Spectrum News | By: Cassie Semyon
Judith Boivin was dropping her husband off at a doctor’s appointment when she got a phone call from the Rockville, Maryland police department.
“They said, well, there’s an active case at the FBI and we’re going to transfer your call to the FBI,” she recalled during a press conference on Capitol Hill Thursday. Boivin wound up the victim of an elaborate multi-month scheme in which the retired therapist was conned into forking over roughly $600,000.
“I truly believed that I was involved with a real life case,” she said. “Nobody knows, really, what a scam is until you’ve been scammed.”
The FBI reported in its Internet Crime Report that cyber-enabled crimes defrauded Americans of nearly $21 billion last year, with complaints of cybercrimes on the rise.
“We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people who have been victimized, and we just do not have the proper scale of response yet to this national crisis,” said Rep. George Whitesides, D-Calif.
On Thursday, National Scam Survivor Day, Whitesides renewed his push for legislation to try and put an end to that.
“We’re really proud to be putting forward the National Scam Prevention Coordination Act, which proposes, really for the first time, to set up a National Coordinating Center so that all of these different law enforcement partners and nonprofit agencies and others can connect around this crisis that doesn’t exist right now, and we have to have it,” he explained.
The National Scam Prevention Coordination Act would establish a National Fraud and Scam Prevention Office in the White House and instruct its director to coordinate the implementation of national fraud and scam prevention policy and strategy with federal agencies. It would also require an annual report to the president and Congress on the effectiveness of national fraud and scam prevention policy and the status of implementation.
He also is leading the Veteran Scam Victim Foundation Act to “establish a nonprofit foundation to direct charitable contributions toward veterans and their beneficiaries who fall victim to financial exploitation.”
The issue is personal for Whitesides, who says his own mother was the target of a scam. The individual alleged that someone in their family was in an accident and needed money. “We started looking into this as an office because we kept getting other people, you know, particularly elderly folks in our district, who are getting scammed.”
That led Whitesides to team up with two well-known scambusters: Ashton Bingham and Art Kulik. The two founded Trilogy Media and have a cult following on YouTube in addition to a Fox Nation show.
“I was getting inundated with those scam calls, those IRS ‘you owe a bunch of money, pay it now, or you’re going to go to jail’ calls, and I decided to answer one and mess with the guy,” said Bingham of how they got started a decade ago. “[I] wasted like an hour of his time. And I recorded it, thankfully, and it went crazy, insanely viral. And so the more that we just kept doing it, it just really started to dig a little deeper into, like, what was really going on behind those scams.”
Since then, he and Kulik have been able to help individuals seek some level of justice, even if they can’t get the money back. Their work has also helped lift the stigma surrounding these scams.
“When somebody gets scammed, you don’t tell anybody, and that’s the problem, and that’s what scammers the counting on: that shame,” said Kulik. “That’s why we so grateful last year when we sold our show to Fox and we went nationwide, the amount of people that will publicly submit their stories our email — we cannot find the bottom of our email after the show was on air, because everybody like, if they told their stories, what happened to loved ones, to them… I want to tell my story.”
“We want to take people through from beginning to end, A to Z, on the brainwashing, the manipulation, and all the tactics they’re using to get you to believe it,” said Bingham. “A lot of cases drain your savings, drain your retirement. We’ve seen people take their life over this. It’s heartbreaking.”
The duo said they were thrilled to be on Capitol Hill with Whitesides to put an even bigger national spotlight on their work and the desperate need for federal support.
“We’re not cops, we’re not lawmakers. We have no authority over anybody other than our freedom to ask questions and walk around in public, and that’s what we’ve focused on. It sucks when we can’t get victims’ money back. It sucks when a scammer beats us to it and we can’t get it in time,” explained Bingham. “What we can control is keeping eyeballs on this, and that’s why we’re happy to be here.
“This is one of these few topics that everybody can relate to, despite which party you belong to, everybody getting scammed, Democrats, Republicans,” added Kulik.
Whitesides’ bill has bipartisan support, but until it actually gets a floor vote, Whitesides and the scambuster duo are focused on continuing to educate the public.
“The simple education is so important we’re not doing enough of it training, not just of the targets, but of the family members, like myself, you know, so that we can help, you know, our parents, or we can help our kids, that’s super important,” Whitesides said.
If you believe you have been the victim of a scam, file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at IC3.gov. The FBI also recommends alerting your financial institutions to be on the lookout for suspicious spending, lock down your credit, and preserve all communication with the scammer.
