Kati Daffan

Our most recent challenge, which finished up in 2024, was about voice cloning technology and the development of multidisciplinary approaches to protect consumers from AI and voice cloning.

Let me talk to you about the anatomy of a income scam investigation.

What we see is we get consumer reports directly from people who file a report at reportfraud.ftc.gov.

We mine that data every day and we use it to reach back out to people and find out what happened.

Who did you send your money to?

How did you send it?

We have authority to issue civil investigative demands, which are like subpoenas before we've filed a case.

So we can send those to folks who are involved in the transaction, the payment processors, the banks, the telephone folks, everybody but the scammer, him or herself, so that we can build up evidence about exactly where the money is going, who's behind it,

And then we can go to court without the other side's knowledge.

That's called an ex parte filing.

We can ask for a temporary restraining order and say, just shut it down and freeze all the assets because otherwise they might get hidden away.

But we want to be able to return that money to consumers.

We've been able to freeze many millions of dollars and return billions of dollars to consumers over the years.

That's always our goal at the beginning of every single case.

We also are very focused on going after the people who are facilitating fraud because that is a very good, effective way to use our limited resources.

One example would be a recent case we brought against a payment processor named Paddle.

We charge it with abusing the U.S.

credit card system and allowing deceptive operators and scammers to have access to that to process consumer payments.

In our complaint, we told a story that during the onboarding process for a new company that wanted to use Paddle to process people's payments.

There was a Paddle risk and compliance employee who told Paddle's key executives about consumer complaints, alerting them to information that they may be running a scam and even circulating a link to see these detailed complaints.