Santa Clara County prosecutor wants to help victims

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Thieves believe that cryptocurrency stolen from duped consumers is the perfect anonymous, secret, and elusive crime.

Erin West proves them wrong.

Over the past year, the Santa Clara County District Attorney and his team have recovered $2.5 million worth of digital currency from defrauded Bay Area residents, with approximately 75 investigations still ongoing.

One of the victims was an entrepreneur whose cell phone account was hacked and then emptied. Another was a father who was tricked into a bogus investment plan, losing his child’s college fund. Yet another was a grandfather, deceived by the sobbing of someone pretending to be his grandson in a car accident. There are hundreds more.

Shedding light on a complex world that thrives in darkness, West crafts legal techniques to find and return once-missing funds. With the rise of cryptocrimes, she gained worldwide fame, earning invitations to share her strategy at conferences in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and other US cities, even the law enforcement agency of European Union Europol.

It’s not difficult, but it’s new, said West, an assistant county prosecutor who favors professorial glasses and a no-frills tone. We cannot afford not to understand it.

“We owe it to our victims to track how the bad guys move their money,” she added. “People are really desperate, sometimes suicidal.”

Born in Sunnyvale, the daughter of an Intel vice president, West chose a career in law, not technology.

When civil litigation proved daunting, West turned to pursuing sexual assault and domestic violence cases, lured by the emotional reward of helping victims.

Eight years ago, he was offered a new challenge. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen appointed her to the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT), a Bay Area multi-agency task force that investigates high-tech crimes. , headed by his office.

With criminals hiding behind the seemingly bulletproof anonymity of blockchain transactions and anonymous wallets, expanding REACT’s expertise was essential, Rosen said. “If we were in Los Angeles, we would be experts in cases of celebrity harassment or stealing intellectual property from movies, scripts or music. If we were in New York, we would be experts in banking crimes.

Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, we are the nation’s premier law enforcement agency when it comes to investigating and prosecuting high-tech crimes in all their forms,” he said. .

As federal investigators become increasingly successful in deciphering the cryptocrimes of drug dealers, money launderers, child pornographers, suspected terrorists and corporate ransomware attackers, they are focusing solely on heists majors.

For the average victim, there was no way to get help. Local police lacked the time and training to investigate digital thefts.

“I thought that was an area where I could make a difference,” West recalls. together.

Cryptocurrency is so new that West and the REACT team had to learn on their own; there are no courses or specialized training. She subscribed to YouTube videos about cryptocurrency, listening while driving in her car or taking a walk. Whenever she heard a term she didn’t understand, like “token lending,” “mixer,” or “API,” she wrote it down and then searched for it.

“You only take small bites at a time,” she said. “I’m a big proponent – even in my personal life, like in the garden – of devoting just 15 minutes a day to whatever I’m doing. Small, consistent efforts can make a big difference.

It’s a male-dominated world – “it’s very dude heavy”, she jokes – but it’s a comfortable landscape for the mother of two teenagers. “There’s a culture where people like to talk like they know it all,” she said. “I felt compelled to actually understand what was going on.”

West’s early cases involved “SIM card swapping, where criminals steal identities to drain digital bank accounts. Here’s how it works: Impersonators go to a cell phone carrier like AT&T and persuade the carrier to give them your phone numbers. Then, with access to calls, texts and other verification tools to change your passwords, the criminals withdraw funds.

She left after phishing scams, when an email or text message forces you to pay someone different from the one you wanted to pay. It has also recovered funds if you are required to deposit money at a Bitcoin ATM.

Last year, his team began investigating a new scam, called pig butcher, which combines a fake friendship with an investment. A scammer uses text or social media to engage you and then encourages you to invest in fake cryptos.

For local detectives, an investigation can seem daunting. For example, they cannot go abroad with a warrant to find hidden, well-organized criminal gangs.

But West knew that blockchain, a storage technology used to back up data on decentralized networks, leaves a trail of money, perfectly preserving evidence. Each transaction has a unique identification number. Software tracking tools can identify the cryptocurrency exchange, which acts like a bank, where the money is held. Exchanges have ledgers and know who holds a blockchain “wallet” address, the series of letters and numbers used to send and receive funds anonymously.

Working with blockchain exchange and analytics companies, West and the REACT team can map the flow of transactions between criminals and a duped Bay Area resident. The team finds the stolen money at an exchange, then asks the exchange to transfer the funds to a government-controlled wallet. Then they ask a judge to allow them to return the stolen funds to the victim.

“The exchanges will respond to a search warrant from Santa Clara County. They want to remove the ‘dirty money’ from their platform,” she said. “If we provide them with the proper legal documents, they will return the money to us.”

To explain herself, she compares it to a stolen bicycle.

Imagine you live in Santa Clara County and your bike is stolen. Detectives find the bike in a storage locker in the UK They sign a warrant to the storage company, which does not want stolen bikes on its property. The storage company gives notice to the person renting the locker, and the bike is returned to Santa Clara County.

The challenge is that there is no simple mechanism in California law for a victim to get the bike back without filing a criminal complaint against the person who rented the locker.

Wests Strategy: We send a letter to the person renting the locker and say Hey, you can look in your locker and see the bike is gone, because we have it, we have it. We want to give it back to that person who says it’s their bike. But if they’re wrong, and it’s actually your bike, then let’s talk about it in court. ”

“It really is that simple,” she said.

So far, the team has been able to return money to 25% of the victims. The chances of recovery improve if a victim reports the crime quickly, with accurate details, she said.

US Secret Service agent Shawn Bradstreet calls West a “pioneer in recovering stolen funds from victims of cryptocurrency fraud.” His passion for helping victims knows no bounds, and we are fortunate to have him as a partner in the mission to fight cyber financial fraud.

West reached out to help remote police departments in Silicon Valley. “She is a mentor and a resource, and was instrumental in helping me solve two cases,” said Sgt. Jake Tuzinski from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, a suburban town north of Minneapolis.

To meet the growing demand, last September she founded Crypto Coalition to provide online webinars to law enforcement officials, banks and others. Founded with 85 members, its ranks have since grown to 900. Its California cryptocurrency conference, held in Palo Alto last January, was the first of its kind to provide hands-on training for investigators and prosecutors. .

Were able to shrink the world and share ideas,” she said. “There’s no such thing as money gone overseas and we can’t get it back.” Because we can.

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