Q&A
NYPD's approach to seasonal scams and use of technology in crime prevention
1:18:42
·
177 sec
Council Member Salaam inquires about election-related elder fraud scams, leading to a discussion on the NYPD's approach to seasonal scams and their use of technology in crime prevention.
- No significant uptick in election-related elder fraud scams reported in New York
- NYPD identifies and prepares for seasonal scams (e.g., tax fraud, holiday gift card scams)
- Use of a digital media truck to display scam awareness videos in targeted areas
- Discussion of funding challenges for acquiring new crime prevention technologies
Yusef Salaam
1:18:42
Absolutely.
1:18:43
During this election season, there has been a lot of reporting about illegitimate calls and text soliciting donations as we were just discussing or prompting people to register the vote.
1:18:55
Has the NYPD seen an uptick in reports of election related elder fraud scams?
Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez
1:19:04
Not in New York.
Spiro Papavlasopoulos
1:19:06
Not particularly Not particularly.
1:19:08
You have to remember, so when when we started looking at certain scams, right, there there's certain categories that we look at, certain matrixes, certain scams are actually some of them are seasonal as well, like every I r tax season.
1:19:22
We already know when the tax season's around, we have to start expecting that there's gonna be tax fraud, and that's where we start, you know, honing in holiday season.
1:19:31
We know every holiday season, we're gonna have an uptick of gift card scams.
1:19:36
So we actually have we get the head start, and you mentioned technology.
1:19:42
Again, we are actually using technology to combat some of these crimes.
1:19:46
And, specifically, the crime prevention division has a digital media truck.
1:19:52
Which is an actual big box truck that has over 15 inches of screens all over.
1:19:59
We're using basically our social media team to advertise certain scams on video on this actual truck, and we would actually deploy this truck throughout the actual city.
1:20:11
Yesterday, we were in transit in certain locations where we would show certain type of scams.
1:20:16
So if we know that certain type of areas are experiencing certain type of crimes, We would actually use our digital media technology to hit those specific areas with a digital media campaign, and that would include the truck being out there, that would include officers on actual foot, disseminating some of these flyers as well.
1:20:39
But, yeah, technology is one of the things that we actually look for to possibly help us combat some of these crimes.
1:20:47
Again, one of the major issues is funding Some of these are very costly going forward to trying to acquire some of these new state of the art equipment.
1:20:58
And that could be even our little pens that we usually give out our older adults when it comes to tax season.
1:21:04
There's specific pens.
1:21:06
When they're writing out their checks, the actual ink gets embedded into the actual check itself.
1:21:12
We've seen that some of these scammers are very crafty where they were actually able to take the checks and wash the check.
1:21:20
They call the check washing.
1:21:22
So they're able to remove the actual link.
1:21:26
So we were actually we had a campaign not too long ago giving out some some of the things that we certain pens that we had before.
1:21:33
But again, the funding is one problem that we have with trying to get some resources out.
