monitoring them and making sure they're staying effective and doing what they're supposed to do?

05:02:36 --> 05:02:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And how do we make sure that they are ingesting the right data? Because it really comes back down to the old adage, you know, garbage in, garbage out. Same thing with your agent. So how do we make sure that we have the human in the loop? We're governing this and we're making sure that it's doing what it's supposed to do. So.

05:02:52 --> 05:02:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: but I feel like we just need to make sure that we are still incorporating the strong foundation of governance.

05:02:59 --> 05:03:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: As we continue to go down this path.

05:03:01 --> 05:03:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you.

05:03:03 --> 05:03:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I…

05:03:05 --> 05:03:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I agree with everything that was just said, but I'm here as a different perspective. So I would say yes to all of that.

05:03:16 --> 05:03:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One of the things though that I realize as, as my agents are out there talking, we're already in the midst of the Agentic wars. And what I mean by that is the criminals are sitting there using older models of ChatGPT and Kimmy and DeepSeek.

05:03:31 --> 05:03:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And I'm already seeing that 30 to 40% of all my conversations are agent versus agent. So what Kassar said is completely correct in the sense that we're going to shortly get to Agentic payments, where imagine we live in this cognitive offload environment where everything is tokenized.

05:03:49 --> 05:04:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and moving 24-7, and somebody may know your agent to get through something, and then how do you know if that agent's behaving correctly or incorrectly? How do you follow the chain of transactions that are happening at lightning speed? All that being said.

05:04:04 --> 05:04:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: going back to it from a perspective, I would encourage everybody to simply get better.

05:04:10 --> 05:04:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: at building and understanding your prompt engineering and your training of the agents. And what I mean by that, if you're building out a task for an agent to do, you should also be building an auditor agent and a challenge agent. That challenge agent should question the agent you created on everything they're doing, and then have an audit agent to follow along to make sure that everything they said was correct.

05:04:30 --> 05:04:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You share it in your repo, and then all of a sudden, you actually get to some level of truth. And we're sitting out there now hiring people. I agree, you can hire some bad workers or not, but I'm hiring 16-year-olds in Ukraine, in Romania, in Lithuania, because they are amazing at prompt engineering and training and act as interns to build this out.

05:04:50 --> 05:05:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That is where, yes, there are the kids out there who can do the most horrible things because the technology allows it. Part of it is investing in those same people about how to have them build the protective systems we all need.

05:05:05 --> 05:05:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Great closing. So thank you very much. All of you, I think you set a very high standard for the rest of the panels that are going on today and tomorrow. So thank you very much for this perspective and we'll talk around. Thank you.

05:15:22 --> 05:15:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Is it on?

05:15:25 --> 05:15:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi everybody! If you can put your headphones on, then uh… We'll be starting shortly. We will be starting shortly.

05:15:55 --> 05:15:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yes.

05:15:58 --> 05:16:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Well, welcome everybody. We have a very interesting topic for you today, at least we think so.

05:16:06 --> 05:16:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So today we will start talking about Agentic AI. And basically what we are thinking and what the topic is about is, is the agent going to be scammed? So we move from social engineering to agent engineering.

05:16:22 --> 05:16:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we're going to start with Google who will give a presentation about agent commerce.

05:16:30 --> 05:16:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And after that, our CEO from ScamAdvisor, Aaron, will tell you something about what we are working on.

05:16:38 --> 05:16:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But first, I want to ask Jean-Jacques from Google to the stage and tell you more about AgentCommerce.

05:16:47 --> 05:16:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Enjoy!

05:16:58 --> 05:17:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Good morning, I hope you can hear me. The silent disco is going to start soon, you're going to start hearing the music… or not. I haven't programmed my agent for that. So, I'm going to start with quite a high-level overview, right? We're not going to get into a lot of the technicalities, it's really trying to consider.

05:17:16 --> 05:17:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What is the Agentic era that we're entering today? What are some of the risks, but also what are some of the solutions, some of the positives, some of the opportunities for us when we consider the interaction between Agentic Commerce?

05:17:32 --> 05:17:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And the world of scams.

05:17:35 --> 05:17:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So by way of introduction, you could consider that AI agents is the next step in a way in the gradual evolution of AI. You know, obviously it's been coming for decades and AI has taken some new shapes. We've had the introduction of generative AI.

05:17:52 --> 05:18:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Three, four years ago, and coming to the mainstream. Now, Agent, the big difference is that with generative AI, we were very much in a mode where you had a chatbot, in many cases, or a form of chatbot, that was generating content.

05:18:09 --> 05:18:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In very exciting ways, of course. But here, we're moving into the next phase, really, where the agent is not only generating content, but actually able to take actions from the initial input from the user, and take actions on users' behalf. And that's, of course, a major paradigm shift.

05:18:29 --> 05:18:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If we think about digital and online interactions, especially when we focus on the commercial side of things, the trade side of things. The economic impact, when we hear, you know, estimates are estimates, but I think when we consider the.

05:18:45 --> 05:19:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the ways in which Agentic Commerce is going to be able to make it easier, smoother for consumers to look for products, to buy products, et cetera, but also for enterprises to trade, the potential for productivity gains, both at individual level and enterprise levels, are massive. So some estimates have come up already.

05:19:05 --> 05:19:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: They're talking about three to five trillion dollars globally. That sounds enormous, but frankly, if you just think about the ways in which this is going to change economic interactions, this is not really fanciful. This is very much something that could happen.

05:19:22 --> 05:19:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the, the potential benefits of, um, of the, the, the Agentic world for, uh, the world's economy and, and commerce are enormous. But of course, like every, uh, economic interaction.

05:19:35 --> 05:19:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Notably online.

05:19:37 --> 05:19:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This is not going to work unless we have a trusted foundation for this, that people are happy using agents because they feel not only that it's removing some loads and some difficulties, but importantly that they do that in a safe and secure way.

05:19:54 --> 05:20:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and that goes not just for end consumers, of course, but very much also for enterprises. We need to make sure that commerce is safe. So, let's go a little bit more into detail about what that means. Um…

05:20:07 --> 05:20:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And starting with the risks, right? We need to think about what might be coming.

05:20:13 --> 05:20:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We're arguably still in early days of the Agentic world. I think it's definitely a matter of months before it becomes really mainstream. We're still not there completely, but we're fast getting to it. And so some of the trends that we're seeing and some of the threats, and I'm sure you'll hear more from colleagues in detail in the rest of the panel, this is just a…

05:20:34 --> 05:20:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, a snapshot, if you will, right? We don't yet know the full extent to which agents are going to be misused by scammers, but you can imagine, and that's what we've seen already, of some early attempts of that.

05:20:48 --> 05:21:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that the scammers or the bad actors generally will try to hijack the prompt, and basically have a harmful injection of prompts that might be, for instance, hidden in external web sources. So when the agent is crawling a website, it'll.

05:21:06 --> 05:21:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: come up against effectively malicious code that will tweak the prompts it's received so that the agent behaves in a way that it wasn't supposed to do, that doesn't correspond to the user's demands. Similarly, you'd have things like honey traps, where basically the agent is out there scouring the web, looking for a good deal, for instance.

05:21:25 --> 05:21:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, and it's… the website will be constructed by the bad actors in such a way as to attract those agents looking for cool deals, and then it will be, uh, an occasion to, um… to obtain something from the agents unwittingly, such as.

05:21:42 --> 05:21:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: For instance, harvesting payment credentials. You have, like, on the third one, a sort of slightly broader ways of tricking the agents. And this time, not at the beginning, at the level of the prompt, but actually during the communications, in flight, if you will.

05:21:57 --> 05:22:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: where the bad actor or their systems will try to inject a fake command in the middle of the operation, if you will, of the agent. And then the fourth one is broad, right? The sky is open, if you will.

05:22:15 --> 05:22:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: in a negative way, which is, you know, a bit like Gen AI already for the past few years, you've got the huge power of these tools to come up with new ideas to help us in our everyday lives. Well, sadly, they can also be exploited in that way by scammers. They could try to use agents.

05:22:32 --> 05:22:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to come up with completely novel ways that we've never thought about before, of, for instance, obtaining information, that sort of thing. We've already seen some headlines in recent weeks about how agents can actually evolve.

05:22:48 --> 05:23:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: effectively of their own volition and come up with some clever ways of finding vulnerabilities to have access to certain data that you shouldn't have access to, those sorts of things, and we should expect that the scammers are going to try and do that.

05:23:04 --> 05:23:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That might sound bleak, but it's not all bleak, especially if we start getting ready now.

05:23:10 --> 05:23:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Oops. So, I'm using here some, you know, Google examples, but I think they are here to illustrate the point, and they're not just about Google, it's about really trying to illustrate how we should think about strengthening our defenses across the ecosystem.

05:23:28 --> 05:23:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And the first one is when we think about these economic interactions, right, between consumers and enterprises and from enterprise to enterprise, we need to have in place systems that underpin a safe and secure commerce environment.

05:23:44 --> 05:24:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: by the agents, through agents. So, one of the first protocols that we've put in place, together with a number of other industry players, and when I say industry, not just tech, but, you know, financial, e-commerce, shopping, etc.

05:24:00 --> 05:24:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: is the Universal Commerce Protocol, and that's basically, uh, you know, it's built on industry standards. It's a protocol that enables, uh, seamless, authenticated ways, uh, for transactions to happen across the value chain, right? Um…

05:24:15 --> 05:24:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Then, uh, you need other components, if you will, in that chain of trust. Um, so you've got an agent-to-agent protocol. It's basically, um, you know, you might have, uh, your bank might have an agent that is interacting with you as a consumer, or rather, your agent.

05:24:30 --> 05:24:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So how do the agents talk to one another? And again, know that this is indeed the right agent that they're talking to, that it's a genuine consumer that's contacting the genuine bank, those sorts of things, right? So you need to underpin that trust with some protocols, some technical protocols to recognize that.

05:24:46 --> 05:25:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And similarly, on the payment side, when a payment is being initiated, we need to be able to have some confidence that, indeed, this is coming from a genuine agent, but not just that, that it corresponds to the user's initial instructions and parameters that they have set.

05:25:05 --> 05:25:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, for instance, in a crude way, how much… what is the limit of payment that the user has agreed that the agent could take? You know, say that I said, agent, you can go and find me a flight ticket.

05:25:18 --> 05:25:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But you will never spend more than $1,000. You want a way for, for instance, the travel agent or the airline that you're contacting to buy that ticket to be able to say that, yeah, not only is this the right customer that I've got here, but indeed, the money they're about to pay corresponds to the sort of limits that they've put in place.

05:25:38 --> 05:25:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Might not be the best example, but I'm trying to illustrate what we're talking about here.

05:25:43 --> 05:26:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then, underpinning all that, as well, there's a number of, um, identification, authentication, verification mechanisms that are being put in place. Um, for the benefit of time, I'm not going to go into detail right now. Um, I should have mentioned, perhaps, that all of this is now available online. I see you taking pictures. I should have said that before, I'm sorry.

05:26:02 --> 05:26:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, we've just published a white paper, uh, yesterday, uh, at the occasion of GASA. It was announced by my big boss, Kent Walker, on stage yesterday. So, uh, it details a lot of this, uh, so you'll have all that, but please continue to listen to what I'm talking about.

05:26:18 --> 05:26:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, um, but just so you know, it's online, if you look on LinkedIn, on my page, or Kent Walker's page, you'll get all the links to the white paper. Um, and, um, yeah, so, going back to identity authentication and verification, you know, there's a number of ways now in which we can.

05:26:34 --> 05:26:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: really underpin a safe system for commerce in the age of Agentic AI, and it's very much about, again, having signatures, right, effectively credentials that are.

05:26:50 --> 05:27:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: recognized that are safe because they're cryptographic, but you know that they can be recognized across the value chain, right? And that extends to a number of different actors in the value chain, right? So I've mentioned here agent cards, you know, basically like a license plate for agents where they're being recognized and you know that that can't really be tampered with in the shopping chain, if you will.

05:27:15 --> 05:27:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: um, you've got merchant credentials as well, um, but it extends also to other parts of the ecosystem. So if you think about apps, um, we want to be sure that, uh, when a consumer or when an agent, uh, interacts with an app.

05:27:28 --> 05:27:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that this app is actually a genuine app, that it's not one that is operated by scammers or other bad actors, and that's why we've been running developer verifications on the Play Store for a long time. We scan 350 billion apps a day, if my memory serves right.

05:27:46 --> 05:28:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And so we stop a lot of bad actors trying to go in through the Play Store and con people, for instance, with fake banking apps. Now what we've found is that a lot of the ways in which the scammers are doing that is trying to encourage people to download.

05:28:01 --> 05:28:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: their dodgy apps from outside of a proper, uh, app store, right, from a website. So, in order to mitigate that, what we're starting to do as of this month is, uh, to verify developers, even if they're not automatically on the Play Store, we just want to have a confidence that if they want to, um.

05:28:19 --> 05:28:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, get users to, uh, install some… something…

05:28:23 --> 05:28:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: on their Android phone from outside our store. We don't have a problem with that, but we just want to know who they are, mitigate a little bit the risks of, basically, them being bad actors. And you can imagine that that's just on the app side, but you can imagine they're doing that for a range of other actors and intermediaries in the shopping chain.

05:28:42 --> 05:28:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and then, yeah, we're, we're extending, you know, the, basically the principle of zero trust, uh, that we apply on the cybersecurity side to, uh, shopping interactions or economic interactions.

05:28:53 --> 05:29:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, uh, we're also beefing up… and when I say we, it's Google, it's true, but the message here is that everybody should be doing this, right? Whether you're a bank, you're a telco, you're just any economic actor out there, you should get ready for the fact that agents are here. If you haven't started already, you really should.

05:29:10 --> 05:29:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and it's thinking about defenses in a very broad sense. We need to have, really, an ecosystem of defense. We need to beef up our cybersecurity defenses, knowing that agents are coming, um, because of the risk of scams, but also just generally, uh, other vulnerabilities. And I think colleagues on the panel might touch on that a little bit more.

05:29:27 --> 05:29:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, so there's various ways we're doing that with, uh, with, uh, across the Google chain. I think one to note that's useful for everybody as well, not just our cloud customers, is on Chrome, where we've really beefed up the ways in which Chrome looks at agents when you're browsing on Chrome.

05:29:45 --> 05:30:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And again, tries to check, uh, you know, that it is an authentic, uh, agent, uh, that is properly mandated, if you will, by the user, and respects, you know, it does specific checks, Chrome does specific checks to make sure that it respects, that the agent respects the choices, the instructions of the user. So that's all been introduced in recent months.

05:30:04 --> 05:30:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Really to try and make sure that, as much as possible, we can try and reinforce trust along the value chain. And I think the really important part that we should think about is that — and this is something we were saying about GenAI in the first place. We're definitely seeing that with Agentic AI.

05:30:20 --> 05:30:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This is a great opportunity, Agentic AI, not just for the nice stuff about shopping and commerce and better economic transactions, but also for us to leverage it to get ahead of the scam and cybersecurity risks. There's no reason why the bad actors only are going to use Agentic AI. We should use them. And already, maybe just walking the streets of San Francisco, you might have noticed a lot of ads already from companies that advertise this. They are using agents in order to really speed up.

05:30:49 --> 05:31:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the tech support work, and the cybersecurity team's work, so that you're moving increasingly from reactive cyber defense to proactive cyber defense, where the agent thinks ahead about vulnerabilities and thinks ahead about solutions, so that you can get patches ready.

05:31:05 --> 05:31:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, early, if not almost in advance of a potential attack.

05:31:09 --> 05:31:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, just some final thoughts to sort of wrap it up. We really need to think about having a comprehensive environment for trusted Agentic Commerce. By that we mean we need to think about.

05:31:25 --> 05:31:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the commerce value chain as a whole, end-to-end, if you will, and try to make sure that we have ways for all the actors in that chain, from the end consumer all the way to the producers, to have trusted interactions through things like authentication.

05:31:41 --> 05:31:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, secure by design systems, good risk governance frameworks, et cetera. Many of you will have heard this in the cybersecurity field for the past 20 years. We're not reinventing the wheel here, but we really do need to freshen this up.

05:31:55 --> 05:32:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: because of the agents coming here, and to do this at scale and rapidly, because this is nearly upon us. And we need to make sure that standards, if they have not already taken into account Agentic AI, should do that. So you've got frameworks like NIST AI Agent Standards Initiative that started, there's a few other.

05:32:15 --> 05:32:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Standards framework that were done for the context of AI, we need to make sure that they're just updated with Agentic in mind. IETF is also looking at several standards in that field. We need to make sure that we have that as an industry ready to support everyone in a clear and interoperable manner. Governments have got an interesting role as well. It's not that we need to reinvent the wheel. Something that was illegal before agents is going to remain illegal with agents. That's quite clear.

05:32:42 --> 05:32:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But there might need to be a bit of update here or there. It may be the case, for instance, if you think about payments, they've got some very, very specific pieces of regulation. Some of that might need some updates, so I think regulatory stock-taking might be useful.

05:32:57 --> 05:33:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But I think perhaps more importantly, I think the government's got a great sort of convening role and a directional role. They can champion open standards so that everybody starts to use common protocols, common ways of authenticating and verifying so we can sort of talk to each other and trade with each other. And also we can think about leveraging public procurement. Government procurement is a major part of the economy. If they make sure that they insist on having robust safety and security features in products that they procure.

05:33:26 --> 05:33:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: then that encourages industry, really, to put them in place, right? If you're told, if you want to sell to government, you have to be, you know, agent-proof.

05:33:34 --> 05:33:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: then the industry will follow suit. So that's the government part. And I think for all of us as a whole, and that's a theme you've heard hopefully already quite a bit in Gaza, we need to double down on disrupting scammers. So we can do the tech stuff. We can help users. We can continue to innovate in tech solutions.

05:33:50 --> 05:34:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But really, at the end of the day, we need to think about how we stop the criminal gangs who are behind the rise in scams. And that goes through thinking, again, across the value chain, if you will, how the scammers are exploiting all our legitimate infrastructures, whether it's banking systems, telecom resources.

05:34:06 --> 05:34:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: digital platform resources. These guys are, or indeed, agents, as a case in point. The bad actors, and scammers in particular, are really trying to leverage all that. We need to go to them, try to, and beef up, in the same way that I described how we're doing that for agents, we need to think about how we disrupt the.

05:34:24 --> 05:34:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: their exploitation of all our systems. There's a major project that the Gaza Enforcement Working Group is starting. I hope many of you will join that. Again, you know, we need to get ready for agents, get our systems ready, but also think about the enforcement side, work together, support law enforcement as private sector.

05:34:42 --> 05:35:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and support law enforcement cooperation across borders as well, so that we can get after the scammers. I think that remains a key priority for our community. So, that was it by way of introduction. So, we need to save Agentic Commerce. We're starting to lay the foundations for that. We need to harness AI, and Agentic AI in particular, for defense. There's great potential.

05:35:01 --> 05:35:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And as often, as always in the Gasar world, in a way, we need to collaborate with each other. Thank you.

05:35:12 --> 05:35:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you so much, Jean-Jacques.

05:35:15 --> 05:35:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Next up is Aaron and talking about disrupting scammers on the Agentic field. That's what we are going to talk about. So I want to welcome Aaron on the stage.

05:35:30 --> 05:35:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: All right.

05:35:32 --> 05:35:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you all for joining today. And feel free to sit down. There's still some seats around here. So there's a reason why we started with Google laying the foundation first. Because I think here, the naming of our track, for instance, the agent is the new victim. We're trying to be a little bit more provocative here.

05:35:48 --> 05:36:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: we're trying to explain that, you know, we've barely solved victim, uh, we've barely solved human protection, right? But now what we see here is that the agents are going to be the victims as well, and then why do we see that? Why do we think so? Alright.

05:36:03 --> 05:36:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, first of all, let's lay the ground a little bit, right? I'm not sure how many people here, like, fully utilize agents in their day-to-day, but, you know, the simple thing about an agent compared to just looking at ChatGPT, for example. You know, with ChatGPT, you give a question, they give you an answer. With agents, you give them a task, they complete that task for you.

05:36:23 --> 05:36:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now that can be a numerous different things, right? They can write your PowerPoint for you. They can like create designs for you. And then as part of a thing that we're really looking at is that they can eventually do different actions such as searching stuff for you and maybe even reserving or ordering stuff for you as well.

05:36:40 --> 05:36:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And that might come sooner than a lot of people think here, which I'll get to in a little bit.

05:36:45 --> 05:37:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, uh, again, like a normal, like, normally using LLMs, normally using AI, it responds to a prompt. Whereas, with agents, it pursues a goal, and it works towards that goal that you give to them. Alright, so this is the basic foundation of what Agentic AI is.

05:37:00 --> 05:37:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay. And so, now we see that, because of this, there is a new sort of control point that we need to look at. In the past, when it was just humans doing this, right, where, you know, it's the same thing, like, oh, you receive a text saying your parcel's ready, and you look at it, you click on a link, and then, you know, you might get credential theft. It's a classic phishing link, right? Nothing new.

05:37:20 --> 05:37:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now, the only difference right now is that instead of the human doing it, it could be the agent doing it. And so we have to rethink a little bit about how we are safeguarding these agents instead. Because the same things that we're doing right now and applying to humans might not apply to agents. There is a nuance there. There is a difference there.

05:37:37 --> 05:37:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: AI, LLMs, they are strong at some things, but they are weak at others. So this requires a different type of thinking, uh, and a different set of skills to really harden the entire process.

05:37:49 --> 05:38:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay. And so, a common thing that, as we are talking about this, is, you know, the general skepticism, right? Like, oh, I will never let an agent take control of my credit card and order something for me, right? And I think that's a very common response to it. Um, but…

05:38:05 --> 05:38:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But, what I think, what we think, and a lot of people think, is that, you know, this is not going to… when you're explaining this to the general public, you're not really going to go and say, oh, you are going to use Agentic AI to do this. Like, the general public doesn't care. Normal people don't care what the terminology is.

05:38:23 --> 05:38:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: They just care about the convenience. They care about whether they can complete the action that they want to complete faster, easier, and maybe hopefully cheaper as well, right? And it's already here. And going back to why I said, uh, why we're letting Google speak first, you know, in Google I.O, like, a few months ago.

05:38:40 --> 05:39:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One of the big things, one of the big pushes they made was the change from normal Google search into Agentic search. And I think many people nowadays should have already interacted. If you interact with Google from a day-to-day basis, like you're searching something, you can already see at the top result, it's not just giving you all the links anymore. It's asking you, hey, are you searching for this? Do you want to have a deeper search into this? What is the final goal that you want to do?

05:39:04 --> 05:39:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's interacting with you. And if you ever interacted with that and asked a follow-up question, congratulations, you're using Agentic AI. That is Agentic Search. So the natural progression after that is, oh, let's recommend a product for you. So I see that you're looking for this sneaker. I see you're looking for this flight.

05:39:20 --> 05:39:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Can I actually then go ahead and book that for you? And if you do, congratulations, that's Agentic e-commerce. All right, so it's not a matter of, oh, do I want to use this or not? It's the fact that if it's in your normal process, it is going to be, you are going to be using it sooner or later.

05:39:39 --> 05:40:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: all right and so like and these are just some of the the examples of where the scam could be right like a classic shopping example like nowadays I'm sure a lot of people use AI to help research a certain project right so so this is it's a little bit hard to see but I believe this is using GPT codex so you go into there you can actually already you know prompt it to say oh I want to search for the best I don't know like pickleball or tennis rackets for example help me find what's the best brand help me find a good place to to shop.

05:40:08 --> 05:40:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: for it. And it can already start recommending some stores for you. And sometimes it can even help you purchase it as well. But, you know, like, if it's looking up something for you, can it actually help tell you that the link that you're going to, the shop that you're going to, is actually an unscripturalist link? It's a scammy link, right? It's not someplace that you would want to shop.

05:40:26 --> 05:40:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Are these safeguards being built in? And the answer is, as of right now, not necessarily. Not yet. Okay. Or a second example here is, for instance, you know, a lot of people are using these AIs to help with their day-to-day work. We're all professionals here. I'm sure a lot of you have been using it to help manage your inbox.

05:40:44 --> 05:41:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: For example, right? Give me summaries, what are the tasks I need to do, et cetera, et cetera. Well, is an agent actually going to be able to discern that, hey, this is actually a phishing email or this is something that's actually going to steal my credentials instead of just executing it or forwarding to you as a summary, right? So these are some of the things that…

05:41:01 --> 05:41:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: could potentially be the problem.

05:41:03 --> 05:41:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And so, you know, there's also a lot of talk about, oh, you should just learn to prompt it better, or the LLM should be built better, right? They should be more smart in this. I hear a lot of people saying, for instance, that the GPTs, the clouds, or the Geminis, they're already being trained to recognize scams. Well, here we come into another problem.

05:41:21 --> 05:41:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: LLMs, by their nature, are probabilistic, right? You can tell… you can give them the same exact prompt 10 times, and then the 11th time, they might give out something different. It's all probability. So, when we're in the scam field, and we want to do something to protect people against scams, it needs to be deterministic.

05:41:39 --> 05:41:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Right? It means that if you put in the same thing 100 times, it should give out the same exact answer 100 times as well. So these are the things, like, that needs to be changed here, and this is a switch-up. Like, it's not just a matter of teaching the AI to be better, or prompting it better. Like, there needs to be hard, deterministic.

05:41:56 --> 05:42:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: guardrails put in place. And that's the only way that you can achieve true confidence in that it can be able to protect itself.

05:42:04 --> 05:42:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Right. And so, you know, um, agent trust is not destination trust, and this is just a little bit of going back to what we're talking about in terms of, okay, let's just use a very simple example, right? The shopping example. Like, can it… like, it should be an easy thing to say, oh, is this shopping site that this agent is recommending me, is it actually safe or not? You know, we've solved that.

05:42:25 --> 05:42:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: numerous times over in the industry already. So it's just a matter of applying those same things into the agent.

05:42:32 --> 05:42:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Right, and so if there's any takeaway from this, it's that, you know, the people are still bearing the loss, and what we're talking about in terms of the agents, it's that the agents are changing the path, right? So we're still doing the same thing, it's just that we now need to add and think about this new other thing, and adapt some of the principles that we're already working on.

05:42:49 --> 05:43:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to this new angle, right? And then, okay, finally, like, I do need to shill a little bit for our company, for ScamAdvisor as well. We do have an actual, like, agent protection, uh, um, like, AI guardrail scam prevention kind of a thing that we've launched just today on Product Hunt.

05:43:06 --> 05:43:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Like, if you guys are interested, go check it out. It's also in private beta. Basically, it is what I'm talking about, like, guardrails for your agents. So as you're using it, as you're using your Codexes, as you're using your CloudWorks, or your Hermes agents, your Open Claws, for example, you can just util.

05:43:22 --> 05:43:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, make sure that your agent is not going to get scammed or tricked by some of those things, right? And then, of course, like, in the future, probably a lot of these things should be built in to either the LLMs themselves, like, not as part of the model, but as part of the, you know.

05:43:37 --> 05:43:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the harness that's controlling the model, or from other players, either from the payment, the commerce, and so on and so forth. But, you know, this is an open discussion right now, and hopefully in the next panel session, uh, all of our experts will show a little bit more about how they feel this should be evolving.

05:43:52 --> 05:43:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and where exactly the checkpoint should be. Thank you all.

05:44:01 --> 05:44:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you, Erin, so much. And thank you, Jean-Jacques, for setting the stage.

05:44:07 --> 05:44:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So I think that we talked about a few things. One of the things is we are already using Agentic AI, if we know it or not.

05:44:18 --> 05:44:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And the other point is AI itself. So as Aaron already pointed out, the…

05:44:25 --> 05:44:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The issue, let's say the issue with AI is that it's it's readout information and based on what it reads, it makes an educated step of an educated guess what's going to be the next step here.

05:44:40 --> 05:44:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And that is also where the vulnerability is. And what we are thinking is that scammers will make use of that vulnerability from AI as how it's been set up.

05:44:53 --> 05:45:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, um, um, that's all we're going to talk about within this panel. I want to ask, uh, Jean-Jacques, Leila, Katja, and, uh, Jungo to, uh, come to the stage.

05:45:23 --> 05:45:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Welcome, guys. I wanted to start with a quick introduction. So, Jean-Jacques, if you would like to start.

05:45:31 --> 05:45:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think I've done my introduction. I'll pass it on to… Okay, yeah, that's fine. Hello everyone. I'm Leila Abilgay. I'm a cybersecurity expert working at Gen Digital. I guess many of you might not know the company name. This is the mother company of…

05:45:47 --> 05:45:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Norton and the biggest cyber security conference, I'm sorry.

05:45:53 --> 05:46:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, product, uh, for consumers. Um, so, I have been doing a lot of research on several, uh, cybersecurity topics. Uh, I might… I started from, like, very old-type, uh, malware, then switched to scams, and… and recently, I have, uh, started looking at.

05:46:10 --> 05:46:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Agentic security topic, and we will be talking about it today.

05:46:15 --> 05:46:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi everyone, can you hear me well?

05:46:18 --> 05:46:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Awesome. Uh, my name is Katja Gaethke-Rausch. I'm a strategy lead at Adyen. For those of you who don't know Adyen, we are a payments and financial infrastructure company. So, chances are that your morning coffee, or if you're like me, indulged in some Labor Day shopping spree.

05:46:36 --> 05:46:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It was processed through Ariano. My responsibilities, I'm responsible for taking our new strategic bets from zero to one, and that right now includes Agentic Commerce. So I spend a lot of time talking to customers and using these insights to shape our strategy.

05:46:55 --> 05:47:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, yeah, hi, I'm Jong-ho, uh, I'm from Korea, and I started my career as a hacker for the government, like, 18 years ago, and then…

05:47:07 --> 05:47:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, after I studied at Stanford, I moved to the AI security. I've got interest in AI security, and then I've been working.

05:47:18 --> 05:47:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: about several years ago, and then… and then now I'm…

05:47:24 --> 05:47:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: working in, uh, AI security startup AIM Intelligence right now. So, what we are doing here is that, uh, AI red teaming, and then AI guardrails for, uh, enterprises. So…

05:47:39 --> 05:47:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I'm happy to hear talking about agent security right now.

05:47:44 --> 05:48:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you so much. So Jungho, let's start with you. We want to talk a little bit about the bad actors under the hood. A lot of people assume that scammers will trick the AI the same way as they will do with humans.

05:48:00 --> 05:48:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, um, um, your team, you, you mentioned it, you're red teaming. Red teaming means that you try, actually, to be that bad actor, break the system.

05:48:09 --> 05:48:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What we want to ask you, normally with phishing or with fake websites, they misspell a little bit, use a fake logo. But you mentioned to us is that doesn't work for AI.

05:48:24 --> 05:48:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So.

05:48:26 --> 05:48:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Can you tell us a bit why the normal safeguards doesn't work and what needs to be done?

05:48:33 --> 05:48:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Oh, yeah, I'd love to talk about it because it's quite interesting phenomenon these days. So here's the thing that makes different from classical social engineering.

05:48:49 --> 05:48:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know…

05:48:50 --> 05:49:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: To fool humans, we usually use psychological tricks, and then we usually reach out. We, like, we send a phishing email, and then we spark their curiosity, or…

05:49:06 --> 05:49:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: interest to make them click something. Right. But, in the case of AI agents, it's, quite opposite.

05:49:15 --> 05:49:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The attacker doesn't chase anyone.

05:49:20 --> 05:49:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: For… at all. I mean, we just set up a trap, and then wait.

05:49:27 --> 05:49:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So so that here's the difference. I mean.

05:49:32 --> 05:49:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: AI agents are purpose-driven, so it has its own mission already. We don't have to spark any curiosity or interest to make it move.

05:49:44 --> 05:49:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So…

05:49:45 --> 05:49:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We just need to, set up the trap like a prompt injection by indirect prompt injection. And then and then the attackers can just wait.

05:49:56 --> 05:49:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And.

05:49:58 --> 05:50:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There are another differences. I mean, the processor layers.

05:50:04 --> 05:50:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Phillips 2, I mean…

05:50:07 --> 05:50:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We often use visual trick to fool human like type of squatting. You know, if we.

05:50:17 --> 05:50:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: make them believe that they are entering the Google site, and we can just change some, uh, alphabet to numbers, and then look similar to Google. But then…

05:50:31 --> 05:50:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That barely works for agents at all, right?

05:50:36 --> 05:50:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What does work?

05:50:38 --> 05:50:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: an agent is the opposite. Agents hallucinate, you know, so they are confidently reach out something.

05:50:50 --> 05:50:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This sounds right.

05:50:52 --> 05:50:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But, doesn't exist, right? So, they…

05:50:58 --> 05:51:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: like, uh, for example, the plausible-looking API, or plausible-looking package name, they're happy to install them, right?

05:51:08 --> 05:51:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So…

05:51:11 --> 05:51:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Even the approach to the AI agents quite different in this case.

05:51:18 --> 05:51:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, I think it's, um, it's not, um, social engineering with a new target. I think it's, um…

05:51:25 --> 05:51:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's a different discipline and it needs its own defenses.

05:51:31 --> 05:51:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah. Thank you. And just how would you resolve that issue?

05:51:37 --> 05:51:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, so…

05:51:39 --> 05:51:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The thing is…

05:51:41 --> 05:51:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This field is, the landscape shifts faster and faster. The models changes, prompts changes, and we see new attack techniques.

05:51:58 --> 05:52:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Evolves every week, so.

05:52:02 --> 05:52:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Honestly, we are just, you know, keep going, you know, with new techniques and new, you know.

05:52:12 --> 05:52:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: New methods, I think, yeah.

05:52:15 --> 05:52:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, monitoring, updating, and keep an eye on the scammers. That's right.

05:52:21 --> 05:52:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, I want to talk to, um, to Leila, because we spoke, of course, before, and one of the things that you said is that, um, according to the research that GenDigital did, is that consumers are currently very skeptical.

05:52:36 --> 05:52:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: AI, and especially when they're handling the money. Aaron also mentioned, like, well, actually, a lot of people are already using Agentic AI without knowing it.

05:52:50 --> 05:53:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The other thing that you pointed out, and Erin also touched on it, is how AI is built. And you mentioned during our call that you said, well, one of the issues I see is you can ask an agent something not to do, and 10 times it doesn't do it.

05:53:07 --> 05:53:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But the 11th time, it glitches, and it still does it. That's an issue. So, um, what I want to ask of you is, um, um…

05:53:18 --> 05:53:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How do you think we get consumers to trust AI better? And and do you think that the a lot of us think like our genetic AI will take off very quickly or do you think, well, I'm not sure about that?

05:53:34 --> 05:53:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: could take something sometimes longer. Yeah, okay. Um, you know, like, AI is a very interesting topic, actually. Like, you know, uh, if you're very opportunistic, likely you're not gonna be very secure, because, like, you know, obviously, uh, AI is still not ready for us to be using right now.

05:53:53 --> 05:54:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: accurately for Agentic actions. Yes, already we are starting to use, as you said, if you're doing a Google research or you're doing a little research around the topic, the AI is going to decide.

05:54:08 --> 05:54:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to identify what resources are going to be shown to you and summarize it for you in its way. It's already happening. But for many actions still, you know, people are hesitating. And myself, I passed from very different phases, where I would just, like.

05:54:23 --> 05:54:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: summarize with AI and read, and then now I come back to a moment where I'm literally reading every line myself, because I saw that AI is not yet there, even for simple tasks like summarization, right?

05:54:36 --> 05:54:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: being said that, uh, yes, people right now are skeptical, but, like, very soon they won't, because they won't even understand there's an Agentic solution, uh, uh, there, and we have to prepare them, uh, for that future. So, around, like, uh, 15 years ago, I remember, like, when people start using mobile phones.

05:54:54 --> 05:55:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One of the kind of, like, problems we started seeing was, like, all those typosquatting domains were not shown for the usability reasons on the mobile phone, and because of that, a lot of people were clicking on things that they didn't know they were unsafe. Like, because we created kind of, like, an abstraction layer.

05:55:12 --> 05:55:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to make people's life easier. And similarly, now we're adding this agentic layer, and people don't notice, and maybe while the agent is processing something for reading your emails for certain things, actually doing something else behind.

05:55:27 --> 05:55:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, so we will have to work, like, we don't have an answer yet. Like, we have to do a lot of red teaming, we have to be following all the state of the art, which models are coming. And also, like, one of the realization we have to come up with is that not everyone will use exactly the same model, right?

05:55:45 --> 05:56:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: very good models are already pretty good at detecting prompt injection attacks, so we are also doing similar activities around red teaming. But a lot of people would just use the cheapest option, free option, and they will be scammed. So we will have to really, really work on.

05:56:00 --> 05:56:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We're democratizing the Anti-Scam protection for everyone. So we have to take our responsibilities in this topic. This problem is going to boom even more. If you're going to put some agents to do certain actions, okay, find me the best shoes.

05:56:16 --> 05:56:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: likely this agent is going to go crawl thousands of websites, and who knows how many of those websites will be malicious, and what's going to happen to your device or your data, right? So this is a really, really important topic that we have to start talking about.

05:56:30 --> 05:56:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, and, and, uh, Jacques, I saw that you, uh, during your presentation, mentioned a trust layer. So can you explain a little bit more, and following up on, on the vulnerabilities that we see right now, and…

05:56:43 --> 05:56:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How does Google look at that? Thank you. Yeah, I forgot to mention I work for Google, which is a startup that was started further down the road a few years ago. And it has been using machine learning for a while.

05:56:58 --> 05:57:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think the trust layer, again, it's not something new, although we have come up with something called the trust framework when we're thinking about AI, and it's about things like thinking about some of the key principles that should guide, at least ask Google, where it could be useful for others, things like.

05:57:14 --> 05:57:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: transparency, reliability, etc. But to talk about it at a broader level, I think we were hearing it just now from Leila, we're gonna… we have already a huge number of models out there, right?

05:57:29 --> 05:57:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And Aaron made a good point earlier about guardrails, that we need guardrails on models. And I think that that's clear, whether it's for content safety or more broadly. But realistically, as you were saying, not all the models are going to be putting on those guardrails. And then it's not just the model developers that you need to think about. You've also got the deployers, the people that customize the tools, et cetera.

05:57:51 --> 05:58:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, some of them will be better than others, etc. But there will be some that won't be. And we see that already today when we think more broadly about the scams ecosystem. You know, you have some of the mainstream financial players, for instance, have a lot of great protections, etc.

05:58:07 --> 05:58:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: well, the scammers just focus on the smaller payment providers, for instance, and go for the weakest common denominator, the people who are too small to have a really good abuse mitigation technique. And I think we're going to see exactly the same with AI and Agentic AI, or we are seeing the same, effectively, right? So we just need to be ready for that, which means.

05:58:26 --> 05:58:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yet, we should continue to encourage the sort of AI developer community to do the right thing, absolutely, and share best practices everywhere in the world. But I think more broadly, when we think about the — that's why I was talking about commerce, because that's what we're talking about here, right? It's taking action on behalf of a user.

05:58:42 --> 05:58:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's really that whole economic value chain. We need to make sure we have the right protections along the value chain and ways for verifications to happen along the value chain. Authentication, recognizing that, yeah, it's a genuine agent, that it hopefully hasn't been.

05:58:57 --> 05:59:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: contaminating, hijacked, that it comes from that particular user, that it's following the user specifications, that sort of stuff. So it's really… that's what we should think about in our trust layer, in each of our organizations, really.

05:59:12 --> 05:59:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. I want to switch gears a little bit, because we also need to talk about transactions and payments. So, um, Arjen?

05:59:21 --> 05:59:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: works, uh, of Kate Gaggia from Agenda, I'm sorry, or Audience. Um, you work with global merchants. So, what I wanted to, uh, talk with you about is, uh, on the merchant side, um.

05:59:35 --> 05:59:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How do merchants experience the agent commerce and how do they see the disruption for their business?

05:59:45 --> 05:59:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, happy to talk more about the merchant side.

05:59:48 --> 06:00:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I mean, truthfully, if you ask merchants, they expect Agentic Commerce to disrupt the entire shopper journey. So from discovery to, let's say, loyalty to checkout to, of course, fraud and risk management, which we are speaking a lot about today as well.

06:00:04 --> 06:00:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, the reality looks a bit different, so volumes are still really low within Agentic Commerce.

06:00:10 --> 06:00:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But that doesn't mean that merchants shouldn't care about it just now, right? So, the focus right now for merchants is really about setting the right controls, frameworks in place to be ready when this channel scales, because we've heard it before, it is coming, we can't, you know, escape it, but we can prepare for it.

06:00:27 --> 06:00:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There are a couple areas where we are already seeing significant disruption today. One of them is discovery, as you can imagine. So, for merchants.

06:00:38 --> 06:00:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Whenever you ask your agent to identify the best option for something, they have very little visibility.

06:00:47 --> 06:01:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: real, like, what alternatives were shown? Was anything about the value proposition of the merchant, um, shown, like, the service, the shipping, like, how did the merchant come across besides just the headline price?

06:01:00 --> 06:01:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So they're very concerned about what we call disintermediation, so, like, losing this customer relationship. I'd say that's number one. What also comes up a lot is losing the transaction context. So…

06:01:13 --> 06:01:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: losing the transaction context that basically they used to build out their risk and fraud models, and to also recognize their customers, right? Again, the questions are, if an agent intermediates a transaction, am I still getting the same data points that I need to build out my risk frameworks?

06:01:32 --> 06:01:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, I'd say these are the main areas where merchants are concerned about.

06:01:38 --> 06:01:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That makes a lot of sense.

06:01:42 --> 06:01:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, how do you expect, then, that the fraud evolves around Agentic AI?

06:01:48 --> 06:01:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: From the, from the PSP side. Yeah, no, it's a good question. Um, I think…

06:01:54 --> 06:01:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The… what we're seeing more is, instead of…

06:01:57 --> 06:02:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: like, credential or identity theft, we see the shift towards misuse of legitimate authority, if I can put it that way. So, basically.

06:02:08 --> 06:02:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This is a bit of an odd example, but if you tell an agent, hey, go launch this marketing campaign, and then the agent goes and buys the web hosting that it needs to host that marketing website, or whatever.

06:02:22 --> 06:02:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: is it, like, who's at fault here, right? So…

06:02:26 --> 06:02:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And I think Sharjah, you also mentioned a couple examples before, but as transactions become more autonomous, there's just multiple ways that, you know, the agent can be attempted by like malicious actors or it can act with a scope that is broader than the user actually intended.

06:02:44 --> 06:02:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In all of these scenarios, the actual credential may be genuine.

06:02:49 --> 06:03:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But the use of it is, um, not as expected. And that's making… that's making, let's say, fraud and dispute management within the payments industry very, very difficult, or, like, at least more complicated within Agentic Commerce.

06:03:01 --> 06:03:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, yeah. So, what I think we do need to have in place in order for this to, to scale, and again, I think, Georgiak, you just, uh, alluded to it, is…

06:03:13 --> 06:03:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: a payment record is not enough, right? A payment record would have not been able to differentiate across these three scenarios that I just mentioned. What you need is really proof at every step of the way. So you need to know what instructions… like, the evidence, essentially, needs to be.

06:03:30 --> 06:03:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What instruction was given? What was authorized and when? What was the scope of that authorization? Um, what's the identity of the agent?

06:03:40 --> 06:03:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What are the transaction details? Was the objective fulfilled? Um, and so forth. So it's really having, like, every step of the way, having credentials and mandates in place to support that, and to, when things go wrong, be able to go back and find out where.

06:03:57 --> 06:04:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you for that.

06:04:00 --> 06:04:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think that Gaza is all about, it takes a network to break a network. So, and we know that Google is, of course, a small player in this area, but you guys are driving a bit of the platform standards.

06:04:15 --> 06:04:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: in this. Um, but I also want to, to understand is how is, how is the industry working together from the payment platforms to the security providers, um, um, and.

06:04:28 --> 06:04:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to all the players who are in this, um, um, um, because I think that we need to, as a network, we need to drive these standards. Absolutely.

06:04:36 --> 06:04:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. Um, yeah, I mean, I think, if you think about universal commerce protocol, for instance, this is something which was based on existing industry standard, and that now brings together players not just from the tech industry, but actually also from the other key sectors involved.

06:04:51 --> 06:05:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So you think about retailers, think about banks, and I think there's about 60 at the moment of very large organizations, but I think it needs to filter through. I think in the world of standards, we have of course a lot of the traditional tech and telecom players involved in things like IETF.

06:05:13 --> 06:05:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And a NIST.

06:05:16 --> 06:05:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But maybe if we think about what you were just saying, Katja, about payments, I think we need to think, you know, what are some of the suggestions coming from that side? How can we come together for certain protocols, making sure, you know, that we have the right input from all the right players?

06:05:35 --> 06:05:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The good thing is that the sort of standards bodies that I mentioned, like IETF, are open to everyone, and I think we should, you know, maybe that could be an interesting one for GASA to think about, you know, we could maybe sort of signpost some of those.

06:05:50 --> 06:05:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: those discussions to make sure that everybody inputs, uh, into them. Um, but I don't know if you've got more specific suggestions as well, but yeah. Yeah, yeah.

06:05:59 --> 06:06:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I mean, I guess, like, one of the parts, um, and thank you so much for actually organizing this thing, because I think this was your initiative. Like, in the last summit, we had another session. Uh, we will have to start having, like, more sessions about this problem, because when, uh, we're talking about, like, very human problem here, uh.

06:06:17 --> 06:06:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: so far, but very soon, we're going to have our agents doing things for us, and likely, we will be also making a lot of mistakes while setting up those agents. The problem will be much bigger. Yes, the future might not be a little bit too far, and people might be thinking, like, oh my god, it's not even a problem yet.

06:06:34 --> 06:06:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But it is coming really full force, so we should have start conversations in this conference as well. Yeah.

06:06:42 --> 06:06:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think maybe just to add, I think what's really interesting is having players from different sectors, right? Because if you… if I listen to what we discussed before, Aaron, you were just… I think ScamAdvisor basically is at the beginning, right, of the transaction. It tries to…

06:06:57 --> 06:07:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Prevent the bad actor.

06:07:00 --> 06:07:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: gets to a point of transaction. Now, from a payments industry, or, like, when I'm looking at it, is, okay, once it happens, what can we do, or what needs to be in place to resolve it? Um, so I just think it's very interesting, or very important that whenever we have these conversations, we include.

06:07:15 --> 06:07:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: people from different sectors, um, to really have a holistic view? Because otherwise, we will have blind spots, and we won't be able to solve for that.

06:07:26 --> 06:07:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, yeah, I, I truly agree with the, you know, approach. I mean, uh, even for the AI road teaming, we are collaborating with multidisciplinary, you know, areas, so we…

06:07:41 --> 06:07:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: for AI agents, I think, you know, we cannot solve with just focusing on one area. I mean, we can just rely on the technology itself. I mean, we need some sort of…

06:07:56 --> 06:08:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: multidisciplinary efforts to solve this safety and security issue. So, yeah, I think this is the…

06:08:05 --> 06:08:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: right approach for the future? Yeah, from what I'm getting, and what I know is in the payments industry, very normalized, is that there needs to be a scheme owner, someone who is guarding, setting up the safeguards, and basically.

06:08:21 --> 06:08:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, saying what needs to be done and how it needs to be done so that the consumer is protected. So the last question, we already touched up a little bit on it. I want to ask, what is the most important thing, the upcoming 12 months?

06:08:41 --> 06:08:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that the industry needs to deploy to make us safer and build trust on the Internet.

06:08:49 --> 06:09:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I mean, I think, yeah, 12 months is probably a good timeline, if not less, six months, or at least to get things seriously started. You've seen some of our suggestions here. I think it's really making sure that you build on the existing defenses that you have.

06:09:09 --> 06:09:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: um, to make sure you're ready from a, for the sort of threats that we're starting to see from, from an Agentic perspective. Um.

06:09:17 --> 06:09:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And that extends also, I think, to training people, and getting them ready in your org… well, I'm talking enterprise here, of course, but we should think about it as consumers as well. It's coming, and frankly, it's going to be good. Like, Aaron talked about, you know, some examples of how we're already using agents without knowing it. They're positive examples, it's going to be good, but we just need to do it.

06:09:36 --> 06:09:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And so, yeah, we need to beef up our systems quickly, and I think we need to work on those protocols and standards, make sure that they are really mainstreamed across the value chain, because, yeah, the bigger players will be ready, but the problem will be the smaller ones that are still involved in that.

06:09:53 --> 06:10:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: ecosystem. So we want to, we want to, you know, share that, uh, that knowledge and make sure, uh, we have the right input from all the right places when we develop new protocols, and that we make sure that they can be implemented at scale across the value chain.

06:10:07 --> 06:10:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, so yeah, we talked about the fact that this problem doesn't exist right now, but in reality, it started, right? Only just after OpenCL became mainstream, a very big percentage of skills online, they were malicious. Very quickly, scammers, attackers, cyber criminals.

06:10:29 --> 06:10:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: try to compromise you, right? Like, and people don't know, it's just like a piece of file that helps you summarize something, get you the best deal, and you just load it to your thing, and the worst is that, right now, we have put this technology in front of people that don't understand even.

06:10:45 --> 06:11:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, how it works. They don't have statistical thinking. They're having certain assumptions. So we will have to really guardrail and harness really well, and on critical points, like whenever you're downloading something, whenever you're browsing something, whenever you're making a payment, whenever you're doing any action that is critical.

06:11:05 --> 06:11:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: we have to be checking these things. So you cannot just, like, leave… let the agents do whatever they want, which is the case right now. Like, even when you're coding.

06:11:14 --> 06:11:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It goes and finds some packages online that you don't even know what's going on. We don't have a solution right now and we should start working on those solutions and implement them. And I think one of the other part is that we have to really start understanding what they mean even.

06:11:30 --> 06:11:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, what does agent mean? What does AI mean? How is it useful for us? Yeah.

06:11:35 --> 06:11:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No, uh, totally agree with what my colleague just said. I… in terms of, like, what we would need to build.

06:11:43 --> 06:11:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Again, I want to reiterate on these mandates that I spoke about before.

06:11:48 --> 06:11:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And I'm not saying that, like, every Agentic transaction needs to have an additional click, and we need to make it very cumbersome, and, I mean, that breaks the whole point of Agentic commerce, or Agentic-led AI.

06:11:59 --> 06:12:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But the level of autonomy needs to be…

06:12:03 --> 06:12:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: let's say, aligned with the level of risk that that agent is taking.

06:12:09 --> 06:12:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, yeah, um, for 12 months, uh, in the industry, I'm seeing that the adoption is.

06:12:18 --> 06:12:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: getting faster and faster. So, well, people might think it's not ready yet, but I think it will be…

06:12:27 --> 06:12:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, the agents will prevail, uh, everywhere in about 3 or 6 months.

06:12:34 --> 06:12:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, so, from…

06:12:37 --> 06:12:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Our perspective, I mean, relative perspective, I see many opportunities. The AI agency is not secure yet. I mean, especially when when it comes to long horizon behavior.

06:12:52 --> 06:12:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Is.

06:12:54 --> 06:12:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's, you know, it's critical, but…

06:12:58 --> 06:13:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's a bad news, right? For the teamwork, it's a good opportunity, but it's a bad news for the AI agents industry. So I think we need to…

06:13:13 --> 06:13:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Prepare. I mean, like we mentioned before, continuous monitoring and.

06:13:20 --> 06:13:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: red teaming, pen testing, this should be the default mode. So…

06:13:27 --> 06:13:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, just controlling is not enough. I mean, if the AI agency is a moving target, we cannot…

06:13:40 --> 06:13:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: thing that you certified last week is not the same thing running today. So, the…

06:13:49 --> 06:13:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Only the continuous monitoring and detection testing is is the the.

06:13:55 --> 06:13:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Way we need to, yeah.

06:13:58 --> 06:14:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I want to thank you all so much, and I think, indeed, what we all need is keep talking about this. The AI agents are here, they are coming, they are taking over, they are useful, we love them, and we hate them.

06:14:13 --> 06:14:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, uh, keep inventing, keep thinking. We are working on our agent, Looker, to keep you all safe, and, uh, thank you so much.

06:14:24 --> 06:14:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you.

06:14:46 --> 06:14:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you.

06:14:48 --> 06:14:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Te ramu kesu hava ji yo sa haja tuna baani.

06:14:55 --> 06:15:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: # # # # # # .

06:16:13 --> 06:16:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Do you want your water closer to you.

06:16:18 --> 06:16:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: All right.

06:16:20 --> 06:16:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hello.

06:16:23 --> 06:16:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If you don't have your headphones on yet, you're missing so much of the program.

06:16:29 --> 06:16:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's not Abigail, that's AI. Is it me or is it AI?

06:16:42 --> 06:16:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What are we listening to?

06:16:44 --> 06:16:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to myself.

06:16:47 --> 06:16:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Can you hear me too? Yeah. To advance to the next slide.

06:16:52 --> 06:16:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's just the… it's the big…

06:17:03 --> 06:17:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Growing pains, guys, growing pains.

06:17:06 --> 06:17:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If everybody could get there.

06:17:08 --> 06:17:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Their headsets on. A couple of you, Lauren.

06:17:15 --> 06:17:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Put on your headset. Everybody's doing it. It's not embarrassing.

06:17:21 --> 06:17:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, don't make it weird. Yeah, please. It's so weird for us. Please don't make it weird.

06:17:30 --> 06:17:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Oh, look, they put my picture up there. Did you do that? Did you make that?

06:17:38 --> 06:17:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's cumulative happening.

06:17:47 --> 06:17:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I feel like a.

06:17:50 --> 06:17:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Like a toddler.

06:17:51 --> 06:17:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Restaurant.

06:17:54 --> 06:17:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We've all agreed.

06:17:57 --> 06:18:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that the worst chair to sit on when you're on stage is a bar stool. Pass it on.

06:18:04 --> 06:18:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Pass it on. If there's like a survey, could you write that in?

06:18:08 --> 06:18:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No more bar stools. We got people supporting us on that.

06:18:13 --> 06:18:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's good. Thank you. Okay, if everybody could take their seats, I could tell them that, but they're not having their headsets on, so they…

06:18:21 --> 06:18:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: They can't hear us tell them what to do.

06:18:24 --> 06:18:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's true.

06:18:28 --> 06:18:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'm just kidding.

06:18:29 --> 06:18:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Oh, look, it's John and Mary Ellen.

06:18:33 --> 06:18:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi guys!

06:18:35 --> 06:18:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Local celebrities in the house. Make sure you put your headsets on. What's that all about?

06:18:41 --> 06:18:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So NPR. Really? Yeah.

06:18:45 --> 06:18:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's something different. I thought it was different.

06:18:49 --> 06:19:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: At least, this isn't an actual silent disco, which is what Abigail told me, and I was like, you're gonna need to give me a clamp before I dance. Okay, everybody. Clark actually believed she was going to have to dance. I did, and I really didn't want to. Actually, 100% believed it.

06:19:04 --> 06:19:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's day 4 for her.

06:19:07 --> 06:19:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: She's tired. We're gonna use that. We're not doing well. You're just so gullible. I am.

06:19:14 --> 06:19:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: All right, guys, let's go ahead and get started. Really great to have all of you here today. My name is Kathy Stokes. I work for AARP. I run a program called the Fraud Watch Network, which is parts fraud prevention through education.

06:19:32 --> 06:19:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: systemic change, but it's also about victims. It's about supporting people.

06:19:39 --> 06:19:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: well, it's about trying to educate so that it doesn't happen, but when it happens, it's about support in the aftermath. I know there are a lot of people in this room today who have very close ties to this space, and I'm really happy that you're here, and I'm happy that you're.

06:19:54 --> 06:20:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that you're part of the fight. And I can tell you, um, I hope you all listened to our session yesterday morning when we had John DeMay and Mary Ellen Strange, who are up front here, that told their story to help us all remember why we're here in the first place. We're here because this is harming people.

06:20:11 --> 06:20:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, in, in ways that, that are for many of us unimaginable. And I can tell you, I went to a session yesterday on national fraud strategy and we had Singapore and the UK and, um, and Canada and, you know.

06:20:27 --> 06:20:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the U.S. a little far behind, but we were all represented there talking about, uh, the national fraud strategy, and at the beginning of that session.

06:20:36 --> 06:20:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Singapore and the UK and Canada said the reason we're doing it is because of the victims.

06:20:42 --> 06:20:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then we had a very prescient person at the very end of that ask, so what are you doing for the victims?

06:20:48 --> 06:20:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: None of them had an answer, at least not one that was acceptable.

06:20:53 --> 06:21:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we really have to bring it back to why we are here to begin with, and that is to solve this heinous crime.

06:21:02 --> 06:21:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and come together and do meaningful things.

06:21:06 --> 06:21:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to better this situation for everybody. And so now I'll jump off of my soapbox. It's kind of high, though, so I'm not going to jump off. Anyway, I'd like to introduce you to a couple of women here who I think are the hardest working people in the fraud space.

06:21:22 --> 06:21:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: To my right is Clark Flint Barr. She is the Government Affairs Director on financial security issues for AARP, not the least of which is fraud prevention. Um, if you've ever been on the Hill for any day when there was something happening about fraud.

06:21:37 --> 06:21:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Clark was there. And she's so well-positioned for the work that she's doing. She was a policy advisor at Chainalysis. She was an analyst for the FBI. She worked on the Hill. She has all of this, um, sort of intrinsic, um, knowledge that is, uh, helping AARP show up so.

06:21:57 --> 06:22:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So well and so strongly on the Hill. So thank you for that, Clark. And then to my left, Abigail Bishop. She is, I think, the only person I know that has a title including global and fraud strategy in them.

06:22:14 --> 06:22:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And it couldn't be for a more well positioned person. She's an absolute nonstop thinker and doer. Her work sits at the center of product and policy and partnership.

06:22:32 --> 06:22:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we're going to be talking about the public policy end of things, what is being considered at the federal level on victim restitution, victim recovery. And we're going to talk and talk to Abigail about how.

06:22:47 --> 06:22:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Maybe, uh, organizations, for-profits, could be doing more than they think.

06:22:53 --> 06:23:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So with that, I welcome both Clark and Abigail. And no, you don't have to dance. You don't have to dance. Thank you. So, you know, Clark, I'm going to start with you. Tell us, what are you seeing?

06:23:08 --> 06:23:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: on the Hill right now, in terms of everything having to do with fraud? Because it's a lot, a lot more than it used to be, right?

06:23:15 --> 06:23:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, absolutely. When I started at AARP 3 years ago, there was really not much going on in the fraud space, um, the… and scam space, and I think a lot of congressional offices, when we started going in and meeting with them, and talking to them about AARP's Fraud Watch Network, and the helpline, and the stories that we were getting.

06:23:35 --> 06:23:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And even raising awareness about things I thought they should have already known, like the numbers coming out of the FTC, out of IC3, they really just weren't aware. And so we've spent a lot of time building awareness.

06:23:51 --> 06:24:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: which I think we've been fairly successful in. We've got a Stop Scams caucus now, which is really exciting, uh, in the House, led by, uh, four bipartisan congressmen. Um, Jefferson Shreve from Indiana.

06:24:05 --> 06:24:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, Gabe Amo from Rhode Island, Jamie Raskin from, uh, Maryland, and Zach Nunn from Iowa.

06:24:14 --> 06:24:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Sorry, slippy. And they've really pushed members of Congress to do more in this space and to work on more legislation. We've seen dozens of bills introduced in the past few years.

06:24:29 --> 06:24:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: at least 10 hearings. I know, Kathy, you've testified at three this year? Four?

06:24:35 --> 06:24:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah. Uh, so we've seen a lot more… a lot more focus on this. Um, I think there's still a long way to go, um, but I do think we are… we're seeing a lot of bipartisan work. Um, there's a lot of focus right now on consumer education, on task forces.

06:24:53 --> 06:25:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, which I know the folks who work for government agencies don't love, but it's a starting point. Um, there's also been focus on holding industry accountable and making sure that industry is doing the right thing and kicking scammers off of their platforms.

06:25:09 --> 06:25:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, such as the, the Scam Act. Um, and then the, one of the things I'm sort of most excited about is the, some of the tax relief bills that we've been working on, uh, because there've been just this huge increase in victims who've come to us and said, you know, I just got hit with this huge tax bill because I experienced fraud.

06:25:28 --> 06:25:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Like, isn't that crazy? Everyone assumes that that's not an issue. And when you meet with Hill staffers, they're like, really? We're taxing people on money that was stolen from them? And so I think getting legislation in that space has been really exciting, and I'm very excited to hopefully.

06:25:46 --> 06:26:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hopefully we'll get it out of at least one house this year. You know, um, one of the things Clark has been exceptionally good at is getting the, um, getting people on the hill to talk with and hear from victims and, um, I, I had the opportunity to work with.

06:26:03 --> 06:26:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Liz Buser on my team, who, if you don't know her, you should. She's just amazing. Um, and I get some smiles and nods. Um, she put together, um, uh, some audio clips from victims who have come through our victim support program, and we can talk more about that if you want. But I really wanted you to hear, uh, the voices of.

06:26:23 --> 06:26:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: some of these victims to understand the financial and other implications of this crime. So let's see if we can get this going.

06:26:37 --> 06:26:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This is close to three years since the end of the crime, and it just absolutely shocks me.

06:26:48 --> 06:27:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: how much pain I'm still in financially, how unmanageable, um, my monthly bills are, how scary it remains when you just hold your breath and hope that.

06:27:05 --> 06:27:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You can pay all of the important bills of the month.

06:27:11 --> 06:27:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Umm.

06:27:12 --> 06:27:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I guess I just thought that when some of those emotional scars started to heal, that the financial ones would disappear as well, but…

06:27:26 --> 06:27:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What I'm learning is this is just the kind of crime that…

06:27:31 --> 06:27:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Stays with you and you're really never the same again. I.

06:27:39 --> 06:27:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: have been robbed of $250,000, which I worked for all my life. That money was supposed to go to my grandchildren's college education.

06:27:52 --> 06:28:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But now I don't have it anymore. The police consistently expressed that they believed my assets were likely already offshore in another country, and that the likelihood was very.

06:28:09 --> 06:28:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: low that I would ever recoup my losses of nearly $800,000. And as if that isn't enough, I discovered not too long after that.

06:28:24 --> 06:28:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that I have to pay taxes on the sale of my securities, capital gains taxes, and from the distribution of all these assets from my IRA account. In regards to.

06:28:39 --> 06:28:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The other losses I experienced.

06:28:43 --> 06:28:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, after the scam…

06:28:46 --> 06:28:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I realized immediately that I could no longer afford to live anywhere, that my rent was going to be an impossibility.

06:28:57 --> 06:29:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, um, so I was forced… well, fortunately, I landed with my adult son, who has said I can live there with him for however long I need or want.

06:29:12 --> 06:29:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'm 69 years old, and I had retired, and now I am seeking employment because my Social Security check is not covering the expenses that I have.

06:29:30 --> 06:29:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: On a regular basis. I have had to.

06:29:38 --> 06:29:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: accept help from the government in the form of SNAP benefit and partial Medicaid assistance, and going to food bank when I used to be the person dropping off food for others.

06:29:54 --> 06:30:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I am now in a humbled situation of being the recipient of such things. These losses are real, and they're incredibly painful.

06:30:11 --> 06:30:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, um, Clark, what do you think the biggest disconnect is between what victims need and what people on the Hill think they need?

06:30:20 --> 06:30:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I think one of the things that we've really tried to push against is, frankly, more bills about education. I think everyone who is here knows that education is important. We should all be taking steps to protect ourselves.

06:30:37 --> 06:30:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But education is not the solution here. We can't educate our way out of scams. And so I think really trying to get a shift in mentality away from that. I also think one of the things that has been really important, and you talk about this and have done such a great job of educating me and.

06:30:54 --> 06:31:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: everyone about the blame and shame narrative, and how we do not talk about scam victims the way that we talk about victims of other crimes, right? Um, somebody's house is robbed, nobody's like, oh my god, I can't believe they…

06:31:08 --> 06:31:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: owned a house? I mean, I don't know. Like, um, we just, we don't talk about scam victims in, in a way that is kind or empathetic, um, and so I think that is also something that is, um, has been a focus of ours, because I also think that one of the reasons that people don't.

06:31:25 --> 06:31:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Report scams and fraud is because they're ashamed, they worry about having, um, their financial independence taken away, they worry about how others will perceive them, and it leads to a lack of information, a lack of reporting, a lack of, um, response where you maybe could have gotten one.

06:31:44 --> 06:31:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So I think that's been very important.

06:31:46 --> 06:31:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I also think, um…

06:31:49 --> 06:32:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Another disconnect is in the ways that victims report scams. So we've got all of these federal agencies and state and local law enforcement agencies that are working fraud and scams, but not in…

06:32:04 --> 06:32:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the most coordinated approach. Um, and so, for example, when you go and you report.

06:32:10 --> 06:32:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, a scam that has happened to you in IC3, it's… it just sort of goes off into the ether, uh, and… and it's also hard to figure out, like, did I… did anyone actually get this? Like, is there somebody looking at this? Um, and there's so many different agencies working that…

06:32:26 --> 06:32:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: working on scams and fraud, which is great, but it means that you have to report the same scam or fraud to many different agencies. So I think streamlining the reporting approach and then the response approach is really critical, and I'd like to see some more work in that space.

06:32:41 --> 06:32:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and then I think I've mentioned the tax thing, but I think that really is a surprise to congressional staffers. They, they can't believe that we are like, what, we haven't fixed that already? Like, and when you talk them through, like, think about how you save for retirement and what happens when you withdraw the funds and it makes sense, but, um.

06:32:59 --> 06:33:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But that's been another disconnect. And the last one I would…

06:33:03 --> 06:33:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: highlight is the restitution issue. I think you hear about these big seizures happening, which is great, but very rarely are people actually getting their money back. Um, and I think people do want law enforcement to investigate the scams that happen to them. They want people to be arrested, but more than that, they want their money back.

06:33:21 --> 06:33:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: They want to be able to rebuild their lives.

06:33:24 --> 06:33:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: All right, so you mentioned that there are a dozen, maybe two dozen bills winding their way through their house. Is there one in particular or a couple in particular that if there was action on in the next couple of years would be?

06:33:39 --> 06:33:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: materially beneficial to victims.

06:33:45 --> 06:34:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yes, there are a couple. So on the theft less side of things, which is the tax deduction that you used to be able to take if you had been a victim of fraud or scams, there are two bills. One is the Tax Relief for Victims of Crime, Scams, and Disasters Act. That has about 80 co-sponsors in the House, fewer in the Senate, but it has a.

06:34:06 --> 06:34:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: bipartisan, um, identical bill in the Senate. Um, and that bill would reinstate the personal casualty and theft loss deduction so that you could deduct the losses, um, that you incurred in the scam, um, to offset the fact that you owe taxes. Um.

06:34:21 --> 06:34:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It wouldn't completely zero it out, but it would be incredibly meaningful help to many, many victims of scams. There is another version of that bill called the Tax Relief for Victims of Fraud Act, which the House Ways and Means Committee marked up last month. Nope.

06:34:38 --> 06:34:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We're in September, two months ago. Um, and so that was voted out of committee unanimously. And that takes a similar approach, but also, um, if you were under 59 and a half and withdrew funds from a retirement account, it would waive that 10 percent early withdrawal penalty as well.

06:34:55 --> 06:35:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, the challenge with that bill is that it is not retroactive. So, whereas the first bill I talked about would apply, um, back to 2018 when the, um, deduction was removed, this other bill would not be retroactive, so it would only help victims going forward, which is important, but…

06:35:14 --> 06:35:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's not fair to people who were victimized between 2018 and now that they were victims in the wrong year. And so you don't get the tax deduction. So we're hoping that that will be made retroactive if that does move forward.

06:35:31 --> 06:35:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The other one that I think has, um, some legs is the Guard Act, uh, which was introduced by, um, Representative Nunn and Representative, um.

06:35:47 --> 06:36:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Gottheimer, sorry, I was blanking on his name. Um, and that would provide federal grants to state and local law enforcement. One of the things that we often hear is that, I went and I reported this to the police, and they told me there was nothing I could do.

06:36:02 --> 06:36:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And they told me to go to the FBI, and then the FBI said, you didn't have enough money stolen from you, and we can't prioritize this. And that's crazy. Um, so the Guard Act would provide more resources to state and local law enforcement to ensure that they have the tools and the training they need to investigate fraud and scams.

06:36:21 --> 06:36:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And that they're able to do more to help victims when victims do come to them and ask for help. So, those are just a couple, but… Yeah, and I also think that…

06:36:30 --> 06:36:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In the scheme of things, I am not a government affairs person, at least I, I was like 20 years ago, I forgot everything, but I think one thing we all need to be aware of is that we can create new reporting mechanisms, we can have the front door for people to report, but unless there is some law enforcement entity that.

06:36:51 --> 06:36:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: is obligated to take those cases and investigate them. It's just another layer of bureaucracy.

06:36:59 --> 06:37:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we just keep that in mind as we're hearing all of these ideas about reporting. Yeah, and I would add to that, there have been a number of bills that have been proposed that create a centralized door, but it doesn't replace the existing doors. Um, and I worry that that approach.

06:37:14 --> 06:37:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Won't be as effective as intended, because it'll just be an additional place that victims have to go, and there's already so much burden on victims to report to a million places and do all sorts of things, and…

06:37:25 --> 06:37:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We should be moving away from that.

06:37:27 --> 06:37:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. Now, we talked a little bit about federal policy. Let's talk about what actual companies can do that you may think you can't. And I know I'm sitting up here with Amazon, Abigail Bishop, and you're thinking that we're going to be starting to talk about the tools that they're putting in place.

06:37:45 --> 06:37:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's really not what we're here to talk about. I mean, you guys are doing a lot, more than any other organization I'm aware of, in actually dealing with victims in recovery and restitution. What can you tell us about that?

06:37:59 --> 06:38:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, I cannot wait to tell you some of the things that our team is doing. But before I do, I just want to say thank you to you two for everything that you guys do and everything that AARP does. It's an incredible team to work with. And thank you all for choosing. We know you have choices of sessions to participate in. Thank you for choosing to be here.

06:38:22 --> 06:38:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: sort of voting with your feet on the issues that matter. Um, so thank you for being here. Um, and one last point, and this is like a total aside, so bear with me, and then I'll get on track very quickly here. But Clark was mentioning the idea of, of, um, you know, nobody blames a homeowner for getting robbed, right?

06:38:41 --> 06:38:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And one of the things that sticks with me.

06:38:44 --> 06:38:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And none of this is like a, you know, a silver bullet and all of that. But, we made a switch in just the language that we used, from saying you were burgled to saying you've had a home invasion.

06:38:59 --> 06:39:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In that situation, and so it just strikes me that there's maybe an opportunity to add some rigor and some urgency to even what we're calling these activities. AARP.org slash words matter for more information.

06:39:14 --> 06:39:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Sweet plug there. Um, so back to, um, some of the things that, that, that we're doing, um, behind, uh, in, in addition to, to some of the, the supports we're doing, but, um, and preventative tools and things like that.

06:39:29 --> 06:39:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'm…

06:39:31 --> 06:39:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The reality is, is that, um…

06:39:35 --> 06:39:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If prevention worked, we wouldn't be here.

06:39:39 --> 06:39:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, so until prevention works, our strategy is both to prevent, but also help recover.

06:39:48 --> 06:40:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And so we have done a number of different things to not just think about what are scammers doing, but what do people who are experiencing these terrible crimes, what do they need?

06:40:05 --> 06:40:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: how can we help? Um, and for those who are less familiar with the types of experiences that our customers report having, um, with scams.

06:40:15 --> 06:40:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Most often, it's the impersonation of our brand. And we heard it from Mary Ellen's story yesterday. And it's one of those things that is not unique to Amazon. If you have a prolific brand, you're likely to be impersonated.

06:40:32 --> 06:40:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And it's one of the trickiest types of scams, in some ways, from the brand that's being impersonated, or the organization that's being impersonated, because oftentimes you have no line of sight into it even happening, right? Like, even in Mary Ellen's experience.

06:40:50 --> 06:40:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, had she not sort of taken action, we might never have known that some bad actor had made some phone call.

06:40:58 --> 06:41:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to her. And so, we have to, um, really think creatively about where we can, uh, both prevent, but also.

06:41:08 --> 06:41:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: help people, ensuring that they're able to come forward, tell us about their experiences, and take action on their behalf, and figure out how we can support them.

06:41:17 --> 06:41:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, you do talk to victims. Yes. So, tell me, what is it you're learning from them that's guiding your path forward?

06:41:25 --> 06:41:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So one of the things that has come through very clearly in our conversations with victims and with incredible organizations that speak to victims day in and day out, like AARP and others, is that as much as the financial impact is there and that's real and not to be minimized in any way.

06:41:49 --> 06:42:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the, the ripple effect of, of scams is, is not just financial. Um, it is emotional, it is social, it is, um, something that, um, is very disruptive to your state of mind. Um, and, uh, we have looked through.

06:42:08 --> 06:42:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: so many different avenues with the help of, um, of folks who, who have such a great pulse on what victims are telling them as well, um, to, to be able to lend our sport, support creatively and try to, to, um.

06:42:24 --> 06:42:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, push boundaries on what victim support could look like. Um, and just as an aside, I don't know the best time to weave this into, to our conversation today, but I'll just let you guys a little bit behind, behind the scenes on the relationship, um, evolution for the, the folks on this stage.

06:42:43 --> 06:42:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, when I first had a… Kathy's kind of smiling. So the first time I ever met with AARP.

06:42:50 --> 06:43:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, I, uh, joined a conversation, and it was Kathy and a couple of her colleagues, and, um, you know, they let us have it.

06:43:02 --> 06:43:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Right? And they are unapologetic advocates for victims. And it was just, you know, it was like, well, why don't you do this? And have you thought about that? And, you know, where is this if you care so much?

06:43:19 --> 06:43:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And our response to them was, "You're right.

06:43:24 --> 06:43:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and it was, well, we should work together. And so one of the ways that we, um, uh, sort of kicked off some of that effort was to literally workshop.

06:43:38 --> 06:43:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: together. Like, they… they came to HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia, we sat down in a room, we literally did an exercise called Walk the Store, where we went through our storefront.

06:43:53 --> 06:44:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we're like, "Well, is this working? How do you do this? Where do you do this?" And we had really meaningful debates because by the way, it's not easy to do that, right? I don't, contrary to popular opinion, I don't just like snap my fingers and things change, right? And so it's a real meaningful set of trade-offs that many organizations have to go through.

06:44:18 --> 06:44:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But we worked through sort of debating the rationale and having some of our assumptions tested through that exercise together.

06:44:26 --> 06:44:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, uh, which was exceptional. Um, we even created something called a guide for brands. I don't know that we ever did much with it, but it was just the idea of, you know, looking at it closely from the lens of, uh, the consumer and the victim. What could you change on your site, on your platform, to be more helpful.

06:44:45 --> 06:45:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: in the wake of victimization, for example. But give us some concrete examples. I have a few because it was hard for me to pick favorites. So one of the things that we were, in addition to the guide for brands, which I encourage all of you to take a peek at, is we have also set up with various set of partners, the Scam Justice Legal Clinic.

06:45:13 --> 06:45:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Just like for fun, has anybody heard of that? Raise your hand if you've heard of it. And my colleagues who help run that in the third row here, you guys can't raise your hands. The Scam Justice Legal Clinic is sort of the first of its kind.

06:45:29 --> 06:45:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, it was set up with the Pro Bono Institute, the BBB, um, and one of our outside counsel, um, law firms, David Wright Tremaine. David Wright Tremaine. And it essentially offers pro bono legal services to scam victims.

06:45:48 --> 06:46:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: At Amazon, since launching in 2025, we've logged, you know, over 1,000 hours of pro bono legal services. There's more opportunities for others who are interested in offering pro bono hours to that effort. Please find me, and I'll direct you to.

06:46:07 --> 06:46:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: These people right here smiling. But they've done incredible work to kind of push the boundaries on what victim support could even look like. And the reality is, and I'll just be very candid, the reality is that in many times, the legal avenues are limited, much to Clark's point earlier.

06:46:26 --> 06:46:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And in some ways, that's not the point.

06:46:30 --> 06:46:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In many ways, it's about leaving victims in a situation where they've felt confident that they've left no stone unturned, that they have figured out sort of what their options are, and somebody has taken the time with the expertise that they've…

06:46:47 --> 06:46:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: they've amassed to really think thoughtfully about their experience and what opportunities they might have to resolve it differently than maybe they pursued previously.

06:46:57 --> 06:47:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, could you speak to what some of those legal avenues might be? I cannot, but these guys can. Um… Yeah, you don't want me to get into the ins and outs, but yes. Um, and, um, so that's one avenue. And again, this is…

06:47:14 --> 06:47:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: this is not, um… uh… it's not earth-shattering stuff, but it's different than we've thought about it historically. Um, another… another, um, uh, effort that we put underway, and a little bit in the sense of…

06:47:29 --> 06:47:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, trying to kind of reset the, um, the stigma around scam experiences is working with the BBB Institute to set up, um, National Scam Survivor Day, um, where we're thinking differently about victims, and we're thinking about those who have pushed through and are surviving.

06:47:50 --> 06:47:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: day in and day out, um, and developing a scam survivor toolkit, which is, um, available on their website.

06:47:59 --> 06:48:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And it allows people to essentially go through the toolkit and come up with sort of a bespoke game plan of next steps for yourself. And then lastly, I would be so remiss if I didn't sort of… oh, there's two more. Can I do two more?

06:48:18 --> 06:48:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, thanks. Two more amazing things. One is actually with Kathy, again, the National Elder Fraud Coordination Center, which is an incredible organization. If you're not familiar, who knows NFC?

06:48:35 --> 06:48:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, shame on you if you don't know. If you don't know, we're all judging from the stage. But no, Kathy's the head of the board there. Amazon's been a sort of a founding partner. It's an incredible effort to help sort of bridge intelligence to go after bad guys together.

06:48:53 --> 06:49:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So it's an information sharing sort of hub that has really gained momentum and you should all be aware and plugged into it. And then lastly, something that actually came from some of our learnings that we had with AARP.

06:49:09 --> 06:49:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: was we went back to what do our customers tell us they have a hard time with? Like, what is the number one challenge that they're faced with if it's impersonation scams? And we said that classic question of like, how do I know it's really you?

06:49:25 --> 06:49:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: how do I know it's really you? Right? Like, this is… this is something we think about every day. And so, for us, we thought long and hard about, okay, well, what can we actually do to answer this question? What's within our spans of control? And it's our ability to verify.

06:49:43 --> 06:49:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that we've communicated with you. And so now we have different touchpoints, verifiedamazon.com, through our customer service help page, as well as Alexa for shopping on our online store and app. You can have… you can literally go to Alexa for shopping and say, like, hey, did Amazon just call me?

06:49:59 --> 06:50:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we'll be able to tell you within seconds, with 100% certainty, yes, no, WhatsApp, text message, email, phone number. Um, and so, early days, but that's…

06:50:11 --> 06:50:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's the latest and greatest.

06:50:13 --> 06:50:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Does Amazon ever call people? Yeah. Why? I don't know. There's lots of reasons. I don't represent everybody. I'm always looking for that silver bullet that says, you know, the IRS will never call you. But that's actually not true because they do hire people to call you after you've not paid attention, perhaps to all of the letters that came and stuff.

06:50:34 --> 06:50:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So there's never really anything ironclad, but… so I threw that at you, sorry. No, it's okay. Yeah, yeah. I dodged it. Yeah, you did well. Um, the one other thing that, um, I think is super impressive, um, and Amazon's not alone in this, and in fact, you've worked with other major.

06:50:49 --> 06:51:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Corporations whose brands are being impersonated all the time. Talk a little bit about the activity you guys are doing to go after the, the, um, the, the call centers around the world. Oh yeah. So one of the things that I'm outside of.

06:51:04 --> 06:51:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: of the tools and the education and things like that. We actually have a really incredible team, our customer protection and enforcement team. They're the same people that run the Scam Justice Legal Clinic for us, and they're smiling right now. Can you guys just wave your hand? Because now it's weird. Okay, there they are.

06:51:20 --> 06:51:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This team are… they're fantastic individuals, wicked smart, and super aggressive when it comes to pursuing legal actions and building cases, both on behalf of Amazon, but in conjunction and support of law enforcement around the world.

06:51:39 --> 06:51:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One of the most compelling outcomes we've had is a joint action we took with Microsoft a couple years ago now, but we were able to work with the Indian government and Microsoft and others to basically shut down 70 companies.

06:51:56 --> 06:52:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Call centers that were conducting fraudulent calls to to customers around the world and just like put into perspective, um, a call center isn't like in a strip mall necessarily, it's like in a sky rise building. Um, these are huge operations, um, and we have multiple examples of that from, from this team and it's, it continues to be something that we do and, and.

06:52:20 --> 06:52:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One of the best places that we get evidence to build those cases is through the customer reports that we receive.

06:52:28 --> 06:52:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, if there are, uh, brands out here, and they're hearing this, um, and are open to this concept of.

06:52:37 --> 06:52:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, following your lead, what do you think is, like, the most important thing for people to grab onto?

06:52:44 --> 06:52:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay. Of all the things you're doing. I think it's, like, a very fundamental… we call it… don't roll your eyes all at once, but we call it a mental model at Amazon.

06:52:56 --> 06:53:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, nobody rolled their eyes. Um, but it's, it's, it's really a mental model of, um, building victim support into your.

06:53:07 --> 06:53:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: experience mapping. Um, it is… it is not something that's an afterthought, it is part of the design. Um, even with the, um, the communication verification tool we just built, um, along the way, we are asking ourselves, now, where could we insert some support for people?

06:53:25 --> 06:53:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How could we make this not just a, no, it's not Amazon, goodbye, and click. It's not Amazon, so now what?

06:53:35 --> 06:53:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What can we do at Amazon to make sure that we're offering people really useful resources and support, and also in a tonality that exudes empathy and compassion and care? That is just part of what we do at Amazon.

06:53:52 --> 06:53:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: super, super proud of it. My team will attest that this is something that we we think about often.

06:53:59 --> 06:54:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Well, thank you for sharing all that. And now you can see — so there are policy changes that are floating around. There are corporate decisions being made to be more part of the solution without the carrot stick approach.

06:54:14 --> 06:54:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So there's a lot of activity in this space. And I think we have to be asking ourselves wherever we are in, let's call it the scam life cycle or the, you know, this whole enterprise, what can we be doing?

06:54:30 --> 06:54:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: more, better, differently, to not just, you know, figure out disruption, think about consumer education, but really get to the heart of the problem. I think I hang around too many people from the military, because I've learned this concept of.

06:54:48 --> 06:55:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Left of boom and right of boom and the left of boom is everything we can do for prevention. It's, you know, it's consumer education, of course it is, but it's not just that. It's, you know, real time disruption. It's stopping with technology that scam from ever getting to the consumer to begin with. But it's also really important to look at right of boom when that.

06:55:09 --> 06:55:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: crime has happened, what's next? What do we do to support the victim? What do we do to help them recover emotionally, financially, understand the impact on them, their family members, their communities where they can no longer spend money, right? And it's law enforcement.

06:55:28 --> 06:55:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, I don't know if y'all follow Erin West, uh, on LinkedIn and on… she runs Operation Shamrock. Um, she did a trip, uh, very dangerous trip to Nigeria a couple of weeks ago, and she was talking to the Yahoo boys, um, and asked… asked in very several, you know, different ways.

06:55:45 --> 06:56:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What would make you stop doing this? And then originally it was like, yeah, well, we don't have any other way to make money, so we're doing this. But when it came down to brass tacks and she's like, what would stop you? And they're like, arrests. Nobody's coming after us. We are acting with impunity.

06:56:01 --> 06:56:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And they're remorseless about it. So there's a whole range of things that we need to be doing. And I think we do have a little bit of time for some Q&A. If anyone wants to even just make a comment, we have a mic runner.

06:56:18 --> 06:56:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In the back there, we got somebody over back in the corner, Mark.

06:56:25 --> 06:56:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hey, thank you. This is Robert Wise, Capital One. I just had a quick question.

06:56:30 --> 06:56:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: about the verification center. And I actually looked on Amazon. I just looked on my app and saw where you can check for emails and phone calls and text messages. How do you get that?

06:56:45 --> 06:57:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: information to the consumer so that they know where to look? Oh, this is such a good one. And it's one design flaw. I'm sure there's others, but that is a design flaw. It's challenging to make sure that people know that these tools exist. One of the things we talked about yesterday in the consumer education working group session was thinking differently about what we're actually educating people on. And it's not just about platitudes. And there's.

06:57:15 --> 06:57:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So there's this tried and true sort of tips and cautions that are helpful to be reminded of, but it's also helping people know what resources exist, how to use it, making it incredibly user-friendly, discoverable.

06:57:30 --> 06:57:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I would love for our tool to be able to just have such strong design that you don't even have to think about where it is. It just is where you think it should be. And also we're looking at sort of in phase two of opportunities to fully remove the ask.

06:57:51 --> 06:58:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: from customers to be able to kind of have it be back office, back end verified on their behalf. And so there's a massive opportunity, by the way, that none of this is like proprietary. I'm happy to talk to anybody who wants to do something similar, and I would encourage any organization that is being impersonated to come up with a way to ensure that your customers.

06:58:13 --> 06:58:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Can verify communications are from you.

06:58:16 --> 06:58:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you for saying that because that's really, that's an important element of this. I know many, many years ago hearing about some really incredible technology in gift cards and stopping gift cards from being offloaded minutes after they were purchased across the country.

06:58:31 --> 06:58:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: really cool technology, but it was proprietary. So, we gotta, we gotta lift those, those restrictions. Thank you for the question. Who else?

06:58:41 --> 06:58:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Any other questions, thoughts? Oh, here we go. We have two.

06:58:48 --> 06:58:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's on or… Leave him on.

06:58:53 --> 06:58:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, I'm Debbie Fox, and I'm a romance fraud survivor, and…

06:58:59 --> 06:59:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Clark, I hang on your every article that comes out, because you're my connection to what's going on with legislation, so you've narrowed down the… one of my questions is, what policy do you see as most actionable? So I've got those notes. And Kathy, I applaud you for, when you do speak.

06:59:16 --> 06:59:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I also follow you like a hawk. When you speak to Congress, you don't…

06:59:22 --> 06:59:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: use any PR.

06:59:24 --> 06:59:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You're just telling it like it is. You're one of the few voices who will call out the tax impact, which, in my purview of the people that I know and myself included, is extremely as devastating as the crime. Abigail, I was just looking for that legal.

06:59:40 --> 06:59:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: website, I did a quick Google search, and it didn't come up. So if it's… Scam Justice Legal Clinic? Yeah, it's using Google, and it just… it wasn't coming up safely, right? So I would love that. All right. Another comment is…

06:59:57 --> 07:00:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: When I reported my crime to IC3, I'm old enough to qualify for elder, and so I did have a representative who did take my information, which was helpful. As my case advanced and I had more local detective intel, I wanted to make sure it reached the feds.

07:00:14 --> 07:00:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That follow-up message is not taken by a phone, someone assisting me on the phone. Also, at that time, any of the information they provided to me for resources was all dead end. So my question is, do any of you know how.

07:00:32 --> 07:00:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: how…

07:00:33 --> 07:00:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: IC3 representatives, elder care, they get the resources that they can then pass on to the victim reporting the crime.

07:00:40 --> 07:00:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think that's all you, Clark. Only because you were an FBI analyst, and you do look at policies, so maybe there's not an answer, but a solution.

07:00:49 --> 07:01:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think ICI… ICI… IC3 is a real problem. I think the way that it interacts with the other FBI systems, the way that it is accessible to victims, it's not working well. That's one of the things that we have been pushing on and got.

07:01:05 --> 07:01:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: language into the Commerce Justice Science Appropriations Report, um, which, if Congress passes the budget this year, it will, uh, go into effect, and the FBI will have to work on that, but…

07:01:18 --> 07:01:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: um, it's… the IC3 is not the system that it should be, it's not the victim… it's not the system that victims deserve, and I think, um…

07:01:28 --> 07:01:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It, yeah, it's, your experience is unfortunately common.

07:01:35 --> 07:01:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We have another? Yeah.

07:01:38 --> 07:01:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi there, I'm Sarah Osborne, and I, um, go out into the community, and I talk to people about scams, so hopefully they're one step ahead.

07:01:47 --> 07:01:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, one thing I do notice is, like, I know there's a bunch of great websites out there, I know there's a bunch of great tools out there.

07:01:57 --> 07:01:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And…

07:01:59 --> 07:02:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If you don't know they exist, then they don't help you.

07:02:04 --> 07:02:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And so, I… I've just started, I'm… like, just last week, I started… I'm putting together a spreadsheet of sites that I have found, and it covers the whole spectrum. It's commercial, um…

07:02:18 --> 07:02:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and nonprofits and different phases of the scam cycle.

07:02:24 --> 07:02:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And I guess it's just more of a comment. It's just really hard.

07:02:30 --> 07:02:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to find information. And so I think that's something that we could all be working on somehow. Plus one to that, um, a thousand percent. I, um, just quick analogy that I, I go back to as we're building things at Amazon is.

07:02:47 --> 07:02:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If you're walking down the road, and there's roadwork ahead, and you… there's… if you're a construction company, you could put a bunch of signs in front of the roadwork, you could say, oh, danger, danger, be careful, be careful, be careful.

07:02:59 --> 07:03:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Or you can just…

07:03:01 --> 07:03:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: just direct people this way and, like, build a path over here. One takes the onus off of the person walking down the street, the other requires that person to think about, okay, now what do I do? And so, I'm hopeful that at Amazon and at other companies that we are finding ways to take the burden off of.

07:03:21 --> 07:03:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: consumers. Um, I don't think anyone's quite cracked that yet, but, um, the aspiration's certainly there.

07:03:28 --> 07:03:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And it also, um, gets to the very, um, uh, the nature of everything being so disjointed in this space. And, you know, 5 years ago, I submit that it was a lot worse, even. Um, but now that, uh, you know, transnational organized crime.

07:03:47 --> 07:04:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Has fully entered the scene with the technologies to scale and and perfect. It's that much more important that we have resources for people and they they they know where they are. And I take a lot of I'm grateful for the resources of AARP. We have a very large membership. We can reach them. But that's just.

07:04:08 --> 07:04:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the members that are reading it, so maybe even just a percentage of our members that we're reaching, and then, you know, we're trying to get outside of that. And it's so frustrating because people still don't know that there's a Fraud Watch network, but we don't have unlimited money. People don't have.

07:04:24 --> 07:04:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: unlimited attention spans. So that is a big issue, and I think it's something that should definitely be built into this concept of a national fraud strategy, which is starting to get some legs, I would say.

07:04:38 --> 07:04:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, uh, this is Leisha Kozlovsky, and, um, you know, I'm thinking about the number of the very few people who report it.

07:04:47 --> 07:04:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And there's the shame involved, but also a feeling that nothing will happen. And, uh, I'm thinking of, you know, how the billboards of lawyers who…

07:04:58 --> 07:05:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: advertised, call me, I'll get your money back, or whistleblower laws where you get, you know, treble damages if you… if your lawyer succeeds. Is there any focus in that direction of, you know, if your case… if they… if you can recover it, you get…

07:05:13 --> 07:05:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: triple damages on the bad guys, or… You know, is there something that is being floated around to kind of… make it worth someone else's while, so that they…

07:05:23 --> 07:05:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: advertised to the victims?

07:05:27 --> 07:05:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There are definitely lawyers who have set up.

07:05:31 --> 07:05:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: recovery businesses, where they will, if they recover your funds, take a portion of the money. Um…

07:05:39 --> 07:05:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The problem is there's also a lot of recovery scams, and so it's very hard to know who you could trust. And frankly, I think we'd probably all rather that law enforcement get us our money back than having to give 30% to some company. I haven't seen any legislation.

07:05:56 --> 07:06:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: in that regard. There is more of a trend towards, um, liability, so there is a bill that's the Scam Act that would require, uh, online platforms to do verification of the advertisers that are placing ads on their platforms, because scam ads have become such a big problem.

07:06:15 --> 07:06:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, so there's things like that, like liability where you then could in theory sue if, uh, they hadn't properly done the, the ad verification. Um, and I think there is more interest in Congress on doing that sort of front end. Um, I do think we didn't get into this, but I'd like to briefly if I can.

07:06:31 --> 07:06:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, asset forfeiture is a real challenge in this space, um, because what will happen is that law enforcement will seize $15 billion, as they did in the Prince Group case.

07:06:43 --> 07:07:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But if they cannot directly tie those funds to a specific victim, like if I didn't, sorry, you're a criminal in this case, if I sent you money directly, then they know that happened and they'll give me my money back. But if I sent you money and then you sent it to all of these different people, because it's money laundering, right?

07:07:02 --> 07:07:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Which is how money moves now in these sorts of fraud and scams. It's really hard for law enforcement to tie that original transaction back to me without doing a lot of legwork. So, um, that's a place I think we're going to need to focus more to ensure that the asset forfeiture is actually happening and people get their money back.

07:07:19 --> 07:07:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now, is that something under current law that can happen? Or, I guess, because of the nature of money laundering, that's kind of not the right question to ask, I don't know. No, it certainly can happen. It's just so much work…

07:07:32 --> 07:07:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: After you've seized the money to then go back and trace it all the way back, that it is really resource, uh, dependent and law enforcement agencies, federal government has been getting less money, not more money, um, so yeah, it's a resource.

07:07:47 --> 07:07:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Problem.

07:07:48 --> 07:08:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We have a yeah, I've got a question. My name is Alan Cohen. I'm a supervisor with San Francisco Adult Protective Services. And, I think you would be surprised or people would be surprised to know just how many, cases we deal with of, of scams.

07:08:04 --> 07:08:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And it's very good to hear that there's recognition that we can't just educate out of this, because we're constantly educating our clients about this. They're losing from hundreds of dollars to hundreds of thousands to, you know, over a million dollars at a time.

07:08:21 --> 07:08:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It is so disheartening, just like, you know, the audio we heard earlier, um, to witness this. One of the things that we see that I think, um, is…

07:08:32 --> 07:08:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: becoming more apparent is that, uh, early, uh, like, early-stage dement… early stages of dementia, there is a condition called anosognosia, where people lack insight into their own deficits. And so those people will not recognize even…

07:08:48 --> 07:09:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: when they're told, you know, you're in the midst of a scam, you can point out all of the things that make it a scam, and they… they can say yes to all of that, like, I see that, I see that, and they…

07:09:00 --> 07:09:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: can't… they can't internalize and accept that it's a scam, and they will continue to engage with scammers. Um, so…

07:09:07 --> 07:09:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: so really, it has to be front-end, stopping it from even getting to these folks. And I think people should be much angrier at our politicians, and at the telecoms, and at Google, and at, um, you know, who's created AI that's just multiplied the seriousness of this.

07:09:25 --> 07:09:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: problem, and I think only us being angry and forcing our politicians and those platforms to do something about this… I mean, it'll get… it'll happen very quickly if banks are held accountable for paying, you know, some of the money back when they know that, like, an 80-year-old for the first time is buying.

07:09:41 --> 07:10:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: cryptocurrency, and they did nothing to slow the process down. And it's very sad to witness. Thank you for your work at APS. It's critical. And you're right, education isn't a solver. It's a component. And it's also important to understand, as you did the other day when John Demay was on.

07:10:02 --> 07:10:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: with us, um, that this isn't just an older adult's problem because of cognitive declines. Um, this hits everybody of every age.

07:10:12 --> 07:10:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And if I could just piggyback on what you were saying, I… please reach out to your members of Congress, I know…

07:10:18 --> 07:10:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that it may feel like a dead end, but it is not. Like, they do really read all of the emails, especially if they're not form letters. Um, they answer the phone. If you have somebody in your family, or a friend, or if you have been a victim, they have caseworkers that their whole job is to help people.

07:10:36 --> 07:10:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: work with the government and try to resolve problems. And I can point to very specific things that have happened thanks to Mary Ellen and Debbie reaching out to their members of Congress. There are bills that are moving forward because you got their ears and they heard the issues that you had experienced and they were like, we've got to fix this.

07:10:53 --> 07:10:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It really does matter putting pressure on.

07:11:00 --> 07:11:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you all. Um, my name's Chris Groshong from the Crypto Recovery Alliance. It's a 501c3 to help victims of crypto fraud, and touching all the pillars that you talked about today, because you can't just focus on.

07:11:13 --> 07:11:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: financial part alone. And I think it's really great that someone's talking about that you're bringing up taxes.

07:11:20 --> 07:11:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Because we've seen not only the front side of that, where you're penalized, but also…

07:11:27 --> 07:11:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: On the restitution side, if you've claimed a loss, you then have to pay taxes on the money that you get back, also.

07:11:35 --> 07:11:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Right? So, it just… there's this, uh, air of feeling penalized and re-victimized, even while going through, and what should be, like, a reward or a good feeling, right? And then the asset forfeiture thing, I think is really great that you brought that up, too, because.

07:11:53 --> 07:12:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The DOJ's site, right, to help you connect to the fraud is usually you have a 30 to 60 day window, and they're not advertising it on TV. Like, imagine a victim who then loses their money.

07:12:08 --> 07:12:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then there's a bust, and they had a chance to get their money back, but they missed the window.

07:12:12 --> 07:12:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: if you didn't think about jumping off the bridge the first time, right? Like, you're really thinking about it now, because you just lost a second chance at getting your money back. So, working these angles together, I think is going to be the biggest impact for people, because.

07:12:29 --> 07:12:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: They really need to have some hand-holding towards knowing what the actual steps of recovery are.

07:12:36 --> 07:12:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So thank you all.

07:12:39 --> 07:12:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think we have time for one or more questions. Are we over here, Mark? Thanks.

07:12:46 --> 07:13:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi there. Shining Shu, attorney for the Federal Trade Commission. I've heard a lot of talk about not knowing where to report. The two best channels are ic3.gov for immediate — if it's a bank transfer, within 48 hours to get your money back.

07:13:03 --> 07:13:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then the second is reportfraud.ftc.gov.

07:13:07 --> 07:13:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the FTC cannot guarantee that we can handle individual service, but the aggregate of the information dictates our enforcement priorities. So we prosecute based on where the data leads us. So if it can't be report… if it doesn't report, then we can't enforce. So I really urge everyone to work with us. I know it can be frustrating.

07:13:26 --> 07:13:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But we have to start somewhere.

07:13:29 --> 07:13:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I would just say that for actual law enforcement support, IC3, if you can get the asset recovery in the 48, 72 hours, you got to call local law enforcement. You have to insist on a police report and get a number from them.

07:13:46 --> 07:13:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: for it. It's gonna be helpful down the road somehow, but if they're not hearing your reports, they don't understand what's happening.

07:13:52 --> 07:13:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And there's a chance at action for criminal law enforcement, criminal action if you do report it. Yes, sir.

07:14:02 --> 07:14:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hey, Ben Hirsch with KeyBank, and for as much opportunity that still exists within the IC3 complaint portal, and historically there being this belief that it is kind of going off into the ether.

07:14:18 --> 07:14:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Why am I even doing this? Without going too far into the specifics of it, I can acknowledge public-private partnership with that data now via the NCFTA to be able to take what has been learned from somebody else's.

07:14:34 --> 07:14:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: um, complaint and shared in that public-private partnership to the NCFTA to enable, uh, financial institutions to try to identify, uh, via link analysis or other efforts, um.

07:14:49 --> 07:14:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And so as much as we might, um…

07:14:52 --> 07:15:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: there's a lot of ways that they can report. I can just acknowledge and try to encourage as many people as possible to report, and it's specific the IC3, uh, complaint portal is, I can attest, getting action, um.

07:15:07 --> 07:15:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: regularly. And so, I just wanted to throw that plug out there, and if there are any other banks here that don't know about that, and they are connected to the NCFT, I'd be happy to, uh, encourage them and talk to them about how they can get plugged in.

07:15:20 --> 07:15:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And there's that other element of NCFDA, which is, uh, separate but under the same umbrella of the National Elder Fraud Coordination Center. Yeah, thanks. Did you have something you wanted to… No, no? Okay. I was just gonna say, and you said it's really important to report it quickly, but one of… maybe you're hinting at this, but the FBI, um…

07:15:38 --> 07:16:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Has the rapid asset, I forget what rat team, rapid asset recovery team. Um, FBI is not great at acronyms. IC3, why would anyone think that's where we report scams? Like what? Um, anyways, uh, and they are combing through all of the reports they've, they've just gotten. And if any of it is actionable, if it's a, a wire that might not have, you know, it might, you might be able to claw that back.

07:16:00 --> 07:16:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, they do have people who are staffing that full-time, trying to pull money back, and FinCEN has the, um…

07:16:06 --> 07:16:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Sort of the international version of that. Um, so.

07:16:10 --> 07:16:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Well, we have actually gone a couple of minutes past, so thanks for sticking with us. So grateful that you guys were here. You can come up and talk to any of us anytime, and enjoy the rest of the summit. Thanks.

07:16:23 --> 07:16:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Adopt. Thank you.

07:16:26 --> 07:16:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No, no, no, we're good.

07:16:28 --> 07:16:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yes.

07:16:30 --> 07:16:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you so much to the previous panel. So on this session, what we're going to do is focus, do a bit of a zoom in on the US market and how APIs are being successfully deployed. I'm Claire Messenger, head of marketing at Aduna. So I'm really pleased that Anthony is able to stay for this session, our CEO.

07:16:52 --> 07:17:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we've also got Andy Stegner from AT&T, and Shirag Bakshi from Zomigo. So, we have representatives from the different parts of the API ecosystem. We have Andy from the supply side, we have.

07:17:07 --> 07:17:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Anthony Iduna on the aggregation side, and then Shirag, who can talk about it from the deployment side. So, Shirag, perhaps if I start with you, I mean, fraud is a massive industry, which is why we're all here, and in the US market.

07:17:25 --> 07:17:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: US citizens reported fraud losses of up to 15.9 billion last year, which is absolutely staggering. What specific fraud challenges are you seeing that banks and financial institutions are facing?

07:17:41 --> 07:17:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, can you guys hear me?

07:17:43 --> 07:17:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, so banks and financial institutions, they're facing fraud challenges in all aspects of their business, whether you talk about a consumer trying to open an account.

07:17:55 --> 07:18:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Trying to update their account, you know, make a purchase or…

07:18:01 --> 07:18:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, even try to call into a call center, and, uh, spoofing and other issues that show up. So they're facing challenges across the entire life cycle. I think the consumer, obviously, you know, the consumer life cycle, as they go through these events with their financial institutions.

07:18:19 --> 07:18:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, they expect protection from the financial institution. So these are challenges that, you know, banks and financial institutions are facing. I think one of the major things is, as a consumer, we all know that we get.

07:18:35 --> 07:18:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Random text messages, we get phone calls, and we always wonder, should I answer this? Should I pick up or not? Right, so the consumer is always confused and don't know what to trust. I think a lot of us in the US, for example.

07:18:52 --> 07:19:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We've received text messages from either UPS or FedEx saying your parcel is going to be delivered, please confirm. And all that is happening is the fraudster is trying to confirm your phone number so they can then perpetrate fraud using your phone number. So these are challenges.

07:19:09 --> 07:19:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that banks and financial institutions are facing every day. And they come to us, and, you know, obviously we work with them and try to mitigate the fraud.

07:19:18 --> 07:19:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. I mean, I think it I mean, I think from a consumer side, we're getting more and more, you know, suspicious of everything. And the banks are facing increasing fraud challenges. Talking about mobile APIs, then, which are sort of intelligent signals, really.

07:19:33 --> 07:19:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, what unique characteristics do they have that other data sources don't have, and why are they so important for your business? Yeah, very good question. I think, you know, I founded the company about 14 years ago, and we are working towards enabling mobile intelligence, because your mobile number is now.

07:19:51 --> 07:20:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: like your social security number, and so it's a very critical item where every consumer wants to hang onto their phone. I think what's really important about mobile networks is the fact that a lot of fraud systems, the fraud ecosystems, depend.

07:20:07 --> 07:20:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: on past patterns and behavior, and then make predictions on whether it's fraud or not. The cool thing about mobile networks and the network API is that it's real-time, and it's authoritative, and it's now, right? So when fraud happens.

07:20:22 --> 07:20:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It doesn't tell anyone that it's going to happen. So it's very important that the real time nature is utilized because fraud happened. I think if your mobile account has any changes, we get to know about it in seconds. And that's the very most important aspect of this.

07:20:39 --> 07:20:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think if you rely on historical data or patterns, you're going to have a lot of fraud, and I think…

07:20:45 --> 07:20:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Enterprises realize that over time, they don't realize that they are not using the right technology or the right solutions to prevent this kind of fraud, which is what is leading to $15, $17 billion of fraud every year.

07:20:59 --> 07:21:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. I mean, coming to… to you, Andy, um, in… in the US, I mean, obviously, there's a… there's a huge demand for these data signals. Um…

07:21:09 --> 07:21:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How important is standardization in the US market and how does successful collaboration work between you and the other carriers? Because effectively you are competitors, but you have to work together in order to sort of make this industry work. Can you give us your perspective on that, please?

07:21:26 --> 07:21:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, so, um…

07:21:29 --> 07:21:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay. So, you know, from a standardization standpoint, there's there's two aspects, right? There's the actual API itself. There needs to be standards to the API itself so that when a developer goes to actually build in this functionality, they now have the standardization of an API across the three US carriers. Right. Let's only talk about the US right now.

07:21:50 --> 07:22:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I mean, AT&T, Verizon, and TMO make up about 99% of the US market. And so, as a developer, what I want is I want standardization, I want consistency, and I want predictability. So I want to know that my user, regardless of their carrier, is going to have the same experience.

07:22:07 --> 07:22:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And so, the Camara standards that we're all building these APIs to, which is driven by the GSMA and the Open Gateway project through the Linux Foundation, are critical to the success. Then you get into the standardization among the three carriers in the US around a common roadmap.

07:22:27 --> 07:22:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It doesn't help Chirag very much if AT&T and Verizon provide, they provide API A and then T-Mobile provides API B, right? That doesn't give him then the 99 plus percent of the market that he needs to go and build the solution into his solution that gets sold to the banks.

07:22:49 --> 07:23:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So the standardization is really critical for us to hit the scale of these APIs that we want to hit, and that the industry needs to hit. I think, you know, to Claire's point on the competitive nature of AT&T, Verizon, and TiMo, we are conditioned, right? And every bone in our body is to…

07:23:08 --> 07:23:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to fight against the other carriers. However, in this instance, we are not successful if we cannot, uh, come to a standard agreement on a common roadmap with a common suite of features within those APIs, and that is really where Aduna.

07:23:26 --> 07:23:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: comes in. They give us the ability to come together, and they can drive the three of us that all have very different viewpoints.

07:23:34 --> 07:23:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to bring in the demands of the customers, like Chirag and Ellie, to then help us make decisions to actually go and launch a particular suite of APIs.

07:23:46 --> 07:24:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. Um, coming to you, um, Anthony, as Andy said, you know, Aduna is the, sort of, aggregation, uh, layer, and… and Aduna can access APIs across AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

07:24:00 --> 07:24:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Can you just tell us what APIs are currently available in the US market, and how the market is responding to these standardized APIs? And also, if the industry in the US is going to continue to evolve and remain relevant.

07:24:16 --> 07:24:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: um, and, and grow, you know, what, what do you think needs to, to happen over the next few years?

07:24:23 --> 07:24:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'm gonna start with the, uh, last one, I think. Um, I think we've talked about before…

07:24:30 --> 07:24:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that when you collaborate, you get better outcomes. Um, if you…

07:24:35 --> 07:24:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: at any point of interface, you're either creating… you're creating value, or you're eroding value. There's just… there's just two outcomes. So, by collaborating, you've got a better chance at that point of interface to create value, so I think that's what needs to continue to happen.

07:24:51 --> 07:25:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This show, or this event, is largely about that, too. Sharing experiences, sharing learnings, sharing best practices. An API is effectively a service-level agreement. It either works or it doesn't. You know, you make the API call, you're gonna get a… you're gonna get a response back. That response is gonna help you, or it's going to…

07:25:10 --> 07:25:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: or not, but you need to get some of these real-time interfaces. So, if I take a look at the APIs that are available, and these are… we call them APIs, but they're really signals. They're real-time, valuable signals that.

07:25:25 --> 07:25:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: come, as Chirag mentioned, from a source of truth, not probabilistically. Probabilistically meaning Anthony does A and Anthony does B, therefore he's likely to do C. That's the way we currently do it in the hyperscaler world, etc.

07:25:40 --> 07:25:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But because you've got these large sensors, which are the mobile networks, they have a relationship with you that probably span more than a few milliseconds, they span years or decades. So they know you, they know that they can verify you, so they come.

07:25:57 --> 07:26:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: from a network or an ecosystem of repute. Those APIs, the ones that are being shared right now, if you just look at the US, the primary ones are SIM swap and number verification. Um, SIM swap determines whether someone's, your SIM card is, uh, SIM's been changed recently, number verification verifies.

07:26:16 --> 07:26:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you to that particular number. There's a few other APIs that are coming out this year, things like call forward signals. Call forward signals is a very powerful API. It gives the… because call forwarding is the sinister one, where.

07:26:31 --> 07:26:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's not just something that if you have a SIM swap, all of a sudden you might lose your phone signal and you're wondering why, what's going on, but call forwarding and that, and you'll ask that question of yourself for an hour at tops or a couple of hours, but call forwarding.

07:26:46 --> 07:27:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you could have your number being called forwarded for the last 2 or 3 weeks, and you wouldn't even know it. So, that's a very important signal. So, you have KYC match. Is your… is this person who they say they are? Once again, they're coming from a source of truth, which is the carrier, which has got a lot of different.

07:27:02 --> 07:27:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: different attributes. So those are some of the APIs that exist today in the US, and coming through the, uh, through the course of the rest of this year. Around the world, those two, those first two are the most likely, uh, APIs, and there's also DeviceSwap. Have you changed.

07:27:18 --> 07:27:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Has someone changed the ownership of this device to somebody else? These are all a ladder of friction that you're moving up against to, uh, uh, you know, for solutions like Chirag's teams do that creates that friction level.

07:27:33 --> 07:27:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to verify somebody. Not to create coefficient of friction, to keep that friction low for someone who's legitimate, and high for someone where you're suspecting something of a sinister nature.

07:27:48 --> 07:28:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, Shirak, I mean, you're using these data signals on, um, you know, a day-to-day basis. If we take the, the sort of, the hero ones that Anthony's mentioned, available in the US, SIM swap, um, uh, device swap and number verify.

07:28:03 --> 07:28:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Can you… can you bring in a couple of use cases about how these are being… how these data signals are being used to safeguard customers? Yeah, sure. I think, uh, consumers are used to OTPs. I think every consumer.

07:28:18 --> 07:28:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Receives an OTP if they're trying to open an account or verify a login. It's basically multi-factor authentication and consumers are quite sort of expect this probably a few times every day. And so I think what's happening is it has its challenges.

07:28:34 --> 07:28:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Because, you know, because of account takeover, I think there's…

07:28:39 --> 07:28:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: things like iCloud hacks, uh, which leads to, you know, account takeover. And there are a lot of issues with OTPs, and so I think one of the first network APIs we are working together, I think we had silent authentication.

07:28:54 --> 07:29:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: which is sort of verifying a phone number for a few years, but now, with the newer technology, we expect to replace OTPs with this new network API, so we're hoping that, you know, this takes broad adoption, and we can get rid of the risk factors.

07:29:10 --> 07:29:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that come with OTPs. In terms of SIM swap and device swap, obviously, this is what is used to identify risk factors, whether you're receiving an OTP or you're being authenticated with number verification, either way.

07:29:27 --> 07:29:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think you want to see if that phone number was hijacked and you want to be protected. So you check whether the SIM or the device was swapped. And this is the network API that basically protects a use case where a person is trying to log in or access an account.

07:29:42 --> 07:29:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And the risk signals are available. I think there are other signals that we have where, you know, we verify the phone ownership, uh, of a phone number, or we verify that the account was not recently activated, and we look at the risk signal for that.

07:29:58 --> 07:30:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think these are risk signals that are very useful when a consumer is trying to open an account and the enterprise wants to know, is it risky or should I let this account opening go through? I think there are some newer APIs that we all discussed, which is we've had call verification, which is…

07:30:15 --> 07:30:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Is this mobile phone number currently active in a phone call or now the scam signal where the demand is, is the phone number, active either way, whether it's an incoming or an outgoing. And I think this is probably a very important signal going forward as well.

07:30:32 --> 07:30:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So I think there are a lot of these network signals that we can use for enabling, sort of.

07:30:38 --> 07:30:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: protection of the consumer and preventing fraud. I think the important recognition that I feel out of this whole session over the last day and a half is that there's a recognition that most fraud, somewhere in the journey.

07:30:54 --> 07:31:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: is touching the telephony infrastructure. You know, because a lot of people feel comfortable in the fact that, well, I own the application, therefore, from application to application, I have some sense of control. But the actual fact is, somewhere along the journey.

07:31:10 --> 07:31:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: there's this phone infrastructure that is valuable, at the same time has some susceptibility, and there are signals that we haven't exposed. Now the carrier communities are exposing them, and they're fabulous tools to leverage.

07:31:25 --> 07:31:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, Andy, I think, um, Shirag alluded to, sort of, SMS OTP, and that the number verify solution is going to replace that. I mean, I think probably the audience is very familiar with SMS OTP, but… but can you just…

07:31:38 --> 07:31:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: talk a bit more about, um, you know, the vulnerabilities around, um, SMS OTP, and why the Number Verify alternative solution provides a more secure and frictionless alternative, and is this the carrier's approach now to sort of moving to this Number Verify world and moving away completely from SMS?

07:31:59 --> 07:32:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: OTP. Yeah, so, I mean, SMS OTP is very much a very large business within the carriers, right? And so, I don't foresee this being a hard cutover. I think this will be an iterative cutover. You also have to remember that as these businesses.

07:32:15 --> 07:32:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: go and implement network APIs like number verification as a replacement to SMS one-time passcode, there's still going to be a need for a fallback mechanism. And so the way I view this is SMS OTP is not inherently going away in the immediate term, but it becomes more of the secondary authentication or a fallback.

07:32:35 --> 07:32:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: whereas the network APIs, like number verification, become the primary. I mean, I think we're all familiar with the SMS one-time passcodes of, do not share this number with anybody. You get that for a reason, right? The social engineering is massively a problem, and this is not just for.

07:32:53 --> 07:33:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the financial industry. We've talked a lot about the banking industry, but developers as a whole, right, all of these applications want to make sure that you are who you say you are. And so, the way number verification works is it actually.

07:33:08 --> 07:33:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: takes information from the application developer, we bounce that up against our network database to confirm that it matches the information on your SIM card, and it all happens silently. And the beauty of it is, you remove friction within the application, so now I'm not asking you.

07:33:26 --> 07:33:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to go into your… to put your phone number in, it then… or choose whether it's SMS or email, I have to go into another application, I have to pull that, I have to copy and paste it, and then I have to hit send. Right? That's a lot of user friction, and frankly, we've seen some applications using number verification.

07:33:44 --> 07:34:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: not as a way purely to reduce fraud, but they actually are doing it to reduce the friction, and they find that the onboarding, their conversion to onboard a new customer is actually more successful. Um, and so that's the other really cool aspect, is that you remove a significant.

07:34:02 --> 07:34:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: portion of the friction. The other is now there's no middleman, right? So there's no SMS number that anybody can try to… it's an API in between the application and the carrier, fully encrypted, and it happens instantaneously, and so it's significantly more secure in that standpoint. So I do…

07:34:19 --> 07:34:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: believe that you will see use cases of number verification that are truly to prevent fraud, but that you also are going to have applications that recognize that I can convert customers to an actual, whether it be a paid subscriber, or I want them to build an account with me.

07:34:37 --> 07:34:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And I want to reduce every point of friction I can to get them onboarded faster.

07:34:44 --> 07:35:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. I mean, I think, Anthony, you know, it's great that this solution is available in the US, but there are businesses here that have a global footprint and, you know, require this solution across multiple countries.

07:35:00 --> 07:35:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, how is it being… just stepping out of the US for the moment, how is it being adopted? Um, you know, are you satisfied with the way that the industry is now going and coming together and bringing this solution to market?

07:35:14 --> 07:35:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, it's a really great question. I mean, uh, firstly, we tend to default to the US when we're sitting here in the US, but the reality is the standards were developed by the GSMA, uh, and CAMARA, which is a global entity. So these standards are…

07:35:31 --> 07:35:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: used around the world. Um… you know, how do I feel about how it's coming together? I mean, in my lifetime, the last time I saw the carriers come together was for global roaming.

07:35:43 --> 07:35:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, once again, you know, that was a point of interface that created value, and I'm not so sure.

07:35:50 --> 07:36:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, there'd be too many other sort of super victories like that that we would see, but this is the closest thing that has this fuse that it's moving in that direction. Because they're global.

07:36:00 --> 07:36:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: we have this… we have this terminology called the network effect. The network effect is something that the telecoms industry were the ones who sort of pioneered the network effect, so it's… it's sort of…

07:36:12 --> 07:36:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, not unreasonable for the telecom industry to do sort of the same thing.

07:36:18 --> 07:36:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: by having the network effect of having that same API available, not only at AT&T, but across all the three carriers in North America, and likewise across the, you know, six carriers across North America, and then the 15 carriers across North and South America.

07:36:34 --> 07:36:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: or the, you know, 1600 that are around the globe. And when you get that, you get a network effect. And then, obviously, you have customers in the banking industry, I'm one of them, who lives in one country and travels a lot in other countries.

07:36:49 --> 07:37:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's important to me, to have secure access to my banking services anywhere around the world, and if that means they can validate me anywhere around the world and give me services anywhere in the world, rather than have a service that's only available to me at home, but not available to me elsewhere in the world.

07:37:05 --> 07:37:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's a huge value add for me as a customer and comfort as a customer, but it also reduces the balance sheet footprint of fraud that we put on our balance sheets as a bank. So yeah, I think we're in the early stages.

07:37:22 --> 07:37:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think everybody wants it. It's hard to achieve, but it's worth achieving, because… because it's hard to achieve, it… um, us chasing it down, we shouldn't just leave it easy to the fraudsters to take… take it away with… from us.

07:37:36 --> 07:37:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. Um, Shirag, with the APIs that are available at the moment, um.

07:37:41 --> 07:37:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Can you be more specific about what success points you're seeing, whether it be reduction in fraud, improved customer satisfaction, or improved customer trust, or improved efficiency? If you can give us some sort of an outline on that, that'd be great.

07:37:57 --> 07:38:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, no, I think, uh, you know, obviously, the outcomes are tremendous.

07:38:03 --> 07:38:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, for example, today, we protect 70% of U.S. bank accounts from account takeover, so all the big banks use us. For example, any of your own personal accounts, we are probably protecting you from account takeover.

07:38:17 --> 07:38:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Having said that, in terms of…

07:38:20 --> 07:38:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: quantitative numbers, customers are very hesitant to tell us, you know, what percentage of fraud or fraud dollars they've prevented or, you know, benefited.

07:38:32 --> 07:38:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, for obvious reasons. I think it's both, you know, for commercial reasons and reputational risk. So, we completely understand that, but having said that.

07:38:43 --> 07:38:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There were some customers that gave us.

07:38:46 --> 07:38:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: data sets for tests and files with fraud labels, and what was interesting was when we ran it through these APIs and our technology.

07:38:56 --> 07:39:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: we were able to eliminate 97% of fraud labels. So that tells us that the benefit is tremendous. And this is just, you know.

07:39:06 --> 07:39:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the big enterprises will not tell us the benefit, but the fact that they keep on using and increasing over year over year, that says it all. I think the… obviously, the financial benefit of preventing fraud loss is the biggest…

07:39:21 --> 07:39:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, benefit. I think secondly, uh, you know, there are other benefits where, uh.

07:39:28 --> 07:39:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Oh.

07:39:30 --> 07:39:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, there are actually fourfold benefits. One is the consumer experience that you were saying. The number verification technology, we utilize it in a way which is not just to prevent fraud, but to improve the customer experience.

07:39:45 --> 07:40:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: where once the number is verified, we use it to make the consumer experience very simple on a pre-fill. So you can easily, in a secure manner, where the number is verified, you can pre-fill your information on a bank account application or a credit card application, and this is enabled, so I think that's…

07:40:04 --> 07:40:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: tremendous benefit. In terms of, you know, the other benefit is the trust and loyalty that consumers have with the enterprises that are protecting them. So these are certainly, I think, one last.

07:40:17 --> 07:40:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Big benefit is, as you said, the fraud losses are 15 to $17 billion a year, but there's a implicit benefit, which is saving on customer service costs when fraud happens. So customer service costs are…

07:40:34 --> 07:40:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: equal or in fact, maybe bigger than the fraud loss itself. So that's another big benefit. So the actual financial benefit may be 30, 35 billion compared to just the pure fraud loss. So there's benefit across all fronts.

07:40:49 --> 07:41:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And clearly this technology is primed for adoption in all industries. Today, I think the adoption is mainly in financial industry and we are seeing now merchants adopt this. So we look forward to adoption in other industries as well.

07:41:06 --> 07:41:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. So just to bring the panel to a close, maybe, Andy, I can ask you to just mention some of the new APIs that are going to be launched before the year out. Yeah. I mean, Anthony kind of alluded to two of them. So one of them being KYC match or know your customer match.

07:41:27 --> 07:41:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, there are data points that we have within our databases that a customer could say, hey, does the phone number, the email address, and the physical address that Anthony provided me match what you have on record, yes or no?

07:41:42 --> 07:41:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And what that does is it allows us to use our single source of truth with the network information that we have to provide that application with better insights to ensure that they are working with who they think they're working with.

07:41:57 --> 07:42:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Another one, Anthony mentioned, call forward signal. So, we heard it loud and clear from the financial sector that that is a huge area of fraud. I think, you know, just anecdotal, we as the three carriers got together with Aduna, and we're talking about our roadmap for 2026, and.

07:42:15 --> 07:42:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: All three carriers say, well, wait a minute, like, who uses call forwarding? Like, our usage numbers are very low. This doesn't make sense. Why are the banks telling us this? So we then go back, and this is the collaboration, and where, you know, Ellie mentioned collaboration, collaboration. We have to hear from the end customers to know.

07:42:33 --> 07:42:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And the banks are like, yeah, you'd be amazed at how many people are socially engineered to turn that call forward signal on so that when you get that one time passcode and they get you to choose voice, so then that number, that five digit code gets sent to the scammer, not to the person on the phone.

07:42:51 --> 07:43:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we all kind of got together and we said, wait a minute, although the usage is so low, like 100% of it is fraud. And so that is where we as carriers would have never made the decision to move forward with this API if we didn't have that collaboration and the insights that this industry is bringing together with the true demand side, the true supply side.

07:43:13 --> 07:43:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Those are two, I think, looking forward, I think we'll start to see more that focus around anti-fraud solutions, and then you might start to see more that leverage more network intelligence, right? It gets maybe a little bit away from fraud, and how do we take it into incremental use cases that are not just centered around fraud, but.

07:43:33 --> 07:43:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This is really where we see the biggest benefit right now in talking with customers.

07:43:38 --> 07:43:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. So, I think, you know, this industry is continuing to evolve, and we'll be updating you in due course at future events, I'm sure. If there's anything that you'd like to talk to us about, please come and find us. We've got the Aduna stand further down the hall, but we're all happy to help with.

07:43:57 --> 07:44:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: any inquiries, or if you want to find out more about these APIs. So thank you very much to my panel, Anthony, Andy, and Shirag, and thank you very much for joining us today.

07:44:08 --> 07:44:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thanks, y'all.

07:47:35 --> 07:47:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Good.

07:47:42 --> 07:47:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okie dokie, alright, thank you all for coming. Uh, please put your headphones on and stick them onto the red channel.

07:47:50 --> 07:47:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Red channel, please. Well, if you can hear this, then you're already on the red channel.

07:47:56 --> 07:48:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What did you say about red? Red channel, please. Not the blue, not the green, the red.

07:48:02 --> 07:48:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If you all cut off lines, then I'm very sorry.

07:48:08 --> 07:48:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: All right. Well, thank you very much for coming. I'll stop shouting. Thank you very much for coming to join us at the Gaza Prevention Intervention Working Group. We have the purpose of the working group, which has been meeting since spring.

07:48:24 --> 07:48:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's to try and uncover areas of collaboration where we can work together across borders and across sectors to try and design out fraud and scams, in a sense, and identify how do we assist ourselves to design this stuff out in our own organizations.

07:48:43 --> 07:48:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: but also how and where we can work together. We've got a number of short presentations for you guys today, and then we'll present some of the work that the working group has been doing as well in the margins, and then I'll be really keen to have a conversation about what is missing from the prevention space.

07:48:59 --> 07:49:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that we can start to work on together. So, um, we have three excellent presentations, and I'll start, we'll start with Zach Martin from the, uh, Better Identity Coalition.

07:49:11 --> 07:49:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. Again, my name is Zach Martin. I am with the Better Identity Coalition, but I'm also a director of privacy and cybersecurity services at Venable. Venable is a law firm, but I am not a lawyer, so I have to give the disclaimer. Nothing I say today should be considered legal advice.

07:49:27 --> 07:49:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, so the Better Identity Coalition is an organization of 18 different companies, um, under the cybersecurity, uh, under the Center for Cybersecurity Policy and Law, uh, which is a non-profit. Um, we're, as the name, as the name states.

07:49:42 --> 07:49:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: we're focused on improving digital identity within the United States in a secure, privacy-enhancing way that makes digital identity easier for individuals to use, um, for all Americans.

07:49:56 --> 07:50:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, basically, our current identity infrastructure is fueling identity theft. Um, this isn't… it shouldn't be anything new to anyone in this room. You know, we're seeing billions, if not trillions of dollars lost due to identity theft, fraud in the U.S. Now, the U.S. government doesn't necessarily differentiate between fraud and scams.

07:50:15 --> 07:50:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, it's all… it falls into one bucket at this point, according to the GAO. You know, we're looking at $233 to $521 billion lost annually in difference and fraud, and then they're talking, um, $100 to $135 billion lost during the pandemic in fraud.

07:50:35 --> 07:50:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This is also costing consumers a lot of money. You look at numbers from FinCEN, $212 billion in suspicious activity reports.

07:50:45 --> 07:50:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: were tied to identity or authentication in 2021. This was 42% of all suspicious activity reports in 2021.

07:50:53 --> 07:51:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Early, um, reports of the 2023 numbers have $394 billion in transactions tied to identity and authentication.

07:51:03 --> 07:51:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, this is half the volume of suspicious activity reports. This is costing consumers money. This is… these are tied to romance schemes, telemarketing schemes, these are directly tied… not all of them are directly tied to scams, but a lot of these are directly tied to scams.

07:51:19 --> 07:51:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So this is something that is a huge problem for everybody.

07:51:24 --> 07:51:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Part of the problem is our approach to identities to date. You know, this cartoon makes light of it. You get a new puppy, child gets a new puppy, they name it Matilda. You know, Matilda is the password that they use for, you know, Matilda1234 is the password they end up using for their password.

07:51:40 --> 07:51:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That password gets breached, that ends up being what they, um, you know, ends up getting used in a database, and they end up, uh…

07:51:50 --> 07:51:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, it gets used over and over again, and they have to…

07:51:56 --> 07:52:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Then it gets, you know, used over and over again.

07:52:00 --> 07:52:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This isn't practical. And in order to reset that password, if you forget it, you ask, what's your favorite color? Now, if you set that password 20 years ago, what was your favorite color 20 years ago? It might have been green, but now it's… maybe it's blue. So you don't necessarily remember that.

07:52:15 --> 07:52:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Also, it's the last four digits of your social security number. This is also information that's not necessarily secret anymore. If you don't know that, your social security number is on the dark web. Everybody is on the dark web, so…

07:52:29 --> 07:52:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This information is not necessarily a secret anymore.

07:52:32 --> 07:52:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we've pivoted. This is a good thing. We started using something a little bit more robust. Document verification. Take a picture of your driver's license or your passport, take a selfie.

07:52:44 --> 07:52:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That information's validated. Much better than the out-of-wallet questions that were asked, you know, prior to that.

07:52:51 --> 07:52:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But as we pivoted, as banks have pivoted.

07:52:54 --> 07:52:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So too have the attackers.

07:52:57 --> 07:53:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This was a great story out of 404 Media a little bit more than a year ago, and I gotta hand it to the fraudsters. This website was called OnlyFakes.com.

07:53:07 --> 07:53:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This was a site where you could buy a digital replica of a driver's license with your photo on it, demographic information, and use it to fool identity verification sites. It's a great story from 404 Media. If you don't follow them, you should. I don't get paid by them, but seriously, great website.

07:53:26 --> 07:53:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Great news, great stuff.

07:53:28 --> 07:53:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But this is an example of how deepfakes and AI are attacking, um…

07:53:34 --> 07:53:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The identity verification, modern identity verification systems.

07:53:40 --> 07:53:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Again, and this is another example, North Korean IT worker fraud. I'm sure you're all aware of this, you know, they're using deepfake technology for remote identity verification work.

07:53:50 --> 07:54:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, either they're doing it just to get a paycheck and to fuel the North Korean nuclear program, or they're doing it to exfiltrate data.

07:54:00 --> 07:54:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um…

07:54:01 --> 07:54:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And to sell it to other folks.

07:54:06 --> 07:54:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And deepfakes in the consumer space are a huge problem as well, as we're all seeing it. Romance scams, all sorts of other things, they're here, they're happening. The bar for deepfakes is so low right now and so convincing, it's so easy to pull off.

07:54:23 --> 07:54:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So one of the things that Better Identity Coalition… in 2025, we started working with the American Bankers Association and the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Commission on, um…

07:54:35 --> 07:54:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Series of white papers on how generative AI works.

07:54:40 --> 07:54:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the threat of generative AI to financial services sectors, identity and access management systems. So, how does this affect you all? There were scams involved in that, too. So, what happens when the phone rings?

07:54:52 --> 07:55:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: it's… caller ID comes in, says it's your daughter, or it's your granddaughter. Sounds like your daughter or your granddaughter. Says, help, I've been in an accident. I need money.

07:55:03 --> 07:55:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What do you do?

07:55:05 --> 07:55:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How do you mitigate this threat?

07:55:08 --> 07:55:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now, these scam… I'll admit, I'm relatively new to these scam… like, fraud? I know the fraud landscape. Scams? I'm getting… I'm new to it. I'm… this is my first gossip event. I'm getting into it.

07:55:21 --> 07:55:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: These are hard challenges to solve. I've gotten into it with my family. I have a 12 and a nine year old at home. I have a passcode set up with my family. That's what we've resulted, that's what we've defaulted to.

07:55:37 --> 07:55:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's where we're at. But this paper, it focuses on financial sector, but I think a lot of the messages translate across industries. So we published two white papers that came out this February.

07:55:53 --> 07:56:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One is about the top 10 attacks and mitigations, and then the other one is recommendations for policymakers.

07:56:02 --> 07:56:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So again, if you scan the QR code, it'll take you to the papers. This is one about mitigations and attacks. So it looks at deepfake-driven social engineering and impersonation, synthetic attack identity creation, and AI attacks and surrogates.

07:56:18 --> 07:56:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, common themes and mitigations, you know, liveness detection. So, you know, again, I've talked about deepfakes, liveness detection, using AI to fight AI is critical, you know, especially when it comes to face recognition.

07:56:33 --> 07:56:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you have to be using liveness detection. Um, when it comes to voice recognition, also, liveness detection is critical.

07:56:42 --> 07:56:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Also with generative AI, phishing. What's old is new again. Generative AI enables phishing at a scale and such a lower cost. You have to start using phishing resistant multi-factor authentication.

07:56:59 --> 07:57:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Pass keys, um…

07:57:02 --> 07:57:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: basically render phishing moot. Um, you need to start using this technology in order to prevent… so if you click on a phishing email, it doesn't matter. No information gets sent, it doesn't… it renders it moot.

07:57:17 --> 07:57:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The other thing is mobile driver's licenses and verifiable digital credentials. These all use cryptographic technology that generative AI can't do anything with.

07:57:29 --> 07:57:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Get the quantum technology, that's a whole different story, hopefully that's a few years off, but…

07:57:35 --> 07:57:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We don't have to worry about generative AI with these technologies at this point.

07:57:40 --> 07:57:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So what can policymakers do?

07:57:46 --> 07:57:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So basically, we're recommending that…

07:57:48 --> 07:57:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Basically, government, um…

07:57:51 --> 07:57:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: invest in tools for identity verification.

07:57:54 --> 07:57:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and also enable these technologies. Right now, like.

07:57:59 --> 07:58:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Financial services and regulated industries want to use mobile driver's license as a pass case.

07:58:04 --> 07:58:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: but the regulations don't explicitly enable these technologies to be used. Um, and so, they're…

07:58:12 --> 07:58:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: not keen to use it unless it's explicitly laid out, so we want regulators to explicitly state that these technologies can be used. That passkeys and mobile driver's license.

07:58:22 --> 07:58:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: licenses can be used for these purposes.

07:58:27 --> 07:58:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We also want them to invest in these technologies, um, and invest in states so that we… they can start issuing more of these licenses. I think 24 states are issuing mobile driver's licenses.

07:58:40 --> 07:58:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: we need every state to issue them. We also need states to invest in the infrastructure so that they can be used online, because right now, all the use cases are in person, and while it's nice to have, it's not really the killer use case.

07:58:57 --> 07:59:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we have four key initiatives in the paper. Again, we wanna prioritize the development and deployment of next generation identity proofing.

07:59:06 --> 07:59:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Promote and prioritize use of strong authentication. It's really critical that we coordinate with other countries and harmonize requirements.

07:59:14 --> 07:59:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then lastly, and kind of this one's more importantly, educate consumers and businesses about better identity and emerging identity threats. You know, I don't think people understand that we really do need to focus on educating folks on why this is important.

07:59:31 --> 07:59:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now, Treasury is not ignoring this. There is other work going on at Treasury on this when it comes to crypto. So Treasury is working on guidance on how to use verifiable digital credentials.

07:59:44 --> 07:59:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, with existing consumer ident- customer identification programs, and they're working with Congress on legislation to incentivize development of these programs as well.

07:59:56 --> 08:00:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And there is a bill in Congress right now that would, um, enable a grant program to states, um.

08:00:03 --> 08:00:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: for issuing mobile driver's license and verifiable digital credentials. We're not sure, though, if this is gonna move before the end of the year.

08:00:13 --> 08:00:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has done a lot of work on mobile driver's licenses as well. They did a fairly robust pilot with financial services sector last year. A lot of that documentation is free and readily available online.

08:00:29 --> 08:00:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If you click on the QR code that hopefully I will not pass, there we go, is, um, you click on the QR code, you'll be taken to that information. Lot of great information, frameworks and stuff is available on that website as well.

08:00:44 --> 08:00:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, so with that…

08:00:47 --> 08:00:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think I'm under my time, and, um, I don't know if I can take questions now, or should we wait to take some questions?

08:00:55 --> 08:00:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think I have time for one or two questions, if…

08:00:57 --> 08:00:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Raise your hand, Oliver.

08:01:00 --> 08:01:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think I'm in the wrong.

08:01:04 --> 08:01:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know my name already. Oh, careful. We don't want to have a thing where you say, I'm tripping, so I'm doing a metaphor. Hi, Alex Greenland, co-founder, CEO of Epic Security. Interesting that you say phishing is mood. Passkey's definitely…

08:01:20 --> 08:01:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: make phishing harder. I will say that OAuth scams are huge, and that is not mitigated, so you still need to be careful. And also, QR codes. So, a lot of passkeys will present a QR code when you do a login.

08:01:35 --> 08:01:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to use another device, so you've got to be careful that that QR code is actually an official one that is going to do a login. And there's always going to be security reset flows, which are not going to be using passkeys.

08:01:47 --> 08:02:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Security resets are a huge problem as well as, you know, help desk as well. That's a challenge, but I… you're right, but I think passkeys go a long way towards solving the phishing problem that we have nowadays.

08:02:00 --> 08:02:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Can I just, can I intervene as well to say that, I mean, there's always gonna be, victims can always be talked into, um, sadly, into handing over their, their kind of, look, credentials through whatever means you do, or, or persuaded to, uh, uh, allow others to access their.

08:02:16 --> 08:02:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: bank details or whatever. So, but I think the more we can make that more challenging, and the more we can make that more obvious to victims and signpost that, and put the right warnings in the right place, we're never gonna… it's never gonna solve it, but I do think we can make it more difficult.

08:02:33 --> 08:02:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Anything else?

08:02:34 --> 08:02:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No, it's not.

08:02:36 --> 08:02:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: All right, with that. Thank you all. Thank you, Zach.

08:02:40 --> 08:02:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'm…

08:02:44 --> 08:02:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: With that, we are on to our next panel. Donald Hamblock from Match Group, who's going to talk about some of the ways that they identify and prevent criminals from exploiting their platforms.

08:03:00 --> 08:03:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Nope, nope, back.

08:03:02 --> 08:03:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hey folks, my name is Donald. I work at Match Group. If that doesn't ring an immediate bell, we are the company that owns most of the dating apps out there. So Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, and many, many more. One little caveat before I start, I'm actually not an expert on fraud or scams. That person is on vacation this week.

08:03:23 --> 08:03:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So you get me instead. Um, so with that, I'm actually… I'm gonna scoot this over here, because I need to look at my notes to give this presentation, I'm really.

08:03:34 --> 08:03:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, um.

08:03:37 --> 08:03:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we are going to talk about how we detect bad actors today at Match Group. So over the next few slides, we will walk through how we do just that, the signals we collect, how we turn those into rules and models, and where our newest tool, Face Check, fits in.

08:03:52 --> 08:03:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, but before we, uh, jump into that, I want to add a brief caveat to set expectations about what we can and cannot see.

08:04:03 --> 08:04:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We can't see very much. So our visibility is quite limited, and scammers move through our apps and the user journey very, very quickly. They sign up, they match, they chat, and then they take the conversation off the platform as soon as they possibly can.

08:04:22 --> 08:04:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, by the time a scam is actually happening, the conversation is usually moved to WhatsApp, or text, or someplace that we just cannot see at all.

08:04:32 --> 08:04:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And this is what every scam conversation, well, not every scam, but most scam conversations look like. You'll see they look pretty dang normal. Benign, normal conversations until they aren't. Everything I'm about to describe is about catching bad actors before they get to the point of this off-platforming their victims.

08:05:00 --> 08:05:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, so, uh, this is how we think about detection, uh, as a funnel that runs the course of a user's journey. We get more signals at every stage of it.

08:05:10 --> 08:05:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, at the top of the funnel, onboarding, we're working with what's available the moment somebody signs up. IP addresses, device info, phone numbers, uh, email, age, photos, etc.

08:05:20 --> 08:05:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, it's limited, but it's the earliest chance we get to flag something before, uh, interactions with other users occurs.

08:05:27 --> 08:05:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, in the middle, once a user is swiping and being shown to other people, we start to see actual behavior on the platform, uh, how they're swiping, what's in their profile text, their location, suspicious location changes, and, uh, very, very valuable, any reports that come in from other users.

08:05:42 --> 08:05:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, after things go haywire. So all this behavior builds a richer picture.

08:05:47 --> 08:06:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, and finally, at the bottom post-match, we get our strongest signals yet, um, messaging behavior, actual content of conversations, and reports of what happened after the scammer took someone off-platform to WhatsApp or text or what have you.

08:06:00 --> 08:06:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, a lot of scammers do not show their hand until late in this, uh, in this funnel. They look completely ordinary at sign-up, and only give themselves away once they start doing something, like pushing every, uh, meet, uh, match with over to WhatsApp.

08:06:14 --> 08:06:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's why we can't lean on any single, uh, stage. Instead, we can, uh, we need, uh, coverage across the whole journey, and we need to combine what we learned at each step. Um, so now I'm gonna talk a little bit about how we turn those, uh, signals into actions.

08:06:31 --> 08:06:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We use signals… oops, sorry. Oops.

08:06:35 --> 08:06:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There we go. We use signals to build our rules and models, and those rules and models combine signals to flag bad actors at different points in the user journey. But there's a tough trade-off. The longer someone stays on the platform, the more signal we collect and the more accurate our decisioning gets.

08:06:51 --> 08:06:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The catch is that the longer they stay, the more risk they can introduce. That's the central tension we have to continuously navigate, speed versus precision.

08:07:01 --> 08:07:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, um, because we wanted to get more signals more quickly, we've introduced FaceCheck, which gives us a way to collect critical signals at the very top of the funnel.

08:07:13 --> 08:07:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And it's a defense designed specifically to stop scaled abuse. The way it works is that at sign-up, new users take a short, mandatory video selfie, and we use that video to confirm they're a real, live person.

08:07:27 --> 08:07:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: From that selfie, we generate a face map, and from that face map, we derive a unique encrypted face vector. This is a protected, non-reversible signature of the face, and then we delete the selfie video itself.

08:07:40 --> 08:07:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The face vector is what powers the enforcement. We compare it against other accounts so we can detect the same… when the same face shows up across multiple profiles, which is a common tactic for scammers and bot networks.

08:07:53 --> 08:07:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And because face check is mandatory at sign-up, uh, that same face vector lets us stop banned users from re-registering.

08:07:59 --> 08:08:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, if someone's already removed, uh, and they try to come back under a new profile, we recognize them and we block them.

08:08:06 --> 08:08:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We've already seen FaceCheck make an enormous sustained impact, driving down abuse of bad actors by 60% and reports of them by 40%. And that is, in my trust and safety career, I've never seen a single tool give that kind of results. It really is, it's pretty extraordinary.

08:08:24 --> 08:08:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, so, to sum up, um…

08:08:28 --> 08:08:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's clear that face check isn't a silver bullet, and it doesn't mean that we don't invest in, uh, any less than other detection across the rest of the funnel.

08:08:36 --> 08:08:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, it's definitely a complement to what we already have, because it makes our detection systems more durable.

08:08:42 --> 08:08:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Scammers can get a new email or a new phone in minutes, but it's a little harder to get a new face. Being able to block on the face vector is powerful, and it's what gets us out of playing whack-a-mole with the same bad actors coming back under new identities.

08:08:56 --> 08:09:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, that's all I got for you. Thank you for being kind and letting me read from my notes. I appreciate it.

08:09:04 --> 08:09:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you very much, Donald. Are you accepting questions? Yeah, sure.

08:09:08 --> 08:09:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Didn't even do that.

08:09:16 --> 08:09:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi there, I'm Andre. Uh, nice to meet you, great presentation. So how are you dealing with, uh, deepfakes bypassing the liveness detection, uh, flow?

08:09:25 --> 08:09:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, it's… it is definitely a challenge. I think that…

08:09:29 --> 08:09:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Again, sorry, I'm not the expert, so I can't give you specifics, but I can talk about it at a high level. I think the best analogy I can give, like, I have a Gmail account. I got it in 2004, I think, right when Gmail, uh, became a product. I still get spam in it every single day.

08:09:44 --> 08:09:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So it's, you know, deepfakes are… it is true that bad actors are going to be able to bypass anything we put out there. It definitely is a roadblock. I think this is a really big roadblock, you see from the stats that I shared.

08:09:59 --> 08:10:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, but yeah, it is inevitably just… it's an ongoing evolution, um, so it's… it's just gonna keep going and going and going, so I'm sorry to not give you a more specific answer.

08:10:11 --> 08:10:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, I, I, maybe I missed this, but is that face check mandatory for all new sign-ups? And if it is.

08:10:17 --> 08:10:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How has it impacted sign up rates? And is that a factor as well in terms of balancing that? Yeah, that's a good question. And it's definitely a discussion we've had internally. So Face Check is, it is our directional goal to roll it out across all platforms on all brands around the world.

08:10:33 --> 08:10:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: it's not quite there, but for those platforms where it is live, it is mandatory for all new users that sign up. And yeah, it does, I mean, it puts some friction into the process, there is a trade-off there, but I think overall, it ends up creating a healthier ecosystem, and that's what powers, you know, the growth of the platform in the long term.

08:10:53 --> 08:11:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Out of interest, Donald, have you seen a reduction in reports or what's the early impact you're seeing of this? Yeah, in terms of reports, that is one of the big stats. It is a 40% reduction in reports basically overall after this tool is introduced. So again, pretty massive. And one more question for me is how do you expect criminals will get around it?

08:11:16 --> 08:11:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Oh, geez. Again, this is probably where my lack of expertise is gonna show through. Uh, again, like, top-level generic answer, you know, uh, uh, deepfakes are certainly one concern, but it is, I think, sort of as a, uh, a more broad statement to work in trust and safety, sort of in this broader space, uh, scam fraud.

08:11:34 --> 08:11:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You can think of a thousand different ways that, uh, bad actors are gonna, uh…

08:11:38 --> 08:11:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, uh, try to, uh, access your platform, and you just have to miss the one, and they will, uh, they will get on there. So, again, I think it's just a constant evolution that you have to be enthused to respond to.

08:11:48 --> 08:12:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So I'm kind of pulling on that thread a little bit. I'm over here. Oh, there you are. Pulling on that thread a little bit more. This whole match dating world or whatever is a little bit new for me coming from a bank. But do you also, is one trend that you see here as well, mule networks, do you see then fraudsters trying to recruit mules to sign up?

08:12:09 --> 08:12:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to bypass this face check? Has that become…

08:12:13 --> 08:12:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, it is definitely the case that a lot of the fraudulent and scam activity you see on match group dating apps and all sorts of dating apps come from coordinated networks of people working together, so these are, you know, folks in Southeast Asia.

08:12:29 --> 08:12:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, at a specific location. Um, so yeah, we definitely have seen in, in the past, uh, people using other live human beings as sort of a, as a, as an immediate workaround for, for it, for sure. That does exist.

08:12:40 --> 08:12:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's how they get a new face, they have to actually get another real human being.

08:12:44 --> 08:13:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Brilliant, thank you. And one last final question from Alex, and then we'll have to move on. What do you do when a bad actor misuses the face of, I don't know, a public figure, or indeed someone that they know in their network, and then they're blocked from.

08:13:00 --> 08:13:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the platform? How do they… how does the real person get unblocked if they want to join the app? Yeah, that's a fine question. I don't know if I… I can't think of any… again, I don't work in a daily basis, but… yeah, that, uh… I don't know if there's any scaled way to deal with that, but, uh, you know, when famous people, uh, want to use, uh, match group apps, I'm sure we can, uh…

08:13:19 --> 08:13:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Find a way to make that happen.

08:13:21 --> 08:13:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Brilliant. Thank you very much, Donald. Um, uh, quick round of applause. Thanks very much, folks, very kind. I think we've had some… we had two really interesting presentations, one on, kind of, emerging threats, and kind of overall… at a strategic level, and how that's attacked at a strategic level, but also how a particular platform.

08:13:38 --> 08:13:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: is also dealing with these issues. And now, I think we want to pass over to Paul, who's going to tell us about how we can detect criminal actors doing some of the worst crimes out there in the space.

08:13:51 --> 08:13:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you.

08:13:55 --> 08:13:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: All right.

08:13:57 --> 08:13:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We still have half a face check on here.

08:14:02 --> 08:14:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: All right, good afternoon. Can everyone hear me?

08:14:05 --> 08:14:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent. Thank you for joining. Quick presentation here today to highlight the emerging threat of financially motivated sextortion.

08:14:14 --> 08:14:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You all heard Jordan's story yesterday. Jordan is the one on the left. The same exact thing to happen to all these other victims here on this slide. James Woods received over 200 threatening messages in the span of 19 and a half hours before.

08:14:29 --> 08:14:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: he took his own life. Um, Timothy Barnett, Deontay, uh, Torres, they were both being blackmailed for multiple weeks, um, paying the scammer in small increments over time, um, before they ran out of money and felt like they had no other decision.

08:14:43 --> 08:15:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, Gavin Guffey, after he died by suicide, the same criminal started to blackmail his family, his parents, his uncle, and his brother and his cousin, or else they would continue to distribute his images, um, unless they paid money. Um, Braden Marcus received his first message on Instagram by the criminal at 11.01 PM.

08:15:02 --> 08:15:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: 27 PM, just 27 minutes later, he had been groomed, coerced into sharing a photo, and then ruthlessly blackmailed with many threats that these criminals were throwing his way until he.

08:15:18 --> 08:15:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: also died by suicide. What I started to see a couple of years ago was that these cases were not the isolated incidents that they were being reported as in the media. In fact, many of these cases had the same exact threatening messages, the same exact typos in some of these messages.

08:15:38 --> 08:15:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The perpetrators were using the same exact images in some of these cases.

08:15:43 --> 08:16:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So I started to look at this like the organized crime that it was. These were not isolated cases, um, but kind of all part of a network of criminal activity. So a couple years ago, I published this research, um, uh, Digital Pandemic Uncovering the Role of Yahoo Boys in the Surge of Social Media-Enabled Financial Sextortion Targeting Minors.

08:16:02 --> 08:16:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, it was the first report to actually put a name, uh, to the group that's doing the majority of the financial sextortion targeting youth today. Um, and so we took a deep dive into the criminal intelligence about what these groups were doing and what they were talking about. Um, I'm proud to update, uh, since my last talk at GASA.

08:16:20 --> 08:16:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This research has been entered into evidence in multiple lawsuits against some of the big tech platforms, um, since there were many foreseeable things that they could have done, um, to prevent the surge of this tragedy.

08:16:34 --> 08:16:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Just by sheer numbers, as background, there were only 139 reported cases of this crime in the US targeting minors back in 2021. That skyrocketed to over 55,000 last year, and the number is still increasing.

08:16:49 --> 08:16:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Most victims who report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are boys aged 14 to 17 as the primary target of this scam.

08:16:57 --> 08:17:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This is how it kind of works across multiple platforms. It almost always involves Instagram. The reason that is, is there's a privacy vulnerability. The moment you accept a scammer's friend request on Instagram, they can see all of your friends, your followers lists, and they use that as leverage.

08:17:13 --> 08:17:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, they coerce you to share that intimate photo, and then the blackmail happens, and they say, I've screenshotted all your friends, your followers, your family, you can't block me now, because I'll just send it to all of them, individually, one at a time. Um, you know, we see this, uh, you know, across the spectrum, blackmail threats often happen on encrypted messaging apps.

08:17:33 --> 08:17:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then payments, we see a lot of peer-to-peer payment apps like Cash App, as well as crypto and gift cards. Today, I think the solutions here require many industries working together.

08:17:49 --> 08:18:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But given the audience today, I want to focus on social media and tech platforms, as well as financial institutions. And also, in the spirit of this panel, we're wanting to talk about, like, interventions. What can we do ahead of the crime to actually prevent and reduce some of these numbers here today?

08:18:05 --> 08:18:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So.

08:18:07 --> 08:18:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: High level overview, social media tech companies, here are some of the highest level recommendations. Some of these are implemented at some platforms already, others not so much. But I essentially bucket it into four different categories, safety by design, detections, intelligence, and user education.

08:18:24 --> 08:18:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, that that framework isn't exclusive to tech companies. So think about those buckets in your own organizations. Are there things that you can do in those categories to protect your users when it comes to financial institutions? Pretty similar categories here.

08:18:40 --> 08:18:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Safety by design, thinking about those payment apps, do they require parental controls? If you're transacting, uh, sending money to a new contact, does that require parental approval, or is it just getting parental notification? Or is there no notification at all, and the parent has to find out.

08:18:56 --> 08:19:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, when they open up their, their Zelle, or whatever platform. Um, so there's all sorts of things to think mindfully about those settings when you design it in a safe way. Um…

08:19:08 --> 08:19:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I guess this is where things take a little turn.

08:19:13 --> 08:19:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We wanted to highlight myself, and who here knows Erin West? She's pretty big in the scam community. Lots of hands. We wanted to do something that no American has done before, and we wanted to highlight the blatant gaps that exist in the ecosystem.

08:19:30 --> 08:19:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: across those sectors that I mentioned before. There's gaps at tech, there's gaps at finance, there's gaps, uh, when it relates to law enforcement and international cooperation, and we wanted to put those on full display, and the only way to solve a problem is to know about the problem.

08:19:45 --> 08:19:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, so what we did was, you know, we had this idea, this concept, what if we could get targeted by a sextortion scammer?

08:19:54 --> 08:20:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we did. And we tracked them down. 6,000 miles to a remote village in Nigeria. Um, and here is exactly how we did that. I think there's audio on the next slide, so just queuing that up for the, uh…

08:20:09 --> 08:20:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: system.

08:20:15 --> 08:20:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I know who you are, and you're going to jail. 10. Our teenage boys are being blackmailed. Paul and I are reaching out to our friend Kit Boga. 9. I don't know if any American has witnessed before. Yahoo Plus, these ritualists can do charms.

08:20:30 --> 08:20:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, what are we doing?

08:20:31 --> 08:20:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We are headed out to track down this scammer. We're closer than we've ever been. This is a real message from a real scammer. On the other end, they believe they're talking to a teenage boy.

08:20:43 --> 08:20:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: They're wrong. They're talking to us. We came all the way to Nigeria to find the people who blackmail teenagers. We know that more than 60 teenage boys have lost their lives as a result of this scam. We thought we'd find monsters.

08:20:59 --> 08:21:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We were wrong, and that's the part we still can't shake. We know this crime as sextortion, but the criminals, they call it BM, for blackmail.

08:21:08 --> 08:21:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, we keep trying to pay this criminal. He says, if I count to 10 and you don't make the deal, then it's going viral. He is starting to upload these images, uploading 9 images, 14% complete. If you're wondering how a former prosecutor and a cybercrime researcher.

08:21:24 --> 08:21:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: end up on the phone with a man on the other side of the world, a man who's been ruining teenagers' lives for money, I need to take you back to where this started.

08:21:41 --> 08:21:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Alright, so… we hatched this plan, and we didn't know what was gonna happen. Um, we created the Instagram account, where we know a lot of these scams are happening. We posed as the perfect target, and we got sextorted not once, but multiple times. And as soon as we got a…

08:21:58 --> 08:22:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: location of one of those criminals. We bought that plane ticket, and we wanted to go confront them and highlight all the gaps that were present in this whole scenario.

08:22:09 --> 08:22:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, along the way, on our way to meet our scammer, we met 10 other, uh, so-called Yahoo boys. Um, these are scammers that do sextortion, and they also do other scams as well. Dating scams, impersonation scams, etc. They do dozens of scams.

08:22:27 --> 08:22:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But we were able to meet 10 folks who admitted to doing sextortion. They told us the platforms they were using. It's Instagram, it's Facebook, it's WhatsApp.

08:22:40 --> 08:22:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: honorable mention to TikTok, the other three are all Meta's platforms. And they told us about the financial rails that they use, the Cash App accounts, the Zelle profiles, the crypto, that's a large part of this as well.

08:22:55 --> 08:23:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: they shared with us the scripts that they use, the women that they impersonate and they pretend to be, um, and, you know, we're highlighting this as essentially, like, things that are all detectable. We have this information, let's use it now.

08:23:09 --> 08:23:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, along the way, one of the things we were also surprised about was the, um, use of ritualistic, uh, behaviors as part of scam activity out of West Africa. We met with someone who is called a Baba Lau. Has anyone ever met a Baba Lau before?

08:23:25 --> 08:23:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No. I don't know, maybe there's one in San Francisco we could visit. The Babalao is essentially what they called a witch doctor, a spiritualist, a shaman, who blesses these scammers and does a whole ritual in order to help them improve their riches.

08:23:44 --> 08:23:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we were accompanied by a scammer in the yellow shirt, um, to this remote village where there weren't even paved roads, and this Baba Lau, um, you know, performed this ritualistic spell, uh, to basically improve the scammer's riches that involved.

08:23:59 --> 08:24:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: herbs and spices and talismans and fire and alcohol, and, um, it was just really an otherworldly experience. Um, we thought it was gonna be a quick, like, 20, 30 minute little bit of chanting here and there. It was two and a half hours.

08:24:17 --> 08:24:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In that building you saw, it was not fun. It was not very fun, especially when we saw the machete come out. Luckily, it wasn't coming for us, but there was a live animal sacrifice that was part of it, which is not much better.

08:24:32 --> 08:24:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: At all. So what they did was, um, you know, he has the victim here, this man who he is, um, you know, scamming, we found him on Facebook, he lives in Wisconsin, um, and this porn star woman who he's impersonating on his social media accounts, and.

08:24:49 --> 08:25:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: He let us experience this, and I believe we're kind of the first Americans to see one of these in real life. This is called a Yahoo Plus ritual. Plus means all the extra black magic, they call it, that goes into it.

08:25:04 --> 08:25:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There's a darker side to this, too. Um, in the past year, the government of Nigeria has reported 160, uh, ritualist killings involving human sacrifice. So, that's called Yahoo++, so there's an even darker side to the scams, uh, beyond this.

08:25:21 --> 08:25:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, we ultimately found our scammer through a lot of open source intelligence, Truecaller, TikTok. We found his TikTok profile. He was bragging about sextorting other teenagers on his profile publicly, which confirmed that was his real TikTok account.

08:25:36 --> 08:25:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, based on where his photos were, we found his exact location, um, down to the… down to the coordinates, and we showed up, uh, where he lives. He was not there, um, he refused to meet with us, he was a coward. Um, he knew that we were around town, because two people that look like me and Aaron don't typically.

08:25:55 --> 08:26:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: show up in that town normally. Um, so there was a lot of buzz happening. Um, all… everyone in the village knew that we were there, there was a buzz. Um, and…

08:26:06 --> 08:26:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The criminal, our scammer, refused to meet with us.

08:26:11 --> 08:26:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We also had a contact at the telecom industry. They sent us the phone numbers that our scammer most frequently contacts, so we had all his friends on speed dial, and we were, like, telling them, essentially, we called each one of them once, politely, we didn't harass people.

08:26:26 --> 08:26:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, we just said we want to talk to Dame Lare. He goes by the nickname Big Dollar. Um, and after enough of that, he finally agrees to speak with us. Um, by this time, though, he had already, uh, you know, put us off multiple hours, and we were on our way back to Lagos.

08:26:44 --> 08:27:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If you wanna see what that confrontation was like, once we actually got on a call with our scammer, it's on YouTube for free. I don't have time to play the whole thing here, unfortunately. So I do wanna end with some final big thoughts here and tying this back to the whole idea of intervention.

08:27:01 --> 08:27:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If Aaron and myself, two people without guns and badges, can get scammed, and within a week, go and find our scammer and confront that scammer, and then find 10 other scammers who are actively admitting to doing blackmail, blackmailing American kids.

08:27:18 --> 08:27:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If we can do that in a week or 10 days, imagine what a larger network with all the right stakeholders can do. Imagine what law enforcement and the private sector partners, if we work together, imagine what we all could do.

08:27:29 --> 08:27:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This is the largest blackmail operation in human history, it's a public safety emergency, and a national security emergency, too. So let's use this information, let's act on it, protect your families, protect your communities, um, and, right, all of you are hereby deputized to go talk to your local high school, middle school.

08:27:46 --> 08:27:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Tell them about this. You know, you all work in this industry. You are an expert. Go talk about it. And lastly, protect your organizations, users, and customers. Thank you so much for the time. Really appreciate it.

08:28:03 --> 08:28:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I've also been to Nigeria, I've also talked to these guys, and one of the most interesting things is that they view, a lot of them view romance scams and this sort of stuff as an entry-level scam, and it allows them to build up the capital to then engage in either more serious crime, or in, you know, business email compromise, or stuff that's more technologically.

08:28:22 --> 08:28:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: challenging for them. But it's so low-tech that they see it as an entry-level crime. The other thing is that there is a great researcher by the name of Suleiman Lazarus, who publishes multiple articles, academic articles, on juju practices in the space, so worth you talking to him.

08:28:38 --> 08:28:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, we've got time maybe for one or two questions, um, I appreciate that multiple people want to talk, so we'll start with the lady over here, and then there's a gentleman halfway down.

08:28:49 --> 08:29:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. Hi, uh, Gabby with Allstate Any Protection. That was just really fascinating, and I'm just curious, um, ultimately, how did you get these scammers to talk to you? Did you… did you have to make promises of no legal repercussions, or…

08:29:04 --> 08:29:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: what was kind of their attitude or reasoning for even talking to you and sort of exposing themselves in that way? Right, so the scammers agreed to us… to speak with us on a couple conditions. One, that we would blur their face, um, and…

08:29:17 --> 08:29:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Actually, that was really the only condition. I mean, we weren't there with law enforcement, so we couldn't arrest them. I wish we could, that would have been fantastic. Um, but ultimately, these scammers are after fame and fortune. They're getting their fortune from the scams, and when two foreigners with cameras roll up.

08:29:32 --> 08:29:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: they're there for the fame. And we did our best to not give them fame in that way, it's more infamy for what they're doing.

08:29:41 --> 08:29:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. And just one more — actually, two more questions. There's a gentleman over there, and maybe we'll take two questions at the same time.

08:29:51 --> 08:29:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you again for all your efforts, but Ken Connor from Citibank. Um, so from a financial perspective.

08:29:57 --> 08:30:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: from a mitigation and transactional monitoring, could that almost cause more harm in some of these scenarios? So if we, as the banks, have the capability to identify this and stop.

08:30:07 --> 08:30:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: a child from sending money to these individuals, could that then cause the individuals to release the photos and potentially cause more harm? Obviously, we want to protect the individuals, but I want to understand all sides of the scenario. So, how do we effectively.

08:30:24 --> 08:30:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Protect that child.

08:30:26 --> 08:30:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: but is it better to allow the funds to go out the door, or is it better to stop the funds? And then, is there a duty to speak to their parents? Things, like, along those lines. Yeah, my opinion would be, for a financial institution, would be to block the payment. Um, once a payment goes through.

08:30:42 --> 08:30:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That kid or young adult becomes the number one target for that scammer, and they will continually harass them again and again, because it's never one payment, it's never $500 and they'll delete the photos, then it's another $800 for the boss to delete his photo, another $1000.

08:30:57 --> 08:31:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, to delete it from the recycle bin, that sort of thing. So, it goes on and on. Um, I think the best way to do it, to… to get the target off that kid's back, don't let any payments go through if it's within your capability. Um, it is difficult, because these are often smaller payments, and they fall under the…

08:31:15 --> 08:31:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: reporting thresholds for a lot of different things, but I think we need to start looking at, let's say, $100 for a kid, the same way we look at $10,000 for an adult, and putting appropriate reciprocal protections in place.

08:31:30 --> 08:31:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, um, I'm Tomomi. I used to be an economic advisor to the Nigerian government for two years, and the kind of best way to really approach this problem, the economic activities, is through the chief system, the chiefs. Like, I would go to.

08:31:45 --> 08:32:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, greet the chief, and then they could kind of, you know, influence or, you know, cooperate with you to, you know, change people's behavior. So there might be good, you know, ways to intervene these activities through the chief systems.

08:32:01 --> 08:32:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you for that point. Fantastic. Thank you so much, everyone, and thank you, Paul, for your fascinating and horrifying presentation.

08:32:15 --> 08:32:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'd like to make the point also that this isn't just about Nigeria. These sorts of crimes also happen in a number of jurisdictions across the world. I think Nigeria is maybe one of the most obvious ones, salient ones, partly due to the size of its population.

08:32:31 --> 08:32:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But this can happen, and does happen, all over. Um, so, um, have you got a clicker? Sorry.

08:32:38 --> 08:32:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, um, I'm afraid we now have to go to something far less exciting, um, and much more prosaic than, uh, than, uh, Paul's presentation. Um, I'm really keen to talk to you guys about how do we capture best practice.

08:32:52 --> 08:32:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, one point I'd be… I'm keen to…

08:32:59 --> 08:33:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Next slide, please.

08:33:01 --> 08:33:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One point I'm keen to make is that we all recognize that fraudsters are extremely competent at adapting to any attempt to disrupt them. That, you know, the classic metaphor, you squeeze the balloon, it pops out somewhere else, right?

08:33:17 --> 08:33:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So the way we need to attack it is by trying to be sufficiently strategic so that we squeeze the balloon from all directions, so we try and anticipate how they'll get around our interventions. They still will, but if every single time we change their behavior.

08:33:33 --> 08:33:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We make it more complicated for them, we make it more difficult for them, we make it more expensive for them, and we make it much less financially attractive, until they develop a new solution at scale, or they take advantage of a different type of technological opportunity.

08:33:49 --> 08:34:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What we are really keen to do, however, is to start to capture the vast amount of best practice that we know exists across the Counter-Scam ecosystem. Each one of our organizations is probably really good at disrupting scams in a particular way.

08:34:05 --> 08:34:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: However, many of our other people around here will not know that. Many countries at the policy level will not know that. And there are many companies who are not in this room. So what we are really keen to start developing as GASA, and as part of this working group.

08:34:22 --> 08:34:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: is essentially what we're calling a Global Anti-Scam Framework. Um, what that is essentially is, is a very simple, oops, sorry, a very simple, um, uh, best practice capture form. You can scan the QR code, promise it's not a gas attempt to try and scam you.

08:34:38 --> 08:34:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, it's a one-page, at best, like, four or five hundred words, um, entry, to try and basically enter the… your, um, uh, company's or organization's best practice, um, and that we are really keen to start putting together.

08:34:53 --> 08:35:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and to try and, uh, kind of, into a, essentially, a counter-scam Wikipedia on, probably, our website. We'll try and see how we can get it published, etc. I'd be really keen to make the point, this is not a marketing exercise, we will not do logos, we'll try our best to not try and.

08:35:09 --> 08:35:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We're trying… this is very much not around competition. We're trying to make sure that we are beginning to capture all the different things across all the different countries that apply. Now, we recognize that some things are feasible in some countries and not in others. Some things are feasible in.

08:35:26 --> 08:35:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Some sectors are not in others. That's fine. I think all we're trying to do is capture the diversity, but also the full range of things, because all too often we, you know, three companies meet and then discover four new things that each of them can be doing. And I think we need to start working out what is baseline best practice and then how to build on that rather than constantly, constantly, constantly.

08:35:48 --> 08:35:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: um, uh, rediscover, um, the wheel.

08:35:53 --> 08:36:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So this is the… this is the proposal. It's very, very, very straightforward. Um, I'd really welcome your feedback and views on, uh, both this as an exercise, um, your participation. Um, I've got a few questions here. Um, we've got, I think, a few more minutes, I don't… about…

08:36:09 --> 08:36:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, about 7 more minutes for a very quick discussion, I'd really welcome ideas and thoughts on to what extent is this useful, or, if not useful, what else should we be doing as a community, uh, as a collaboration dedicated to preventing and intervening in, uh, scams.

08:36:27 --> 08:36:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So with that, over to you guys. Has anyone got any questions? And could I possibly ask someone to run around with a mic?

08:36:35 --> 08:36:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thanks, Stacey.

08:36:38 --> 08:36:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Any questions?

08:36:41 --> 08:36:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Appreciating appreciating Paul was a tough act to follow.

08:36:44 --> 08:36:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Maybe I should have put him last.

08:36:47 --> 08:36:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Over the gentleman over there.

08:36:59 --> 08:37:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Oh, sorry. Sorry, apologies. Please do bear with us. We can't hear you.

08:37:07 --> 08:37:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think you need to switch it up. There you go. There you go, okay. I was just looking at the questions and, you know, as an organization, why couldn't we do something very similar to COSO's framework? So we could have…

08:37:22 --> 08:37:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, a framework of best practices, uh, in verticals between different industries, um, and have that published, um, and do it as an annual report with contributions.

08:37:35 --> 08:37:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: from you globally. So I don't know if you know the Tradeway Commission COSO. It's a internal controls framework that financial institutions, insurance companies, banks, so forth, use to manage, identify, manage the risks within their organizations. A lot of that is data driven.

08:37:55 --> 08:38:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, this would lend itself very well to that sort of a framework, and an annual report is published every year of a global survey, and this could be an element that maybe even partnering with COSO and other organizations that are already doing that survey work.

08:38:13 --> 08:38:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: might actually help GASA accomplish what they're trying to do. So, I certainly wasn't aware of that, but please do reach out. I'd be keen to understand how that framework works, and yes, very… what I'd be extremely keen to say is definitely do not want to duplicate anything that's already out there. We are already aware of, for example, the GSMA has a whole.

08:38:33 --> 08:38:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: framework in terms of best practice in telecommunications and policy initiatives out there, which we will just copy-paste. The purpose of the exercise is not to duplicate, but try and have a single place where we can refer to all this stuff, which sounds very similar to what you're describing.

08:38:49 --> 08:38:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Please do reach out and we'll be keen to have a longer conversation.

08:38:54 --> 08:38:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Any gentleman over there from Citibank?

08:39:01 --> 08:39:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, Ken Hunter from Citibank again. So is this intended to be create lists for customers or for the industry or both? For industry. So you can say, for example, we'll find a framework in which to structure it, maybe some sort of kill chain. We're not quite sure yet precisely how it will work.

08:39:18 --> 08:39:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, uh, I think it will partly be contingent on what we get back from, from the gas community, and we will promote this, um, aggressively on our platform. Um, I think the, the, the…

08:39:30 --> 08:39:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think what I would like to… how to work, if, let's say, we have a bank, um, doesn't… not Citi, but like, I don't know, bank number 23, who wants to set up an effective counterfeit framework, they don't know where to start, and then they go in here and they say, we can do, you know, we can do transaction analytics, behavioral monitoring, we can do, you know.

08:39:48 --> 08:40:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: enhance CDD in certain areas, we can, you know, slow down certain payments, and they can see, you know, these are the 10, 20, I don't know, X number of interventions. The same goes for country, I don't know, if we have, um… I don't know, Estonia's a bad example, I don't know, um… Guatemala, for example, wants to set up an effective counter-fraud response and strategy, et cetera, rather.

08:40:07 --> 08:40:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: go through all the work and assumptions that are involved in terms of coming up with an effective counter-fraud framework and strategy, they can just look it up. This is a menu of options, you don't have to do all of them, you don't have to do them all in the same way, but this is a starting point.

08:40:25 --> 08:40:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There's a lady at the back.

08:40:29 --> 08:40:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's the one challenge with doing this, uh, silent disco thing. We have to stand up here awkwardly while the, uh, the mic runs.

08:40:38 --> 08:40:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, I'm Lily Baldwin from Backgrounder, um, but before I got into this, I had, uh, 16 years in conflict prevention. Um, and it's very interesting, so I was in counterterrorism, then conflict prevention, peacebuilding, human rights, now in this.

08:40:53 --> 08:41:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and so there's so many frameworks, kind of from the preventing violent extremism, the peacebuilding, conflict prevention world, that are very relevant here. Um, so Alliance for Peacebuilding has the, um, Irene Peacebuilding database, where they basically did this, right?

08:41:12 --> 08:41:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Distilled or collected essentially what worked across the globe, created a whole framework around it, both for national strategies and policies and for interventions and also for monitoring evaluation techniques.

08:41:27 --> 08:41:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So you might want to kind of look at what they have, because it's available and accessible, and really drove a lot of what people were doing, at least in the conflict prevention world. So if you're looking at interventions, I think there's a lot of similarities there. Yes, always, as I said, very keen to not duplicate or redo the work.

08:41:46 --> 08:42:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If there are some examples of what actual activity or even examples of how to structure this framework in a way that is digestible and accessible, then yes, all is. Please do again, drop me a line after this. Very happy to have a conversation.

08:42:02 --> 08:42:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, one further, one last question, and I think, after that, we probably have to, yeah, we have to wrap up. Oh, hello. Uh, my name is Zach.

08:42:11 --> 08:42:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And I was curious in seeing how we would be able to create something that would be public, yet alone also still restricted. I think that for fraudsters and scammers that are as dedicated to the craft as they are, it's very possible that they could end up finding said.

08:42:27 --> 08:42:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: TTPs, or techniques, tactics, and procedures. Um, I just wanted to see, like, how we'd be able to mitigate… also, obviously, you know, being able to make, uh, practices known well to the people that need it, but also restricting it from the people that shouldn't see these things. 100%. I mean, look.

08:42:43 --> 08:42:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: at the end of the day, none of this stuff is, you know, this room could be breached by a criminal. Our websites could be breached by a criminal. It's not a classified, you know, it's not an enclave where we can safely discuss some of this stuff.

08:42:57 --> 08:43:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, at the end of the day, um, I think we will have to structure this in a relatively high-level fashion, that, um, that criminals… criminals, frankly, tend to know this stuff and how to get around this stuff better than we do. Um, uh, we will have to structure it in a relatively high-level way, and then maybe put at the bottom, saying, if you want to know more.

08:43:15 --> 08:43:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and then you contact so-and-so at whatever company, and then they can give you the details, the actual concrete details, but say, for example, you can do filtering of SMS based on reports, and then give it, like, you know, a few hundred, couple of hundred words, examples of how broad terms that works, you can absolutely say, right, you can say, you know.

08:43:35 --> 08:43:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: filter a bit on certain URLs, or whatever. Like, we're not trying to say… we're not going to list the specific URLs, we're going to say the.

08:43:42 --> 08:43:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, technical ways of, of, of executing, executing, executing the stuff, but you can absolutely give a sense of the overarching tactics. And I don't think, I don't think that would be a news to the criminals.

08:43:54 --> 08:44:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: All right, well, with that, well, thank you very much for your participation and engagement. I hope this has been interesting. Please do always reach out to us. We are very keen to have another meeting of the working group, uh, within the next few weeks, um, uh, probably remote at this point, and then we'll have another meeting in Bangkok in, uh, on the 10th and 11th of November.

08:44:11 --> 08:44:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you so much.

08:49:15 --> 08:49:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Do you want to put your headphones on?

08:49:25 --> 08:49:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Can you all hear me? Yes, good, good. So, first of all, welcome to this afternoon's session of the Research Group of Gaza. My name is Professor Mark Button, I'm going to be chairing this session, and we've got two very interesting presentations looking.

08:49:42 --> 08:50:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: at the state of scams and the extent of scams in, um, North America and more globally from Molly. Um, so we're gonna have a presentation from Molly, um, and then, uh, Kenneth, and we'll have an opportunity for probably about 20 minutes questions.

08:50:00 --> 08:50:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: at the end. Um, but just before we get started with Molly, um, I just wanted to go through, you know, the purpose of the research group, because you would have heard yesterday, um, from Yuri, um, the different work of the different research groups.

08:50:16 --> 08:50:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And one of those research groups, which there wasn't a lot of information about, was the research group, which I chair with a colleague from Surrey University in the UK, Jack Whittaker. And in that research group, we do a number of very important things.

08:50:32 --> 08:50:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We help to advise Gaza on the questions for the survey. You know, each year there's a kind of circulation of those questions and we comment and academic members of that group provide that feedback. Secondly, we have webinars and we've got a webinar coming up on the 17th of September.

08:50:52 --> 08:51:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, so if you haven't heard about that, please, um, look at the Gaza website. You can register to come to that. Um, it's online, um, and we've got some excellent speakers looking at different aspects of, of scams. And then the third part is obviously these summits, where we, we bring.

08:51:09 --> 08:51:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: colleagues together to present on some of the kind of very latest research in frauds and scams.

08:51:18 --> 08:51:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So why did Gaza create the Research Working Group? Well obviously the central reason was to help to develop a strong evidence base for what works in tackling scams. And already we have been doing a great deal on that. The Education Working Group has been doing a lot on campaigns and awareness.

08:51:41 --> 08:51:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we've been helping that group with providing the evidence from research on what actually works and doesn't work in fraud awareness campaigns. Um, I've already mentioned the, um, the webinars and the summits, but one of the things that, um, Gaz is hoping to do in the future.

08:51:57 --> 08:52:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: is to actually fund some research. Um, and there are various ideas that, um, have been kind of, um, identified, um, and if you look at the, the slide, you can see, you know, some of the, some of the areas that, um, that.

08:52:14 --> 08:52:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: At the last research group, we discussed how Agentic AI has changed fraud. How can romance frauds be effectively interrupted? How can we understand the perpetrator base more? These are just some of the ideas, and I think the plan is for guys to actually consult.

08:52:31 --> 08:52:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: with all its members to identify some key research topics, and then use that network to get a funding pool, and then, you know, invite key academics to bid to actually undertake that research. So, you know, that's some very important work.

08:52:47 --> 08:53:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: for the future for Gaza in developing that evidence base to better tackle frauds and scams. So, obviously, I'm biased, I'm an academic, I think this is one of the most important working groups, so hopefully, you know, this will be a good taster today with the speakers that we have.

08:53:07 --> 08:53:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: um, coming up. So, um, I'd like to now hand over to Moni McLean, um, who's going to talk about the research on the Global State of Scams Report 2026.

08:53:22 --> 08:53:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Or do I need to add them? OK, OK, sorry.

08:53:26 --> 08:53:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, be done.

08:53:28 --> 08:53:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'm just going to… Hi, guys. Sorry, I haven't used this clicker yet, so I'm just going to give it a quick…

08:53:36 --> 08:53:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Go.

08:53:38 --> 08:53:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Perfect. Um, my name's Molly. I'm a research director at Opinion Research. We're an independent insights agency based in London, New York, and Amsterdam, and we've been working with Global Anti-Scam Alliance for the last two years on their State of Scams report.

08:53:54 --> 08:54:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So today, I'm going to be taking you through some of the headline findings. There's plenty more to digest if you do manage to get access to the global report, which is coming out in October. But also, hopefully, at some point today, or perhaps after the presentation, I'd love to hear from everyone about.

08:54:12 --> 08:54:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What topics you'd like us to address in the research moving forward?

08:54:18 --> 08:54:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Apologies if I keep looking down. There's a few things that I'll be reading from the screen, specifically when I want to sort of direct you towards certain data points. So today I'll do a brief overview of the methodology for the State of Scams report.

08:54:34 --> 08:54:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'll then talk you through the scam funnel. Um, if you were here at the beginning of the conference yesterday morning, Yuri, um, did a little bit of an overview of the scam funnel approach that we took this year, so we'll do a bit more of a deep dive into that. And we'll look at that, um, across globally, so across all of the consumers that we surveyed.

08:54:52 --> 08:55:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But also compare that with the US and Canada to see kind of how North America plays out a little bit differently when it comes to encountering, interacting, and losing money to scams. And finally, we'll talk you through some of the findings when it comes to reporting, the prevalence of reporting, who consumers report to when they do lose money.

08:55:13 --> 08:55:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And also some of their attitudes towards prevention measures that potentially could could happen in the future.

08:55:21 --> 08:55:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, to start with the methodology, um, our global research surveyed 58,900 consumers worldwide, um, and that was across 42 markets, so you can kind of see where those markets are here, North America, South America.

08:55:36 --> 08:55:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Europe and Asia, we quite heavily surveyed in those continents. Australia and parts of Africa as well.

08:55:44 --> 08:55:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This is a demographic breakdown of the consumers that took part in our survey globally. Everyone was an adult aged 18 plus, and we set nationally representative quotas on age, gender, and region in each market.

08:55:59 --> 08:56:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It was a 15-minute online survey, and we recruited respondents from our trusted panel partners who look after market research panels across the world and in local markets as well. The research took place from March and April this year.

08:56:16 --> 08:56:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So some of the findings. So as I mentioned, the approach this year was really to understand how consumers move through the scam funnel. So to what extent do consumers encounter scams? To what extent do they interact with those scams that they encounter?

08:56:33 --> 08:56:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And to what extent do they actually end up losing money after interacting with those scams? So we kind of wanted to understand the prevalence and also the drop off throughout that funnel and what stops people from moving through it. So globally across all of our respondents, 75% encountered a scam in the last year.

08:56:52 --> 08:57:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And this is a little bit higher in Canada and US, perhaps unsurprisingly, as we know these markets are targeted by scammers.

08:57:01 --> 08:57:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: A third, or just over a third, of all global consumers that we surveyed interacted with the scam. So that's about half of those who encountered a scam actually interacted with it in some way. And if we think about the types of scams we encounter, that could be an advertisement, it could be an email, a phone call.

08:57:19 --> 08:57:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: When we say interacted, we quite clearly defined that that meant kind of like responding to that in some way, picking up the phone, clicking open the link, opening the email, downloading something, clicking on the advertisement. So that counts as interacting. And in the US.

08:57:35 --> 08:57:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that was slightly higher at 43%, but roughly half of those who encountered the scam actually interacted in the USA. In Canada, it was slightly different, so while 84% encountered scams, a lower proportion actually went on to interact with them, so potentially something going on in Canada where.

08:57:55 --> 08:58:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: um, Canadian, um, uh, sorry, Canadian consumers are, you know, deploying some kind of protection measures to actually prevent them from going on and interacting. And then finally, um, almost 1 in 10 of the respondents we surveyed globally actually had money stolen.

08:58:15 --> 08:58:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And that was the similar proportion in the US. However, the conversion rates from interaction to financial loss are actually quite different globally compared to the US and Canada. So globally, 9%, that's around a quarter of those who interacted with a scammer.

08:58:30 --> 08:58:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But in the US, that drops down to a fifth. So a fifth of US, um, respondents who interacted with a scam actually went on to lose money. Um, and it's even less so in Canada, so it's 17%, just under a fifth. Finally, 3% of all global respondents that we surveyed reported to authorities.

08:58:50 --> 08:58:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And that's 4% in the US and 3% in Canada.

08:58:55 --> 08:59:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So let's go back to the top of the scam funnel. So globally, three quarters encountered a scam in the last year. But how do consumers actually recognize that those scams that they're encountered are encounters?

08:59:10 --> 08:59:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: where we asked respondents this. We asked them, um, what's been the most effective in helping them recognize scams. And, um, the most common, um, cited kind of source was, uh, information from their bank.

08:59:25 --> 08:59:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But also friends and family. So this comes up quite a lot, the sort of key role that friends and family and colleagues actually play when it comes to educating and helping people protect themselves or recognize scams.

08:59:41 --> 09:00:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: perhaps, um, unfortunate, is that 29%, um, actually learn, um, how to sort of recognize scams from, from experiencing scams themselves, and that's more so than, uh, how they learn from government. So, obviously, a way to go in terms of, um, you know, that kind of 360.

09:00:00 --> 09:00:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, approach to education from both, you know, payment providers, government, and other, um.

09:00:07 --> 09:00:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: other kind of authorities that can support consumers and educate them on how to recognize scams.

09:00:14 --> 09:00:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So looking at Canada and US, what was interesting is that in Canada, respondents were significantly more likely to say that news coverage and public awareness campaigns or adverts helped them recognize and spot scams.

09:00:31 --> 09:00:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, so perhaps, you know, initiatives going on in Canada that are actually really helping and could explain some of those, um, lower financial loss, um, figures that we saw in the scam funnel earlier.

09:00:45 --> 09:01:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But then what was also interesting is that Canadian and American respondents were significantly more likely to say that they had not received any information on how to recognize or avoid scams, and that was especially the case in America, so almost 1 in 5 Americans saying that.

09:01:03 --> 09:01:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So back to our global figures. So 55% of those who encountered a scam interacted with it in the last year. But what prevents those consumers from actually interacting?

09:01:19 --> 09:01:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Again, we asked respondents this, um, thinking about the scams you encountered but did not interact with, what stopped you from interacting with the scammer?

09:01:28 --> 09:01:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And what we found is that globally, respondents are or consumers are really relying on kind of self-protection measures. So things like picking up on like sort of gut instinct that the message or the request just didn't seem legitimate.

09:01:45 --> 09:02:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Others have rules in place where they don't respond to messages and calls that they don't recognize. Others say that they noticed that the contact came from an unexpected or unknown source. And others say that they have recognized common scam warning signs.

09:02:02 --> 09:02:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Consumers are very much relying on themselves to navigate and understand what is and isn't a scam.

09:02:09 --> 09:02:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: As for Canada and the US, we actually found that they're significantly more likely to be kind of relying on these self-protection measures. But what was interesting is that they are significantly more likely to say that what stopped them from interacting was that.

09:02:26 --> 09:02:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the message or the contact, whatever it was, was flagged or blocked as suspicious by the platform that they were using. So there is an element of, kind of, external scam blocking going on in these markets, more so than in the rest of the globe.

09:02:44 --> 09:03:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, back to the global figures, a quarter of those who interacted with a scam had money stolen. And what was really shocking is that half of those people experienced revictimization. Um, but as I mentioned initially when I was taking you through the scam funnel, these figures differ quite a lot across.

09:03:03 --> 09:03:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the global versus USA and Canada. So, scam interactions in the US and Canada were less likely to result in financial loss than they were, uh, across the rest of the markets that we surveyed.

09:03:16 --> 09:03:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So what stops interactions from leading to financial loss, and why do some markets have lower conversion from interaction to financial loss than others?

09:03:25 --> 09:03:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Again, we found that when it comes to kind of what stopped individuals from, you know, they've encountered a scam, they've interacted, what stops them from actually handing money over to a scammer? Again, these were kind of self-protection measures that were being used.

09:03:41 --> 09:03:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: by consumers. So the request for the money or payment or personal details was suspicious. The offer or request felt too good to be true. These kind of things. If we look at Canada and the US.

09:03:57 --> 09:04:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: When they actually interact with the scam, they're no longer kind of deploying the self-protection measures as, you know, more so than the global average. But instead, and what was interesting, especially in the US, is that they're significantly more likely to say.

09:04:15 --> 09:04:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that their phone or email or device automatically blocked or filtered the message. So it feels like, you know, globally, everyone is really trying to navigate scams and identify what is and isn't a scam and protect themselves, but when it really comes to the kind of last point of interaction where the scammer is trying to get money.

09:04:35 --> 09:04:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Actually, external, um, technology, um, software, whatever it might be, intervening is a real fail-safe for consumers.

09:04:46 --> 09:04:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, um, just ending on a few more points around, kind of, how…

09:04:53 --> 09:04:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How respondents or how the victims felt scammers were actually able to scam them.

09:04:58 --> 09:05:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And essentially, it's kind of what we already know. The scams are very sophisticated. They look authentic. A third said that the situation was convincing and realistic. 29% said the scam communication looked genuine. 28% even said that they offered something that seemed like a good deal, a prize, refund, or an opportunity.

09:05:21 --> 09:05:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Finally, who do victims report to? So globally, what was interesting is that consumers, you know, their first point of contact to report is their family and friends. So again, that community element is so important for victims.

09:05:38 --> 09:05:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But also, there's a lot of, maybe, trust, or maybe it's expectations in their financial service providers and banks, so victims also go straight to them. A fifth also report to the national police.

09:05:51 --> 09:06:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This looks quite different when we break it out across Canada and the US. So, in particular, in Canada, respondents said that they were significantly less likely… sorry, they were significantly less likely to report to their family and friends, which was interesting.

09:06:07 --> 09:06:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I don't know too much about what's going on in Canada and what the culture might be like there, but that was a very big difference.

09:06:14 --> 09:06:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, in the US, respondents or victims were significantly more likely to report to their bank or payment provider, and this was a lot more so than the police. So, US victims are significantly less likely to report their scams to the police, so again, whether that's.

09:06:31 --> 09:06:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: down to trust or expectations. I'm not the expert, but that certainly was coming through as a difference.

09:06:39 --> 09:06:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, to end, um, what scam protection measures would consumers support, Global Anti-Scam Alliance asked us to include some sort of potential future measures that, um, that I think are potentially being tested out, or people would be interested in, so we wanted to understand.

09:06:57 --> 09:07:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: whether consumers would support or oppose these measures if they suddenly came in. And we found quite strong support, but a bit sort of less so in US and Canada. So as an example, almost three quarters of.

09:07:12 --> 09:07:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The global consumers that we surveyed said that they would support allowing banks to block transactions above a certain value without the customer's permission if they believe the transaction may be a scam.

09:07:24 --> 09:07:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Three fifths said that allowing banks, telecom operators and law enforcement agencies to share consumer data if they believe someone is being scammed or is involved in scamming. And just over half said that they would support requiring people to show a valid ID or passport.

09:07:41 --> 09:07:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: When setting up an email account.

09:07:44 --> 09:07:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Outlook, Gmail, whatever. And we also asked this, um, about social media, and there was similar kind of support, just over half, um, would support that. Slightly different results when we break it out across Canada and the US.

09:07:59 --> 09:08:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Where Canada's sort of in line with the global average, US consumers tend to be sort of less supportive of some of these measures. So 67% of US respondents supported allowing banks to block transactions above a certain value.

09:08:15 --> 09:08:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Whereas Canada, they're sort of in line with the global average. Just over half of US respondents support allowing banks and telecom operators and law enforcement agencies to share consumer data. Again, Canada closer to the global average.

09:08:31 --> 09:08:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then where we saw sort of least support among US respondents was around requiring people to show a valid ID or passport, and also less so in Canada as well.

09:08:45 --> 09:09:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So to end, to summarize, three quarters have encountered a scam in the last year. So as we know, scam exposure is near universal. Banks, friends and family help consumers identify scam encounters. So they're the most effective at helping consumers recognize what is a scam and what isn't.

09:09:05 --> 09:09:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Engagement is common, so more than half of those who encountered a scam interacted with it.

09:09:12 --> 09:09:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And the conversion is the key risk. So we saw that a quarter of interactions led to financial loss and half were re-victimized. I think we didn't do loads of research, sorry, we didn't ask lots of questions to follow up to those who were re-victimized. That could be an interesting area for the research next year.

09:09:30 --> 09:09:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, self-protection measures prevent interaction, but external blocking prevents loss. So, the research indicated that, you know, these kind of external sources, whether it be social media, whether it be anti-scam software.

09:09:45 --> 09:09:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: play a key role in actually preventing consumers from losing money when they weren't able to protect themselves.

09:09:51 --> 09:10:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Scam success is driven by trust and realism, so, um, again, we know that scams are very convincing, authentic, and that's why consumers believe that they were scammed.

09:10:03 --> 09:10:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and then on to reporting, consumers report their scams to their friends and family, so we know, again, that, um, friends and family provide a really important role, um, in terms of, like, community, where people feel safe to report, but where also they can get information about.

09:10:22 --> 09:10:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How to recognize scams. Banking providers also played a key role in this. And then finally on protection. So appetite is high globally, especially when it comes to banks intervening, data sharing, but also stricter authentication methods.

09:10:41 --> 09:10:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: methods, but this was sort of less so the case in the US, where consumers were less supportive of these measures.

09:10:49 --> 09:10:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No, don't do it.

09:10:51 --> 09:10:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's me done.

09:10:59 --> 09:11:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We're gonna do questions at the end, so, um, Kenneth, if you could, um, come up, and, um, we've, we've now got Kenneth Westbrook, who's going to talk about his research, uh, or the research he got commissioned by Gallup, looking at the state of scams in America.

09:11:14 --> 09:11:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And just as an aside, um…

09:11:17 --> 09:11:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One thing that always amazes me in America is that in England and Wales, we have the crime survey for England and Wales. Happens four times a year, 30,000 people interviewed on each one. So we have very accurate data on fraud victimization.

09:11:32 --> 09:11:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In England and Wales. And you don't have that. And Kenneth was telling me last night the battles he's been having to try and get that in America. So in the absence of that, the best we have is this. So, um, I'm really looking forward to this presentation. Over to you, Kenneth.

09:11:47 --> 09:11:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, sorry to be second best compared to the Census Bureau, which could be doing these surveys, but they've chosen not to so far.

09:11:54 --> 09:12:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, Ken Westbrook, I'm the CEO of Stop Scams Alliance. We're a… a non-profit, we're a partner of GASA's, um, and, uh, to me, measurement is oh-so-important. Why did we do this survey?

09:12:08 --> 09:12:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, I believe that the United States is under attack. It's a cyber-enabled attack by transnational criminal organizations.

09:12:17 --> 09:12:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, um, our house is on fire, and we're about ready to pour a bunch of gasoline on the fire, and it's gonna be a bonfire, and the gasoline I'm referring to as AI is going to make it oh so much worse. So…

09:12:31 --> 09:12:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I served in the intelligence community for 33 years, and I've analyzed many national security threats over the years, and one of the features, in my experience, when faced with a national security threat, we need to measure it with all of the power of the government to understand the nature of the problem.

09:12:49 --> 09:13:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to be able to mount the best defenses to fight back. With national security threats, we have human source intelligence, we have satellites, we have imagery, we have SIGIT, we have all these features, we have sonar, we have radar, we have all these measurement tools. When it comes to scams.

09:13:05 --> 09:13:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Our measurement tools are lacking, so that's why we did this. We face many important public policy choices in the years ahead, as the transnational criminals ramp up their attack.

09:13:15 --> 09:13:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we are going to need accurate data to help make these policy choices in the years ahead. So that's the why.

09:13:24 --> 09:13:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now let's talk a little bit about the how and what we were trying to address. There's been four challenges in trying to measure scams up to this point at the national level. One is that some surveys combine fraud and scams into one report, which makes it very hard to untangle the difference, and they are different from a regulatory point of view, especially.

09:13:44 --> 09:13:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Small sample sizes are, um, the case in some, uh, surveys that are out there, which makes it very difficult then to do, uh, detailed analysis of how scams occur.

09:13:55 --> 09:14:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Number three, some measurements rely on opt in surveys where the respondents opt in to take the survey themselves. But then that, according to research, has the downside of undercounting, especially elderly and lower income Americans, which are harder to reach through those mechanisms.

09:14:11 --> 09:14:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then fourthly, the government statistics are the definition of self-selection bias, because it's people choosing to report to the government, and then that skews the data considerably, as we'll see as we go through this.

09:14:26 --> 09:14:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, the Gallup's approach was to survey a little over 5,000 people. Um, the margin of error… so, scams are very difficult to measure, and we want to be very clear about the margin of error that we encountered. Most questions are about 1.6%.

09:14:44 --> 09:15:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: At the 95% confidence level, but when you start querying scam victims about their experience, you're now talking about a very small population of only 472 people in our case, so that means that the margin of error goes up to about 5%.

09:15:02 --> 09:15:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And that's just about the best we can do. It's just a feature of measuring this problem.

09:15:10 --> 09:15:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, um, let me, uh, hammer home the point about probability-based panels compared to opt-in panels. In a probability-based panel like Gallup offers, the respondents cannot opt-in to the panel. They don't raise their hands and say, I want to take a poll. Gallup instead finds them through random selection.

09:15:28 --> 09:15:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So that's sort of the gold standard. It's very expensive to do it that way. Gallup maintains a panel of 100,000 people who Gallup chooses. And then, within that pool, we survey a smaller group to do the survey of this kind, to get the 5,000 respondents.

09:15:43 --> 09:15:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We also, uh, Gallup believes in dual-mode, uh, survey administration, so they reach people both via web and mail, so the mail, uh, reaches people who aren't online, so especially older or lower-income people, it's better to reach them sometimes via.

09:15:58 --> 09:16:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: male. And then, of course, they oversample the difficult-to-reach populations to make sure they get an adequate sample. The picture here I'm showing you, this is written in stone on Gallup's headquarters wall. It says, if you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing. So Gallup believes in a lot of time and effort going into the question development phase. We spent three months.

09:16:18 --> 09:16:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We had proposals from all of our 12 donors, all of whom had 2 or 3 subject matter experts. They argued about the questions. Then, when all the experts got done putting the questions together, Gallup convened a focus group of real people.

09:16:33 --> 09:16:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And they read the question to them, and sometimes the people say, I don't know what you're talking about, you gotta go, you know, give me a better question. So sometimes, when you expose the best expert question to real people, you need to change your course. So they have this extensive process for putting in the questions together.

09:16:50 --> 09:17:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We went through a research plan, initial draft, and final draft, all of which was removed, was reviewed multiple times over by all the subject matter experts, must have been 30 of them. My email inbox was full of comments and suggestions, and let's use this word instead of that word kind of stuff, right?

09:17:08 --> 09:17:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then on top of that, when the experts got done, Gallup has a separate peer review board that they submit the survey to.

09:17:17 --> 09:17:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, very important. Um, very few surveys I've discovered, uh, define the word scam. And it turns out that in popular, uh, usage, scam can mean different things to different people. So, we thought it was very important to come up with a definition that's the first thing that the respondents see when they go into the survey.

09:17:35 --> 09:17:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We're defining scams as someone is deceived into losing money, and we very carefully rule out identity theft, fraudulent credit card charges, and card skimming, unless you were deceived into doing that.

09:17:47 --> 09:18:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, we just… we're trying to be as careful as we could. This is a rather narrow definition, I think you would agree. It's narrower than some surveys out there, which ask, generally, were you scammed, and then leave it up to the person to define it themselves.

09:18:01 --> 09:18:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Some of our top findings. 1 in 4 U.S. adults, uh, say they have been scammed in their lifetime. 24% of Americans say they've been scammed in their lifetime. 1 in 10 more than once. 6% scammed in 2025 alone. So to put some numbers on it, that's 64 million people in the U.S. say they have been scammed up to this point.

09:18:19 --> 09:18:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: 27 million have been scammed more than once. 15 million were scammed last year alone. 15 million is more than the population of Illinois. It's more than the population of Pennsylvania. It's about the size of the number of U.S. adults in New York State. That's the kind of size we're talking about in one year alone.

09:18:40 --> 09:18:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now, across the bay over here, some of you may have observed Oracle Park, this big baseball stadium. Some of you may have gone to the pre-event where you looked at the size of Oracle Park. Here's Oracle Park. It seats 41,300 people.

09:18:54 --> 09:18:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's the number of people who are scammed every single day in the United States of America.

09:18:59 --> 09:19:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So picture Oracle Park with every single seat filled. That's one day's worth of scam victims in the U.S.

09:19:08 --> 09:19:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Gallup estimated that the losses in 2025 alone were about $68 billion. Now, we're very careful to say that at the 95 percent confidence interval, it could be between 33 and 114. It's so hard to measure.

09:19:24 --> 09:19:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: because of the distribution of the losses. Many people lose small amounts, a few people use very large amounts, and it depends on how many people you have in your survey as to whether you're going to capture all of them or not. So this is something that would have to be done with larger respondents.

09:19:42 --> 09:19:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: pools, and over the years, we'll develop a better picture of this, I think. This is about the best that we can do at this point.

09:19:49 --> 09:20:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So how does that compare to the losses that are reported to the government? The FTC says that about $16 billion was reported to them last year, $20 billion was reported to the FBI, but if $68 billion is closer to the truth, the government is seeing about one quarter of the iceberg, whereas the whole iceberg is really four times more than the government sees.

09:20:09 --> 09:20:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And the distribution is different, too. The top of the iceberg tends to be the very large dollar scams. The government doesn't tend to get victim reporting on the $100, $500 scams that are below water in the iceberg, right?

09:20:24 --> 09:20:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, some unique contributions. I didn't want to… I knew that Gasser was going to present, and I didn't want to overlap some of the same findings that we did with them, so let me just focus on kind of differences that we did. We measured not only the impact on the primary victim, but also the impact on the whole household.

09:20:42 --> 09:20:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And it turned out that even if you're not the primary victim, household members are affected by scams too, financially and emotionally.

09:20:51 --> 09:21:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Estimates of lifetime and repeat victimization rates, we have that. Also, we did a real deep dive on scam mechanics. When a scam was successful, we did a deeper dive than I've ever seen in any other survey on how did it begin? What were the payment methods used?

09:21:07 --> 09:21:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Was AI involved or not? Who was being impersonated? All that kind of stuff that you need to know. We also talked about the most common method of communication used during a scam. Now, this is unique. I've seen lots of surveys that ask, how were you first contacted?

09:21:22 --> 09:21:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But a feature of scams that all of you know, I'm sure, is that very often the scammer moves you to another platform after that, sometimes three platforms, sometimes even four. And so what we wanted to measure was where did most of the communication occur, so we have that, and I'll show you that in a second.

09:21:37 --> 09:21:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then we also asked, did Americans view this as a threat? And I'll show you that. So, on the issue of where did scams first begin, the number one method, according to the Gallup survey, was making a purchase on a website. So, either non-delivery or someone going to a website redirected to a fake website where their credentials are stolen.

09:21:57 --> 09:22:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's the number one method, followed by phone calls and social media posts.

09:22:02 --> 09:22:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Then, but this important question to me, I think it's even more important to ask, well, where did most of the communications occur? And when you ask it that way, telephone calls bubble up to the top. 21% of people said that most of their communications took place via phone calls.

09:22:17 --> 09:22:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I've heard scammers speak about they want to get people on a phone call because you can convince someone through synchronous communications to do things that they wouldn't do with asynchronous communications.

09:22:28 --> 09:22:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Text messages and email were also prominent. The 45% number means that phone calls, text messages, and emails each were implicated at some point in the path on scams. So nearly half involved those mechanisms.

09:22:43 --> 09:22:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Which operating system was used? Turns out that mobile phones are about twice as likely to be used in a scam than desktops.

09:22:51 --> 09:22:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Which parties were impersonated the most during scams? Tech support scam… tech support professionals were number one, followed by banks.

09:22:58 --> 09:23:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we asked people, what are the most effective ways to reach you if we're going to try to educate you about scams? They said, reach me on social media, mostly, followed by television or radio, and then communications from financial institutions. Government websites were like kind of really way down the list there.

09:23:15 --> 09:23:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Where do most of our communications take place? Websites. So how about if we use these other channels, they might be more effective, right?

09:23:22 --> 09:23:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: When we asked Americans, do you view this as a threat, guess what? Americans disagree on lots of things, but we agree on one thing. Look at this, 98% of Americans said that this was a threat.

09:23:33 --> 09:23:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: 66% said it was a major threat, and when you ask people over the age of 60, 80% of people over the age of 60 say major threat, okay?

09:23:43 --> 09:23:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then when we asked how is the government doing here, we found out that 82% said the government is doing too little.

09:23:52 --> 09:24:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Now, one thing I've done is to look at other surveys to see how does this Gallup survey compare to the other ones, and I have a few observations to make about that.

09:24:01 --> 09:24:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So here are the surveys that I looked at. There's been at least about half a dozen of those in the last just year or two, and actually, Mark, you put me on to another one last night, which I could add to this to make seven. You'll notice on the right side, this is my best job to figure out what it is that they're measuring.

09:24:19 --> 09:24:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And you'll see that sometimes they focus on scams, sometimes only on online scams, sometimes they'll add fraud in there, sometimes identity theft is in there. So this is just kind of a warning when you're comparing surveys, you have to really pay attention to what are they measuring.

09:24:35 --> 09:24:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: If they're measuring fraud and scams, I think that probably the losses will be higher, for example, than if you measure a smaller thing like we did with Gallup. The Federal Reserve study looks very large at 12,000 people, and it was very well designed.

09:24:53 --> 09:25:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But they only asked one question. So it wasn't a very — they only asked, did you lose money? So some of these ask large numbers of questions. Some ask small numbers of questions. They have different techniques. So my view in looking at all these surveys together, where are the areas of agreement?

09:25:08 --> 09:25:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think there's many surveys now that say that most adults receive scam communications daily or weekly. There's tens of millions annually. Many, uh, Gallup, uh, Gasser Survey said that too, uh, and others. Tens of billions of losses annually. Very few funds are ever recovered, according to all these surveys.

09:25:26 --> 09:25:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The prevalence is similar for younger and older population. In the Gallup survey, 6% of older people, 6% of younger people, 6% of people in the middle, 6% of veterans. It was like 6% across the board. We did find some differences in lower income had higher prevalence.

09:25:43 --> 09:26:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And lower educated and people of color had a little bit higher prevalence. But for the most part, this is not necessarily split younger, older. In fact, there's some surveys out there that say younger people are being affected more. So there's that. Victims across the board in many surveys now are reporting significant effects on their well-being and emotional health.

09:26:03 --> 09:26:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Very few scams are reported to the government in many surveys. In the Gallup survey, 7% was reported to the FBI, 10% was reported to the FTC, about 18% was reported to local police, 55% was reported to banks. So people, universally, I guess, have found the same thing.

09:26:22 --> 09:26:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: People report to banks more than they do, uh, police, unfortunately. And then we asked people, why didn't you report? And the number one answer was, it wouldn't, won't do any good, why waste my time, right? Uh, so that's, that's, uh, that's what, those are, I think many, many surveys now are coming up with similar answers on these kinds of questions.

09:26:42 --> 09:27:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: There's some areas that I've seen where we diverge, and I think we need to have more conversation about why is it so that gas's average was about one-fourth of Gallup's. And when you look at the FTC and the FBI averages, they're quite high. I think I can explain that. Remember earlier I told you that people.

09:27:02 --> 09:27:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: are much more likely to report to the government if they suffer a very large dollar loss. Well, I think that's what skews the data, so that's… I think it's very clear that the… at the FTC and FBI data, they suffer both from underreporting and a significant skew in the types of scams that are being reported.

09:27:21 --> 09:27:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I don't know.

09:27:23 --> 09:27:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Another area of disagreement is the dollars lost each year. You'll see this is… there's various surveys out there that say different things. I think the Federal Reserve was quite large, and they asked very specifically this question, did you lose money or not? They split it between.

09:27:39 --> 09:27:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: 100 billion total losses in 56 after some people got money back, and that's similar to what Gallup's coming up with, I think. The FTC, for its part, has a very wide range of 31 to 196 billion, um, so…

09:27:54 --> 09:28:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We're kind of all over the map right now, and I think there's more discussions that will need to be had to nail this down further. One thing I wanted to show you was what's the difference in definition between fraud and scam? This is something I've been floating around the floor here.

09:28:09 --> 09:28:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Nobody's been able to shoot it down yet, but if anybody has ideas for me, do let me know. What this is showing is that all scams are fraud. All fraud is not a scam.

09:28:18 --> 09:28:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Also, some identity theft is a scam, but not all identity theft is a scam. It depends on whether deception was involved, I think. So, when you see a survey, I think you need to know, are they measuring… are they measuring the whole thing, or are they measuring just pieces of this? And I think…

09:28:35 --> 09:28:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: My suggestion to all survey people is to be clear about what it is that you are counting.

09:28:42 --> 09:28:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, my plea is that surveys should clarify what they're surveying, um, and also to disaggregate. If you're measuring fraud and scams, that's perfectly fine, but it's, I think, a best practice to disaggregate them and not combine them, because that confuses the picture.

09:29:00 --> 09:29:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And if you don't trust me, the Aspen Institute put out a report that says current research often combines scams and fraud into a single category, making it difficult to fully understand, and their recommendation, too, is to disaggregate fraud and scams, and so I agree with Aspen on that point.

09:29:15 --> 09:29:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And that's the end.

09:29:21 --> 09:29:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you, Kenneth. Um, we're gonna have some questions now, so Molly, if you could go up onto the stage. Um, so, we're looking for questions to the speakers about their presentations, but we're also looking for ideas and questions and how.

09:29:37 --> 09:29:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that the Gaza survey can be improved. Um, so I'm gonna walk around with the mic, um, a bit like a talk show host. Um, are there any questions? Um, so first of all.

09:29:47 --> 09:29:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This lady here.

09:29:51 --> 09:30:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you. So, I'm Jennifer Pitt. Um, Molly, you had mentioned in the survey that you talked about dollar loss. Did you guys actually survey if PII was lost due to deception and not dollars? Yes, can you hear me?

09:30:06 --> 09:30:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, yes, we did. We broke it out, so, um, whether people lost money, personal information, but no money was taken, and personal information that led to money lost.

09:30:18 --> 09:30:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we can send you the full breakdown and the data tables. We can chat after. OK, next question. There was someone else here. Yeah, it's you, Jen.

09:30:26 --> 09:30:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: This question for Ken. So you had a clear definition around scams.

09:30:33 --> 09:30:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Question for you is whether, you know, some of that phishing was included as a scam or not.

09:30:40 --> 09:30:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Well, we left it to the person. What we did was we say scams is you are… the definition is you are deceived into losing money, and so if the person perceived that the phishing was the deception that led them to lose money, then they would have counted that as a scam, I think.

09:30:57 --> 09:31:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, any more questions from the lady over here?

09:31:04 --> 09:31:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, I'm Jennifer Lind with Meta, and I loved your stat on education and social media, Ken. And I'm curious if you broke that down by different regions, like globally throughout the world. Did people have different appetites in different locations?

09:31:21 --> 09:31:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, no, we… this is U.S. only, uh, for one thing. We do have, uh, breakdowns, um, by demographics, so we can tell you, um, uh, among older people, do… I think… I think it's true that older people.

09:31:37 --> 09:31:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: prefer radio and TV more than younger people, for example, and we have all that data. It didn't… this is the top-line data, and we don't have it here, but the… actually, Meta has access to that data now yourself, so you could look it up.

09:31:49 --> 09:31:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we'd be happy to help you analyze it yourself if you want. OK. Marty? Thanks.

09:31:55 --> 09:31:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, everyone. Marty DeLima, University of Minnesota.

09:31:59 --> 09:32:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Two things. So I think a lot about measurement as a researcher. And the monetary loss question has always tripped me up. It's really hard to measure. I know when we did the Bureau of Justice Statistics study, we pulled people out of victimization category and prevalence if they got their money back.

09:32:18 --> 09:32:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But then I, like, have been trying to think about how we compare fraud and scams to other crime types. Yes. And I've been thinking about, like.

09:32:26 --> 09:32:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the impact of victimization still matters, even if you didn't experience a loss, if you started to walk down the path of victimization. Yes. So it can feel really harmful that, say, like, if you were assaulted on the street, but you held onto your purse or your wallet hard enough that the criminal just didn't get it. That still feels really…

09:32:47 --> 09:32:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: really traumatic, so…

09:32:49 --> 09:33:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: when we think about victimization, what I would like to see in the future in research, because I know you asked for recommendations, is even including the people that didn't experience a financial loss… I agree. …to almost present two numbers. Like, this is the number that we have with dollar lost, and this is the people that.

09:33:08 --> 09:33:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: feel that they were victimized, and then ask the emotional questions, too, to see if the emotional impact varies much between the people that experienced a loss and those that almost did, but didn't. I agree. So, when you do things like this, you have to fit all this into a 15-minute survey, and choices need to be made.

09:33:28 --> 09:33:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But I agree with you. So I know a guy who runs a small business. He got an invite to a meeting. He clicked on the link, turned out it went to .ru, and his administrator had to shut down his computer.

09:33:43 --> 09:33:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: He lost business for days as they reconstructed their email account. He didn't lose money per se, but he lost money and time because he fell victim to a scam, right? So I agree with you that I'd like to find out ways to measure that more.

09:33:58 --> 09:34:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And also what I'd like to do ultimately, and I know gas is starting to do this some too, is the overall impact on our society. We're, if we're now at 24% victimization rate for the country, we're heading to 50. And when you get to that point, what is the loss of faith in our commerce and the internet, uh, that happens and how do people change their behavior? You know, when, when, when you know, everybody is gonna know someone who's been scammed.

09:34:24 --> 09:34:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: or they've been scammed themselves, and it's going to change behavior, I think, and I'd like to start measuring.

09:34:29 --> 09:34:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I would just echo that as well. I've done some research on older adults and we found significant problem with fear of fraud, even amongst those who aren't victims. And I think that's got to be measured as well because that's a cost to society. Molly, do you have anything more to add on that one? Just that I agree. I think it's a really interesting angle to take. We only in our survey, we do ask about emotional impact, but it is only among those who lost money. So yeah, that's a really good idea.

09:34:53 --> 09:34:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So any more questions?

09:34:56 --> 09:34:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You really haven't, so you can come back if there's no one else.

09:35:00 --> 09:35:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, Karen Rose with Inner Alec Consulting Group. I just want to echo the comment made about measuring people's change in behavior or loss in trust in whether it's in platforms or whether it's the internet itself.

09:35:16 --> 09:35:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, we already know on, on phones, many people have changed their behavior with respect to unknown calls, right? Um, and that's really important because it represents if we don't get fraud scams under control, that represents a loss.

09:35:33 --> 09:35:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to technology companies. The fewer people that are engaging, the fewer people that are trusting either the platform or the internet itself represents a loss for companies. So there's something in it for everybody to get this under control.

09:35:48 --> 09:36:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I would agree. I think even now people aren't trusting the largest brands in the world that they initially will have felt, you know, a lot of loyalty towards. That was actually a high contender question for the survey, but didn't make the cut.

09:36:03 --> 09:36:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, yeah, I mean, if it's a priority, we'd be always happy to add it. Yeah, I know my own mom was a scam victim, and I observed in her behavior, she became much more of a recluse, and didn't trust people, didn't trust the internet.

09:36:17 --> 09:36:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, we've got a gentleman back here.

09:36:22 --> 09:36:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi there, Alan Cohen with San Francisco Adult Protective Services. Ken, I watched a presentation of yours in the past, and… Yes, yes, hi. Hi there, and, um, you said at the time that while, um, young and old were being, um.

09:36:37 --> 09:36:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, victimized in similar, similar amounts that seniors were losing more money. Is that. Oh, well, so, yeah, there are surveys out there, not Gallup. We with our number of respondents, we couldn't go into which demographic lost the most money. We do plan to do this in the future.

09:36:55 --> 09:37:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We had 5,000 respondents the first time around. We plan to go to 10,000 next time, which will allow us to do this kind of analysis. But I think the best data, the FTC has data that show pretty clearly that older people tend to lose a lot more money than younger people for a variety of reasons that are obvious, I think.

09:37:12 --> 09:37:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But by prevalence, just numbers of people, it's a, you know, from our view, it's similar between older and younger, but when it comes to dollars lost, that's a different story.

09:37:23 --> 09:37:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, uh, Kyle Fredrickson. Um, first, thank you for the talks, they were very interesting. Um, I had a question for Molly about the scam conversion rates. Uh, so…

09:37:35 --> 09:37:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I recently read a paper, it was published in, like, 2024, and it was in the context of crypto scams, um, basically being advertised by YouTube livestreams. Um, the conversion rates there were, like.004%, uh, so I'm wondering…

09:37:50 --> 09:38:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, you know, obviously that's, like, per view, uh, you know, converting from view to victim, so I'm wondering what, uh, exactly.

09:38:00 --> 09:38:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: is what's converting in your data that's, you know, getting, like, 10% conversion rates? Yeah, so I guess we are looking at all different types of scams, and really, we're just looking at the proportion of people who interact, how many of them actually then.

09:38:18 --> 09:38:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: have some kind of financial loss. I think just because it's completely different types of scams. Crypto is obviously huge and people are losing a lot to crypto, but it's definitely not the most common way people are being scammed. Our survey found that money recovery scams.

09:38:34 --> 09:38:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, um…

09:38:36 --> 09:38:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Shopping scams are the most prevalent globally, so that probably explains the difference. But I would say, too, that let's say that, I think it's true, as I recall in the Gallup survey, about 2.

09:38:53 --> 09:39:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: were saying they had lost money through a cryptocurrency scheme. That sounds small, but 2% of 270 million Americans is a lot of people, okay? So even, you have to just keep that in mind when you see percentages. They also tend to lose more money.

09:39:09 --> 09:39:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: In those scams as well, so…

09:39:12 --> 09:39:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hello, uh, so my name is Roger Interia, and I have a question, uh, directed to Molly. I know that you had a slide about self-protection measures, so my question is where, if you've ever measured it, the…

09:39:26 --> 09:39:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Where in the funnel do family and friends, you know, help interrupt those scam you know?

09:39:32 --> 09:39:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Interrupt those scammers and fraudsters. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I would have to have a look at the data because we did ask about family and friends and sort of support there. I know, I do remember off the top of my head, we could get the slide back up.

09:39:50 --> 09:40:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: um, it was certainly in the lower… lower ends, um, which is interesting because I know that scam victims, or just people in general, rely so much on their friends and family in the community, um, but I think, obviously.

09:40:05 --> 09:40:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: when we're asking people, okay, what stopped you once you've encountered a scam, what stopped you from actually interacting with it? It is probably, you know, they're thinking on the spot, like, they've just seen an advert, they've just received an email. Obviously, some people might say, hey, can you check this out for me, and do you think this looks weird? I think that definitely happens, but…

09:40:24 --> 09:40:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: People are running on gut instinct in those moments. But hey, let's have a look at the data again and see.

09:40:32 --> 09:40:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: My question is for Molly, Jennifer Quaid. I run the Canadian Anti-Scam Coalition. Hello. I would love to see the tables because I'd really love to dig into the questions that you asked and the timing to see if we can actually look at some of the patterns.

09:40:47 --> 09:41:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: why Canada did so well. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, timing could… timing could be it, but… Well, because we've got a national awareness campaign, and I just… I want to see if there's a correlation. I saw you nodding when I mentioned that, um, that Canadians had been picking up on things in the news and campaign awareness, so…

09:41:04 --> 09:41:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hopefully that shows that it's been working.

09:41:07 --> 09:41:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, any more questions? Oh yeah.

09:41:12 --> 09:41:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Come down here.

09:41:20 --> 09:41:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, I'm Julia. Thank you both for sharing your thoughts on the research. It's really incredible. I have a question.

09:41:31 --> 09:41:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: about what I noticed in both of the survey reports, US citizens were less likely to go to law enforcement.

09:41:44 --> 09:41:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, it might go to… to… to… to the bank, um…

09:41:49 --> 09:41:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: more, and my question, I'm going to try not to get political, so I'm going to show an example. My favorite.

09:41:57 --> 09:42:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, social media account that I follow is the Department of Interior's Instagram page, and several times weekly, they'll post these beautiful photos of national parks.

09:42:07 --> 09:42:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And, and, and wildlife. Um, and it, it almost seems like…

09:42:13 --> 09:42:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Law enforcement.

09:42:15 --> 09:42:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: like police or where you go to report.

09:42:20 --> 09:42:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, scams, IC3.

09:42:23 --> 09:42:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: has… might have a branding problem, like, and what do you… what do you think can be done? Interesting. Um, I know very well the wife of the former FBI and CIA director, and she says the same… she's… she's a former wife of the FBI director.

09:42:38 --> 09:42:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And she says that the FBI does not do a good job of branding. And so that was her remark, not mine. So, one observation about reporting to the government. The British government has made a real effort to set up a reporting website, to advertise it. It's called Report Fraud.

09:42:56 --> 09:43:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It used to be called action fraud. From the studies that I've seen, about 15 percent of people in the U.K. who are scam victims report there. In the U.S, we're finding out it's about 7 or 10 percent are reporting to the government. So I think that there's — maybe we could add 5 percent or so to that.

09:43:13 --> 09:43:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But I don't think we'll ever get to 50. It's just, uh, people tend to, uh, think of these things as more of a local thing. They're more trusting of the local police and their bank than they are the federal government up to this point. Now, if the federal government were to advertise, we can get your money back, then I think you'd get a flood of reporting.

09:43:31 --> 09:43:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But it's where we are right now.

09:43:34 --> 09:43:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I mean, Ken can speak for the US, but I can say in the UK, government is very slow, so how quickly things could get done is probably what's deterring people. Well, we'll give you a race about how slow our government is compared to yours.

09:43:49 --> 09:44:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, well, we're slightly ahead of you on actually doing the crime measurement, you know, so… Yes, you are. But, um, we've probably got time for one more question, if anyone is out there, or we will end it there and go and have a coffee.

09:44:03 --> 09:44:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Well, what I can say while someone is thinking of something, we are gearing up to do year two. We're in the process of these surveys are very expensive. We're seeking financial support from companies to do that. We have in mind increasing the respondent rate to 10,000 next year.

09:44:18 --> 09:44:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Also, there's some things that we would like to be able to survey in the future, like, what about teenagers? Both of us right now are surveying people over the age of 18. What if we survey these other populations who are also being scammed, right? Um, we'd like to measure the effectiveness of education. We'd like to measure the total cost of society. That's one of Mark's, uh…

09:44:37 --> 09:44:53
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: favorite things. So, and we'd like to produce really good quality trend information over time, because as I mentioned at the outset, we're going to be doing battle with these transnational criminal organizations for decades to come. There's resources, there's funding decisions to be made, and we're going to need the best data we can.

09:44:53 --> 09:45:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to make those public policy choices. Okay, thanks for that, Ken. So, um, just to end then, um, if you do have any further ideas, and you don't want to raise them in public here, uh, contact Molly Direct with your ideas to improve the survey even more.

09:45:08 --> 09:45:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and perhaps we'll end it there with some appreciation for our speakers. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, everyone.

09:45:15 --> 09:45:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think five.

09:45:16 --> 09:45:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'll talk to you soon.

09:45:27 --> 09:45:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You don't get it on the internet.

09:45:36 --> 09:45:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's right.

09:45:38 --> 09:45:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Those slides, yeah. What do you see there?

09:45:44 --> 09:45:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's fine.

09:45:46 --> 09:45:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It wasn't like a panel phot.

09:45:48 --> 09:45:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No, no, no, I think we're good.

09:45:52 --> 09:45:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Oh yeah, we have one, two, three.

09:45:57 --> 09:45:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Elliot Woodbury.

09:46:00 --> 09:46:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I've not spoken, but I know that you and I can share. Yeah, we can share. We can share up. We have to speak into this. Oh, I can share. We'll just hand back. Oh, they're gonna hear more.

09:46:13 --> 09:46:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Off the clock.

09:46:14 --> 09:46:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Well, it's all hot.

09:46:16 --> 09:46:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Green? Yes. Did you hear that? Yeah, I think so.

09:46:25 --> 09:46:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, just a little bit. Okay.

09:46:28 --> 09:46:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Do you want to be so funny? Yeah. Do you want to be so funny? Thank you. Mmm.

09:46:35 --> 09:46:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Ah, that's it.

09:46:37 --> 09:46:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's why I stood in the back and kind of hit it a little.

09:46:41 --> 09:46:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's how I know.

09:46:43 --> 09:46:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent. Should we get started? 30 pounds. All right. Welcome, welcome. This is the How Philanthropy Can Help Build the Scam Prevention Infrastructure We Want. So everyone needs to put on their headphones.

09:46:58 --> 09:47:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So it should be headphones sitting on the seat, yeah, it's a bit of a… if anyone's been to a silent rave, it's that… that's the… that's what we're doing today. It.

09:47:08 --> 09:47:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And there should be a volume control on this side. So I'll keep talking while everyone experiments with this novel technology. Good? Okay, excellent.

09:47:17 --> 09:47:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's working for at least one person.

09:47:22 --> 09:47:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Give it one more minute.

09:47:24 --> 09:47:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I kind of like this, it's a good solution. Um, excellent. So welcome, everyone. Again, uh, this is the How Philanthropy Can Help Build the Scam Prevention Infrastructure We Need, uh, panel. My name is Nick Wally, I lead, uh, Dahlberg Advisors Finance and Investment Practice. Dahlberg is a sort of social impact advisory firm.

09:47:42 --> 09:47:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And I have the honor of being joined by four esteemed panelists today, who I'll let them introduce themselves in a moment. This panel is really, as it states, around the role of philanthropy in preventing scams. I think, of course, scams are a very…

09:47:58 --> 09:48:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, complex, very complex space. It involves governments, corporations, philanthropists, NGOs, right? There's a lot of different actors involved. It's a complex problem on multiple platforms. And so there's a really interesting question around how do we think.

09:48:13 --> 09:48:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: very deliberately about what philanthropy can do in this space, right? And we need to be, it's an honest conversation about what it can and can't do, frankly. And we thought there's a lot of people doing interesting work in this space already, so we'd bring a few of them to have a little bit of a discussion.

09:48:29 --> 09:48:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: on four main things. So first of all, where can philanthropy take risks? I think it's an important role the philanthropy traditional plays, and we want to get a sense of some of that. Second, what can be treated as infrastructure versus like individual programs? And how do we think about that distinction and the role philanthropy plays in supporting both of those?

09:48:45 --> 09:48:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, third is how do you, you know, how do we move away from awareness, uh, to actual prevention? I think we've had a lot of discussions we've had with each of you about, um.

09:48:55 --> 09:49:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: sort of… there's a lot of information out there, there's a lot of actors out there doing things, we understand it's a problem, but as this is accelerating with AI, etc, how do we actually think about making a difference and a lasting difference that addresses both the scams of today, uh, and the scams of tomorrow?

09:49:10 --> 09:49:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So without further ado, I will let the panelists each introduce themselves. So over to you, Mercede. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Mercede Mortezavi. I head up financial health and global philanthropy for JPMorgan Chase. Really excited to be here with my fellow panelists.

09:49:26 --> 09:49:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, scam prevention is a core focus area for us, and we sit in a unique place in corporate responsibility where of course we have philanthropy as our, as our lever. Um, but we also think it's really important to be working across our firm.

09:49:42 --> 09:50:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to really think about with our business counterparts, how we can really show up as one chase, if you will, and bring all of our tools and resources to this issue. Scams are incredibly broad and complex, as we all know, and so we really want to make sure that philanthropy is layering on to the priorities that we have as a firm.

09:50:03 --> 09:50:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: thinking about whole-of-ecosystem approach, and many of the things you've been hearing today, so I'm excited to get into it a little bit through this panel.

09:50:11 --> 09:50:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi everybody, I'm Kathy Stokes, and I'm with AARP, and I run a social mission program, really trying to help older adults understand they've saved and done everything right, ready, and they're in their retirement, and then somebody comes by and manipulates them psychologically and emotionally, and steals.

09:50:30 --> 09:50:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: everything from them. Um, I'm actually gratified, um, today, sitting here and listening to the conversations, for the most part, over the last day and a half, that we've really moved beyond this just really blatant assumption.

09:50:45 --> 09:51:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that scam only happens to old people, right? Because they have cognitive decline, or they're not tech-savvy, or they're too trusting. And I think a lot of that still permeates, but we wouldn't have 1,200 people.

09:51:00 --> 09:51:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: at the Global Anti-Scam Alliance Summit, if all of us believed that, we have to understand that this…

09:51:07 --> 09:51:22
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: affects all people of all demographics, that we are not going to educate our way out of it, um, that it can't be so much about, um, what consumers can do to protect themselves, and it has to be about what all of us all.

09:51:22 --> 09:51:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: do to protect those consumers?

09:51:26 --> 09:51:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, everybody. My name is Rob Mascio. I'm a director with FINRA. So for those of you that might not know, FINRA is the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. We are a self-regulatory organization responsible for regulating a portion of the securities industry.

09:51:41 --> 09:51:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, I wear two hats, so I work for FINRA, but I also work for our FINRA Foundation. So, within FINRA, our mission is market integrity and investor protection.

09:51:52 --> 09:52:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Our foundation is a subsidiary of FINRA, and through that foundation, we do a lot of programmatic work, and our focus is on improving financial capability for all Americans. And part of that equation of building that financial capability is protecting consumers from financial fraud and scams.

09:52:09 --> 09:52:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, the portfolio that I manage is our investor protection campaign. We work with a lot of different nonprofit organizations to really try to address and attack the fraud and scam issue and problem from multiple different angles. So, we conduct research around the problem, what the problem is.

09:52:25 --> 09:52:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, what causes an individual to potentially be more, uh, likely to engage with a, with a fraud or a scam.

09:52:32 --> 09:52:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We do outreach, we work with different organizations to reach consumers and educate, but as Kathy said, education is not the only solution. Um, we train law enforcement, victim advocates, and we work with different organizations to provide support for victims once an individual has been victimized, because we know.

09:52:49 --> 09:53:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that the financial loss is devastating, and as you've heard from a lot of the different sessions today and yesterday, and I know Kathy's been on a few, that emotional impact is often overlooked, so we work to try to make sure that there is a support mechanism for those that have been victimized.

09:53:05 --> 09:53:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: To really focus on that emotional impact.

09:53:08 --> 09:53:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, everyone. My name is Anthea Molokala, and I'm with the Asia Foundation, which is an international nonprofit, and we work across more than 20 countries in the Asia and the Pacific. In that region, we work on a number of issues, but also included our cybersecurity, scam prevention. We work on micro, small and medium enterprise resilience and policy and the wider governance challenges that are associated with scams. So our experience of scams is that it really needs to be tackled at three levels. So first, of course.

09:53:38 --> 09:53:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: is the individual being targeted, which we talked a lot about, um, during this summit, but also the institutions around those individuals, so banks and platforms, telecoms, government, community organizations, and then the wider criminal ecosystem, including scam centers and.

09:53:55 --> 09:54:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: cross-border networks. And this is a really important and prominent issue in the Asian context. Um, and often the problem for us is not that the actors are absent. You know, there are many actors working on these issues, but there is weaknesses in the connections, the handoffs, the incentives, and the accountability.

09:54:15 --> 09:54:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: between those actors and institutions. So much of our work is focused on translating philanthropic investments into systems that actually function in local contexts and across the region.

09:54:28 --> 09:54:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent. Thank you so much. All really interesting, and I think feeds into my next question, which is, when we think about the role of philanthropy broadly, you know, how do we think, what is its unique role in this ecosystem? I mean, we have lots of different types of actors here. We'd love your perspectives, and I think it'll be very different coming from each one, but love your perspect.

09:54:44 --> 09:54:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And within that kind of space, what you think is really important that philanthropists be thinking about and doing now?

09:54:50 --> 09:55:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I think philanthropy has a few ways where it can play a really unique role, and JPMorgan Chase thinks about it in a few different ways, and I'm excited to hear how we all kind of differ in slightly different ways. But we think about philanthropy in the space of.

09:55:07 --> 09:55:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: building infrastructure and capacity, um, to be able to do a lot of what we call, like, systems change work, right? This is more long-term, more complex type of work, where we're thinking about, for example, supporting GASA, or we work with Aspen Institute to build, in the U.S. primarily.

09:55:24 --> 09:55:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the task force on fraud and scam prevention, where over 80 companies came together to really build a U.S. national strategy that we're now working together to implement. And so, I think that infrastructure, capacity building, convening is a really key component of.

09:55:41 --> 09:55:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: philanthropy. I think the other components, which are incredibly important too, is testing innovation, and this could be de-risking early-stage pilots to scaling interventions, um, that could really showcase proof of concept. And again, this can scale from.

09:55:57 --> 09:56:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: education, which is not the only tool, as Kathy keeps saying, to real-time intelligence solutions, to, you know, a variety of different interventions that, and for us, we're really focused on the prevention and focusing upstream.

09:56:14 --> 09:56:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and then lastly, it's how do we build a… and generate a evidence base? Um, so this could be research, but it could also be thinking about what are, uh, best practices, lessons learned. Especially, I think it's important, uh, you know, being in this community at GASA.

09:56:32 --> 09:56:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: is the cross-border information sharing is incredibly important. So I think these are the key components that are incredibly unique for philanthropy to play a role in. And we were really excited at JPMorgan Chase to recently make an investment a few months ago. We made a $14 million investment to seven organizations.

09:56:50 --> 09:57:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that are doing just that. They're, they're scaling interventions from EBT theft and blocking EBT theft all the way to thinking about real time intelligence solutions to right here in San Francisco. We heard the treasure and I know Amanda's in the crowd here somewhere. There she is.

09:57:05 --> 09:57:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, uh, to launch Stop Scams SF, uh, the first city-led, uh, initiative where we're excited to see how we can build a playbook for other markets to, to think about this. So, um, we're really invested in this space and excited to, to continue to develop the work.

09:57:22 --> 09:57:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I, I kind of, um, sort of cutting from the same cloth on infrastructure investment in terms of, and I'll, and I'll, uh, double, double down on you, the Aspen Institute, um, that is, uh, has produced the first on-paper.

09:57:38 --> 09:57:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: serious-minded, uh, national fraud strategy, and there's now sort of a 2.0 to that initiative that is looking to effectuate some of the changes that came to that paper, um, with a lot of pain.

09:57:54 --> 09:58:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: a lot of finger-pointing, but then a lot of, like, okay, this is a way we can… here's a path forward. I think that's really important, and I think philanthropy has a role to play in that. Absolutely with research, but I have to tell you, I really would be happy to not see behavioral.

09:58:12 --> 09:58:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: research anymore to look at and say, why is that person vulnerable? If that person's vulnerable because they're overly emotional, they're not going to change that. To what end, right? So I think it really needs to be less about, like, how to stop the consumer from doing something.

09:58:30 --> 09:58:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and how to stop it from coming to the consumer in the first place. I think on the education front, I think we should be feel like we're kind of over the here are the 80 scams and here are the 10 red flags to each scam. So here you only have to know 800 things.

09:58:49 --> 09:58:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No, I think we need to… how many of you remember, uh, elementary school, if you were here in the U.S, learning what to do, um, in the event of a fire?

09:58:58 --> 09:59:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What was it?

09:59:00 --> 09:59:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Stop, drop, and roll. And we need a stop, drop, and roll for fraud. We don't need 800 red flags, right? And we've actually come up with something, we don't have the money to push it out there, but maybe, I don't know, philanthropy could help, with something called pause, reflect, protect. And the only other last thing I would say is…

09:59:17 --> 09:59:43
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Look on both, all sides of the continuum. The national, people are laughing. Because you're like pitching me. Well, you didn't even say this earlier in our prep. I told you I was gonna wing it. She's like elbowing me. She's like, "I have this thing." I told you I was gonna wing it, didn't I? You did. The National Elder Fraud Coordination Center, first of its kind effort nonprofits to bring for-profit entities with…

09:59:43 --> 09:59:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: fraud intel into the cases of law enforcement to grow these cases beyond the single grandparent scam or the single romance scam and actually build actionable cases and get the bad guys off the street. Those are some of my ideas. Sorry about that.

09:59:58 --> 10:00:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No, I love them. Everything you say is perfect.

10:00:03 --> 10:00:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So I'll add in, not going to be as perfect as what Kathy said. So we take somewhat similar, but a little bit of a different approach. So we're a little bit more grassroots when it comes to some of the programming that we work on. On the research front, so I agree, we participated in some research projects.

10:00:20 --> 10:00:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: where we're trying to determine the prevalence of financial fraud and things like that. But we've also done research around what methods of educational intervention have been successful or can be successful. So we did one project where we looked at, um.

10:00:35 --> 10:00:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: uh, video interventions. How effective are those? And we found that video interventions can be effective, but there is a waning period. So after, say, 6 months, they're less effective. So from that, we can use that research to learn, okay, so if we are going to do some kind of educational intervention, we know now that.

10:00:52 --> 10:01:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It can be successful, but we have to continually do that on an ongoing basis. So, we're able to leverage that research to implement some of our programmatic efforts. On more of kind of that grassroots that I mentioned, we work with a lot of different nonprofit partners to.

10:01:08 --> 10:01:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: get information out into the community, and I fully agree that education is not the solution. It's part of that equation. We can't attack fraud and scams without.

10:01:18 --> 10:01:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: adding some into that educational awareness, but there are other pieces, right? There's the technology piece, there's a whole lot of different components that come together, and if we're looking to.

10:01:28 --> 10:01:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: really attack this issue, funders have to look at it from multiple different angles. And those in the room that are in a funding position, you likely have a lane in which you are an expert in. Lean into that side of your business.

10:01:42 --> 10:01:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, for us, again, we have connections with a lot of these different nonprofits. Um, one example… so, most people don't know who FINRA is. Anybody in here know who FINRA is before I said FINRA?

10:01:54 --> 10:01:58
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Besides the… okay. So that's more than normal. Um…

10:01:58 --> 10:02:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: nobody's gonna come and listen to me, right? Because nobody knows who FINRA is, nobody knows who I am. But we work with organizations like Better Business Bureau, and they're known in the community. So when they put together an event, the community knows who they are, and they're more likely to attend, right? So we have a program where we work with Better Business Bureaus to.

10:02:16 --> 10:02:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to help train staff at all those different local offices to be able to go out in the community and educate the community, right? Because people are going to show up for that, they're not going to show up for me. So we look for ways where we can kind of leverage partnerships.

10:02:29 --> 10:02:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: At more of that local, local level.

10:02:32 --> 10:02:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I would agree that I think what most of you, or all of you, have said is the catalytic role, you know, um, that philanthropy can play, and, like, where to find those kind of unique points to leverage, leverage that, um, that capital. Um, you know, it's most valuable, I think philanthropy's most valuable where there isn't an obvious owner.

10:02:52 --> 10:03:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: of what needs to be done. So, you know, where maybe different sectors need to be working together, but they aren't for whatever reason, or where an approach or a solution. And we've heard so many solutions proposed over the last day or two, you know, whether how do you test that solution, how do you pilot and improve it before you take it to government to scale?

10:03:14 --> 10:03:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Because, you know, of a problem of this magnitude, governments need to take a lot of ownership, countries need to take ownership, regional entities need to take ownership, particularly when you're looking at something across a region. So philanthropy cannot outspend the problem. It can only sort of de-risk the solution and work as a catalytic kind of tool.

10:03:34 --> 10:03:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh… device.

10:03:36 --> 10:03:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent, thanks all. And building, I guess building on a little bit what was just discussed, I mean, when we think about, uh, what philanthropy can fund, oftentimes there's discussion around infrastructure, these broad, sort of underlying pieces of infrastructure, and then separately there's sort of community-based, local, programmatic work.

10:03:51 --> 10:04:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How do we think, you know, in each case, you know, the infrastructure doesn't work unless the community understands it, and the community may depend on necessary infrastructure, but oftentimes those are built in isolation. So I'd love to, like, open it up a little bit to understand, how do you think about that relationship between infrastructure development and, sort of.

10:04:08 --> 10:04:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, isolated programming, and how do you deliberately sort of ensure that both are in place and that they work together? How do you think about that balance and that intersection as you're doing philanthropic work?

10:04:22 --> 10:04:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Who wants to? Yeah, yeah.

10:04:25 --> 10:04:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Which one of us can answer that first? They had notes, guys. I knew this question was coming. What I would say is that it's various elements, and like we're talking about here, the importance of a known entity in a community with the support behind them to be able to scale and do the things that.

10:04:46 --> 10:05:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that are needed for that particular community. I think it's also about broadening the philanthropic aperture a little bit. So let's say you're a philanthropy and your focus is on family well-being.

10:05:01 --> 10:05:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And it's economic well-being, but you're not tuned in at all to the fraud crisis where most of the dollars that are being stolen are at the, you know, the older people of that family. And when that money is gone.

10:05:18 --> 10:05:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Generational wealth is gone. Even if there wasn't so much generational wealth, anything that they had that was intended to support, uh, the family through generations is gone. So you need to put that into, uh, into your calculation. Same thing with community well-being. When that person or those people.

10:05:36 --> 10:05:54
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: don't have money anymore, and they're not getting it back because of a scam, they're not spending in that community. And equity, it goes with that as well. So I think it's, it's as much, um, I think it's equal parts, uh, trusted community partners, but also the philanthropies behind it, understanding that they need to broaden their aperture.

10:05:57 --> 10:06:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, yeah, I would completely agree. I mean, I think there is plenty of institutional social infrastructure out there that people already trust. And trust is a really key element here. I think we heard yesterday, um, when there was the National Strategies Panel, and the guy from Singapore was saying.

10:06:15 --> 10:06:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, what great reporting rates they have in Singapore, because people have incredible trust in the government, right? So you don't have that everywhere, but people have trust in institutions that are close to them, in community organizations, in industry associations that represent them.

10:06:32 --> 10:06:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So we need to build and strengthen that existing infrastructure. So it's about empowering organizations to be one-stop shops for people. Maybe they go there now for some kind of health service or some kind of other advice, business advice.

10:06:48 --> 10:07:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: add on, you know, scam preparedness, let's say, or resilience, because they already trust that organization, rather than them having to, like, necessarily call some number and they don't know who's on the other end, right? It's much easier to go to someone who's trusted. So I think trust is a really key element when we're looking at infrastructure.

10:07:07 --> 10:07:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, and I would just add, um, just to my earlier point, I think when we think about infrastructure and individual programs, I think what I agree with what everyone's saying here, which is we have to do both.

10:07:18 --> 10:07:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and it's important to think about this, um, from a variety of levels, because the infrastructure work can take a really long time to see some wins, right? That, to me, feels like the systems change work, right? Like, we're thinking about how do we move the needle working across the private sector, public sector, nonprofit sector.

10:07:36 --> 10:07:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Or how do we influence law enforcement or, you know, how do we these are these are kind of more complex. It's going to take a little bit more time. But I also think the individual programs, to me, it's it's about the people. Right. And it's about the communities. And, in philanthropy, we, we.

10:07:52 --> 10:08:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We focus on the most underserved communities and people and making sure that we're supporting the nonprofits that are closest to those communities and understand what the people want and need. And so I think that's a really important pulse to have as funders is to say.

10:08:09 --> 10:08:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We want to work and listen to the community and the people who are closest to what's happening to be able to support those programs and have both systems change, but direct to consumer, right? Like, we need to be thinking about the people at the end of the day, because that's what this is all about.

10:08:27 --> 10:08:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Can I just add that it's really important, though, that that system works. So once someone goes to someone, whoever it is, you know, some kind of local organization to report something, they need to know that it's going to then get translated to someone else or that information moves on.

10:08:44 --> 10:08:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: as I said, those handoffs need to work, so that at the end of the day, the right person gets that information to be able to act on it, and I think that's where there are gaps that we need to work on strengthening. I would add, in addition.

10:08:56 --> 10:09:07
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: how that individual who goes forward to report, how they're received, right? The consistency in which an individual who decides that they have the courage to come forward and report something that has happened to them.

10:09:07 --> 10:09:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: depending on where they go, they could be met with a variety of different responses, a variety of different, um, accusations even, even. So…

10:09:16 --> 10:09:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One of the efforts that we do, so we work to try to train law enforcement, but we're not an organization that has the bandwidth or the policy advocacy to be able to holistically make a change, so we focus on what we can focus on. So we train law enforcement to try to better understand that emotional impact that a victim might be experiencing.

10:09:34 --> 10:09:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So when that person does get the courage to come forward, they're met with empathy instead of language that could possibly turn them away from coming forward and reporting again in the future, or sharing that experience with other individuals who might be in that same position.

10:09:49 --> 10:09:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that's kind of our approach. I mean, when we look to work with different partners.

10:09:55 --> 10:10:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Again, we're gonna be more at that grassroots, that lower level, but we look for organizations where we have a like-minded idea and concept, and we work with them to kind of create that and develop it.

10:10:05 --> 10:10:24
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent. And I guess this kind of opens the next question, is just, you know, this is a place where there's a lot of different potential intervention points, from before you hit the scam, to the moment you've received the scam, to, you know, uh, restitution, etc. So I'm wondering, you know, and there's lots of different actors in this space, so I'm wondering, how do you measure success in this space? I guess both.

10:10:24 --> 10:10:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: collectively, and then thinking about it as an organization that's trying to understand, all right, what is my contribution? Am I doing something that works when there's so many dependencies?

10:10:32 --> 10:10:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, that's a really, really tough question, and for those of you that are looking for an answer, you're probably not gonna get one, right? So, when we're looking at metrics, when we're looking to measure how effective a program is, a lot of it's gonna depend on what that program is. So, if we're thinking from a technology standpoint, it might be easy, if you're working to try to stop.

10:10:50 --> 10:10:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: a bad actor for reaching somebody. You can measure those impacts. You can measure how many times somebody has attempted, and our system has shut it down.

10:10:59 --> 10:11:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: From an educational standpoint, that's more of a long-term metric.

10:11:04 --> 10:11:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: People don't come forward and say, because of what you taught me, because of what I learned.

10:11:10 --> 10:11:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I was not victimized. They tell you when they've been victimized, but they don't talk about the amount of times that the educational awareness or whatever systems were in place helped prevent something from happening. So it's really, really difficult to measure, so…

10:11:23 --> 10:11:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How we measure? We measure engagement, so we measure the amount of individuals that we reach. We, um, try to measure over a period of time whether individuals are more resilient when it comes to fraud and scams. Um, so there's different ways that we try to measure.

10:11:39 --> 10:11:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But a lot of it's gonna come down to the specific, um, process and program that you're working on to implement.

10:11:45 --> 10:12:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And I know others might have some feedback that's going to add to that. Yeah, and I think the broader point in the United States and everywhere, it's impossible to know how much of this is really happening. You know, it could be 16 billion a year, it could be 20 billion a year, it could be what the FTC estimates based on underreporting as much as $200 billion lost in a single year if we don't know where to start with the measurement.

10:12:12 --> 10:12:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We don't have a way to measure, but there are things that are measurable, concrete things. If we get to this place where we're doing a lot more like on the left, on the on the prevention, where we're putting in place barriers to stop a text message, to stop a phone call, whatever it is.

10:12:29 --> 10:12:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That's actually something you can track, right? We recently began a relationship with a call blocking, spam call and text blocking company, and we define success as every blocked message is someone who is protected from that scam.

10:12:46 --> 10:13:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And we can count that. They're counting it for us, and it's actually pretty cool. So there are things where it's measurable because it's technology, or it's something that's measurable. We've just got to work on the harder stuff in a different frame, I think.

10:13:00 --> 10:13:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I'd add that, you know, often when you're running a project around scams, it's easy to equate success with, you know, having delivered the activity, delivered the training, but that doesn't tell you if there's been any change, right? So you really need to look at progression. So did behavior change, right? Did someone's behavior change after they received that training? Did they pause? Did they think twice? Like simple things indicate behavior change.

10:13:26 --> 10:13:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But then, you know, did the institution that they reported to, did they respond differently, right? And then, did the reporting and the referral pathway actually work? So what happened to that? So you can trace the chain, right? You don't yet know whether you've actually averted harm in dollar figures yet.

10:13:45 --> 10:13:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But if you can look at some of those intermediate steps, or intermediate outcomes, you can see some progression.

10:13:52 --> 10:14:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent, excellent. And I guess it must be challenging given it's also a rapidly moving space. I mean, AI is making scamming a lot easier. I think that, you know, as we fix one approach, a new approach emerges. So I'm wondering, how are you seeing scams evolving?

10:14:08 --> 10:14:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Where do you think it's going? We'd love to get reflections on that, and then we can maybe discuss afterward, you know, what to do about those new sc.

10:14:15 --> 10:14:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Well, the scale imperfection is just it's off the charts already. And, you know, people will report to law enforcement. The FBI's report will say last year, you know, 60% of scams reported had AI in them.

10:14:32 --> 10:14:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Well, we don't really know that, do we? Because it's self-reported, and we can… it must have been AI, because it was that good, right? We really don't know that, but we do know, with people like Gary Warner and others that are out and looking at this, um, concertedly, looking on the dark web and looking at Telegram.

10:14:51 --> 10:15:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And seeing how the criminals are teaching each other how to make the best use of artificial intelligence to make the scam attack imperceptible. So it's huge. It's getting worse. And again, it gets back to we can't educate someone about the red flag if the red flag's not there anymore.

10:15:12 --> 10:15:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So it's got to be that higher level message for the educational piece. And then it has to be stopping the scams from getting to us to begin with. I know I'm a bit of a broken record. I'm a little tired. Maybe that's why. But I'm also really tired of like, this is ten years for me in this.

10:15:28 --> 10:15:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And it's just a lot. It's a lot. But I think we are seeing a lot of progress. And I think the role of philanthropy could be really meaningful in a space where we are so sort of bifurcated and can't necessarily rely on corporate dollars.

10:15:44 --> 10:16:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: but maybe their foundations, um, to support some of the stuff that really needs to be done. I, just building on what you're saying, I think SCAMS is so broad and ever-evolving. It's so different. I, I worked several years on our housing affordability portfolio, and it's so different, right? Especially with how we use philanthropy.

10:16:03 --> 10:16:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and because it's so broad, and because we need to focus on so many different.

10:16:09 --> 10:16:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: organizations coming… I mean, look at where we are with, like, what, over a thousand people, right? We need so many different people across the entire ecosystem to be focusing on this. It can be really tough to say, what do I need to do now, in the near term, and in the future, right? Especially with philanthropy, because it's so evolving.

10:16:28 --> 10:16:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But I do think what you're saying, which is, how do we make sure we continue to bring people together? How do we continue to ensure we have shared objectives and we're marching towards the same goals and focusing upstream and focusing on prevention? I think are really important.

10:16:44 --> 10:16:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and I also think that philanthropy can, um, continue to have a really good pulse check. Um, so we, um, a couple years ago launched a call for ideas because we wanted to say, like, one, if you're not thinking about this, you should be thinking about it, and two.

10:16:59 --> 10:17:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, who's doing what? And, and we wanted to understand from fintechs to nonprofits who was tackling this issue and how. And I think that was a really great way to bring people together and bring them in front of our subject matter experts across the firm, um, to really have a pulse check on what's, what's now near term. But also it can help us.

10:17:19 --> 10:17:26
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Give a little bit of a look into the future and how philanthropy can play a role in the ever-evolving space.

10:17:26 --> 10:17:40
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So I would add, I would not let technology be a burden for you all to get involved. So if you're in a position where you can potentially be a funder for some kind of a project, just because you might not be in the tech space doesn't mean that you shouldn't get involved.

10:17:40 --> 10:17:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, we all know that the scam ecosystem has been changing over the years. There's new different technologies that are aiding some of the scammers. There is new products that are coming out that are being leveraged to exploit individuals. But at the end of the day.

10:17:55 --> 10:18:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Scams are the same — the same tactics have been used for centuries, right? A lot of it is that emotional impact. It's that emotional manipulation. An individual, regardless of whether AI is involved or not, there is going to be that emotional manipulation in some capacity.

10:18:11 --> 10:18:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That has not changed. That is always going to be around. So…

10:18:15 --> 10:18:32
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Kathy's idea of looking for ways to kind of encourage individuals to put that pause, to get their nervous system to calm down a little bit before they make a decision. Those are techniques that individuals should be considering. So technology, yes, has impacted the ecosystem.

10:18:32 --> 10:18:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But the same tactics are still being used. We know through research that we participated in that knowledge is power. So again, the more that individuals know about the scams that are out there and how they operate and some of those emotional impacts that are leveraged.

10:18:48 --> 10:19:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the better protected they will be, the less likely they'll be to engage in a situation that could lead them down a scam path. So, I would encourage you not to let technology scare you away from being able to participate in some kind of a project that's impacting individuals.

10:19:05 --> 10:19:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'd like to reframe it a little bit when we look at the ecosystem, because we're often talking about scams from the consumer perspective and then working backwards, right? So how do we educate or protect and support the person that is being targeted?

10:19:20 --> 10:19:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: which is obvious. It's it's in our face. It's every day we're encountering it. if you go to Asia, you know, where where I sit, we're also seeing, the industrialization of scams through scam centers, trafficking, money laundering.

10:19:35 --> 10:20:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: cross-border criminal networks. And this has been around a long time as well, right? Even longer. If it wasn't scamming, it was gambling and, you know, other kinds of syndicated crime networks that have been there. But these are not always just kind of capacity problems to be able to deal with them. And in some cases, in a lot of countries, scam operations are very much embedded into the political and economic systems of those countries. And.

10:20:03 --> 10:20:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you have actors who benefit from the status quo. So…

10:20:08 --> 10:20:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: we need to tackle the problem at that end. You know, we've had… we have people that are scammed. We've had community dialogues in places like Thailand, where, you know, across the border from Myanmar, there's scam centers. And people live amongst scammers, right? So they… they don't report, not because they don't know who to report to.

10:20:27 --> 10:20:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Or not that they know… they don't… they know how to… how to, um, encounter a scam, and they know when it's a scam, but they don't report because they know the scammer. Or the scammer may have political power for some reason in their community. So it becomes very, very messy, right, when you're starting to deal in that kind of context. And then it goes back to, kind of.

10:20:46 --> 10:21:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: fundamental problems of jobs, poverty. You know, how do you tackle crime? How do you tackle the very, very start of this? You know, why is this such a huge industry that we're fighting so defensively from this end? And we can't forget to be dealing with it at that point and where it started.

10:21:04 --> 10:21:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: That has to do with lives, livelihood, um, incentives and political interests. Yeah. And I think that's a really, I mean, it touches on the point you brought up earlier around really understanding the sort of context that these scams are operating in and who are the partners that we can actually affect that may be dealing with different.

10:21:20 --> 10:21:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: different elements of this around incentives, as opposed to just this sort of scam… scam, you know, logic itself. Um, would love to… I mean, this gets… another question is, like, you know, obviously scams, there's so much… there's only so much NGOs and philanthropies can do, right? We must be partnering with corporations, we must be partnering businesses, we must be partnering.

10:21:39 --> 10:21:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: with the public sector. So I'm wondering, how does philanthropy and NGOs, how should we be thinking about those partnerships? What are really important ones?

10:21:49 --> 10:22:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Well, I think we're sitting amongst an important one right now with the Global Anti-Scam Alliance because it is bringing together corporations and vendors who want to support those corporations and philanthropies and NGOs.

10:22:04 --> 10:22:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, this kind of thing is really important. Um, we have to make sure that we're right-sizing it in the way that it's more about solutioning and building networks and bridges. I mean, what I saw yesterday from, uh, Emmy on your team, JPMorgan Chase.

10:22:20 --> 10:22:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: She was talking about.

10:22:23 --> 10:22:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi there. She was talking about things that Chase is doing, basically, to put friction into a system to slow down a scam or to protect people. A year ago, two years ago, I don't think we would have heard that from any organization. So, by Emmy putting that out there, now other organizations are, like, maybe gonna be.

10:22:42 --> 10:22:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: bold enough to say what they're doing as well, and then we learn from each other. I think this is one of the more important ways for us to do that, personally.

10:22:50 --> 10:23:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I would totally agree with that. I mean, these type of convenings, they are fantastic, because you… we've got so many smart people in this building, and they all are attacking this problem from a different perspective. The more we can get those… that hive mentality, more people to connect with each other, to start thinking about, okay, so.

10:23:06 --> 10:23:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: how can we really address this problem from our area of expertise? I think the better we're gonna be. Even just the comment that you made about how the scam, how…

10:23:17 --> 10:23:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Internationally.

10:23:18 --> 10:23:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: scams can impact the ecosystem and the economy within those regions. It's not something that we necessarily always think about in the U.S. here. So having that kind of perspective, maybe a funder in the area would say, okay.

10:23:30 --> 10:23:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: How can we address it from that perspective? So getting folks together to be able to have these conversations is super, super important. I would just encourage folks not to just continue to talk about the problem. Let's talk about solutions. Let's brainstorm. Let's try to come up with innovative ideas.

10:23:45 --> 10:23:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Where we can leverage what we know and really impact the society as a whole.

10:23:52 --> 10:24:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: One thing about bringing people together, like, convening is really important, but you can't always assume that everyone's interests are aligned, right? People have different motivations for being in the room, different incentives, different authorities, you know, different kinds of responsibilities, so you need to be aware of those, like, why.

10:24:10 --> 10:24:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: everyone here is probably not here for the same reason, right? We assume they are, and then when you take that into an international context, that's certainly 100% true. So you really need to understand, you know, what is motivating someone to work in this space or not, or to be at that other end of it, like the hard and the sharp and the criminal end of it as well.

10:24:31 --> 10:24:47
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I agree with everything you all just said. I would just add from just a little bit of a different lens. I also think that to the question of philanthropy, I encourage us to be more bold and continuing to listen to our community partners.

10:24:47 --> 10:25:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think that's really important in a, in a, in a, in the place that we sit as philanthropy. And I, I say this for myself as well. I would love for ideas on how we can continue to be bold with philanthropic dollars. And, you know, we were just.

10:25:02 --> 10:25:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We were just talking at a roundtable with a group of funders, and I think it's really important to also acknowledge that we sit in corporations. Like, I sit in JPMorgan Chase, right? And we have folks in really large companies that have a foundation and have a philanthropic arm.

10:25:21 --> 10:25:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And how do we make sure that we're leveraging the full resources of our companies and our firms, and coming together with others to be able to really think boldly?

10:25:29 --> 10:25:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: The one other thing I was thinking about, and I think both Anthea and you use the word de-risk, and I'm not in the philanthropic space, and I really like that term, but I also think maybe some philanthropies, some foundations feel like supporting certain things.

10:25:45 --> 10:26:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: would bring too much risk to them. And I think maybe that has to be turned around to say, what can we do with our dollars and our resources to de-risk something and not worry so much if it blows back and if it doesn't work? It's okay to fail.

10:26:01 --> 10:26:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Right? That's how we learn from things.

10:26:06 --> 10:26:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: She just had to mic drop.

10:26:10 --> 10:26:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: She had to have the last word.

10:26:14 --> 10:26:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent. And I really like the point about, I mean, incentives generally, like understanding your own institution's incentives, I think maybe the good place to start, but then political economy more broadly and really understanding. I mean, I think too often, particularly if you're used to kind of only speaking with other funders or only speaking with NGOs, you know, or only working in the impact sector, quote unquote, you often speak to people.

10:26:31 --> 10:26:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: who all have the same sort of great view about what the world should look like, and the reality is, is, like, it takes more than that, and it takes people with different incentive structures and, um, you know, either at the institutional level or within the institution. I think it's who we're speaking to at different institutions that really matters as well. Um, one thing I'd love to… this is going a little off-strip, guys, so feel free to avoid it, but, but.

10:26:50 --> 10:27:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: What should philanthropy not be doing? I would love… or what mistakes do you think it's really important that philanthropy avoid in this space in particular? Jumping in and doing something that's already being done.

10:27:01 --> 10:27:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Find a lane that needs the help and the support. And if it's research, great. Identify to what end and how it is going to help further the cause in the end of stopping this crime, right?

10:27:17 --> 10:27:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: just, you know, focus the research on, on things that haven't already been determinative, and, um, and find ways that, um, that it'll, like, it'll be additive.

10:27:29 --> 10:27:46
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Or look for ways that you can scale programs that are already in place. So maybe they are more grassroot type programs, but you have the ability and the network to be able to help scale that, to make that have a larger impact. So yes, it might already be happening, but it's happening at a smaller level.

10:27:46 --> 10:27:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You might be in a position to be able to expand that and reach a larger audience.

10:27:52 --> 10:27:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I would also say…

10:27:55 --> 10:28:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Research for the sake of research. A lot of research sits on the shelf. I was… I was wondering when we were gonna get spicy. We never did. Um, I don't know if this is really spicy, but I think research is important in certain contexts, right? And I think if there's a gap, we should fill that research gap and make sure that it's…

10:28:14 --> 10:28:29
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: action-oriented, we're doing things that are evidence-based. Um, but I also find that sometimes we're just funding too much research, and we need to start thinking about what are the actual actions that we can move towards, and I think the other angle I would.

10:28:29 --> 10:28:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: or the other point I would make here is that every foundation or philanthropy, to my earlier point, comes from a different angle and a different expertise, right? A foundation in a bank is going to be very different than FINRA, or from a foundation in a retail company, right? So, I think being able to.

10:28:45 --> 10:29:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Understand where your vantage point is and not duplicate and make sure it's it's truly action oriented and creating impact is going to be important. And if you are in the research world, make sure that that the research that's coming out, there's an and then what?

10:29:01 --> 10:29:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So it's great to be able to point to what the problem is or what might be out there, but taking that research and making that connection to how can we leverage that research to really create programming or to implement that into whatever you're planning on designing, I think is a really, really important part of research.

10:29:19 --> 10:29:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think research is great, but you have to be able to leverage that to accomplish something. So, research for research, I agree. Let's steer away from that.

10:29:27 --> 10:29:38
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: But we can learn a lot from research. I would add, maybe, to philanthropy should avoid quick fixes, short-term solutions.

10:29:39 --> 10:30:05
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Some are out there, but often I find with corporate philanthropy in particular, the project, it's very projectized and the time frame is very short and you want quick results, right? These are really entrenched problems, right? They can't be fixed in six months or even a year. And if you want to do something well, you really need to have some kind of analysis, some political economy assessment at the beginning before you kind of venture down this path. And it doesn't matter where that is, right?

10:30:05 --> 10:30:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you need to understand your context really well, so that you can devise a solution that's really gonna work. So I would say…

10:30:12 --> 10:30:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Philanthropy should not be like one off short term and very projectized. I love that point. I think thinking about multi-year funding is incredibly important and thinking about metrics that can come in in three years and five years versus like, what can you get me in six months? That's not gonna be impactful in the long term. Yeah.

10:30:34 --> 10:30:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent, thank you. So before we go to, kind of, general Q&A, one final question, which is just, like, is there anything we haven't discussed, or one kind of key takeaway you want the audience to remember?

10:30:44 --> 10:30:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Quickly.

10:30:45 --> 10:31:03
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: No, it's fine. You said enough. I'm going to say something that I said in an earlier session today. A lot of you went and listened to what Singapore was doing and the UK and Canada. We can all learn so much from them. But they all started by saying, we're doing this because of the victims.

10:31:03 --> 10:31:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And then at the very end, they were asked, so what are you doing for the victims? And they couldn't say anything.

10:31:08 --> 10:31:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, we really, really need to close that end, and be sure that we're all focusing on that, and not lose sight of it with so much else that's happening in between.

10:31:20 --> 10:31:23
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I think that's it. I know.

10:31:23 --> 10:31:28
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It's just Kathy dropping the mic every time.

10:31:28 --> 10:31:30
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Great.

10:31:30 --> 10:31:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Okay, excellent. So should we open up to audience questions? I'll try to run around with the mic. I think that's probably the way we do this.

10:31:38 --> 10:31:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yes, down here.

10:31:39 --> 10:31:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thanks, Nick. Uh, my name's Chris Groshong. Um, I started a… a non-profit called the Crypto Recovery Alliance to help victims of crypto fraud.

10:31:49 --> 10:32:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And some of the things that I've heard you guys talk about today, like, I wanted to just touch base on and get your opinions also on, too, is a couple things. Like, Anthea, you mentioned.

10:32:00 --> 10:32:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: trust, but I think there's a… there's an issue around trust for people, that they've already been scammed, maybe multiple times, and so we actually… I think part of it is we need to take some of the trust out.

10:32:13 --> 10:32:20
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Of it. Let people have the ability to verify things, to get comfortable, but they need… they need to feel safe.

10:32:20 --> 10:32:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And so, maybe not just… and maybe this is where the spiciness comes in, right? Like, I don't think that it's just about the trust, because we need that… you need to build those people back up to that, and it goes along with the educational component. When people are going through scams, psychologically, they can't absorb.

10:32:37 --> 10:32:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: things. You kind of have to put them in a place where…

10:32:42 --> 10:32:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: they can step back from looking through that narrow field of view and that straw, thinking, if I just get the money back…

10:32:49 --> 10:32:51
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: It'll solve all my problems, like…

10:32:51 --> 10:33:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You know, but there's… there's things that you have to repair in your life. You gotta recover holistically your entire life, not just the financial component of it.

10:33:00 --> 10:33:08
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And so, I'm… I would love to hear from… from all of you on… on… on, like, the aspect of trust, and, um…

10:33:08 --> 10:33:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: and the victim education, and I love the, uh… the stuff about the philanthropy not pulling out too soon, or looking for quick wins that are just great for PR. I think that's a really important part, because…

10:33:21 --> 10:33:25
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Victims are gonna always be here, so.

10:33:26 --> 10:33:42
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We start with the trust piece. Sure, can I jump in first on that? Okay, just to tackle that point. So absolutely, like when someone has been scammed, their trust is really gone. And I think my point was more about who do they turn to in a situation like that?

10:33:42 --> 10:34:00
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And I think it's, you know, what happened to Mary Ellen, right, when you were talking about your story, you know, she built trust with someone who was completely untrustworthy. Right. So people are going to need to go somewhere where they feel they can tell someone and seek support. That is a trusted institution.

10:34:00 --> 10:34:12
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I mean, the challenge now is who are those trusted institutions, right? And I think part of philanthropy's role might be to vet them in some cases, because when you're dealing with complex environments like in Asia, you want to make sure that that.

10:34:12 --> 10:34:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: place that that person goes to seek advice is actually a vetted, trusted organization. But that is quite important, I think. Having… knowing that you can… your recourse or your next line of action is with someone or an institution that is.

10:34:27 --> 10:34:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: trusted, yeah. So, I'll just continue to pull on that emotional thread, right? So, one of the ways that we've tried to address this problem, or tried to, not address, tried to have an impact with this when it comes to the emotional piece, and I know AARP has done it as well with their peer support programs.

10:34:45 --> 10:35:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We're working with two nonprofits that are focusing in mental health and victim support after an individual has been victimized. So, one is fightcybercrime.org. They are an organization that has a 10-week peer support program for victims of romance and crypto frauds.

10:35:02 --> 10:35:21
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, if an individual has been victimized, they go through that 10-week free cohort with other individuals who have been through similar types of experiences, and it's led by a licensed, trained counselor. So, you're getting that mental health support throughout that period of time, you're connecting with a community of folks that have been through that same kind of.

10:35:21 --> 10:35:39
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: that same kind of challenge. Another organization that we're doing a similar type of work with is Give an Hour. Give an Hour is another national nonprofit in the mental health space. They have peer support programs for victims of financial fraud. They also, we work with them to try to train folks in the mental health.

10:35:39 --> 10:35:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Industry to be able to better support victims of financial fraud. A lot of times when you're talking to folks, whether it's social workers, whether it's a licensed counselor, mental health professional, when you say financial fraud, they're like, it's numbers. I'm not a numbers person, right? I went to school to.

10:35:55 --> 10:36:11
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: learn how to help people, so I don't know how to help this individual. But at the end of the day, it's that same emotional impact that you see in other disciplines. So we work to try to train mental health professionals to connect the dots. Just because you're not an expert in finance.

10:36:11 --> 10:36:27
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Doesn't mean that you can't help an individual that's experiencing grief, that's experiencing loss, that's experiencing different kinds of emotional manipulation. So, we're trying to really… to have an impact on that emotional side. We also know, so if we're talking about a younger individual.

10:36:27 --> 10:36:45
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: if they get victimized, say, in an investment-related scam at an early age, what kind of long-term impact is that going to have to our capital markets, right? So if I'm an 18-year-old and I lose what money I have to an investment-related scam, how likely am I to then go back out into the capital markets and invest in the future?

10:36:45 --> 10:36:50
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Right, so we're really trying to help rehabilitate from an emotional standpoint.

10:36:50 --> 10:36:52
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Those types of individuals.

10:36:52 --> 10:36:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent. Thank you so much. Other questions?

10:36:55 --> 10:36:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah.

10:36:57 --> 10:36:59
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Just say your name and then question.

10:37:00 --> 10:37:10
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'm Tom O'Malley. I'm trying to roll out a Scaminar, uh, education platform through Rotary Club. So, just for example, North Carolina, we have 227 clubs.

10:37:10 --> 10:37:14
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And I'm a former prosecutor, and so North Carolina's got North Carolina Department.

10:37:14 --> 10:37:19
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Pardon? Oh! Sorry, do I talk in this still?

10:37:19 --> 10:37:37
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So, I'm gonna roll out a Scaminars presentation through Rotary Club in conjunction with North Carolina Department of Justice and North Carolina Conference of DAs. So, for example, there's 227 Rotary Clubs in North Carolina. There's 43 DAs covering all the counties. You know, they have access to the local law enforcement, see scams every day.

10:37:37 --> 10:37:44
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Would FINRA participate in that sort of thing? So it's gonna be a combination of live, uh, remote.

10:37:44 --> 10:37:49
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Uh, hybrid, which is recorded and, uh, live sessions, and then on-demand.

10:37:49 --> 10:38:04
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I would say maybe we can connect afterwards and get a little bit more information on how that works. I mean, it sounds interesting. I know each state also has a state securities regulator that might be interested in being involved in something in that capacity as well, so I'd love to connect afterwards.

10:38:06 --> 10:38:09
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Other questions? We have about time for two more.

10:38:12 --> 10:38:13
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yes.

10:38:13 --> 10:38:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: You can just, I don't know how well this mic works in this context, if you just yell.

10:38:18 --> 10:38:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'm Chuck Bell from Consumer Reports. So there's another big network that philanthropy is involved in, which is called digital inclusion in the US. We haven't really finished our work on digital inclusion in this country.

10:38:33 --> 10:38:48
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: And in fact, the affordable broadband, subsidy went away for many people. But they operate networks of libraries and schools and technology centers, and are really present in people's communities to help them with problems that they have with the internet.

10:38:48 --> 10:38:55
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So I would say that that would be another table of funders that we should be networking with and trying to engage more in this work.

10:38:58 --> 10:39:02
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Great. Thank you. Any reflections on that?

10:39:03 --> 10:39:18
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: So I'll just reflect. I think that's a great idea. And I know we work with a variety of different local libraries to try to put out some kind of educational information. So for example, we work with the New York Public Library. I've been doing some work lately with the San Francisco Public Library as well.

10:39:18 --> 10:39:34
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: to get some of that educational material out to consumers, but I think you're right, there's plenty of room for us to continue to work in that space and leverage some of those networks in the community. Yeah, that's a really good point. AARP has offices all around the country in every state and territory, and they do a lot in the.

10:39:34 --> 10:39:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Local library community. And we have a national relationship with the, the nonprofit in the, in the library that they manage the bookmobiles. And so we've had this relationship and, and part of that is to let them know, you know, they're bus drivers. What's going on? You know, what is the scam of the day? And then when people get on the bus to.

10:39:56 --> 10:40:01
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: you know, rent a book or whatever, take out a book. They're also talking about fraud prevention.

10:40:01 --> 10:40:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: I'll just add, I think it's such a good point, and would love to talk more about it. The other thing I'll just add is, as Chase, we have branches and community centers all across the nation. I think I saw Darius, who heads up our consumer fraud and scams, is in the room.

10:40:17 --> 10:40:36
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, and, and he's a great resource. Um, but we also partner with community organizations. Um, we're partnering with OATS by AARP, uh, uh, this fall, um, to bring organizations into our community centers and our branches, um, and their public workshops on fraud and scam prevention. So that's just another, um, avenue that we take, uh, as well.

10:40:38 --> 10:40:41
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Great, thank you.

10:40:43 --> 10:40:56
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Hi, thanks so much today. I'm Christina Louie Dyer. I lead a smaller corporate foundation, and this has been so interesting. And one thing that I've been thinking a lot about is, I'm curious if there are…

10:40:56 --> 10:41:15
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: um, any organizations that you would put on corporate foundation radars who are thinking about, kind of, the intersection of policy, um, as part of the solution as well? Um, we've recently, uh, supported NEFSI, and I've looked at, you know, all this from, like, the data sharing angle, but there is so much around policy that I'm curious about from.

10:41:15 --> 10:41:17
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: the philanthropy perspective.

10:41:19 --> 10:41:35
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Yeah, I'll say from a philanthropic perspective, um, we, um, definitely support, um, policy recommendations. You know, we can't support direct lobbying, um, but of course, things like through GASA or the Aspen Scam, um, Leadership Group.

10:41:35 --> 10:41:57
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: We're thinking about how do we influence and, and think about and lift up policy recommendations, particularly as a collective of organizations. And so I think that's a really important component of the work. As, as a firm, we also support policy solutions that combat scams through a variety of different avenues through our like government relations and advocacy arm.

10:41:57 --> 10:42:06
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Um, but from a philanthropic perspective, that's the angle, and it's a very important angle to your point, which is, how do we lift up policy recommendations and influence the public sector?

10:42:08 --> 10:42:16
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent. Well, first of all, I want to thank everyone on the panel. Really appreciate you being here, really, and sharing your insights. So if we could all give them a round of applause.

10:42:17 --> 10:42:31
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Excellent, thank you. And of course, you know, we recognize that this discussion around the role of philanthropy is a really difficult one, and so we hope this kind of, uh, you can meet some other folks in the room, continue this conversation and the rest of this, uh, this conference. So, thank you all for attending, really appreciate it. Take care.

10:42:32 --> 10:42:33
Global Anti-Scam Alliance: Thank you, Nick.
