Pig Butchering

Trust is one of the most powerful and dangerous currencies that we have. Whether it's a phishing email, a romance scam or a human trafficking operation, the criminals behind it exploit some of the same dynamics; mainly that trust can be earned by playing to our emotions.

This is particularity true when it comes to this episode’s topic; the global crime of "pig butchering". The scam involves luring victims into fake romantic relationships, convincing them to invest in cryptocurrency schemes, and then stealing their money through fake investment platforms. It’s worth to add that the term is a violent term for a violent crime, and that financial grooming might be more fitting description.

This week’s guest, Erin West, spent 26 years as a district attorney, and the last few years she’s been exclusively working on these kinds of scams. She’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal about her work, testified before Congress and started her own non-profit (Operation Shamrock) focusing on educating about and disrupting transnational organised crime.

Erin explains how Chinese organised crime uses high-tech methods, including cryptocurrency, to defraud victims of their life savings, the link to human trafficking, and the surprising scale of it all.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:03

From our headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and on behalf of our host, Robby Peralta, welcome to the mnemonic security podcast.

Robby Peralta 0:15

Trust is one of the most powerful yet dangerous currencies that we have. It's what allows us to hand our child to a stranger on their first day of school. It's why we believe the voice on the other side of the phone. As long as they sound official enough. And it's why large chunks of our life savings can vanish with a single click. Or why someone can be convinced to board a plane to another country for what they think is a dream job, only to find themselves trapped, enslaved, and stripped of their freedom. Scammers, con artists, and even kidnappers understand something fundamental about human nature. That trust can be earned by playing to our emotions. And while we may differ in countless ways, we share the same psychological triggers. These forces are at work whether it's a phishing email, a romance scam, or a human trafficking operation. And while today's episode isn't about enterprise cybercrime, it's about deception, pressure, and control. Both in the digital and in the physical world. Erin West, welcome to the podcast.

Erin West 1:35

Good morning, Robby. I'm so glad to be here.

Robby Peralta 1:37

So I had the pleasure of meeting you at RSA. The most fantastic presentation about such a what's the opposite of fantastic, such a sad topic that we're going to discuss today. And that's pig buttering. I guess I could start there. Why don you like that term?

Erin West 1:52

Number one, they came up with this term. The bad guys call it Sha Zhu Pan. It's their term. Number two, it's violent. It's a violent term for a violent crime. This is no like, hey, we held you up at a gas station and took $200 from you. This is we are going to take away your entire life savings. It's absolutely a butchering. And then finally, the term gets attention. And that's my job right now is to make sure that everybody I know knows about pig butchering. And if I told people that I was going to do a podcast on financial grooming, I don't think a lot of people would be that interested. But if I say I'm doing a podcast about pig butchering, people will say, Oh, what is that?

Robby Peralta 2:35

Yeah, if you type in pig butchery on YouTube, it's literally half pigs and half of scam compounds and stuff. So we're gonna get to that. But before we get to that, because I know that you've been over there and I'm excited to hear some of your experiences over there. But I have to ask, you were 26 years as a district attorney. What kind of pivoted you over to this side?

Erin West 2:59

I loved being a prosecutor. I was a prosecutor for 26 years. I tried all kinds of cases, worked in a lot of different departments. The last eight years of my career as a prosecutor, I was attached to a high-tech task force that really worked on people getting money stolen from them in a high-tech way. And we were among the first to handle cases where cryptocurrency was stolen from people. And those numbers are massive. When people are stealing cryptocurrency, they have access to a lot of money in a way that they never had access to that type of you you really couldn't cash out someone's entire life savings in the way that you can when you get access to their cryptocurrency account. So I began to see how devastating the world was becoming for consumers, that bad actors could really clean them out. And as I as time went on in this assignment as a prosecutor doing high-tech crime, the amount of money getting stolen got even bigger and crazier. And ultimately, the last three years of my career, I was doing exclusively pig butchering cases where people were getting every penny they had stolen from them. And so I realized a lot of things as I sat there as a local prosecutor that this was an international crisis, that this was being run by Chinese organized crime, and that this was more than I could take on from my seat as a local prosecutor. At the time I left being a prosecutor, I had been featured in the Wall Street Journal about this work, and I had testified before Congress, and it felt like the right time to start my own nonprofit that focused exclusively on educating about, mobilizing against, and disrupting transnational organized crime. So that's how I find myself here today.

Robby Peralta 5:00

So you're mission-driven, I can assume.

Erin West 5:03

I am. You know, I've seen this problem, and I have not stopped working on it every single day since 2022 when I realized this is a big problem. And somebody asked me the other day, they're like, has it gotten worse or better since you started working on it? And I was, I said, exponentially worse, which is sort of a dis depressing thing. I will say that definitely we've made improvements in in a lot of different areas, but the fact is, transnational organized crime has only gotten worse. And we'll talk about what I saw in Southeast Asia, but like it's at a scale that is unprecedented. This is the global crime that is disrupting the entire world.

Robby Peralta 5:46

Bigger than the drug trade, they say.

Erin West 5:48

100% it's bigger than the drug trade. It is, we have never seen a situation, we've never seen a crime so completely lucrative that has not been touched, has really not been disrupted in any meaningful way. The numbers are insane. The numbers are tens of billions of dollars, generations worth of wealth being transferred into the hands of bad actors. And the results of where that money is going, there's nothing good happening from it. And yeah, not when you give money like that to really bad people.

Robby Peralta 6:24

Well, that's one thing we have in common. I've been in cyber for like 10, 10, 11 years, and I don't think it's gotten any better since I've been there. So we gotta just gotta keep going. We're doing something good. It would be worse if nobody was attempting to do something about it. So I was watching some YouTube videos about the history of how this even started. Like how, why places like Malaysia, why Cambodia, why all these certain countries? What happened?

Erin West 6:48

Yeah, so really I when I talk about this, I rewind the tape to just prior to COVID. And what we know is that there's an appetite in China for gambling, and there's no gambling allowed in China, and there's an appetite for cryptocurrency, and there's no cryptocurrency allowed in China. So what happened was Chinese organized crime started, and when I say that, I mean like literal known criminals who have been prosecuted for this type of work. And they decided to set up camp in Sihanookville, Cambodia. The concept was let's build some massive casino towers. It's not far from China. People can show up there. It'll be the next Macau. And so they built massive compounds that look a lot like college dormitories in this area, and they were ready for gamblers to come down there and enjoy this beautiful part of the world and also gamble. And COVID hit. And as COVID hit, people stopped traveling. So they've got these massive towers sitting empty, and they decided to pivot to a crime they call Sha Zhou Pan, pig butchering. The idea with that was let's use this office space we have. Let's convert these towers into boiler rooms where we will bring in people and they will begin a long-con romance scam slash cryptocurrency investment scheme. And it was really the perfect storm. Cryptocurrency was just picking up speed. Americans were interested, uh, other nationalities were interested in investments, and they came up with an amazing scheme where first they lure you into a romance, and it's the romance that you always wish you had. They use really psychological, really uh uh advanced psychological techniques to make you believe that you are in the relationship of your life. And the person that you're in this relationship with is also quite wealthy. And the reason they became that wealthy, they tell you, is because they invested in cryptocurrency and they will teach you how to do it. And so that's how it all began. It began with these uh boiler rooms in Canookville, Cambodia, but to fill them, they deceived workers. They, just in the way they deceived the victims of this, they led people to believe with a 20% unemployment rate in Southeast Asia that they could get jobs in white-collar live-work facilities. And so people came thinking they had a legitimate job only to find that they had actually been human trafficked and they were now being forced to work 16-hour days doing these scams.

Robby Peralta 9:35

How do they trick them? It's a cryptocurrency investment scheme. I I can understand the love angle, but like what are some of the really tricky and sort of innovative ways they are able to trick people into investing there or getting the keys to the kingdom, yeah?

Erin West 9:49

Yeah, I didn't understand it either. It's really difficult to understand the concept that somebody is that you would willingly move all of your money into something. So let me explain how it happens step by step. A uh this long con romance scam happens, which you get, and that during that during that long con, the scammer is showing you pictures of themselves on expensive travel and enjoying the finer things in life. And so you are already predisposed to the idea that the person you are with has made a lot of money in cryptocurrency. So then when they offer to teach you how to do it, you think, okay, I know it works because it worked for my love interest. Then the step by step, they will say, I know you're nervous about this. So let's start with just something that's a little bit of money to you. Now they'll they'll know because they've been talking to you for four months, four hours a day. And then when I say talking, I mean primarily texting, that they know exactly how much money you have and where your money is. And they don't ask it at on day one or day 12. Like they they develop this relationship with you where you feel comfortable sharing that information. So they'll take your $10,000 and they you'll have $10,000 in your own personal checking account, and they'll say, okay, let's move that money into a cryptocurrency account. Then they will help you open step by step, screenshot by screenshot, how to open a cryptocurrency account at some place that is a US-based legitimate exchange, like Kraken or Gemini, CoinbaseCrypto.com. From there, you own the account. It is all your money. They will teach you screenshot by screenshot how to take your US dollars and transfer them into Tether or USDT. And so that's one of the stable coins that everyone is talking about right now. And that will seem not that difficult in the way that the scammer is showing you. You're just going to change, you're just really changing your US dollars for poker chips. That's all it is. It's not that complicated. And it's one-to-one, one tether to one US dollar. You still own the money. Now, here's where your money gets stolen. They'll say, My uncle says it's a good time to make that cryptocurrency investment. Here's what you we're going to do. I'm going to show you how to move your money out of your crypto.com account into this investment platform that my uncle says is the one to use. That's where your money gets stolen. Your money leaves your crypto.com account and you think it's going into an investment platform. Now, the enemy is incredibly sophisticated. So the account that you're looking at online will have a website. It will look legitimate. It will look indistinguishable from crypto.com. You will have no reason to believe that this is fake, but it's completely fake. You move your money from your account into this platform, but the fact is it's that's when it's stolen. They've taken it. There's no money in this platform. This platform is just a charade, but the charade will show you that your $10,000 is now $12,000, is now $16,000, $18,000, and before the end of the week, you have $20,000. And you think you have hit the gold mine. You have a love interest that is incredible. You're going to get married, you're going to share a wonderful life together, and you just doubled your money in a week. This thing really works. And so they prey on people who don't know a lot about cryptocurrency, which is most of the world right now, which is why this works so well for them. And then slowly by slowly, they get you to put more and more of your money in there. And when you become nervous about putting more money in, that's when they'll use tricks like, oh, okay, my uncle says that there's a really good opportunity, but we have to put $100,000 in. And you might think, oh, that's more than I wanted to do. And the scammer will say, Oh, well, I'll put $50,000 in with you and we'll do it together. And then you think, well, why would my love interest put money into something that's risky? So of course this is legitimate. And so at the end of the day, you're putting your real money in with their fake money. And now it looks like all of a sudden you've got a half a million dollars in this account, and you think, oh my God. And you can tell your friends that that's how it happens. And then they talk you into liquidating everything you have because of this exponential increase that you absolutely believe. And so by the time people get to me, they really believe that they have a million dollars, a million and a half dollars in these accounts. And they are not at all aware that this whole thing was smoke and mirrors.

Robby Peralta 14:42

Yeah. And on their side, they just have this platform that they're just asking their buddy to like make the numbers bigger by this much, whatever, right? That's exactly right. Ow. Yep. Yeah. And I know that you have a podcast, um, which is now on my list. I didn't know that you had your own podcast because I always see you getting tagged in everybody else's podcast. But now it's called Stolen. So now I have something fun to do for the rest of my vacation. Thank you. Uh oh, good. I'm glad. One of the episodes I know that it was about somebody's story from their side. And I want to ask you, is there anything surprising about the people that you've asked or you've interviewed so far? That like I a lot of people would assume, okay, they're, you know, they're elderly, they're not so smart, which I don't think that you would agree with, right? So what what surprised you with your discussion so far?

Erin West 15:21

This is happening to everyone, all ages, both genders, uh, very smart people. So one of the episodes I and I I want to acknowledge for your listeners that I get it. Like this sounds crazy. If you are hearing about this for the first time, you think, I don't think that would happen to me. It's crazy to me that these people are putting all of their money in. And I I totally understand that. And in fact, I had the same idea when I first started hearing about this as a prosecutor. On one of my episodes of the podcast, I talked to Karina. And Karina is in her mid-40s. She's an attractive woman. She's an athlete. She has a PhD. She's super smart. She's very much like a lot of people that you know. And for me, it was seeing someone that seemed like me that this happened to where I was like, oh, okay, now I get it. What Karina tells is she tells step by step how she got there. And I think it's really helpful to listen to the story of someone who got there to see, like, okay, now you have now he says he can't meet you in person. Okay, how do you deal with that? Why is that okay with you? Why, why do you let that go? Uh and and then she explains that there was a whole thing he told her about how his parents, uh, you know, his dad was stationed abroad and they didn't meet each other for a while, and they had these beautiful love letters that they wrote to each other, and he wanted to get to know her that way. And I and you think, oh, okay, I I could see how you might believe that. What happened to me is that in listening to these stories, you realize these scammers, this is not their first time doing this. This is being done on an industrial level, and they do this all day, every day. So they already know what the resistance is going to be and how they're going to defeat that resistance. And so when you listen to someone who's been through it, you kind of begin to understand that this could happen to people I know. And I'll tell you right now, the statistics show us this is happening to people you know. That you know someone who has lost money in some way through one of these scams, whether it's the job scam, the pick up a package at UPS scam, the you have a ticket that you haven't paid for, you need to pay for this toll. Like they're coming at us every way, every day. It it's every demographic.

Robby Peralta 17:52

And so on the other flip side of this, a lot of people would think like, oh, those those assholes, horrible people, right? And that's just what I thought. Everybody, of course, thinks that until you hear about how that person got there. So why don't you tell us about what it is? Was it uh is it all the people that are on that side, most of them?

Erin West 18:11

It's a good chunk of people. So what what you're alluding to is the fact that the people on the other side of the phones have been human trafficked. A good chunk of them. There are definitely, as the scale of this gets bigger, there are definitely willing participants who are making big money doing this. But the origin of it and where it still is in great part now is being run by human trafficked workers. And uh I thank you for bringing up my podcast because I there's an episode that dropped today, and it's an interview with a human trafficked worker who is now back home in Uganda, and it explains what happened to him and the level of violence that is going on inside these compounds. These people aren't doing this work willingly. It is a soul-crushing enterprise to be in the business of making someone fall in love with you so that you can steal all of their money. And so, in order to make people do that work, you have to threaten them with electric batons. You have to beat them with baseball bats. My guest Mwesi, well, he goes by small Q. He is uh also a gospel singer. Small Q will tell you that if he didn't hit his targets, he would get, he would get slapped and he would get beaten. And it is a desperate situation for the majority of people who are on on the other side of your phones. And this is in contrast to what we usually what we've heard about. We've heard about Indian call centers, we've heard about Nigerian boiler room scammers. This is something totally different.

Robby Peralta 19:45

I don't know uh the details about like how they get there. I know that they're going there for some sort of job. Is it like a similar job that they're all applying for? Like they're smuggled into countries that they didn't really uh land in, like it come come from Thailand, or yeah, want to tell us a little about that.

Erin West 20:00

So the story of the victims on my podcast today, he talks about he lived in Uganda and he was running an internet cafe. He was making about a hundred US dollars a month. Some Ugandan comes in and tells him about a job opportunity abroad where he could earn $1,000 a month, $1,200 a month. And he thinks, I could go do that for six months and make a ton of money for my family and come back here. He is led to believe that he's getting a job working as like a cashier in a grocery store, is what he says. And he's led to believe that he's going to live and work in a nice facility and make big money. So he gets an airline ticket to Thailand and he thinks it's in Thailand. And when he arrives, uh, there's someone there to pick him up and he he knows he's in Bangkok and he knows the job is in Bangkok, but all of a sudden he's being driven hours away.

Robby Peralta 20:54

They even had a little name tag for him, right? Like come.

Erin West 20:57

Yes, yes. They are being recruited from countries where it's it's inexpensive to uh to well, uh I would say the the disparity in what they can make in their home country and what they can make in this situation is enough that they will happily uproot their lives for a little bit. But what they find when they get there is their cell phone. I mean, the the story he tells of like he's being driven, he's getting no sleep, he's being moved, he's and ultimately he finds himself driven into a compound with guys with guns, and he's like, what is happening? And he realizes, oh my God, I've been trafficked into a facility where I am now a scammer. And it's heartbreaking and and gut wrenching to hear how this is happening at scale. It's happening today. Somebody's being picked up in Bangkok and being moved to Myanmar. Somebody's being picked up in Bangkok and being moved to Cambodia.

Robby Peralta 21:58

And you've been there. How was it

Erin West 22:00

It's I needed to see it for myself. When I first started hearing about this in 2022, I, you know, it's funny, as a prosecutor, one of the one of the most important things I did with each of my cases was that went to trial is I would go see the crime scene. It's really important to understand the crime scene, to be able to respond to whatever happens in the courtroom that you realize, oh no, that couldn't happen because I've been there and this is different. Let me ask a different way. And what I was hearing about the scale starting in 2022 of what was happening in Southeast Asia really uh was beyond belief for me. Like I really couldn't even imagine these massive buildings housing slaves being forced to do this work. And I had a really unique opportunity to go with some experts, some Southeast Asian experts, to go look at what is happening. And the first trip, uh, I went a number of times before this, but the first trip to the compounds was to the ones on the in Myanmar that you could see from the Thai border.

Robby Peralta 23:05

Is that KK Park or?

Erin West 23:06

Uh-huh. It's KK Park and Shui Coco. Shui Coco looks like Las Vegas from the other side of the river, but KK Park is the original compound built to house human like this this setup was built for the exclusive purpose of scamming the rest of the world and using human trafficked workers to do it. And the scale is insane. They took me up to a bluff overlooking the park, and it's literally like you move your head, uh, you rotate your head 180 degrees, and that's all you can see is this compound of big buildings housing slaves. It's incomprehensible. And I needed to see it for myself to really, I was agitated about this whole thing before, but to see it in person really ups the scale. When you see it, you think, oh my God, I can't imagine that this is happening in 2025. I am close enough to throw a rock and hit one of the buildings over there, but there's nothing I can do about it as I sit right here in Thailand.

Robby Peralta 24:04

Right. And I also looked a bit into that. And it was something about civil war, and then those that got to run that side of the country, like they were like military, I don't know, call them paramilitary, and now they have friends in China with lots of money, and boom. Is that what happened?

Erin West 24:19

Yeah, you're not far off. It's militia groups that are running Myanmar. And so that's exactly what's happening is that Chinese organized crime has set up camp in in Myanmar. And the fact is that there's just so much money in this that you can buy access and you can buy the ability to run these horrifying campuses of torture because there's so much money. And as a result, you can pay people when when there's no organized government and when militia groups are running the space. I was just gonna say a similar thing's happening in Cambodia. There are ruling elites that are that are part of enabling this to flourish in Cambodia. And when I went to Cambodia, I was stunned by the amount of massive structures operating this business in full view. It's very much uh an industry that is dominating the GDP of Cambodia.

Robby Peralta 25:25

Yeah. So Cambodia is a little different situation than Malaysian, than I would assume.

Erin West 25:31

Yeah, it is a little different. In Cambodia, there is a government that claims even in the last week, they've said that they are cracking down on this and they've raided a few facilities. And when they talk about raiding a few facilities and arresting a thousand or two thousand people, what we know, what we knew back in 2023 is there was an estimate of 120,000 people in captivity. So if you do a raid and you wrestle up 2,000 people, that's not it's 2% or you know, a little less than 2% of what's happening in the country. So there's a lot of smoke and mirrors about what's happening because quite honestly, there's just too much money in it for people to want to actually crack down on what's happening there.

Robby Peralta 26:16

Right. And there has been some crackdowns there. Like I was reading something about the Philippines, that they were like cutting internet access. Like, is there any success stories that like a country has actually listened to what's going on, gotten over the corruption and the monies part of it, and actually moved on? Or is that we haven't gotten that far with our success story yet?

Erin West 26:34

I would say, I would say we are getting, we are marching that way in some locations. And the Philippines is a really good example of what can happen when a part of the government is enabled to go and raid scam centers. So uh I've been to the Philippines, I've been inside some of their rated scam centers, and one of them was 35 buildings. I mean, that's the size of a Santa Clara County tech campus. And so what they've done, while uh while there's definitely room for improvement, what they've done is they've cost these uh organized criminals access to a 35 build a 35-building compound. Like that was an expensive construction. And what they've done is they've made it more expensive, more difficult, more time consuming to run these this dirty business in their country. So that's a success.

Robby Peralta 27:32

Yeah. I saw I think it was one of your videos that they had removed, they started removing infrastructure bridges and things. Was that been everybody?

Erin West 27:42

Yeah, I'm not familiar with that. But what I do know is is yeah, in taking away the physical property, now they've got to find somewhere else to do this and they've got to find new people because the people they had got uh deported. So it's it's a pretty big bump on their road to stealing money.

Robby Peralta 28:01

Right.

Erin West 28:01

But I'll look at the instrument the infrastructure question. I'm sorry. Yeah, so they they did start doing that at the Myanmar Thai border. They cut off electricity and they cut off phone service, but quite honestly, it was three years too late. I mean, I appreciate that work, but but now they're ready for it. They if you stand on the border now, and I've been back since they've cut the electricity and and cell service, you can hear the massive generators. They prepped for this, they knew that day would come, and so they're operating under generator power. And the same thing, and actually, I love to bring up this piece of it because it matters, they're enabled by Starlink now.

Robby Peralta 28:41

Yeah.

Erin West 28:41

They and so we've got American companies enabling this dirty business. And so when we think about a global response to this and what can be done, certainly pressure could be put on the American companies that are allowing this to benefit from their technology.

Robby Peralta 29:02

I don't know if you can answer this, but it just baffles me that a post from I'm sure that Starlink has been made aware of this long before this conversation we're having, and that it's still happening. What is do they have any excuse? What I don't understand.

Erin West 29:19

So when I started to realize that this was happening, and the way I found out about it was somebody inside one of the compounds was writing to us and saying, hey, uh they're using Starlink. If you could get Starlink turned off, you could you could stop this. And so uh with the approval of the district attorney, I wrote a letter to the general counsel for SpaceX, no return. And then just about a year ago, I someone from Wired magazine reached out and said, Hey, didn't you reach out to Starlink? And I said, I did. And we talked about that letter, and then they published a story about it. But really, that's that's kind of the extent of the pressure that's been put on Starlink.

Robby Peralta 30:02

Wow. I just don't, I just uh I don't get it. Is there any sort of like, okay, it can't be that much money, or maybe it can't be just about money. Like it can't be. Right.

Erin West 30:12

Life can't be about money. And and I think, Robbie, that's what breaks my heart about this whole thing, is that there are people who are becoming incredibly wealthy from this dirty business. And a lot of them live in the United States as well. And there are there are corporations that are benefiting from the traffic that goes through their websites. And and it cannot be all about money when we are talking about handing over a generation's worth of wealth to organized criminals who are then using that to buy our real estate out from under us in the United States and buy property adjacent to sensitive locations in the United States. We're literally asleep at the wheel as bad actors are destroying our way of life little by little. And by the time we wake up and realize it, we are going to find out that nation states own large chunks of our country. It's a really desperate situation financially, but it's also desperate in the fact that person by person, we are destroying trust in government and trust in industry. And that will have a devastating impact for decades to come. We will study this in history.

Robby Peralta 31:30

Yeah. No doubt. Well, this short-term profit chasing uh needs to uh need to change someday. But that's uh that's for another another uh podcast, I believe.

Erin West 31:42

I know I kept yeah, I was just gonna say I kept hoping that uh that there would be a a moral compass that would help guide us the right way. And so uh when that fails, we have to look for other ways to to push to to really make a difference here.

Robby Peralta 31:59

I always thought that if you had all the money in the world, if you're the richest person in the world, that you would do good. But yeah, then I grew up. So one side of the coin is, you know, uh because if everybody was fully informed of this and knew that, okay, there's scammers doing this technique and this is happening to me, that is a way to stop it, just by informing everybody. And I know you're trying your best. Another way to stop it is to crack down on the kingpins, right? The governments, the the corruption. I see why you're doing the uh the enlightening part because that government cracked down, that's probably never gonna happen. Can you explain why? Like what I know that you you come from like law enforcement, right? And I know that I see your friends with Kevin Hendricks. Shout out to Kevin. Uh I know that there are law enforcement out there trying their best to do this, but why has that I guess you have to have a counterpart because the U.S. jurisdiction is not in Southeast Asia, I guess.

Erin West 32:52

Here's what I'll say about that. I think there are plenty of opportunities to actually do something about this with law enforcement. Um when we think about who these bad actors are, they are people who travel. They are people who will want to take their kids to Disneyland who perhaps will have kids to go to college in the United States. Uh, they go to Sydney, they go to London. And so there are opportunities if someone were to build a case against them to intercept these people in locations where they could be extradited to the United States. I think there is a fear, and I understand it because I've been in this for three years fighting this, that if I can't win this, then I'm not really sure I want to get involved. And I think that you can't win if you don't try. And so this crisis is so massive that we can't get stuck on the idea of this seems too hard. I don't speak Chinese. That seems like a lot of documents that I'm gonna have to go through that are written in Chinese. It seems in incredibly difficult to do that. But I'll tell you that there are pockets of people who are regular people all over that are trying to piece this together that could really benefit from a national leader holding people accountable and and requiring the disclosure of evidence that we know could tell us how this is getting paid for and who's benefiting from it. There's no question that there are entities in the United States that are holding all of that information and know who is behind this. And it I think it just takes someone with the audacity to think maybe I could, maybe I could make a change here and I'm gonna build that criminal case.

Robby Peralta 34:51

Well, we see from the cyber world and like ransomware, right? Naming and shaming those individuals that does have an effect, even though you can't arrest them in your own backyard.

Erin West 34:59

Right. Yeah.

Robby Peralta 35:00

Yeah.

Erin West 35:00

Agreed.

Robby Peralta 35:02

I remember when at RSA you kind of had like a call to action for everybody in the room. What is that call to action for? I mean, a lot of the listeners were most of us are cyber nerds that have heard about these sort of things before. And like, you know, I I talked to my parents about it. My mom and dad are uh they listen to the podcast, they say I'm not sure if they actually do, but they're paranoid, so they've like, you know, made it so that you can't sim swap them and stuff. So I know one thing is just to talk to your family about these sorts of things. What else would you recommend?

Erin West 35:31

Sure. So I started a nonprofit. It's called Operation Shamrock. It's at operationshamrock.org. And I would encourage you to look through that website and just familiarize yourself with what's happening out there. But the call to action is that we need to assume that every unsolicited electronic communication we are getting is a scam until proven otherwise. And you know what happened to me yesterday? I got an email from UPS saying that I had a package, and I was like, oh, sure I do. And then I looked at it and I was like, oh, I legit do have a package at my P.O. box. So but that was good. Like I came at it skeptically of like, no, I don't. Oh, actually I do. So we need to, we need to change our mindset. And our mindset needs to be they are trying to scam me because they are all day, every day. And that, so start with that recognition. Number two, then start telling everyone you know that that is happening. And you would be surprised the impact you can have just from telling your friends and becoming the new expert on the crime wave out of Southeast Asia that you can make a difference. And the third thing is if you really want to make a difference, um, we have train the trainer classes at Operation Shamrock. We have a slide deck that we will happily download to you. And um come sit with us for an hour with a hundred of your closest friends who are learning how to do this as well, and get our slide deck and go go show it at your uh at your book club, show it at um, you know, your triathlon meeting, like whatever it is, like get the word out because the I I've seen Southeast Asia. That's not getting shut down anytime soon. And so with that in mind, what can we do to keep ourselves safe?

Robby Peralta 37:15

Right. Have you, I know you've been meeting a lot of trainers. What how like what has been like uh what success stories can you share from the trainers that uh like what's the best arena to do these sort of enlightenment I did mine at like Christmas dinner, you know, or like any opportunity I could, but yeah.

Erin West 37:31

Yes. Uh I talk to everybody, I talk to every Uber driver I talk to, every person that sits next to me on a plane, and um and they always they general well one of two things. What one response is like that would never happen to me, or the other response is that it happened to me or my brother or my cousin. So there's ways to work through each of those. But the success stories are this. And where my colleagues are having success is is going to the library and asking for an opportunity to do this presentation. And I would say I have never done that presentation, and my colleagues who do it, I've never done that presentation without getting a reach out from someone who is a victim who is not yet disclosed. That's how goodest this is. And so I think when people find that there is a, I mean, let's let's be honest about this. People that this is happening to are not getting a warm reception when they go to law enforcement right now.

Robby Peralta 38:25

Heard about that. It's horrible.

Erin West 38:26

So, right. So if we if they find that there is a warm place for them to tell their story, they want to tell that story and they want to understand what options they have and they want to, they want to be safe in the future. And so I think providing my work is all about building community, and it's all about building community to learn how to trace cryptocurrency or learn how to educate bank tellers about this or how to tell your community. It it's about building safe places for people to be uh, as my boys would say, noobs about this and say, I don't know how to trace cryptocurrency. Can you put me in a in a community that will help me do it? Or this happened to me and I don't know who is safe to talk to about this.

Robby Peralta 39:16

Right. And I would assume that part of your efforts were towards law enforcement, right? For them to understand, like, hey, when you're talking to somebody that's gone through this, number one, don't be an asshole. I guess that from the cop side, they're kind of thinking, like, why would you do that? Number one, and number two, what what do you want me to do about it? But yeah, I guess this is happening to so many people that they should uh make a playbook out of it, I guess.

Erin West 39:39

Yeah, I think that's the thing, is that um you've totally nailed the the law enforcement response frequently. And what I've done is I've built this crypto coalition. We started with 85 members of law enforcement. We're now up to 25 members of local, state, federal, and international law enforcement who are fully educated about what this is and what to do and how to how to take the report from that victim, what you need to know from them, and then how to trace that cryptocurrency. So little by little, we are making progress in that arena, but I am fully cognizant that most law enforcement agencies you walk into today, you might get a response like that.

Robby Peralta 40:21

Well, is anything that you're working on moving forward that you think is exciting besides the stolen podcast, which I'm looking forward to listening into?

Erin West 40:29

Yeah. So just real quick about the stolen podcast, there are a lot of uh fancy highbrow crypto podcasts and cyber podcasts. Uh this is all about um I I want my aunt to be able to understand what this situation is, and I want her to understand why she should care about it. And so you're going to meet the people who are in the weeds doing this work every day, and they're going to tell you about what they're seeing. They're going to tell you from the perspective of a police officer in Minnesota what's happening with crypto crypto ATMs. They're going to tell you from the perspective of someone who works in blockchain tracing, like, here's what that means in a way you can understand it. And then people who are being hurt by it, victims on both sides of it. So I think it's a great way to just acquaint yourself with what is literally the largest crime that most of the world doesn't know about.

Robby Peralta 41:21

Well, Aaron West, thank you so much for everything you do to prevent that from happening. And I wish you the best of luck. You and Operation Shamrock. And I will share all the uh the podcast, the uh, the great uh content that you put out there. There's so much of it, and I'm so appreciative of it. Thank you so much for your time here today.

Erin West 41:38

Thank you for having me.

Robby Peralta 41:42

Well, that's all for today, folks. Thank you for tuning in to the Mnemonic Security Podcast. If you have any concepts or ideas that you'd like us to discuss on future episodes, please feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn or to send us the mail at podcast at mnemonic.no. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.