The Fraud Economy Has a Supply Chain; Erin West Is Going After It
PYMNTS | Scammers are after money — as much as they can get. As Erin West tells PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in their interview, “Whether it’s $4.5 million or $450,000 or $45,000, the scammer is going to take every penny that you have.”
Operation Shamrock and Erin West are working to make it harder for the fraud economy to succeed.
One challenge is victim response. Law enforcement, banks, and platforms are each set up to handle one victim, one transaction, or one account at a time. But on the criminal side, scam operations are structured like companies, with dozens of entities inside a single compound and branches across places like Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia.
Organized scam syndicates control the compounds, renting space to separate operations that specialize in specific scams or target demographics. Meanwhile, hundreds of online businesses sell the tools of the trade — phone numbers, social media accounts, and messaging apps. Others offer crypto services to move money across borders. It’s an entire industry.
A bank may identify a suspicious transaction. A law enforcement agency may receive a victim report. A social media platform may get a user report of a fake profile. But there’s nothing that ties those elements together.
What if we could connect the dots by creating a shared data platform where public agencies and private companies identify connections? What if law enforcement had the information to aggregate cases and identify larger organizations by identifying common infrastructure and transaction pathways?
Get the research from PYMNTS: Fraud’s Loyalty Tax: How Scams Cost Banks Their Customers
