Transcript
Speaker: Sometimes it's a single mom. Sometimes it's a man who supports his parents. Sometimes it's just, every story has its own tragedy wrapped in it. And the way the victims come is they feel completely taken advantage of. For me, what keeps me going with this is they feel unheard. And that's just, that's not acceptable to me. I can't stomach the idea that they are trying to report a legitimate crime
Speaker: and nobody is hearing them. Have you ever heard about the term pig butchering? Do you know that there is a way to track and seize money lost to crypto scams? Scam Rangers, a podcast about the human side of fraud and the people who are on a mission to protect us. I am your host, Ayere Bigger Levine, and I'm passionate about driving awareness and solving this problem.
Speaker: Welcome to the second episode of Scam Rangers. Today's Scam Ranger is a force of inspiration to the law enforcement community and she will give us a front row seat into the recovery phase of a financial scam. Erin West has a passion for assisting victims and has spent 24 years as a deputy district attorney in Santa Clara County, California.
Speaker: She is a nationally recognized expert and a frequent speaker about the investigation and prosecution of cryptocurrency crimes. She currently focuses on educating state and local law enforcement about how to investigate pig maturing cases and how to seize cryptocurrency from international bad actors. Welcome to the podcast, Erin. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about this with you today.
Speaker: Thank you so much for coming. So wow, there's a lot to unpack here. Before we get into what a pig butchering scam is and why it is so different from scams we've seen before, let's hear a little more about what brought you to investigate these scams and train the community. So tell me a little bit about yourself and your work as it pertains to the topic of the human side of scams. I've been a prosecutor for going on 25 years in Santa Clara County.
Speaker: And I have had the opportunity to do a number of different assignments. I spent nine years in this sexual assault team, and it was there that I really developed a passion for helping victims. And for the past six years,
Speaker: I have worked with the REACT Task Force. It's a high -tech coalition of officers from a number of different state, local, and federal agencies, and we prosecute high -tech crimes. And for the past few years, I've really focused on the impact of these financial losses on victims.
Speaker: When did you decide to be focused or get involved in this topic of pig butchering scams and cryptocurrency scams in particular? What made you say, wow, this is crazy. I need to focus on this and put my all on these types of scams.
Speaker: It was probably March of this year that I first heard the term pig butchering. And I remember an officer saying to me, well, do you know what a pig butchering scam is? And I hadn't heard about it. He told me about it and then told me, but the problem is the offenders are often overseas. And so it's difficult for us to go after them. And so we weren't really sure how to tackle these pig butchering scams.
Speaker: I would say late April, early May, we became inundated with people who had experienced the scam and their stories are so compelling. The amount of the loss is so compelling that
Speaker: We at REACT thought that we needed to do something about this. And just because we wouldn't be able to put handcuffs on these offenders, that wasn't sufficient when we had victims experiencing such a terrible financial loss and the resulting emotional stress that they were feeling. So we thought, well, at REACT, we're really good at tracing cryptocurrency.
Speaker: We have a specialty and we've had the opportunity during our SIM swapping investigating days to get pretty conversant on how to operate within the cryptocurrency world. And we thought, well, what if we could help these victims by tracing their cryptocurrency and figuring out where it went and figuring out if we could get it back for them. Maybe we could make a difference in that way.
Speaker: And for these scams, we're talking about a lot of money, right, to distinguish between these scams and maybe romance scams or other types of scams. We're talking about between hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions for each victim. I think that's one of the differences that makes these stories so compelling is working fraud cases, we're very familiar with people who have lost
Speaker: you know, 50 to 100 ,000, even a little more in romance scams. What we have never seen before are victims losing literally every cent they have and then some. What we're seeing, and you asked me about victims that were compelling to me, is I remember one of the first victims I spoke to
Speaker: told me about this scam and how he liquidated his 401k. He liquidated his children's college accounts. And then one of the devastating parts of this scam is that
Speaker: When victims try to remove their money from the platform and cash out, they're told that they need to come up with another 20 % of their money in fresh money to pay taxes. In this particular case, the victim had been taken out a loan on his house and he had lost over a million and a half dollars. His marriage was at risk. His mental health was at risk.
Speaker: It's a level of devastation that I really hadn't seen before in a victim to really see that he's lost everything he has. Wow. And we'll talk a little bit more about the emotional state of victims further in our conversation. I want to make sure that everyone understands what these scams are. So I'll start by describing what a pig butchering scam is. And then I wanted to talk about your side and how you help victims.
Speaker: Pig butchering is a phrase that alludes to the practice of fattening a hog before slaughter. This technique originated in China, then went global during the pandemic. I'm sure most of you have received a random text from a stranger saying hi, or claiming to have reached out to someone else, or texting asking, whose number is this I had in on my address book? Which seems like good natured confusion, but these messages are step one in befriending the victim in this scam.
Speaker: Step two then is creating a relationship. The scammer starts a conversation with a potential victim to gain their trust. They will often initiate chats about life, family, and work and will ask questions to learn about the victim's lives so they can later relate to that to manipulate them.
Speaker: They'll fabricate details about their own life that make them seem very, very similar to the victims because people like people or like them. Step three is presenting a flashy, glamorous lifestyle and then explaining how you can have one too by investing in crypto. They often explain the reliability of an app called MetaTrader. This is a trading app that fraudsters use for these purposes.
Speaker: by pointing out that the app is available in the app store so it must be safe. Step four is showing small returns on investment and then convincing the victim to invest more and more. So initially they can cash out but later they invest larger and larger amounts. The criminal tells them while you want to see really big returns like I do you should invest more and they convince them to invest more and more.
Speaker: but then they can't get their money out and they tell them well if you want to get your money out you need to pay taxes just like you mentioned and what I've seen in many media outlets is the fact that scammers or criminals work very very hard to drain every possible source of funds that a person can bring like they'll really squeeze them out completely and convince them to take loans because once you catch this poor victim who's willing to participate
Speaker: and get the money, they'll just drain that person out completely.
Speaker: That's exactly right. I think that's what's so devastating about this, and it's so manipulative. It's a level of manipulation we've never seen before. And if you think about the way you described the initial contact and trying to fabricating evidence to appear that they're just like the victim, what they're doing during that time period is they're figuring out all the weak points of the victim. They're figuring out exactly how much money this victim has, what their obligations are,
Speaker: and what their sources of money are so that they can take every single piece of it. And it's a really targeted, evil approach. It's really meant to take every last sense. It's exactly the way you've said it, just to really squeeze that orange until there's nothing left.
Speaker: Yeah, so let's talk about something that you mentioned with the victim story. You talked about it earlier, the shame. I've been asking around and looking at reports to understand how many of these cases are really reported. And I've heard different numbers. I've seen between less than 7 % globally, generally for scams, all kinds of scams, not just these types of scams.
Speaker: But I think there's been even lower numbers for these types of scams. People are ashamed. They don't talk to their families. So I've heard numbers between one and three percent of victims report losses out of fear and shame. And even more devastating fact is that many people have taken their lives and they haven't shared with their families what's going on because they're so ashamed. They took money from their kids, as you mentioned in that story, for example.
Speaker: So you bringing up and talking about it and really educating is so, so important and thank you for that. And one of the goals for this podcast is really to encourage people to share, to report, to talk about it. Don't feel ashamed. It can really happen to everyone. So I wanted to ask you, if someone got scammed, what do they do? I know that if they call the bank, the bank will tell them,
Speaker: to report to the FBI, to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, also known as IC3, but then what happens next? What we tell scam victims is to definitely report to IC3. IC3 is the internet portal for the FBI and it's used by the FBI to select cases for investigation and to determine overall trends nationally and to determine what the volume of cases nationally.
Speaker: You mentioned a really important point about the low numbers of reporting. I think that what's happening with pig butchering scams in particular is it's hitting a lot of people who consider themselves to be somewhat astute about what they're doing. They think they're making a smart investment and they're basing it on, they have a relationship with someone who's doing well,
Speaker: and they can see their money doing well. And they think that they are engaging in a new technology and are benefiting from it. And when they find out that one, that technology, that these platforms they were relying on were complete scams from the get -go, and number two, that trusted friend that they were relying on or romantic partner that they were relying on was not real, they are humiliated.
Speaker: and devastated and are unlikely to report. And I heard when I was first working in this area, I was in contact by someone who said, you know, I know someone who is a psychiatrist and she doesn't want to report because she's afraid her patients will find out and believe her to be unreliable. I worked with a man who was in
Speaker: in financial investing and he really did not want his name out there because he was afraid he would lose clients as a result of this.
Speaker: And then there are just regular people who maybe are just in the beginning of their career and might be embarrassed to tell their parents. That concerned me that there were so many people out there who were afraid, shamed, nervous to report. So we've talked a little bit about reporting to the FBI and
Speaker: What's very important to me and my mission is to create a situation where those kind of people can go to their local police department and have the local police investigate. But I'll tell you, that's a, that's a tall order right now. And that's not something that's happening. I think that we're in the very initial stages of
Speaker: law enforcement being really competent with being able to investigate cryptocurrency cases. And so I heard repeated stories and continue to hear repeated stories from victims that they had gone to local law enforcement and were turned away or were told to report to the FBI. And when they reported to the FBI through this online portal, they never heard anything back. And so
Speaker: When we talk about the human side of fraud, we're talking about victims who are feeling really unheard. And that contributes to the overall devastation that they're in, that not only are they
Speaker: the victims of a terrible crime, nobody cares. Nobody understands it. Nobody's willing to help them. And, and that just, they just really feel alone. Yeah. And that just, that breaks my heart. And that's what feels unacceptable to me is that we need to have
Speaker: people they can report to that understand what the crime is and the ability to, to listen and to help them. So tell me a little bit about, let's take your county, for example, Santa Clara County. If someone comes to local law enforcement, I'm sure they know what to do there today. Tell me a little bit about the process there.
Speaker: Let's be clear, Santa Clara County is one of the best places to have this happen to you, but also there can still be opportunities where people report to our locals and our locals aren't sure what to do with it. But in an ideal world, they would report to their local agency. Their local agency would know about REACT, that's our task force. Our task force is five counties, it's Santa Clara County,
Speaker: It's sort of the South Bay of San Francisco area, a South Bay area. Their case would go to react where there are investigators who know how to scour the blockchain and determine whether the victim's funds have gone to a location where they are recoverable.
Speaker: The way the officers operate is they do initial triage on these cases to determine if there's anything we can do for that victim. And if so, the officers will write a search warrant and recover those funds, and then we will get those funds back to the victim.
Speaker: Okay, so I have to ask a question here. You talked about the blockchain, and I'm going to ask you about investigation tools in just a bit. But what really happens in these scams? Do they really use crypto? Do they just use a fake wallet? Or do they actually use the blockchain to transfer the funds?
Speaker: Yeah, so what really happens is the scammers will sit with the victim via text and they will send them screenshots of every button to push to make sure these happen. They will circle the button, send the screenshot so the victim can do actually exactly what the scammer wants them to do. And what the scammer wants them to do is to take their US dollars and put it into an exchange like Coinbase or crypto .com.
Speaker: And then they will guide them in moving those US dollars into a third party wallet, into the scammers wallet. What they believe is they believe that they are putting their money into an investment platform.
Speaker: But really, it's the scammers wallet. And what they are shown is a fake domain that leads them to believe that they have an account there and they have money there that's accessible and increasing in value. And just like you said, in the initial days, they will let them take out some money to give them some confidence in what's happening.
Speaker: But the money is gone as soon as it's put into this fake platform. They continue to see phony returns and that money, what's happening on the back end is the scammers have already moved it and moved it again and tried to hide it. But it's visible on the blockchain.
Speaker: What the detectives are looking for is for the crypto to hit a location where we can serve a search warrant and recover that money. Before we go into this further, I wanted to ask about the differences between the classic means of moving money in the old days versus this.
Speaker: So in the past when a scammer, sorry, when a cybercriminal conducted account takeover fraud or scam someone, they would have to have a money mule with a local bank account and then they would do a wire transfer globally and move that money. But they would always use money mules so they're not detected or because they can't open a bank account locally in the country where money is scammed from. And you add all these exchanges that you need to make between currencies.
Speaker: So this is a very different scenario because of crypto. You can use a multinational currency, right? And it's really interesting to see how they're leveraging the concept of crypto to really save themselves from all these exchange rates.
Speaker: You're absolutely right. And when we think of the traditional, say, pop -up scam on your computer, we saw those in the old days where you would need to send a check to someone in the United States to pay for it. And that's your money mule. And then that money mule would then move all that money overseas in whatever means they were doing that.
Speaker: That in order for the the American victim to feel comfortable They would write a check somewhere in the United States since that was their money mule in this situation from the get -go the the money
Speaker: They don't need to jump through as many hoops. The scammer can immediately take possession of that money and move it and use whatever tools they have to obfuscate it. Cryptocurrency removes a lot of the barriers that they once had. It's much smoother for scammers. Okay, so how does the React team investigate these types of scams and what can you find? Can you trace the money?
Speaker: React had a good start in knowing how to trace cryptocurrency from SimSwap. We did a lot of SimSwap investigations involving cryptocurrency. So we had a bit of a head start. Maybe we can give a brief explanation of what a SimSwap is and how it's connected to crypto.
Speaker: Sure. Just briefly, what a SIM swap is, is a SIM swap enables a hacker to take control of the incoming text messages and incoming
Speaker: calls to your phone. And why this matters is if you think about when you go to Gmail and you, you forgot password, you need a code from your phone. And so what would happen is the scammers would, what continues to happen, actually, is scammers get AT &T to send those codes to the phone that they're holding. So you lose cell service and text service. The scammer is getting your cell service and text service and is able to then take over your accounts.
Speaker: and move your cryptocurrency. It's a really dangerous, scary operation where people were losing millions of dollars that way as well. And they do that by socially engineering the workers at the telco companies and convincing them to provide them the SIM for the new phone that they got. Absolutely, yes. So how is that related to crypto? Is it multi -factor authentication for crypto that they took over?
Speaker: Yeah. Well, the end goal of SIM swapping is that once they get into your Google account, they go to your Google Drive or your Apple, your iCloud, and they're looking for where you keep your cryptocurrency. If they have access to your email, they're going to see an email from Gemini and they're going to know that that's where they need to go. And so what the SIM swappers figured out back in 2017, 2018 was
Speaker: that it wasn't that difficult to get into people's accounts and steal millions of dollars. And that's what they did. So when they would steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrency,
Speaker: that money would be gone. So React at that time investigated and arrested a number of SIM swappers. And when they made those arrests, one of the key elements in arresting them was to locate where that stolen cryptocurrency was and to get restitution for victims. We've always been really victim focused. So SIM swap was a gateway to learning how people were stealing crypto. So back to what the detectives do,
Speaker: is they will use commercially available blockchain tools. There are tracing tools. There's a number of companies that make these tools. Chainalysis is one of the oldest, and TRM Labs, Elliptic, there's a lot of them. And they enable users to input addresses and to determine the flow of the money. And so investigators are always looking to follow the money to figure out
Speaker: who's holding it and where it is. In the case of pig butchering, using these tools, the officers can see the money leave the victim account, go through various accounts. And when it ends up at a cryptocurrency exchange that is cooperative with accepting service of process, cooperative with accepting search warrants,
Speaker: then law enforcement can interrupt that, can disrupt that and take the money back and give it to victims. That's really interesting. So if the cyber criminal cashes out the money before the investigation is done, it's too late. So it's really important to report immediately. That's the bottom line. Wow.
Speaker: Oh, 100 % it's important and this is a speed game. I'd like people to think about how we can shorten the time between this happening to a victim and that report getting to a law enforcement officer who is interested and knowledgeable. That's the key element here is getting it done in a timely fashion.
Speaker: So I wanted to ask you a question. So you've put your hands on the money or managed to get a warrant and stop the movement of the money. Does that mean people are going to get their money back?
Speaker: Well, I am delighted to tell you that we just had a judge sign our first order authorizing us to return money to victims. So that is part of the blueprint for how to help these victims. The blueprint is get the victims in front of someone who knows how to trace, trace it, write the warrant and seize it, and then have a prosecutor get an order from the judge allowing
Speaker: the law enforcement to return that money back to victims. And so we've closed the loop on that and have been in front of a judge last week who authorized the return of money to victims. So now we feel as though we have it. We've got a playbook that is usable and workable and that we can continue to replicate this, teach it, and get money back to victims. We're very excited about this.
Speaker: This is great and I hope this blueprint will be used across the world but definitely across the US. What about unclaimed money? I'm sure you put your hands on a lot of money that is unclaimed because realistically most people don't report these scams.
Speaker: That is 100 % a very big problem. Often we can, when you were talking earlier about all the people who don't report, I can tell you that, you know, we've occasionally touched wallets that have a lot of money in them. And when I say occasionally, I would say,
Speaker: often we have our eyes on wallets that are a lot bigger than the victim claims. We know that that's bad money. We know that belongs to other victims. The State of California allows us to seize only the victim's money. We don't have an opportunity to seize that entire thing. I think the federal government may have better powers in that regard.
Speaker: But we could all certainly benefit from more victims reporting so that we can get that money in the hands of the right people and the people who've suffered the losses. So I heard you talk about the fact that in the past you've received cases of victims and you heard about their stories through reporting, but not so much interactions with the victims themselves.
Speaker: Recently, though, you've been very vocal about this phenomenon and the complexity of it, and you've been educating across multiple facets to drive awareness and find solutions. And now you've actually had victims reach out to you directly more often than not. And I wanted to ask you, how do you find these victims' emotional state? Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker: I think that's what continues to motivate the work is that I hear constantly, I'm trying to think of the right word, but I hear all the time from victims and each
Speaker: story is very familiar to me because I know it, but each story always has their own nuance that's devastating. Sometimes it's a single mom. Sometimes it's a man who supports his parents. Sometimes it's just, every story has its own tragedy wrapped in it. And the way the victims come is they, they feel lost. They feel very lost and completely taken advantage of. And
Speaker: For me, what keeps me going with this is they feel unheard. And that's just, that's not acceptable to me. I can't stomach the idea that they are trying to report a legitimate crime and nobody is hearing them. And so that's what motivated my work to bring
Speaker: people together to bring law enforcement together to educate and talk about this and collaborate because I really can't stomach these victims being alone and unheard.
Speaker: Yes, and let's talk a little bit more about the emotional aspect of the scam and how pig butchering is different from a classic romance scam. I think there are a lot of similarities, right? Someone is building a relationship and befriending the victim. And pig butchering is typically shorter in the time it takes to actually groom the victim. But what are some differences from your perspective between a romance scam and a pig butchering scam in the means and emotions?
Speaker: I would say with pick butchering, I think the element of opportunity to really better one's life for either their own personal benefit or for the benefit of their children or their family really motivates the high dollar amount.
Speaker: When we talk about dollar amounts, the dollar amounts vary. Someone can lose $40 ,000. Someone can lose $200 ,000. Someone can lose $2 million. But I think the effects are the same. The $20 ,000 was all that person had. And so the losses are the same mentally. I think that there is such a disappointment in what they thought they had, not only in terms of the money, but in terms of a relationship.
Speaker: And I think people generally coming out of COVID are feeling very lonely. And so not only are they feeling the loss of this huge financial situation that they thought they were set for life, and so the rugs pulled out from under them in that way, but they also are losing a dear friend. And we're finding quite often that
Speaker: They're more likely to believe that the scam is bad than they are that the person that they were dealing with is untrustworthy. They still might want to believe that that person's not part of the scam. That person's being scammed too.
Speaker: So I see the differences are just the volume, the huge volume of money. And I would say the speed at which it can happen too. It's like what you said, it's not the long, long getting 25 ,000, 50 ,000 out of someone. It's, it's at all, the whole thing can happen within a matter of weeks. And you've gone from being a regular person to being a devastated shell of yourself.
Speaker: Yeah, and on top of this, when you talk about classic romance scams, typically the scammers need to put in the time to build a relationship because of the way they cash out the money, which is typically saying they're in some form of trouble. Yes. And they say, okay, I need this money to get out and people are chasing me or I'm in the hospital or something bad happened. And of course, you're going to give money to save your loved one.
Speaker: But the scammers really have to walk the victims through every time they try to take money and say what happened now and what happens next. Whereas in these scams the motivation is not fear. In the investment scams the motivation is delight. It's the opportunity. So as you mentioned it's quicker to do because
Speaker: It's, oh, I have this great lifestyle, you can have it too. It's a different motivation, but I think the emotional devastation of a relationship is gone, the feeling of betrayal, that is very similar. The opportunity for criminal is much larger and they need to do less hand -holding, but the devastation is the same.
Speaker: Yes. Okay. So let's take a step back now and look across the scam lifecycle from the very beginning, the first message and all the way until the attempt of recovery. What do you think needs to happen to make a big change and significantly impact the ability of cyber criminals in the space and reduce the amount of scams?
Speaker: The number one thing we need to do is we need to demystify cryptocurrency. We need to educate local and state law enforcement that this is just a different form of money. It's still money. It still accounts. In fact, the transparency
Speaker: and immutability of the blockchain make this even easier for us. We can see the money in the way that we couldn't see it before. I've talked to so many officers who are like, oh yeah, that's crypto. I just can't. I'm not even going to get into that. The sooner we get people to realize it's not rocket science, it's not that complicated. And it's actually a fantastic way of being able to have visibility into where money is going the better.
Speaker: So we need to educate our law enforcement and demystify it. Number two, we need to keep talking about it, and we need to educate everybody about this new scam. I think we all are familiar with the Nigerian Prince idea, and we all know that that's a scam. And so we need to talk about this in that same way, so that we need to talk about it at dinner tables, we need to talk about it at soccer games, we need to talk about it
Speaker: You know at the water cooler work and make sure everybody knows. Oh have you heard about pig butchering? This is what it is Because the sooner everybody knows the sooner this will fail Yeah, I just wanted to share that you talked about soccer games I actually found myself explaining to a few parents at our last soccer game. What's extortion is? Thank you
Speaker: Thank you. That is another one of my things that we've just got to keep talking about because it's happening. And the thing is, it's happening to people you know. And that's another one where people don't want to talk about it. Extortion. So the FBI has seen a huge increase in the number of cases involving children and teens being threatened and coerced into sending explicit images online and then being blackmailed for money so these pictures will not be sent to their whole school.
Speaker: Let's talk about demographics for a second. Who is being targeted by the pig butchering scams? Oh gosh, that's an interesting point is it's hitting everybody. I will say a lot of my victims are Asian American. I would say a greater percentage of Asian American than other, but I will say it's hitting men, it's hitting women, it's hitting
Speaker: millennials, it's hitting elders. It's, it's, it runs the gamut. And I think their playbook is online, some of the scripts that they use. And it's, it's a very manipulative game, and it's designed to laser focus on whatever
Speaker: demographic they're working on and whatever point these victims find themselves in life. So you talked about demystifying crypto, teaching law enforcement about these scams and also educating the broader population. What else can be done? I would love to see the federal government take down these towers of human trafficked victims being required to conduct these scams in Southeast Asia. But short of that,
Speaker: If I can't do that, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep talking about it and I'm going to talk to everybody and I am going to educate law enforcement because that's the only way I know to make this stop. Let's summarize on a positive note. What are you hopeful about? I think if you had talked to me in June of this year, you would have been talking to a much different person. In June, I was hit with this major catastrophic
Speaker: destructive scam and it didn't feel like many other people were working on it. And where I find myself in December of this year is I started a coalition and it's 350 members strong of law enforcement. We exchange ideas on email.
Speaker: and it's enabled me to see that there are big brains working on this all over the United States and other really successful law enforcement making headway. We have guest speakers from Binance, from Chainalysis, from TRM, from Coinbase, and we see that this is a really collaborative community and we see that the public -private partnerships are not a bunch of lip service. We have
Speaker: people out there who want to assist and who want bad actors off of cryptocurrency platforms. So I see momentum. I see developing relationships with people like you who are all so passionate about this and showcasing issues like this. And, and I think stories are getting out, and I don't find myself quite as frequently in rooms where
Speaker: nobody's heard of pig butchering when I'm with law enforcement. So I feel like we should continue to build on that momentum and hopefully move this scam into the past and continue to focus on what's coming next. Erin, thank you for the great work and thank you so much for joining me today and talking about this really, really important topic and all the work that you do.
Speaker: Thank you so much. It was really a pleasure and I welcome any opportunity to talk about this and I'm really grateful to you for shedding some light on this. And I really like the three words that you iterate in every LinkedIn post that you put, those action words. Do you mind sharing those with us? Educate, seize, disrupt. Thank you so much again. Thank you.
Speaker: In the next episode of Scam Rangers, we will talk to Matt Friedman, an expert in modern slavery and human trafficking, to learn about the other side of the scam, the scammers themselves and their horrific reality, and how they might also be victims of organized crime.
