It’s Always Day One: Rethinking Financial Crime in a Converged World

What's up, Fraud Fighters and welcome back to Fraud Forward. Today's guest is someone that I've truly wanted to have on the podcast since the beginning of time, of its time at least. And honestly, it wasn't until the relaunch of Fraud Forward that I finally got the guts to ask him to come and have a conversation with me. So Ari Redbord is the global head of policy and government affairs at TRM Labs, but his career spans federal prosecution, the US Treasury, sanctions, terrorism financing, crypto investigations, really the full intersection of policy, law enforcement and innovation. When I reached out to Ari, I told him the truth, that I've been a long time fan of his work and his voice in this space and not just for the rigor, but for the empathy he brings to the conversations that are often overly technical or overly political. And one thing that was shared in a reflection post that Ari did earlier this year really stuck with me. And it's this idea that when you're serious about protecting the financial system, it's always day one. So today we're going to be digging into how public-private partnership is evolving, what traditional financial institutions and crypto can actually learn from each other and how policy, technology and human judgment collide in modern financial crime prevention. Ari, I'm so glad you're here. Welcome to Fraud Forward.

Hailey, thank you so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of the show and that may have been the nicest introduction anyone has ever done for me. So thank you so much. I see Scooby Doo behind you and that just says everything about crime fighting, right? The ultimate crime fighter. You know, all of us grew up and we wanted to be investigators like Scooby Doo and the mystery kids or whatever. Yeah, I love that you have them back there. That's really cool.

Thank you so much. He is my constant reminder that a simple Scooby snack can help with the culture that we surround ourselves with in the fight against fraud. It really does so much for us whenever we just give a Scooby snack or thank you to a fraud fighter that does the job that often goes unnoticed. So thank you for calling him out. He was one of those things that I said, you know what? I'm taking him with me everywhere I go. Thank you. Yeah. So I'm glad for the fact that when we first joined this call, it wasn't recorded. And the reason being because I truly fangirled for a minute to the point of needing a brown paper bag. It's Ari Redbord. So for anyone who may not know you, which they clearly are living under a rock, but if they don't know you, could you introduce yourself and your path to the work that you're doing today?

No, thank you so much. And again, just stop. You're so kind. And I'm the one who's honored and excited to be here. But yeah, look, I spent about 14 years in the US federal government. I spent about 11 years as a federal prosecutor, as an assistant United States attorney for the District of Columbia, part of the Department of Justice. And there, I really sort of almost had two disparate roles over that decade. Plus one was working on domestic violence and child abuse and sex offense cases, human trafficking in our domestic violence and sex offense section of the U.S. Attorney's Office. And the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. is a really unique place. It is the only federal prosecutor's office in the country that also prosecutes the state or the local crimes. Because D.C. is not a state. We don't have a state's attorney. We don't have a district attorney. It is the U.S. Attorney, the federal prosecutor that prosecutes violent crime. So I really cut my teeth doing domestic violence misdemeanors and child abuse cases and violent crimes, violent rapes and eventually child exploitation and human trafficking. And when I had kids, I kind of had enough of that. And particularly the really bad cases involving children. And then I moved to the national security section, which really I think set in motion a very cool career journey that I've been on for the last decade plus. And in that section, the national security section, I prosecuted cases, really at that intersection of money laundering and national security, what I call threat finance. So terrorist financing, sanctions, criminal prosecutions, export control. Anytime bad actors were trying to take advantage or abuse the financial system. That was kind of our jam back in the day. I then left the U.S. Attorney's office and spent about two years at the U.S. Treasury Department, working in the office that oversees the national security apparatus. So as everyone who listens to this podcast knows, that's OFAC, which is our sanctions regulator, the office of foreign asset control and FinCEN, which is really the financial intelligence unit for the United States. It's the U.S. FIU. And then a policy shop called TFFC, which is where the U.S. engagement to the FATF, the financial action task force happens, as well as this little tiny piece of the giant U.S. intelligence community called OIA, the office of intelligence and analysis. And yeah, I did this really crazy thing about five and a half years ago where I left about 14 years in the U.S. government and joined an eight person startup. And we're about 400 people today across 70 countries or something. And it's been this just incredible journey. And I'm just so grateful that I get to basically be at this really cool startup, but stay on the mission of building a safer financial system and getting to work with really cool people, present company included in this space. It's been a real adventure.

So everyone can understand why the hype for Ari Redbord. I love it though, even how we started with Scooby, right? Scooby was always trying to teach us that to be on the right path and to help the underdog or whatever. And so I love that that's how your story kind of went that way. Like you started with these really hard cases at the US Attorney's Office and then went into the finance sector, especially after having kids. I can totally understand where you wouldn't want to be seeing these horrible things anymore, especially whenever you can definitely relate as a parent. And then moving into and taking a huge leap, right, and joining the startup. I think that that is honestly incredible just hearing where you've come from and knowing what I know as well. You also forgot to mention that you've been a Netflix star.

We can talk about that. Other crazy experiences on the journey for sure.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And for the reasons of this podcast, what I really would like to do is dive in first to that public-private partnership, you know, from concept to reality. So I want to start with your time inside government, because you've seen that private-public partnership from the inside and not just from conference stages. You know, we go to conferences and it's all about everybody's going to say we need to do better with our private-public partnerships. We need to collaborate more. Yeah, in theory, we do. But I feel like there are some ways that this has worked in the past or that there are good partnership examples. So when you were at Treasury working alongside regulators in law enforcement, what did good partnership actually look like in practice?

Yeah, look, you know, it's interesting and I'll answer some of the question and mix it up a little bit here. I hate public-private partnerships. Okay. And everyone's always surprised to hear me say that. And the reason I hate them is I think that they're everyone's recommendation when you have to provide recommendations. So you're testifying before Congress or you're writing a memo or an RFI response and you have to have recommendations. And it's always more public-private partnerships, more information sharing. And I'm being a little facetious when I say that I hate public-private partnerships, but I hate the idea of a bunch of people from the public sector and the private sector sitting around a conference table, sharing ideas and best practices and maybe eventually writing a report or white paper that maybe a handful of people see. What I really, really believe in more than absolutely anything in the space is leveraging cooperation, information sharing between the public and private sector for real-time disruption, interdiction, seizure, operational wins. And really that has been something that I think has been a huge part, not just in my career, but on TRM's journey. In August, we announced something called the Beacon Network. And to me, the Beacon Network is the very best of what a public-private, what we call public-private disruption network can do. And basically we realized in the wake of the Bybit hack, where North Korea stole about $1.5 billion from the Bybit exchange and was actually able to launder those funds from Ethereum to Bitcoin in just a few days. And what we realized is bad actors were moving faster than ever before. They were working with professional money laundering networks and organizations, and we just needed to move faster. Compliance teams could not just stop addresses from transacting with their platforms that were moving just too quickly. So we reached out to Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. We reached out to Coinbase and we said, we'd like to work with you on building a real network for disruption, interdiction and seizure within the crypto ecosystem. And they were absolutely in. So then we reached out really across the space. Kraken, okay. X blockchain.com crypto.com, HTX, Poloniex. I can probably go on and on, Ripple, but then also fintechs like Robinhood and Stripe and PayPal and DeFi protocols like RhinoFi and one inch. And we married the crypto ecosystem essentially with about 70 global law enforcement entities and those law enforcement entities are having investigators flag illicit crypto proceeds as they're moving in real time. Auto alerting. And basically picture a lighthouse. They're sending out a beacon, an alert to the network that is allowing real time blocking and real time interdiction and then ultimately seizure. And it's the coolest thing. It's non-commercial. It accounts for about 85% of all centralized crypto volume is part of the Beacon network today. And we're seeing a real world impact where we don't meet, we don't sit around talking about best practices. It's real time alerting, interdiction and seizure. And the only requirements to be a member of Beacon are that if you're that law enforcement investigator who has the ability to flag that you're going to work, that you're going to follow up on that flag with a seizure. And if you're that exchange, the only obligation is that you work to seize those funds. And it's relatively new, still sort of figuring it all out, but it's really extraordinary. So when I look out in the space, Beacon is really sort of my example of what is possible, really leveraging this technology.

I love the idea that pay to play is not the right phrase, but it is that you have to contribute. You have to be held accountable in order to do something or to be a part of this because we don't need you to just sit there and do nothing and just utilize the software to investigate whatever and not actually follow through. I love that that's part of the components within this technology that you guys have. Love that. So I'd also like to ask, what is the biggest misconception do you think financial institutions still have about how government wants to work with them while we were still just in that realm?

Yeah, that's a great question. And maybe slightly different realm. What we've seen, certainly in the United States, but I think this is becoming more and more true globally too, is that regulators and policymakers are looking to have conversations with subject matter experts from industry. I think the US is the prime example today. I mean, it seems like the entire interagency has been told by the White House that hey, they need to provide regulatory clarity from a compliance perspective to this industry, even without legislative action. So I think something that still is sort of people are so surprised when they say, you know, hey, I reached out to the SEC and we sat down with the SEC task force or the CFTC or Treasury or even the Department of Justice. I think there's just a lot of information sharing. There's a lot of knowledge sharing right now. And I think it's great. I think for years there has been this, to me, always wrong sense that the government doesn't know anything or all the subject matter experts are in the industry, right? Some of the finest subject matter experts in the world on technology and the intersection of technology and national security are at FinCEN, at OFAC, at SEC, and certainly at DOJ. So I think maybe some of that, but I think a lot of that is being overcome right now as there's a lot more connecting between the public and private sectors.

Very true. And you know, I had this phrase as a question, but I think I'm going to use it as more of a statement that some institutions I feel still treat information sharing as optional, like extra credit, like, hey, we did this good thing, but it's not like core risk management. So I'd love to ask, you know, as a follow up to that statement, what's one thing that banks or fintechs could do tomorrow to be a better partner without waiting for the new rules or guidance?

Yeah, I think you answered the question. I think involvement in this type of public-private partnership, particularly in crypto, right? Which is sort of the lens that I really have on the world right now or have for some time. And that is the open nature of public blockchains allow us to follow the money in real time in ways we never could in the traditional world. And happy to get into as much of that as you want. But it also allows us to partner in ways that we never could before. So I think it's more important than ever that we do. And it's not optional. It is best practices when it comes to compliance, working hand in glove with the government. If you are the private sector, it should be absolutely required. If you're the public sector to make sure that you're leveraging the expertise and the knowledge and the tools from the private sector. And just, I think it's absolute best practices. When you talk about what a risk-based approach is for a compliance team, it should absolutely be, particularly in the crypto space, being part of some type of public-private disruption, interdiction, seizure type network where you're able to really utilize these capabilities. Look, I think we're at a really interesting point in human history, right? We have more access to data than we ever have before. AI is going to absolutely change every aspect of our lives. But we're in this world where the private sector has all the data and the public sector has all of the authorities. And we have to ensure that the private sector has the authorities that it needs, but equally or more importantly, that the government has the data that it needs. And I think the only way to do that is to work really closely together.

Absolutely. And getting the resources. I want to give a quick shout out to Matt Hogan for his recent opportunity in DC to advocate for some of those resources, especially for the law enforcement side and showing what Connecticut has done. I thank you.

Matt is the man. I was super proud of him. I had coffee with him the day before, he was all nervous. I told him like, bald man kill on Capitol Hill, you're going to do great. Now I just said, be yourself, he's so sharp, he knows this stuff better than anyone. We need a lot more Matt Hogans and folks doing that work. Spoiler alert, but he's a guest on TRM Talks I think in a few weeks with a really special episode. So yeah, Matt's terrific. Shout out to you, Matt, if you're out there.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think what just stands out really from this conversation about partnership today is that it isn't just about cooperation. It's about that shared ownership of risk. And that idea leads right into the next topic because criminals don't care whether they're exploiting a bank, a fintech or a crypto platform. There's still this tendency, though, to talk about crypto crime like it's separate from traditional financial crime. But in reality, we're seeing the same actors move across the ecosystems, right? So from your perspective, how real is the divide between traditional financial crime and crypto crime?

I think crypto is just another means of value transfer. And the reality is that I've always thought we'd get to this point. I think we're actually starting to. I think 2026, 2027 will be years where we really see this play out. But you know, people talk about crypto crime. It's funny, Nick Fornow and I have talked for years about this and then he called his book, There's No Such Thing as Crypto Crime, which I love, but it's something that we've been saying for years and that is crypto is the means of value transfer in every type of crime. And it's only going to become more true as crypto becomes really, or blockchains become rails for the financial system. We're going to see every transaction occur on a blockchain and we're going to stop talking about crypto crime. It's just going to be financial crime or just crime. Because every crime is a financial crime as I'm sure you would agree. So I think that's a huge piece of this. Even when I look over at law enforcement, there's a virtual asset unit at the FBI, the IRS, something similar, HSI, DEA, Secret Service in the US. I don't think those are going to exist. And I love the people working there. They're the best crypto investigators in the world. But the reality is that every single agent, every single investigator is going to have to be a crypto investigator because it's just going to be money. So it's sort of like you're following the money in the case here, you're following the crypto and you're going to get access to the tools, you're getting access to the training. So I know that we talk about crypto as a very sort of specialized area. And then investigating crypto is different, right? You're using blockchain intelligence tools like TRM, you're tracking, tracing the flow of funds, you're dealing with legal process on crypto exchanges. But I think that that'll just be one tool in a toolbox that investigators have to investigate all kinds of different criminal activity.

I definitely agree and it sort of answers my next question, but I can definitely rephrase it because I want to make sure that we touch on this. So the question was, what does crypto investigation get right that traditional banking has been slower to adopt? And I think a lot of that has to do with the blockchain and rails. That if we had this public blockchain of all of our transactions that we could see and we could say it's that decentralized financing versus having the traditional where your organization or one FI owns their data, another one owns theirs and so there's no real public view into those transactions. Just would love to get your thoughts on that.

Yeah, well to me that's kind of the thing that I think was most exciting to me from a compliance perspective from day one, right? I think that there's a lot of conversation about what modernizing the BSA, the Bank Secrecy Act potentially look like. I've, I don't know, I think responded to like at least three RFI responses over the years from Treasury on that topic. But to me, the really transformative idea is that our Bank Secrecy Act, our anti-money laundering laws have always been predicated on siloed relationships between your financial institution and your regulator, basically think you know US Bank sending suspicious activity reports, SARs, to FinCEN and the only people that ever see those are the bank and the regulator. And maybe if you're lucky a prosecutor or law enforcement because they found a needle in a haystack. Blockchain really kind of obliterates that model because now a regulator could have a bird's eye view of all activity within their regulated ecosystem in real time. You don't need intermediaries. Now that puts a lot of responsibility on the regulator. And I understand that, right? We've always relied on banks. This is how it works. But I think the reality is there's probably a dual system here where a regulator can in fact, in real time, regulate its ecosystem, but also again, work really closely with financial institutions to include cryptocurrency firms in that type of paradigm. But I think the reality is blockchain allows us to arguably regulate the financial system a lot better than we were before.

Love that. And then on the flip side of that, where does traditional FI's maturity, governance, controls, escalation, give it a real advantage?

Yeah, I think it's interesting. I think we're seeing the maturation of the crypto space. But I think it's also interesting. We're having a lot of conversations at TRM with large financial institutions. And really, they are asking really great questions. But they've had these really sophisticated compliance programs in place for years. In the crypto space, we're used to dealing with every business as a startup. Even the biggest crypto firms haven't been around that long and are really learning compliance, are building it. And I think there's a lot the banks can learn from the way crypto firms leverage technology, really leverage the power of the blockchain for investigations, for compliance. But there's a lot that crypto firms, native crypto firms can also learn from really robust, sophisticated compliance professionals at financial institutions. One thing I love to see is when really senior compliance professionals or seasoned compliance professionals from banks go and work at a crypto native firm. And I usually think that's a great fit. CJ Rinaldi is a Kraken now, he's their chief compliance officer, he's a great example of this. There's so many others. But yeah, I'd love to see that because I think there's this really interesting marriage going on between the crypto natives and the financial institutions and they're all trying to figure out kind of how to do this thing.

Okay, so then a quick fun question. If you dropped a traditional fraud leader into a crypto investigation for 30 days, what do you think would surprise them the most?

You know, it's interesting. I think what would surprise them is really the unique ability to follow money on public blockchains. When I was a prosecutor, I investigated cases involving bulk cash smuggling and networks of hawalas and shell companies and high value art and diamonds and real estate. You know, there was no TRM to track and trace the flow of wire transfers and those types of transactions. So I think that when any investigator, compliance professional, starts to really use tools like TRM, really understand the power of blockchain intelligence, they're really blown away by that. But that said, these are only one tool and they follow every transaction that occurs on a blockchain. But the reality is we have to use all the other tools, whether we're an investigator and that means legal process, whether we're a compliance professional, and that means all the other tools that they've always used in that toolbox.

I love it. I think that I've had a lot of conversations with law enforcement that whenever they've talked to me about the hype of crypto in their investigations and I'm sitting here like, I want to see what it looks like. You know, they are like, well, Hailey, you know, in the past, I've had to wait days, weeks for a search warrant or subpoena to be answered. Whereas I go directly here and the information is so readily available in real time. So I literally can follow one and then immediately a transaction happens. I follow. Mark Evans as well from Vegas and he's like, no, I saw it move and then we made a call and we got it stopped and then reversed. And so I love that that opportunity is there for law enforcement to be able to see that. And I think what I also love about that perspective is that it breaks down the idea that one side has it all figured out. Crypto is doing great and is very innovative as far as blockchain analysis and thinking through that investigation side. And then the traditional side, we do have it kind of figured out as far as governance and maturity level. But it also brings something else to think about. And that's the balance between tools and the people actually doing this work. You know, right now everyone is racing towards automation, AI and scale. And for good reason, right? Obviously, we've got to keep up with the times. But you've seen what happens when technology moves faster than policy or when policy ignores operational reality. So where do you think institutions are asking technology to solve problems that actually require human judgment?

You know, it's hard to say and it's changing so fast. I have never seen anything move this fast in my lifetime, certainly. And I don't even think it's close, not the internet, not cryptocurrency, blockchain. AI is moving at alarming speed and scale. And you know, I think as much as people may not like this answer on this podcast, I think the reality is AI should be used at every possible layer of any type of compliance stack. And the reality is, you know, side by side with compliance professionals who know how to use these tools, but you better know how to use these tools. And if there are compliance folks who are coming up who give this a listen, I think I don't think there's any better advice I could give than that. You need to start early. You need to start playing with these things. You need to start learning them because they can do. They're extraordinary. And the people that are going to be successful, no matter what field that you're in, are going to be people that really understand how to harness this. So I know I talked to financial institutions, more conservative financial institutions, that say, we can't do this. It's not regulated. And a regulator says not to do this. You know, the regulators also need to get on board because this is something that is incredibly powerful. And it's going to be incredibly important. And the reality is the bad guys are already using this. They're using it to commit scams at unprecedented speed. We saw about a 500% increase last year in AI enabled scams. Think deepfake videos, really targeted phishing emails, right? The days of broken English are gone. Now these emails are tailored to you, you know, dear Hailey, I saw you do this. I know you from here. You know, I'm a friend. I sound like your mother. I mean, it's crazy, the capabilities here. And I think we really have to focus on how do we use AI in every layer of our platform to fight back against bad actors. And that's how we're thinking about it at TRM today. We are more and more an AI native company that is using AI in every layer of what we do in order to move as fast as the bad actors.

I think that that is definitely a perspective that we all need to embrace. And it's definitely one that we've had conversations about in the past on the podcast. It's, you know, maybe they aren't designed to work together, but they need to try to work together. It's the AI isn't going to replace us, but it can make us better. It can make us more efficient. It can take things off our plate that we spend a lot of time on that we maybe shouldn't. But there was another question that came up. I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago with Frank McKenna and we talked through this and I'd love to get your perspective as well. Do you worry that in the push for speed and efficiency, we're quietly de-skilling fraud and compliance teams?

You know, you hear this all the time. I use AI in so much of the work that we do today. You know, I think that it's interesting. We're raising a generation that may not have certain skills, but they're likely going to have others, maybe new skills that are more important for the new economy that we're building, this new AI-based economy. So I guess I'm just someone who has never been afraid of embracing technology. I think it's really important. I think the more we put our head in the sand on these things, the faster they're going to move either past us or the bad actors that we're trying to keep up with are going to move past us. So I'd rather err on the side of really leaning in and using these tools, understanding that, look, there are limitations here, whether they're regulatory or compliance or otherwise. But I think that my general view is that we should be leaning into it, we should be leveraging it, we should learn how to manipulate it for good.

100% and you know that tension between speed, scale and judgment is something I think almost every fraud leader I talked to is wrestling with, which then brings us back to the idea that you shared that really stuck with me and it's this concept of always operating like it's day one. You said that when you're truly committed to protecting the financial system, it's always day one, not because we haven't made progress, but because complacency is the real risk. So what does day one thinking actually look like in a fraud program?

That's so interesting. I think when I usually use that phrase, it's around building, you know, it's still day one at TRM. But I love the way you're using it in the broader space as well. Look, you know, the way I feel about it is really deeply personal. I don't think I've ever talked about this before. You know, I use that line. It's still day one to really tell our team and tell the world, like even as we've gotten bigger, we announced a big raise recently where the company was valued at a billion dollars. And I'm humbled by that, but also sort of like, hey, we need to keep moving fast. We need to keep iterating. We need to keep moving at what we call TRM speed. We can never take down our defenses for a second, either as a company or really as a space where we're trying to stop bad actors. It's always day one. It's still day one, meaning you've got to be young, scrappy and hungry as they say in Hamilton, all the time. And I think that for me, day one, when I say that, or it's still day one. It's sort of a little bit of getting me in the right head space about like, don't ever, stay humble, stay hard, stay scrappy. Because you know, if you stop operating as fast and with as much care and passion, then maybe it doesn't work or maybe it goes away. That's whether you're building a company, whether you're building a safer financial system, whether you're building a compliance team. So I think that's kind of the context in which I throw that term or phrase around.

I love it so much. It definitely inspired me. It was one of the reasons why I finally got the nerve to ask you to come on the show. I just feel so inspired because that day one mentality truly is something that if we, if you think about whenever you go your first day at a job, right? You're so excited. I'll speak for myself only. I am not a morning person. I don't get up and run eight miles like other people. But I do whenever it's a new job or a new opportunity. I'm really excited. I can barely sleep the night before and then wake up and then I'm supercharged to just get the day started. And it's been that way for me with fraud always. If we lose that passion that we have on day one, I don't think that we will be successful, just like you said. So stay young, scrappy and hungry. Day one. I love that perspective so much. I would like to ask, you know, obviously, I think complacency is one of those things, but what do you think institutions are doing today that feel very day 1000 or 10,000 and maybe need to be rethought?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think it is really leaning into technology. I think it's realizing, and I think we're seeing this, right? It took some time. The Genius Act, I think, was really instrumental in helping financial institutions understand the importance of building blockchain rails, of leaning into crypto a little bit here. I think it is really working to understand technology and how to utilize technology. I know from a compliance perspective, which is so many of your listeners, it really is leveraging transformative technology. I mean, it's there at our disposal. It's at our fingertips. We should really be learning it. And people are like, well, how do you do that? Well, do it as a personal journey, right? I have been messing around with AI tools for, I don't know, a couple of years now. I sometimes, the way all the LinkedIn stuff happens is I'll be messing with something and then I'll be like, if I thought this was interesting, maybe someone else will too. And I'll just kind of put it on there. But I did a couple of deepfake videos that were terrible compared to what they could be now, kind of in those early days. Right. But that was actually just me trying to understand how this stuff works. And the only way to do that is to put your hands on it, to touch it. And I did the same thing with crypto when I got to TRM, spun up a MetaMask wallet, you know, messed around with NFTs and that's the stuff you need to do. So that is what I would encourage folks who are in the compliance space. Yeah, understand how to utilize the technology. And if you're not allowed to do it for work, do it on your personal time. Understand how this stuff works. You are going to be so much more valuable, you know, whether it's career, whether it's whatever else, if you really understand hands on with this technology.

I can't agree more. I feel like I'm just going to keep saying 100% or I... On that I really do. I feel like I probably was one of those in the beginning. I was just like, oh my gosh, this is something...

Yeah, it's so easy. That's the reaction. No one's like I shouldn't do this or I'm not going to do this. It's like, man, that just feels like a lot. And I know what I know. And yeah, I think that's usually the reaction. And I guess what I would challenge folks is to really push through that because this is so important. And you know, I think that folks will really benefit from it.

That's what they keep telling me about this MacBook. I'm an HP user my whole career and now I'm on a MacBook and I'm like, this button does not do what it did before. But once I learn it, I'll enjoy it. So we'll see. We'll see. I'll let everybody know. But I appreciate this perspective so much, this entire conversation. I'd love to kind of have us close it out with, you know, if a fraud or compliance leader is listening and feeling overwhelmed, you know, where would your advice be that they should start to reset and refocus?

Yeah, I get that. Burnout is real. And I think one of the hardest things in the world is getting messages every single day talking about someone who's a victim of a scam or fraud, losing their life savings. So what I would say is though, every day when you get out of bed, know that you are doing the most important work that you are protecting individuals, you are protecting the financial system, you are helping people not lose their life savings or not become victims of scams or fraud. And it's incredibly important work. And what I'd say to compliance people, and I say all the time, it's like, you guys are the tip of the spear. I've been a lot of things in my career. I've never been a compliance professional. And having gotten to know this community and these people, to me, that's what tip of the spear looks like. It's when you're actually protecting a financial institution, when you're working hand in hand with law enforcement to stop bad guys from accessing the global financial system or taking advantage of global financial system. It's really extraordinary work. I hope that even as hard as it is, it gives you energy to kind of fight through those difficult times.

Yes, and I would love it if any of my law enforcement friends would just give me like an honorary badge that I could wear something. It's important. I feel like my grandfather was, you know, former SLED for South Carolina. He was an investigator. And so I want to be like, Granddaddy, I have the badge too. I do. I really do. Right, right. It's just one you can't see. But anyways, it's still there. And I hope that other fraud fighters just feel the sheer sense of just being proud of what we do, right? I mean, that's one thing that even when the days were hard, being a fraud fighter of one, you know, a department of one that did so much for a larger organization and thinking, I'm so done. Like there's no more I can do, but then there was a victim or then there was a fraud fighter on the front line that would call and say, Hailey, I found one, I stopped one. It made it all worth it. It made me realize that this job is so important. And one of the reasons why, of course, I have the podcast too, is to bring these conversations to light. So, Ari, I cannot thank you enough for coming on the podcast. This has been such a thoughtful and grounding conversation, truly. I really appreciate how you bring together policy, technology, and people, right? Without losing sight of the real world impact on victims, investigators, and institutions just trying to do the right thing.

Hailey, thank you so much for having me. Huge honor and really, yeah, just looking forward to the next time.

That's right, that's right. And can't wait for the next time. I do plan on whenever we finally meet in person, I will come on one of those runs. I just have to. Absolutely. Okay, fraud fighters. If this episode sparked something for you, share it, start a conversation and as always, stay vigilant, stay informed and keep moving fraud forward.

Let's do it, let's do it, that's awesome. We can do an interview on a run, that's awesome. Hailey, thank you so much, looking forward to it.