FBI Director Kash Patel met with over 130 Iowa law enforcement officials this morning and Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird told reporters part of the discussion focused on recovering money from overseas scammers.
“I think this is the first time that I know of, in my memory, that we’ve had the FBI director here in Iowa meeting with all levels of law enforcement leadership,” Bird said. “We had people from small departments to big departments, big counties, small counties, county attorneys…talking about how we can work together.”
Bird cautioned that while the FBI has made “tremendous” strides in locating transnational groups that run online scams, recovering money for victims of fraud remains a challenge. “Many times this is in a foreign crypowallet, sometimes in Southeast Asia, for example,” Bird said, “But today we were talking about ways we could work together, follow those cases, follow those threads and try to get the money back from the person it was taken from.”
Waukee Police Chief Chad McCluskey, president of the Iowa Police Chiefs Association, said it would be a huge step to work more closely with federal agents on scams run out of foreign countries. “Anybody that has been scammed, you know, and especially if it’s a parent or a grandparent or somebody, you feel horrible and you want to be able to get those funds back to them,” McCluskey said.
Iowa Public Safety Commissioner Stephen Bayens said detectives in Iowa law enforcement agencies do a good job of sharing information about scams. “Each individual investigation might have a sliver of evidence, but not enough to identify who is responsible,” Bayens said. “…Once it leaves kind of our juridictionaly authority is really where we lean on our federal partnerships because they have that kind of jurisdictional reach kind of both nationally and internationally.”
The FBI director did not speak with Iowa reporters after the meeting, which Bird said also focused on regional efforts to stop human trafficking and pursue drug cases.
