The Expert Podcast

If you have been a victim of an online scam, you may be wondering: do these people ever get caught? Do the scammers, the fraudsters, ever have to face consequences? Well, in our ongoing series, you'll find on this channel that many scammers do get caught if a victim and the third parties around them pursue an investigation, whether it's in the private sector or public sector. These scammers get caught. In fact, we had a conversation with an agent from the FBI from the Portland, Oregon, field office and talked about exactly how they untangled one of these crypto scams.

Here's another article from, I believe, the state of New Jersey, where this scammer took $8 million from victims and was caught, prosecuted, and sentenced to seven years in prison. So these cases do become resolved at some point. It does take a lot of resolve, no pun intended, but if you just give up as a victim, if the government doesn't get involved, or if nobody's pursuing this, then they do get away with it, and that's one of the things that the scammers count on: the fact that most victims don't want to pursue it because they feel either embarrassed that they fell for it, or sometimes they just don't want to think about it ever again, so they just forget about the fact that they were scammed out of money, and sometimes it's a very difficult and painful experience to go through, and having to relive it as part of an investigation is sometimes off-putting.

But if you have any chance of wanting to get your money back or have the perpetrator have to serve justice, action needs to be taken. Certainly, you have other resources available to help you. There may be government resources from the IC3, and there may be third-party institution resources like banking resources or investigative resources, so make the decision early on if you want to pursue it. Look at all of the available options to assist you with making sure that your fraud or scam does not go unnoticed.