Hello, I'd like to call to order the legal affairs committee.

Um in attendance are Councillor Higgins, Councilor Melville, Councillor Peach, Councillor Turko, and myself, Tom Rosnah as the chair, also in attendance are all other counselors except for Councillor Welton.

We have one item on the agenda, and that is a proposed ordinance involving crypto coin and concerns regarding predatory scams.

This was brought to us as a late communication last meeting.

Um and in our packet under seven A, we have an ordinance presented to us by the mayor.

I'd like to now um move to move that into this meeting.

So moved.

It's a vote.

I'm now asked the mayor to come before us and present his uh thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Good evening to you.

Good evening, counselors.

Hope everybody's doing well.

Uh great to be with you today.

Um I'm here and I'm gonna be very brief.

I'm gonna turn it over to people who know much more about this issue than I do.

Uh, but it is an important issue, and I'm glad the city of PBD is is taking this on and having this important discussion.

Uh I'm here today with our district attorney, uh, Paul Tucker.

It's great to have him with us, as well as uh attorney Scott Delay from the district attorney's office.

Uh uh police chief Tom Griffin, as well as Sergeant Dave Betoncourt and Detective Matt Whalen, uh and also our city solicitor Don Conn.

Uh but I think we all recognize that this is an important issue, something that we need to, as I said, discuss as a community.

I'm always amazed by uh the the frauds in the schemes and the uh the uh ways in which criminals uh try to uh rob from our citizens and the uh the the links that they go to to um pull these type of uh frauds on on our residents and uh cities and towns have to do what we can to support our law enforcement to s to support our district attorney's office, our police department, and I'm very proud to to help move this along.

I uh what do you have in front of you?

The ordinance I presented was the ordinance that I uh had from the city of Gloucester, who took a leadership role in this.

Um really I just took uh mirrored their language, put together uh to a um ordinance for our discussion, and uh and hopefully it's something that we can move on in the very near future.

Uh clearly by who's here today, it shows the importance of this.

And again, I'm very happy that PBD is taking this on and and uh hopefully we can enact this and give a tool to our local law enforcement in order to uh to hold people accountable and do what they can to uh to make sure our citizens are protected as best we can.

So um Mr.

Chairman, if it's okay, I'd like to maybe turn it over to our DA and uh I'll step aside.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

District Attorney Paul Tucker.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Council President, members of the Council.

I appreciate the opportunity to say a few words before you this evening about a real scourge, a real epidemic, what is happening in the world of scamming and fraudulent activity.

So the issue that we have before us has to do with these Bitcoin kiosks.

And they they are what our own Federal Trade Commission has described as a payment portal for scams.

That's our own FTC has called it a payment portal for scams.

This is a preferred method for scammers to actually separate money from unwitting people who don't even sometimes realize that they have been scammed until they are contacted by the police department.

What we have seen is the most vulnerable uh folks in our society have been targeted, particularly uh the elderly people who are very vulnerable to to uh being afraid and wanting to make sure they are following the rules.

It's a very insidious problem, particularly the the methods that these scammers uh are using.

Um government impersonation, calling, claiming to be Federal agents, either FBI, ICE, Homeland Security.

Um we have what we call the romance scams where people develop over time, uh an online relationship where where folks think that they are dealing with a with a real person.

Tech support has been one of the biggest ones lately, where somebody will l actually be on their own computer and they'll get an alert with a number to call.

And these scammers are actually so sophisticated, they've gotten in through a virus, so now they are actually on the person's computer, giving them directions of how to go to the bank, and they'll give a variety of of reasons why.

They'll say we we had one recently that they said they were trying to catch um some people who are involved in child pornography, and if the people that they were trying to scam didn't help, there was this there was a chance they could could also get ensnared in it, and they'd never be able to clear the name.

We have had so many, particularly elderly people, um, that will go to the bank literally while the scammers are still in the ear on the phone, and they're so persuasive, they'll tell them, don't talk to anybody.

When they get to the bank, oftentimes the bank tellers will say, you know, can you tell me what you need this for?

And they are actually coached by the person on the other end of the phone.

Um the financial losses are generally irreversible.

Once that once that money is fed into the Bitcoin machine, our chances of getting it back uh probably about one or two percent, and that's if everything falls together quickly and we're able to act very quickly, and that that's far and few between.

Um we estimate in Essex County alone in this calendar year, reported losses are about 11 million dollars, and that's reported.

That figure is probably two or three times higher because what we're finding is so many people, when they realize that they are being scammed, um, either by shame or they are afraid to report it, they're afraid to tell family members.

So what we think is we're really probably only seeing about one-third of the actual loss.

Um Peabody residents are at risk.

Um you have got about a dozen and a half machines here in the city.

The police department, I know, is on this.