What happens when you stop talking about victims and start listening to them? April DeValkenaere, a former banker, cop and white-collar investigator, therapist Cathy Wilson, and Kathy Waters of Advocating Against Romance Scammers built a symposium to find out, with a survivor seated in every roundtable to tell the experts whether their fixes would actually have helped. We talk about victim-blaming language in the therapy room and at the police counter, a survivor’s idea to run scam warnings in the middle of Jeopardy, and how human connection, the very thing scammers weaponize, may be the only way to break the spell.

Episode 73: Hieu Ngo’s path to a career as a cybercrime investigator is anything but typical. From 2005 to 2012, Hieu was a hacker. He stole U.S. identities and resold them on the dark web. In 2012, a U.S. Secret Service investigation lured him from Vietnam to Guam, where he was arrested and eventually sentenced to serve time in a U.S. federal prison. Hieu tells Erin West about the investigation, his incarceration, and how a letter at the sentencing hearing changed the direction of his life.

Get the episode notes on the web: www.operationshamrock.org/podcast/stolen

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Episode 72: Brian Mason of the Edmonton Police Service shares how live scam intelligence and public-private partnerships can stop scams in progress.

Erin West talks with Detective Brian Mason of the Edmonton Police Service, a leading expert in cybercrime and large-scale scam investigations in Canada. Injured in the line of duty in 2019, Mason turned to the one crime he believed was never fully investigated: fraud. He now leads a team focused on transnational organized crime, money laundering, and the networks behind scams.

The footprints, the fingerprints; everything is there. The data trail is there. We can find those digital pieces. — Brian Mason, Edmonton Police Service

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