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AGENCY TESTIMONY
Cybercrime challenges and the need for a computer forensic lab
5:00:18
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153 sec
DA Katz highlights the increasing prevalence of cybercrime and the need for a dedicated computer forensic lab to effectively investigate and prosecute these technologically advanced crimes.
- Provides an example of a recent cybercrime case involving stolen Taylor Swift concert tickets
- Requests $2.4 million for establishing and staffing a computer forensic lab
- Emphasizes the importance of having in-house capabilities to investigate cyber-related crimes efficiently
Melinda Katz
5:00:18
We also, as Dia Gonzalez and a lot of other folks were talking about, as technology increases, the types of crimes that we're going after and the types of victims that we are finding are getting bigger and getting to be more expansive.
5:00:37
So, for instance, when you talk about cybercrime, you know, we just had a case, I don't know how many of you read about it, Taylor Swift concert tickets were being stolen.
5:00:46
And so what was happening is Ticketmaster was selling the tickets and they would have you have the resale value that a lot of us, or my kids mostly, are using.
5:00:58
And they're buying them second hand on StubHub or the contractors that StubHub uses.
5:01:03
And what they were doing was intercepting the tickets.
5:01:07
So you'd buy a ticket, you know, you have to download the ticket.
5:01:11
In that download you were never getting that.
5:01:13
It was going to someone else, a third party who was then downloading it and selling it.
5:01:19
Those folks made $650,000 on these types of crimes, in these particular crimes.
5:01:26
Some of the Taylor Swift concerts were going, tickets were going for like $5,000 And it is so easy to fall for it.
5:01:34
And part of what we do and part of what I do as the DA is make sure that there's a comfort level in the community where people know that they should be comfortable coming to us even if they fall for something like that because it's so easy to fall for.
5:01:47
So it is part of the reason that I come here today with my only like increase asked being for a computer forensic lab.
5:01:56
You know, it's $2,400,000 about to make a computer forensic lab and then to staff it.
5:02:02
And that would mean downloading and being able to ourselves be able to investigate, you know, because we're investigating it now but we have to rely on outside sources a lot of times to do the downloads and to go into the computers just because of time and effort and quantity that it has.
5:02:18
And so when we ask for that money to do that, it's because I don't want to take money from my retail theft policy that we are working on.
5:02:28
If we put money there it has to come from somewhere.
5:02:31
So a crime lab would be amazing at a forensic lab so that we can get those scammers that are on the internet that are scamming our parents and our grandparents and our kids and some of us.
5:02:43
And it's important that the technology that the DAs have keep up with the way things are going in life these days.