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Pragmatically Ambitious: Breaking the Finger-Pointing Cycle to Stop Scams, A Conversation with Kate Griffin, Kate Griffin, Director of Inclusive Finance at the Aspen Institute
133 Plays19 hours ago
In this episode of Scam Rangers, Ayelet Biger-Levin joins Kate Griffin, Director of Inclusive Finance at the Aspen Institute, to discuss the monumental work of the National Task Force on Fraud and Scam Prevention. Over the past year, Griffin has led a diverse coalition of 80 institutions, ranging from financial giants like JPMorgan Chase and Capital One to tech leaders like Google, Meta, and Apple, to develop a unified strategy against the global scam epidemic.
Griffin pulls back the curtain on the "ambitiously pragmatic" approach required to bring competitors and government agencies to the same table. She explores the delicate balance of inclusive finance, explaining how fraud prevention measures can inadvertently create barriers for low-income households. The conversation covers the task force's strategic decision to bypass the "blame game" of liability to focus on immediate prevention, the role of cross-sector information sharing, and the emergence of the Southeast Asian Scam Center Strike Force. This episode provides a high-level look at how policy, private sector action, and human values are converging to dismantle the business model of modern scammers.
Key Takeaways: A New Era of Cross-Sector Collaboration
- The "Yes And" Moment: Griffin highlights that while progress in private sector investment and government policy is worth celebrating, the fight requires sustained, concerted action across the entire scam lifecycle.
- Neutral Facilitation: The Aspen Institute’s role as a neutral third party allowed for "hard conversations" between sectors like telcos and banks that often point fingers at one another.
- Bipartisan Momentum: Fraud has become a rare point of total bipartisan agreement in Washington; the scammers "do not ask who you voted for," leading to the creation of the Stop Scams Caucus in Congress.
- The Scam Lifecycle Framework: The task force’s recommendations are organized around the scam lifecycle, focusing on suppressing activity, disrupting infrastructure, and empowering victims through better response and support.
- Pragmatic Policy: The episode details how the task force's work influenced the U.S.’s first-ever national strategy for financial inclusion and continues to brief Capitol Hill on drafting future anti-scam legislation.
For more information about the task force visit: https://fraudtaskforce.aspeninstitute.org/
Read the national strategy document: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/671a80aa4a84f2359ce4d360/t/690e1fe9c5c80642162575a5/1762533353206/FraudTFReport_Digital_Final+%282%29.pdf
Follow Kate Griffin on LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/katedgriffin/
About the Host
Ayelet Biger-Levin is the Founder and CEO of RangersAI and the host of Scam Rangers, a podcast exploring the human side of scams and the people working to protect consumers from financial and emotional harm.
Through her work at RangersAI and her leadership within the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, Ayelet partners with financial institutions, policymakers, and advocates to elevate scam prevention beyond controls and technology toward trust-based, customer-centric protection.
Be sure to follow her on LinkedIn and reach out to learn about her additional activities in this space:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayelet-biger-levin/
RangersAI: https://www.rangersai.com/
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Transcript
Founding of the Aspen Institute
00:00:01
Speaker
The Aspen Institute is a 75-year-old nonprofit that was founded in the wake of World War II. And a group of corporate leaders came together and said, these were some of the worst atrocities known to humankind. And as pillars of society, as leaders in the private sector, don't we have a job to do to ensure things like this never happen again?
00:00:23
Speaker
And they came together to really talk about what values-based leadership means and how to put that into practice. And over our 75-year history, that's really been a through line that we are an organization focused on values-based leadership and the ways that leaders can truly create a better society.
Leaders' Responsibility in Preventing Harm
00:00:43
Speaker
When we talk about scams, we often talk about tactics, the psychology, the technology, the money lost. But underneath all of that is a deeper question. What responsibility do leaders have when harm is happening at scale?
00:00:56
Speaker
Online scams are now one of the largest transfers of wealth from everyday people to criminal networks in history. They erode trust. They destabilize families. They undermine confidence in institutions.
00:01:09
Speaker
And solving this isn't just a product problem. It isn't just a regulatory problem. It's a leadership problem.
Introduction of Kate Griffin and Fraud Prevention
00:01:17
Speaker
Today's guest, Kate Griffin from the Aspen Institute, helped convene banks, tech companies, telecom providers, law enforcement, and policymakers to build the first cross-sector national strategy on fraud and scam prevention in the United States.
00:01:34
Speaker
Welcome to Scam Rangers, a podcast about the human side of fraud and the people who are on a mission to protect us. I'm your host Ayelet Bigger Levine, and I'm passionate about driving awareness and solving this problem.
00:01:53
Speaker
Today's Scam Ranger is someone who's been researching how we can do better in the U.S. and globally with regards to our controls against online scams. I'm so excited to have Kate Griffin, Director of Inclusive Finance at the Aspen Institute. Kate has been serving as a Director of the National Task Force on Fraud and Scam Prevention. And I've had the honor to observe Kate and work with her a little bit over the
Aspen Institute's Role in Inclusive Finance
00:02:21
Speaker
past year. Kate, welcome to the podcast.
00:02:23
Speaker
Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be a scam ranger. You truly are. And today we'll talk exactly about the the different aspects of your work in the past year, you and your team. Definitely, it took a village there and you had many, many participants as part of the task force. Before we dive into that, I wanted to talk a little bit or ask you a little bit about the Aspen Institute. We have listeners from the US, but also from abroad. What is the Aspen Institute and what What is inclusive finance as part of that as well? What it been you what have you been working on in the past few years? And then we'll dive into this specific task force on fraud and scams.
00:03:02
Speaker
Yeah, i love to talk about Aspen overall. So the Aspen Institute is a 75-year-old nonprofit that was founded in the wake of World War II. And a group of corporate leaders came together and said, these were some of the worst atrocities known to humankind.
00:03:17
Speaker
And as pillars of society, as leaders in the private sector, don't we have a job to do to ensure things like this never happen again? And they came together to really talk about what values-based leadership means and how to put that into practice. And over our 75-year history, that's really been a a through line that we are an organization focused on values-based leadership and the ways that leaders can truly create a better society. We at Aspen, some people might know us from the Ideas Festival. We have public programs in which we create interesting and important conversations about what's happening in our world. We also do a fair amount of leadership development, executive seminars, ways of of helping people to explore their own values-based leadership principles. And then we have about 25 policy programs that are taking some aspect of society and um asking these fundamental questions about how we can do things better. I have colleagues who work on things like medicine and health and sports and cybersecurity and national security. And I sit in our our the policy program called the Financial Security Program.
00:04:23
Speaker
Our focus is on deeply understanding the challenges facing households from a financial perspective. What are household financial challenges? And what are the um both private sector and policy-based solutions that need to be put into practice to ensure that everyone has long-term financial security?
00:04:42
Speaker
That's amazing. Again, i have chills from from the foundation of it and how it started. And it's so important. I think the one question that comes to mind is how you take these great ideas and the research that you do and actually make sure it gets to where it needs to get to influence leadership, influence how we act as leaders in the U.S. and around the world? Yeah, that's You know, my colleagues and I like to ah hold ourselves to a standard of being ambitiously pragmatic or sometimes pragmatically ambitious.
00:05:13
Speaker
And and so um you asked sort of what we do around inclusive finance and and what that looks like in practice. So an example of that is to say we over the last five or six years led a dialogue around what does what does financial inclusion really mean? What does it mean to not just have access to financial services? but for households to use financial services in a way that is is beneficial, right? what's it What's the ultimate outcome that we want when it comes to financial health and well-being? We have been guided not only by an understanding of of what's true for households, but then really diving into how do financial services institutions make the decisions that they do around product design and delivery, where we know what things do and don't work for lower particularly lower income households, And how does the policy, legal, and regulatory environment influence the ability to make those product design challenges and decisions? And that analysis has been guided by having a ah room of people who are practitioners, who are people inside both large financial institutions and small community-based ones and technology companies, um,
00:06:24
Speaker
And people who work directly with consumers on financial coaching and counseling and bring
Formation of Scam Prevention Task Force
00:06:29
Speaker
that perspective. Having those diverse perspectives in a room to look at a similar set of data and information and both come to an agreement on what's the problem we need to solve together and how do we come together around a plan of action for what we can do together and individually to solve that problem. In that instance, it it took the form of actually working then with um elected officials in Congress and with the Treasury Department to create the U.S.'s first ever national strategy for financial inclusion, which was something that was written and and created and published in 2024. That work continues today. There are really important aspects of that work that have continued in this administration and the private sector leaders around the country have been working on. And you'll notice some aspects of that playbook that we've been then deploying for scams. And in fact, the roots of that work for us at Aspen were in that financial inclusion work because fraud and scams were actually elevated as a key issue that needed to be addressed from an inclusion standpoint, that it had impacts in terms of that fraud prevention and scam prevention played a role.
00:07:36
Speaker
in what product design and delivery choices were available to people, that the regulatory environment around things like BSA and AML were impacting that space, and that the prevalence of scams was impacting people's ability to trust in the system and participate in it. And that was the origins of our our own work, um in addition to then ah understanding the vast amounts of money that people were losing to why we we started to care about scams. Oh, so many learnings from what you just said. I think the first one is the way to drive change is to have the right people and everybody at the table to think together and bring their expertise so then they can go back. And even if you don't have an official commitment, being part of this task force for the right reasons and really contributing and participating, that's that's where the collaboration comes from. And then, of course, lobbying and and you know informing people different entities, be it in government or or other forums, is is a big part of that. We'll definitely get to that. But just having the participants in the room looking at the data together, having the conversations and aligning on on what could be done better, I think that's very, very powerful right there. And I know In the past, i I'd asked you this question about, okay, well, ah the outcome of the scam task force will, of course, get to that.
00:08:51
Speaker
How do we drive and make error sure everyone takes those recommendations and braces them and runs? And it really, i realize now the power of sitting together is huge. And then the other part that you mentioned, and ah many of our listeners are... specialists in know in the fraud world at financial institutions. And I know that there's this constant discussion about usability versus the you know the cost of doing business, which is the impact of fraud versus usability. And we often think about the impact on financial institutions in that sense.
00:09:24
Speaker
But what you're bringing here and what you brought up in the financial and the inclusive finance angle is, yes, but how does that also impact the consumers? Are fraud decisions impact consumers in a way that that might really be a barrier to their financial success? So definitely an interesting topic as well. Maybe we'll bring you on to talk about that some other day because that's really interesting as well. But I wanted to dive into your work in the past year and a half ah or a year or so, in and really focusing on fraud and scams. So if you can tell us a little bit about how this came to be, what triggered it, um what was the platform that you used, who were the participants, what was the work, what was the focus? We'll talk about the recommendations, of course, as well. But let's start with ah with the initial work and in the process.
00:10:16
Speaker
So let's go back to the summer of 2024. We had been through this course of work of gathering a diverse set of leaders around a table around inclusive finance. we had named fraud as an issue we wanted to work on further.
00:10:29
Speaker
We have many partners in the private sector who were part of that work or have been longtime partners of ours. And they came to us and said, well, you've mentioned this fraud issue We've really been grappling with the scam problem. There was at the time also um hearings happening on Capitol Hill. So there was increasing kind of political interest and and what is ah a path forward. I think just a few months earlier, there was the um finance, state of finance or something like that with the, probably saying this wrong, but it was JPMC City, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, the but the big banks were there. And there was definitely a lot of ah questioning around scams, what they're doing. Zelle was one example, but overall, so was following that. Yeah, yeah definitely. Yeah, the P2P payment platforms were all part of that conversation, e etc. And so the conversation began sort to sort of say, from the financial institutions perspective, we too want to solve this problem, and we can't do it alone.
00:11:29
Speaker
And we don't have the right forum yet to have a dialogue with all these other parts of the ecosystem around how we can actually prevent this crime. And so that was really up our alley in terms of a project where we could have the potential for um an important impact on consumer finances that brought together and needed a facilitator that could create a space for hard conversations.
00:11:58
Speaker
It's a challenge we don't shy away from. And so that work, we started sort of putting out some ideas around here are some of the basic questions that we want to try to grapple with that have to do with that prevention frame and thinking about how do you undermine a scams business model. And to do that, we needed. we knew we needed to have all of these other sectors around the table that weren't folks that usually a financial security program works with. So, you know, creating relationships with technology companies, social media, telecommunications, retail, online online commerce, etc. And what we found is we started to, you know, have friends of friends make calls, we were putting feelers out, and we had a really...
00:12:41
Speaker
somewhat surprising, positive response that was instantly like, I were so excited. We've been waiting to have this conversation in the United States across these kind of sectoral lines. um And so ah we started to kind of tighten the concept of what this National Task Force on Fraud and Scan Prevention could do and and who the folks around the table would need to be.
Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach of the Task Force
00:13:03
Speaker
So we started first with getting sort of all the sort of private sector actors around the table and then began having conversations with folks in law enforcement, some of the regulatory agencies, getting federal government involved.
00:13:15
Speaker
We didn't have as much sort of at the state and local level. We had to make a few choices along the way to make the both the group size manageable. Even though it ended up being 80 institutions and some 300 different people who participated at different different points along the process. But we we got to kind of critical mass. And initially, we had conversations with every single kind of member of the task force to understand what their perspectives were on how they and both understood the problem, what they've been doing so far. and where where they wanted to take advantage of a cross-sector conversation, what they felt the the sort of highest priority issue areas for this group to grapple with would be. I do want to name a few names of participants. I think it's important, so I'll just read from the website. ah So you have ARP, Capital One, MasterCard, Match Group, JP Morgan, Apple, ah Plaid, PayPal, TRM um Labs, Zelle, Secret Service, Verizon, JP Morgan was one of the leading ones. I started this target. So a good blend of financial, telco, not enough telco, but a little financial, a little telco technology companies. Yeah, I see also Google here, believe Meta, yeah meta Microsoft. So a really good mix of different sectors that came together to solve this problem. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And in some cases, so in the telecom case, we had two of the most important trade associations at the table with U.S. Telecom and CTIA, which was useful to then kind of bring that sector perspective.
00:14:51
Speaker
Okay, so tell me about the process now. So all you managed to get make the connections, bring all these companies together. What happened in that year and a half or year long process?
00:15:02
Speaker
So the first thing we did was sort of say, listen, there's there's some real heat and momentum around four topic areas. You know, in all these individual conversations that we were having, there were kind of some themes and trends emerged. And we said, let's wing up people towards the spaces where this kind of heat and momentum is. We formed four working groups out of the gate and those were worked on first, how do you measure the problem? Like that was a ah big area of concern for people is that we just didn't have good data on this high scale and scope of the problem. And then we looked at, of course, probably no surprise to anybody, information sharing, focused on a private sector information sharing. What are the issues at play here? Why can't we kind of get to a solution ah for us to be able to to see the full kind of scam lifecycle and share information intelligence across sectors?
00:15:51
Speaker
Second law enforcement engagement or third, sorry, law enforcement engagement. What are the issues with the ways that the private sector, the law enforcement groups are um able to cooperate for enforcement today? and and And what are the problems we need to solve for there? and then finally, a broad category we call consumer education, warning and disruption. So everything from broad based, what are the sort of broad based campaign issues all the way down to individual consumer messaging and disruption tactics.
00:16:20
Speaker
and So those four working groups spent three or four months together working out. I mean, honestly, the first task we had to do was to say, can we all agree on what the problem is? And there was a lot of value in surfacing the different ways that member institutions saw the problem and trying to broker an agreement around a problem statement.
00:16:40
Speaker
i can see I can see that it could be very problematic because you just mentioned who was getting the heat at the Senate hearing a few months earlier. It's financial institutions. And if you look at the regulatory landscape around the world, in the UK, regulation is mandating liability from financial institutions. But in Australia, it's split between banks, telcos and and technology companies. So...
00:17:03
Speaker
So it's not straightforward that everyone agrees on what the problem is. So how did you get to that agreement? Well, we did a couple of things. And I i didn' think it's no secret that sort of some of the early conversations, I just call them finger pointing conversations, where just like everybody's like, they're the problem and pointed somewhere, right?
00:17:19
Speaker
The other thing we did actually, and this is and not without its controversy, is is we took a liability conversation off the kitchen table. We felt like that was a conversation where there were such deeply entrenched interests that starting our conversation about how do we solve for prevention from that standpoint was going to be counterproductive to getting to solutions. And so while we recognize that at the end of the day, you didn't come to this conversation unless you ultimately wanted to have fewer victims and less harm, but we were going start at a different place in the chain for the conversation to help kind of diffuse the some of the um interests at play in a liability conversation. so that was that ended up being useful.
00:17:59
Speaker
Interesting. I would suspect that maybe some came to the conversation to ensure that there is no liability specifically enforced on their sector. So just be at the table to make sure. But I think at the end of the day, you can start with that. you You need to start with really like, what can we do responsibly? What are the actions that we can take? And maybe if everyone does a great job, we can avoid liability because our consumers won't get scammed and they won't lose money. But until then, there's a lot we can do.
00:18:28
Speaker
Okay, so these four working groups work for a few months. And then they what what was the outcome of that work? So each of those groups, ah we landed on a problem statement. We talked a lot about a set of solutions and each of them have, ah we did a sort of summary kind of document coming out of each of those working groups where they identified either this is a path forward for a set of solutions, here's a framework to use, here are some key principles to what we need to do to solve this. They got to a some point of the discussion that had to do with solutions.
00:18:59
Speaker
And then we had to take a decision to say, you know, we could keep having working group conversations for a very long time, but we wanted to orient people towards so kind of a comprehensive set of solutions. And so we took a decision at that point to start actually writing the final thing.
00:19:15
Speaker
Right. The final blueprint strategy. um And we use that as the focal point for the conversations with the task force for from that point until we we published the document in October. So we came up with a couple of different versions of ah of a lifecycle framework ah for how we would organize a set of. recommendations and solutions. We had different kind of workshops and roundtables around specific issue areas.
00:19:40
Speaker
So things like identity verification, or we took advantage of um counterparts from Australia being in Washington, DC and said, let's deep dive on on how they constructed their scam prevention framework and what's been working or not in the early days of that work in Australia. And so we took opportunities to have deep dive conversations in in still in in group dialogue and then did a ton of work as well, sort of with with ah proposing various um straw men, straw people, ah getting feedback and reactions and further refining that. We had a very, very early draft of the final paper, more of an outline or a very needy outline that we...
00:20:23
Speaker
put in front of ah about 30 or 40 folks in June. And we did a day-long workshop with everyone, really dissecting it um and giving feedback and input and hearing what the others were grappling with. So it really was ah ah an iterative process of proposing things, getting feedback, refining it, changing tactics until we got to a final ah final outcome, which is that the paper that we released in October.
00:20:53
Speaker
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National Strategy and Public-Private Collaboration
00:21:08
Speaker
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00:21:16
Speaker
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00:21:25
Speaker
You know, i I remember there were some announcement around different task forces, ah you know, in the, I think in the in Congress that are going to focus on this topic. And they said that they after a year, they're going to publish their first outcome.
00:21:41
Speaker
And i i was like pulling my hair. We just had, you know, the national strategy formed by Aspen. It took a year. Why do we need another year? We spent the year. But listening to you speak, I, and I'm not advocating for another year. i think we need to start taking action yesterday. yeah and And some is has started, but there is a lot to say on getting people together, sitting down, raising the issues, raising the controversies. The more I hear you speak, I'm even more certain that many parties who participated in this were there to make sure that they're not held accountable to make changes or... legislation I'm not going to ask for your response to that. That's me saying it. But they were there and they heard. And so hopefully they'll take some back.
00:22:26
Speaker
We're talking about, you know, publicly traded or private companies are looking at their bottom line. And we're just and what yeah the Aspen Institute is trying to do is look back to your ah root core foundation. values is instill the human values of let's remember what's important in life and let's lead with values and let's not just lead with the bottom line. Let's do the right thing.
00:22:48
Speaker
So I hope if anyone from these companies is hearing that, like let's go back to core values and it's important to make the shareholders happy and and make money. But what are we, what destruction are we causing along the way? yeah I talked about pragmatic ambition, ambitiously pragmatic, very pragmatic about what are some of the important things that drive decision-making within a company. And also we had individual leaders around a table who I think i think um I saw, what I saw around these tables was a lot of um people who are passionate about finding a solution. And we're trying to figure out how to navigate that within their institutions. um And so we talk a lot about how do we de-risk taking bold action for leaders? And I think some of the ability to sit in a room and um see and hear across the table that there are other leaders grappling with this, we're trying to do this you know in other institutions, is is really useful to help empower those individuals to drive change within their institutions. So it's a different framing. And I don't know. i I think I think that's really important because I know I know some of the people ah from some of the companies that I talked about two minutes ago that are 100 percent passionate about solving the problem. They were brought in because they're those kind of people. But yes, there are struggling internally to actually drive change in some cases, and maybe they're even put there because they're those types of people who want to collaborate, want to solve the problem. But I think what you said is so important. How how can you empower them to go back and make and influence the decision making within their companies and corporations?
00:24:23
Speaker
I think the other element here too is that, you know, one of the things that mattered about the Aspen Institute convening the conversation is that we didn't have a stake in the outcome. Our only stake in the outcome was was fewer incidences of scams, right? How do we drive that down? Meaningful outcome. Right. but That's a meaningful outcome to keep remind people of, but um being kind of neutral in terms of how we got there was really helpful to facilitate the conversation. And to your point about some of the legislative proposals for a government-led task force and a government-written strategy, that is by necessity going to be a different conversation when it is convened by government actors. People will show up to those tables differently.
00:25:03
Speaker
Note, it has a very important role to play and it's very powerful when the government actually says this is the strategy for us as a nation and it gives a different kind of cover for leaders to take action than has been saying that. And I think both have an important sort of place and role to play and it's It's our hope that everything that we did over that year makes the process for government shorter because we've committed that time together. So let's talk about the recommendations, the the national strategy and the different parts it has and ah the meat and the the nu nuts and bolts of it. So the framework or or the the test the sorry the strategy talks about what can be done on many levels, right? There's the national level with regards to government and law enforcement and and the legislative process and how we can expedite things to make data sharing easier. um And then there's the private sector recommendations. One is collaboration. Two is what every company can do individually to take ownership here. So can you break that down a little bit?
00:26:04
Speaker
So the the strategy document that we put out, so it sort of has um two main sections to it. The first section is um what are all of the things that we need to do to suppress and respond to scam activity? These are actions that both government and private sector institutions need to take at different points in the scam life cycle. So we have an extensive scam life cycle and break it down according to each section. And then the second part of the paper is what is the what are the actions that we need to take that will empower those activities? What's the infrastructure we need or the enabling environment? And that's where we talk about what is the call to leadership for both our federal government and the private sector? What are some of the infrastructure elements we need to invest in, like private sector information sharing exchanges or consumer campaigns? Or ultimately, and we end the paper ah with sort of a ah call to action to consider in greater detail than we were able to get to the design elements of a national anti-scam center. So that's kind of the way that we decided to break it down. And within each of those sections, there are actions, recommended kind of actions that both um public and private sector actors need to take. And ah first of all, the the going by the scam lifecycle, I think is very powerful because then you can talk prevention, you can talk mitigation, can talk response, support, you know, and then i would say it's a scam lifecycle, both from the victim perspective, kind of how I as as ah an individual encounter the scam and how can people institutions intervene with with that process, but also from the scam infrastructure perspective. How do we disrupt that? And and what we, you know, as the US and what can the government do to disrupt um action there? so So it's both perspectives, which is really important. And I encourage, I'll definitely put a link in the show notes and I encourage every institution to go and look at, first of all, what can you do as an organization yourself? I think there's a lot of discussion about employee education and KYC and, and really just getting better about ensuring that your employees, your customers, your infrastructure is set for success and and not abused by criminals. And so I think those recommendations are like the, to me, the starting point for any institution, but then how can we better collaborate? How can we, uh, better work with other organizations to ensure effective, uh, prevention? So, uh, So that's, I think, ah definitely. and And there's also a summary document. I actually recommend to read the whole thing. It's ah it's ah possible. Take a highlighter, print it out, sit down and in ah print it out virtually in a carbon emission reduced way and and really dive into it because I think it's very important for us to be knowledgeable of the specific recommendations.
Impact and Future Steps of the Task Force
00:28:54
Speaker
So it was there was a kickoff. I was very lucky to be there as a part of my role um in the Global Anti-Scam Alliance North America chapter. It was a great presentation. and what I loved most about the launch, besides the presentation talking about the different recommendations, was the conversations that industry leaders had.
00:29:15
Speaker
be it banks, telcos, financial and different financial institutions and tech companies sitting and talking about you know their part in this and what they can do and really talk about what needs to be done. And it was really interesting to see and a little controversy right there on one of the panels where a telco and a financial institution were talking and kind of, yeah, no, but we haven't solved the problem yet. We need to do we still have a lot to do. So that was really, really a great day. What happened after that?
00:29:44
Speaker
How do we make sure that this national strategy is now implemented? yeah And i'm I'm keeping in with the back of my mind your pragmatic ambition and ambitiously pragmatic. But tell me what happened since then.
00:29:56
Speaker
Yeah, so much. And when I had an opportunity to speak at the Global Antiscam Alliance and ah America's event in December, I framed this as the yes and moment because I feel like there are both things to celebrate ah in terms of progress being made here in the United States and globally. And there is more work to be done. We can't stop yet. So first of all, I will say that um for many reasons, i don't we don't necessarily have to take all the the credit from the task force. There are, of course, our private sector investments within individual companies that are ongoing. to try to get better at this, whether that is internally within their own products and customer journeys and ways that they're they're looking at that. Also at investments in getting better data internally at what's happening and investments in private sector information exchanges um where companies are are continuing to invest in both where they would participate, where they would share intelligence and how they incorporate taking action on that intelligence into their journeys.
00:31:01
Speaker
That's exciting. That's good. a couple of exciting things from the the government side. First, it's it has from day one been a really powerfully bipartisan conversation.
00:31:13
Speaker
I would argue for myself personally, it's probably the most bipartisan conversation I've ever been able to have in my career. um um And in fact, I am um personally overwhelmed by the number of thought calls I'm getting from Capitol Hill. Yeah.
00:31:29
Speaker
I think that's amazing. And and just just when you're saying it, I'm thinking, right, because ah a big part of the political views are fueled by their view of, you know, financial ah aspects like inclusion versus, you know, free economy versus, you know, just different ah perspectives that are very, very material to, you know, the the the partisan views. But scams and the impact of scams, that is definitely a bipartisan issue. Well, and I think, too, I think elected officials are hearing from their constituents. I think that... Yeah, the scammers do not ask who you voted for when they scam. don't who you voted for. And, you know, as we increasingly see in the data, this is something that truly affects everyone.
00:32:11
Speaker
Everyone is at risk and the attacks are coming for us all. And so I think part of that is is also why you see so many officials really wanting earnestly to try to do something about it. um There is the creation of the bipartisan Stott Scams Caucus um ah in Congress, and the House of Representatives. We've got some hopes that there'll be a Senate side companion soon and also seeing a lot of legislative proposals happening. being generated. Many of them in these early days are focused on how do we actually um craft ah ah an interagency task force and a national strategy. As I've said, those are really important things to do. And also there will be other hard work for Congress to do when it comes to looking at the legal environment in which each two of those sectors participate in scam prevention. and So there will be harder work to come for Congress.
00:33:02
Speaker
And I think we can also celebrate the creation of the Southeast Asian Scam Center Strike Force, which is a joint initiative from the Department of Justice, the D.C. U.S. Attorney General's Office, the Secret Service, and the FBI. We had talked about in the paper and in our working groups the fragmented law enforcement landscape. And so to see and an effort that starts to knit together some of those issues. entities and to be focused on how would do we look at this particular nexus of the problem being the scam compounds in Southeast Asia and and not only what do we do from an enforcement standpoint, but how do we collaborate more effectively with the private sector, both to gather more intelligence for us as law enforcement to take those enforcement actions and what is it that we can do as law enforcement to empower the private sector to do more takedown actions of their own.
00:33:53
Speaker
And that that part of the conversation, I think, has been very refreshing and exciting for many of the private sector partners who have started to work with the strike force. us And, you know, we'll continue at Aspen to play a role that we can to be helpful and in brokering any of those conversations that are useful. But I think those are those coupled with, you know, over the course of 2025, we saw a number of of sanctions events from the Treasury Department and the State Department. All of that is exciting movement.
00:34:21
Speaker
Right. And I think that it needs to continue. i think we can both celebrate this focus on hitting the criminals hard and continue to ask for.
00:34:32
Speaker
What will it take for concerted private sector action across the chain? What do we need to do to help empower that and empower or incentivize further investment um in those
Government Engagement and Legislative Advice
00:34:43
Speaker
pieces? Because it's it's, I think we've powerfully seen that this is an issue that won't be it won't be solved, as we've heard before, by enforcement alone, by prevention alone, by education alone. It's going to take all of those investments. By liability alone. Yeah. Right.
00:34:57
Speaker
Exactly. Exactly. You said that you've received the most calls from all the previous initiatives, the most calls from ah government with this task force. Tell tell me more about that.
00:35:08
Speaker
Well, just in terms of of, I have legislative staffers from the Hill all the time. I've heard about the task force. Tell Will you come brief our office? Tell us what we should do Will you look at this bill? ah So that's that's been really exciting to see that our elected officials are saying, let's let's do something about this.
00:35:27
Speaker
And um yeah, so that's that's been um really exciting to see the the momentum around potential policy work to be done. That definitely gives me hope. So what's next? What's next for um the the task force on fraud and scam prevention for for the work that you've done? kind of art Is that something that you're going to continue to work on or are there new initiatives going on? Yeah, so we didn't we did officially sunset the task force. We felt like we we had a task and we did the task.
00:35:59
Speaker
um But and I think for me, at least, the paper is important. I think there are really, i i'm excited that people want to pick it up and say, what what is my job to implement this or a part of this? I do think that part of the unequally powerful part of the work was the act of creating it. and and creating the the space for such in-depth dialogue. And so we're looking at it to say there is so much momentum, you know, individual trade groups or sectors are investing more in what they will do for their sector.
00:36:33
Speaker
Spaces like GASA us offer such important community convening opportunities. um Other spaces for fraud prevention um and cybersecurity, et cetera, have started to add scams to the agenda. We don't want to duplicate efforts. um And so I think the space that will be occupied going forward for Aspen is to continue to say, are there a ah a group of scam prevention leaders who still need ah an opportunity to have an in-depth dialogue facilitated by, again, and a neutral third party? We'll happily do that.
00:37:07
Speaker
um There are some elements of um the paper where we felt like we didn't get quite far enough and we're going to spend some time in research and dialogue and ah continuing to do ad hoc working groups, whether that's around the sort of legal environment, the legal incentives um for each sector to participate in scan prevention, looking at things like codes of conduct and safe harbors. Similarly, I'm i'm very interested in in pursuing a dialogue around things like ah the design of a National Anti-Scam Center in the United States.
00:37:35
Speaker
It is another area where Capitol Hill is saying, tell us tell us what the bill should say. And i I think there's more work to do for us as a a cross-sector group to come together and agree on a few things before we tell Congress what to write in a bill. And so there are some just some really important elements of that work that we'll continue to stay invested in as long as the scam fighters will have us. We'll definitely have you. Listen, from my perspective, it's I feel honored to just, ah you know, have observed you in the past year and and you and your team.
00:38:07
Speaker
How does it you know, it i i'm I'm just going to say you guys have or the Aspen Institute and your work as part of the task force. um the the amount of impact and the amount of, I think, making this topic front and center, getting important organizations around the table to drive action together and bring this to government. And you helped Gaza to global anti-scam lines tremendously in getting, ah the, you know, right people in the room to convene as
Legacy and Ongoing Efforts Against Scams
00:38:36
Speaker
well. and And so I think that that work has been so impactful. I don't know how you can top that with other task forces, but I'm sure you're going to continue and do amazing work in in different places. But it's it's just so important. So I wanted to say thank you for all the work, you and your team, for all the work that you've done in the past year and a half. And I've been focused on scams for a few years now. and
00:38:59
Speaker
I remember I was talking to myself a few years ago. Aaron West was also one of the first ah you know people talking about this problem, but we weren't too many. But now the momentum around this and it's because of a problem. Unfortunately, it's it's a big problem and growing, but it's good that there is this is top of mind. This is front and center. And a lot of this is thanks to your work. So thank you for that.
00:39:25
Speaker
Well, that means the world to me. i really i really appreciate it. I will pass it on to the amazing team I get to work with. And um now we appreciate it. And I think I've just been inspired every day by people like you who are so passionate about trying to find a way to solve this. That helps keep us going. Well, thank you.
00:39:48
Speaker
Thank you so much for taking the time and sharing with us and welcome to the Scam Rangers community. i appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.