CHILD ABUSE, HUMAN TRAFFICKING & VIGILANTES

Robert Hansen

Okay. But not necessarily consensual, in this case.

Penn Parrish

Some do. Some not.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I like to refer to people like that as person involved in commercial sex. We don't know what circumstance is going on.

Robert Hansen

What their motive is.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes, no idea. Like Penn said, there are some people that are consensual. I would argue that's extremely limited. We can say, "Well, they're making a choice." But if you only have two or three choices, are you really making a choice? I think words matter. Words are important.

Robert Hansen

So how does this whole thing work? Because there seems like there's a bit of an economy or maybe even a massive economy around there. How does that work? Who gets paid? Who's getting paid off to make sure this all works the way it should work?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Ultimately, at the end of the day, it's traffickers. That's really it.

Robert Hansen

How does someone wake up one day and get into trafficking? How does that occur?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

That's a million-dollar question. I think if we knew we could hit it off. I think economic instability, for one. Most Harvard graduates aren't going out and trafficking people. It happens, don't get me wrong. But you look at that, you look at culture, pop culture. We think about I can say the word "pimp" and I can say the word trafficker.

If I say pimp, everybody thinks about Snoop Dogg and nice cars and jewelry and all this. It's somewhat viewed as glamorous. If I say trafficker, people genuinely have a very different view of that but they're the same thing.

So who at the end of the day is ultimately making the money? It's traffickers. Some hotel owners probably paid off here and there from time to time, of course. Depending on what country you're in, or what location you're in, is it possible law enforcement is paid off? It is.

Penn Parrish

Clubs, the list goes on and on. The surprising amount of places that you find these traffickers will overwhelm you. It's not limited to the cartels who are bad guys, of course. But there are people that build industries off of this, and they get very rich off of this. These pimps survive by having multiple girls on the street and coming back to them with cash.

Robert Hansen

So what does that end up looking like? What's the demographic breakdown? Is it mostly people out of their homes? Or is it mostly cartel? What is the breakdown of where the biggest problems lie if you had to tackle just one of those issues?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Domestic. There's a huge misconception about cartel trafficking and gang-related trafficking. For the most part, they're not trafficking. What's the purpose of the cartel? It's to essentially make money at the top. If you're a trafficker, what do you want? You want money, right?

A lot of times, I like to say it's not necessarily that the crips are trafficking, it's that a crip is trafficking. Or look at it that way. If I had to tackle one particular form, it would be the hotel-based nomadic pimp with three girls. That is, in terms of sex trafficking, the biggest issue that we come across, is just the one-off trafficker with two, three girls.

Robert Hansen

Where did they find those girls, typically?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Generally, on the internet. The biggest place for recruitment and grooming is still Facebook, Instagram, anywhere that somebody could drop into the DM and show their flashy pictures and tell somebody they're pretty, is where you're going to find it.

Robert Hansen

That's not just those two platforms. You're really talking about anything that some child might be on is a potential place.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes, any platform that a child or adult is on. If it has a chat communication on it, they will exploit it.

Robert Hansen

Obviously, I'm a security expert, so I know quite a bit about these issues. But shouldn't it be impossible for children to be on these platforms in the first place? For instance, Facebook has a minimum of 15, I think. Shouldn't that be the thing that stops that from occurring, at least for anybody under 15?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Should be.

Robert Hansen

What's happening? What's the actual reality?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

The actual reality is I left a classroom full of seven-year-olds and asked them, “How many of you have Facebook or Instagram?” And probably three-quarters of them raised their hand.

Penn Parrish

It's amazing.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It's wild. And should they be under the age of 15? You can change the settings on there, create accounts where they can't be found by adults. They're getting found by adults that are also having accounts that look like they're 12 and 13 years old. So it's tough.

Penn Parrish

You have to fault the parents who are not watching what their underage children are doing.

Robert Hansen

What about the social media platforms? Do you feel like there's any fault to be had there? Do you think they should be doing more interrogation on who they let on the platform?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

This is a dicey one. For me, in many ways, I defend Facebook. So you look at it over the last couple of years, like two years ago, there was 21 million cyber tips to the National Center for Missing Exploited Children. 21,000,000. 20.3 million of those came from Facebook.

So is Facebook doing a good job? Clearly, they are. The problem is, in my opinion, you can go out and ask all these soccer moms, “Hey, what do you think?" And they'll tell you, "Well, they should be going through and monitoring the communication and the all the discussion that's going on Facebook, but I want my privacy.”

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Do you want them involved in the DMs? Or do you not want them involved in the DMs? It's that simple. It's tough when you're the number one organization submitting cyber tips 99%, 99 point some odd percent, it looks like you're doing a good job.

Robert Hansen

I'll get back to Facebook in a while. I think they're a big ball of wax that we should probably dig into a little bit more.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

And others.

Robert Hansen

And many others, it's not just them. And I agree that they are doing something. I wouldn't necessarily say a good job. They're doing something. But let's talk about the demographics of the people who are getting trafficked.

What does that typically look like these days? What's the average person whose finds themselves in this situation? What's their background? How old? What sex?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

If you're looking at sex trafficking, primarily female, males get trafficked, trans get trafficked.

Robert Hansen

What rate is it male to female?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

That's really no way to determine that. If anybody is throwing out statistics at you when it comes to anti-trafficking, they're wrong. Period.

Robert Hansen

They just don't know.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

They just don't know. How do we get these numbers? There’s no way to quantify something that's hidden. We can have an idea based on certain things. But if we look at self-reported numbers to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, they'll tell you that about 16% of certain years, people that called in as victim self-identifying, identified as male.

You can look at different organizations that will say it's predominantly 96% female you see very often. There's a few reasons I think why those numbers are off. For one, when law enforcement is doing operations, what are we targeting? We are targeting females.

I just talked with a police department in Texas and they couldn't figure out why they couldn't find males. And I'm like, “You're not doing operations in the area where these males are, generally. You're targeting the area where these females are.”

Robert Hansen

Because there's not a lot of boys at the strip club is what you're saying?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Of course.

Robert Hansen

Is that the genre?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes, there's still tracks. There are still places where women walk up and down the street and cars are pulling up and those are all women. You'd be hard-pressed to find a male out there. So if we're not going where the males are, we're never going to find the males.

Penn Parrish

The males are more clandestine with their activities. Very much.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. How so? What did they end up? What does that look like?

Penn Parrish

It's more of a private network that deal in that. People like NAMBLA, and those type of people that deal in certain bars that cater to them. You’ll find trafficking there.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. What's your feeling on NAMBLA? You've got to have a strong National Man/Boy Love Association.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Absolutely not.

Penn Parrish

Horrific.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

No, absolutely not.

Robert Hansen

You have no feelings on it?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

No, I have a lot of feelings. I think that when we start making something acceptable, we are really doing a disservice to people. I can't even believe that's an organization.

Robert Hansen

It's been around for a long time. You just have thought every one of them would have been raided by now. But apparently, it somehow survives.

Penn Parrish

When you talked about age groups, it ranges. There's a wide variety. I'll give you a specific example. One example of a young lady that I spent quite a bit of time with, she was incarcerated when I first met her. At the age of 11, she was living in South Texas.

Her mother sex trafficked her own daughter to get drugs, and kept her into that until the mother was put in jail. And the daughter the sex trafficked daughter became property of somebody else. And that was a pimp. And that pimp just kept engaging her and engaging her.

She had suffered many arrests, but kept getting released and back into the same old pattern. When I met her, she decided that she was tired of the life and she was going to get out of it and go on. And when she got out, I was there to help her. Andrea was there to help her.

We got her on her feet, got her a job. Got her started and she fell right back into it. It's just a habit that they get into. They get attracted to money. As it is, these pimps don't give these girls much to keep them under control. They give them drugs to keep them under control.

Joe, you may have a little bit to add to that. But that's pretty bad when you get trafficked at 11 years old. That's a scar you can never get rid of.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It's interesting. You can talk to most trafficking survivors and go right down the checklist. If it's not prior trafficking, it's child sexual abuse. There's a lot of discussion on what is the demographic. A lot of people will tell you that the average age of entry is 12 to 14 years old,

Go to Google, type "human trafficking", click images. You're going to scroll down quite a bit before you see a woman of color. Who's being trafficked the most? Women of color.

Robert Hansen

Why is that? Why is there such a disparity between what's reported and what is real?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Look at the socio-economic instability.

Robert Hansen

Just them being poor, is that what you're saying?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes. What is your vulnerability that led to the trafficking? Again, not many Harvard graduates are being trafficked. So look at what's going on in the communities. Kids that come from impoverished families are vulnerable just because of the financial disparity.

There are so many systemic issues that lead to the trafficking to begin with, but even looking at that, the majority of people that are being trafficked are not actually children. We talk about children the most. But the average age of entry that's been self-reported is 18 and 19 years old.

What's happening there? You're generally coming out of your household. If you don't have a solid, stable background and you don't have the ability to go to college, and somebody comes along and is telling you how pretty you are. You don't have any money and then shows you all the things that they have.

Penn Parrish

It’s attractive. They will get attracted to it. They’ll go work in the strip clubs. Then when they're not in the strip clubs, they're out performing for their pimps.

Robert Hansen

And it's just a cycle at that point. Now their children are in a similar situation.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

You look at how many victims of trafficking are criminalized by law enforcement. They're arrested predominantly for prostitution, which, again, is absolutely absurd to me. So what I try telling cops is, "You're literally creating more instability for them to be the victim of human trafficking."

So you take a woman, say she has been arrested three times in the state of Texas, she's now a felon. And she's making $2,000 to $3,000 a day, turning maybe 10 dates. And you get her out of it. What's she going to do at that point?

Robert Hansen

Especially with an arrest record a mile long.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes. So you get her job at Flying J Truck Stop. She's making $10 an hour being screamed at by a boss. I'm not going to make 10, 15, 20 bucks an hour, I can go make 20 bucks.

Penn Parrish

It’s that same Truck Stop turned into a lot lizard and make a lot of money.

Robert Hansen

What about the kidnapping aspects? Because not all of this is just someone who is impoverished looking for a way out. Not necessarily a lot, but a minimum is someone being actually taken from the street or taken from someone's home or being sold out from underneath a family. How common is that?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

What’s the terminology statistically? I mean, it's very small. Out of more than 270 victims at this point of human trafficking, I've only ever had one that was even near a kidnapping. In the United States it's not very common.

Penn Parrish

You see it in Nigeria. You see it in Southeast Asia. You see it in other African communities. And in some of the Slavic states it's pretty predominant. Bulgaria is horrible.

Robert Hansen

In that case, what we're seeing is not so much selling the children, but just grooming them within the families. So some adults, typically male, will start abusing either their kids or their nephews or daughters or whatever. Is that the idea?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

If it's familial trafficking, yes. If it's not, it’s somebody who's smooth with their mouth. That's all it is. And they tell them, “Hey, if you're having sex anyway, you might as well make some money off of it. If you're going to be doing this, you might as well be making $300 an hour doing it.”

300 bucks an hour is a lot of money. I've never made that, for the most part. That’s a lot of money. Now, you take the fact that this person has had 10 years of child sexual abuse history, where they didn't have the ability to make that choice. And now they feel that they have a choice. It's hard.

Robert Hansen

So is that really a choice? Or are they actually in such a place where if they tried to leave, they would be endangering their lives?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Absolutely. In many cases, yes. But also, you have to remember, it's a psychological game. We talk about Stockholm Syndrome. I don't necessarily think that has a ton to do with trafficking, but learned helplessness. You've been taught to be helpless. You've been taught to not be able to make these decisions.

A lot of times traffickers will say, "You can leave, but you leave with what you came with." So nothing. Like Penn said, it may last for a very brief period.

Penn Parrish

A lot of them are kept under the influence of narcotics.

Robert Hansen

That's a way to exert a tremendous amount of control.

Penn Parrish

Without question.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I've never had the misfortune to have to come off of heroin, but I've seen what it does to people. And you keep somebody sick if they don't turn a trick. That’s a hell of a way to do it.

Robert Hansen

And where else are they going to get that kind of money?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes. It's sadistic, but it’s a very good control mechanism.

Robert Hansen

So let's talk about the pimps themselves, the traffickers themselves. Is there an obvious signal that you're like, "This is somebody who's involved in this."? Can I go to a hotel and see someone with three girls in tow and say, that's probably what's going on?

What are some of the obvious clues that somebody just going through life might be able to help you identify this kind of stuff?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

For me, if I was to pull in a parking lot, it would depend on the hotel. We were actually talking yesterday. If I pull into a Motel Six, going for an undercover on a date with what we believe is a trafficking victim, and there's a Lexus in the parking lot. People with a brand new Lexus generally have the money to be able to stay at a Hilton. We're not going to stay at a Motel Six.

So things like that are really obvious. I'm not saying that everybody who drives a Lexus at a Motel Six is trafficking. But when I see somebody just sitting in the car for extended periods of time, it's because they're looking out for the cops and/or there's a date in the room.

So for me, it would just be the situational awareness. What makes sense? It doesn't make sense for somebody to just sit idle in a car, especially a high-end car at an economy rate hotel.

Penn Parrish

They're not, for the most part, the description that you get from watching movies. Guys with fedoras, with the feather and the bright red suits. No, they're guys that look like you and me and, like he said, sit in the car waiting for their trick to be done, move on to the next.

The same with the fellas that work at truck stops that have two or three women in a van. They're working with signals from truckers that know that they're looking for a trick. They sit and wait in the van and put three or four girls to work in the trucks. And that's how it goes.

Robert Hansen

What about the demographics of people molesting their own children? Is there a way to sort of obviously see that from a distance? Because that seems like so hidden to me. You're so now embedded in people's lives, that would be a very difficult thing to identify.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Familial trafficking is extremely difficult. You really can't do it without an outcry from the victim or sometimes you'll find where a buyer has remorse.

Robert Hansen

Really?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes, and they'll come forward and say, “Hey.’

Robert Hansen

Somehow very surprising to me.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes, you'll find that every now and then, but it's not very often.

Robert Hansen

Why does that happen? Is that like a call to religion?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I think at the end of the day, there's more good people in the world and bad. I don't know how to word this.

Penn Parrish

Especially a guy that has a conscience that's just turned a trick with a girl that is obviously 13 or 14. He walks out of there feeling guilty as hell and goes, “What have I done?”

Robert Hansen

Interesting. That's still very surprising to me because you're basically admitting to a crime at that point. That could be serious consequences.

Penn Parrish

Joe can address but that happens so much at massage parlors. Joe busts a lot of massage parlors.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Massage parlors are kind of my forte.

Robert Hansen

Careful who you say that to.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I know. I've been fortunate enough to work those all over the country, Asian countries, European countries. And they're all the same. They're all the exact same. One of the things that's interesting with massage parlor trafficking is I think that because they're out of sight, we tend to look at the victims different.

We don't see them in front of us on the street. Usually, when one gets busted, especially where I'm at, when one gets shut down, you'll have people come forward. “Hey, I was in there.”

Robert Hansen

Really? Why?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Because they know we're coming.

Robert Hansen

So it's a plea deal at that point, from their perspective. I think it's a preemptive plead deal.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I think it's one of those if I come to you first, things won't be as bad because we will go find them. I literally sat with an agency, some other state the other day, I don't remember where I was, and we went through the receipts from the credit cards. Go talk to each one of these people.

Penn Parrish

There's a story you told me some time ago about the Waco massage parlor where you guys staked it out forever. That's a good example.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Well, we got lucky on one it was really interesting. It was two that were connected by an owner. The date we ran the search warrants, my partner at the time came in with an alarm clock and said, “I think there's a camera." "Why do you think it’s a camera?" He said, "Well, it's got an SD card in the back."

FBI calls that a clue. When we started conducting the search warrants and actually going through those, we were able to identify 405 individual people. These clocks were in the rooms so every sex act was on tape. It was really interesting.

We charged a lot of buyers. And as word got out, then people started panicking because they knew we were coming if we can identify you. So we were having preachers come forward. We arrested law enforcement, we arrested millionaires, you name it, everybody went to jail as a result of this.

Robert Hansen

What were these clocks for? Why did they put them in there?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I think the owner did it to make sure she was never getting cheated on the money. I think it was a means to monitor what was happening.

Robert Hansen

Not future blackmail.

Penn Parrish

She caught herself.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I don’t think so. She caught herself. And it was good because you could see her switching out girls, the whole nine yards. One thing that was interesting to me, in a very negative way, is the amount of forcible rapes that I watched actually occur on tape.

I'm talking women being picked up thrown over beds, fought, the whole nine yards. And we typically don't see that when we talk about Illicit Massage Business Trafficking because we think about who's the clientele there? Generally speaking, middle-aged white dudes wearing wedding rings, with good careers.

So we don't really consider that and it's an extremely violent setting.

Robert Hansen

I heard one stat and I don't know if this is true or not. But I'd love to get your take on it. That approximately 5% of all people in the United States trade or could be going to jail for CSAM material. Does that sound right to you?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I've never heard that. I don't know where that would come from. I don't know how you could measure that.

Robert Hansen

It was a back-of-the-napkin rough estimate. But what would you put the number at if you had to throw a wild guess out there?

Penn Parrish

I couldn't even.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

That's too hard to tell.

Robert Hansen

Because if it is that high, and I'm not saying it is.

Penn Parrish

It's massive

Robert Hansen

That means that by the time I'm done with season two, at least one of those people could theoretically be arrested.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes, I don't think that that's accurate. I think it could be if you really start breaking, and this is where we start splitting hairs, you have an 18-year-old boy with pictures of a 17-year-old girlfriend. Is that child sexual abuse material? It is. So should we include him in that statistic?

Robert Hansen

I think the answer is yes because it's completely illegal.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

But many states also have the three-year rule where it's actually not. The Romeo and Juliet Law, similar to sexual abuse that we know. I don't believe you could put 100 people in a room and five of them have child sexual abuse material. I think it's less.

Penn Parrish

Now, the state attorney general's office could probably give you pretty good statistics on that.

Robert Hansen

I'd be curious. Because if it is that high, that means we're fighting a fighting force of people who are not particularly well-networked currently, but easily could figure out ways to start networking and have political law.

They put laws in place like those Romeo and Juliet laws or change the age of consent to 15 in Hawaii, or whatever. There's all these examples where it's kind of like, why does that law even exist?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

When you look at a lot of laws, people oftentimes ask like, "Why did this law not pass?" And I hate to be this way, but spade a spade. Who pays for sex? Generally, it really depends on what kind of trafficking you're talking about. Why do bills get shot down when it comes to illicit massage trafficking.

Like I said, who’s primarily in there? Middle-aged white men who are lawmakers.

Robert Hansen

Not to throw too much conspiracy theory out here, but I met Ken Paxton at one time through Penn actually. And he was talking about all the things he had done for Texas. It was kind of a fundraiser thing.

But one of the things that blew my mind, he was talking about he wanted to have the ability to go run any case he wanted in the state of Texas, just go pick his case. And not only did it not go through rule, but he got massive backlash from all the DA offices.

I had to ask him, first of all, I don't understand why they care. Maybe for the political aspect, like we don't want you going on a political witch hunt. But you could have easily just horse traded and said, “Well, not that. But if you want to go after child prostitution issues, fine.  If you want to go after some sort of sex trafficking, whatever, those are on the table, you can go after those. Or drugs, you can go after those, but no political witch hunts.”

Penn Parrish

The amazing thing in the state of Texas is that county DAs wield unbelievable power and there is very little oversight on them. The only way a DA can be removed is by the legislature.

Robert Hansen

Again, not to throw too much of a conspiracy theory out there, and some other people I've talked to firmly disregard this as even a possibility. But I think it's weird that they didn't just come back with, "If you want to go after child sex abuse issues, fine. Everything else is not allowed."

They didn't do that. They just said no. Why would they say no? Is it purely just protecting my little part of the world, or is there something else?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I don't think they should have the ability to do that. You can go look at the statistics for the attorney general's office for human trafficking, and how many convictions have they secured in the last couple of years? Two traffickers were given deferred adjudication by our attorney general's office. Deferred adjudication.

When that probation is completed, t's not even on the record. That's not a conviction, in my opinion. So are they equipped to do that? Absolutely not. There are some wonderful men and women that work there. I'm not by any stretch saying that they're not fully capable. But I also think that once you do that, you take away from your local District Attorney.

Robert Hansen

So you think the DA should have that power in them alone.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I think the DAs should have the ability to prosecute within the counties that their circuit is. Because what you would inevitably end up happening, and I was very vocal and loud about not letting them do that, is then you have people who can cherry-pick cases.

Well, this one's difficult, you keep dealing with it. This one's a cooperative, 15-year-old girl, it's really good. It's going to look really good for us. Now I have the ability to cherry-pick it. We can’t have that.

Robert Hansen

I like the idea of always having a backup. Let's say the local DA isn't doing their job. At least someone can go in and say, “Look, this is just getting out of hand," at the border, let's say, or in this certain region in Austin, or one of these other major metropolitan areas where there's a lot of people.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

That goes back to the way the state constitution is designed. We want to have the elected DAs do their job. If you're not doing it, as is in Travis County, you need to find a new DA.

Penn Parrish

Vote them out.

Robert Hansen

That's it.

Penn Parrish

Now, the borders, that's a different issue.

Robert Hansen

Wait years and then finally this might get dealt with. Not great. This is just a ball of fun. So what happens to the kids? So they get rescued or whatever happens, and then what happens?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It's a million-dollar question.

Penn Parrish

Like I just said a few minutes ago, one girl that we thought had so much promise and swore up and down that she was on the straight and narrow, and for a while she was. But that lure and those pimps hounding her dragged her back in.

Robert Hansen

How often does that happen as a percentage?

Penn Parrish

Recidivism is extremely high.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Extremely high. Yes, you're looking at, oh, gosh, I don't even know that you could put a number to it. But it's high.

Penn Parrish

It's very high.

Robert Hansen

More than 50% you think?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I would say almost 90%.

Robert Hansen

Really? So they get a taste for it and that's their life.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes.

Robert Hansen

Is it the drugs?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

No. More often than not, they're sober. A lot of pimps will not let their women do drugs. Think about it like a used car. If I give you two cars, both identical, and one is dented, and has cosmetic issues, and I give you your pick of which one. You're going to pick the one that looks better.

Same thing with human beings, unfortunately. You're paying for a commodity, for a product. So I don't think it's necessarily the drugs, I think it's 99% psychological. Look at it similar to domestic violence. How long does it take a woman to escape a domestic violence situation? Usually, a long time.

Now, add in not only is it that, domestic violence, but we're also making time to have fun. So now we're in Austin, what are we going to do? We're going to go to South by Southwest. We're going to enjoy all these cool things in this lavish... Look at the Lexus we have and all of those things. It kind of balances it.

You look at yourself and what's going on, and you may hate it. But then you're looking at everything else and it's enjoyable. It's by design from the trafficker.

Penn Parrish

It's an interesting point that he brings up too and I know you concur on this one. But major events attract a lot of pimps, Super Bowl.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I've worked the last two Super Bowls. One in Tampa, I'll give you an example. You have 4,000 cops descending on one location for one purpose. So if we were to say, hey, 4,000 cops go into Super Bowl in Phoenix this year, "I want you to do nothing but arrest people for heroin."

We can then argue that heroin dealing is the biggest thing around the Superbowl, right? Anecdotally, and in my experience, we'll use Florida as an example, we'd ask “Why are you here? You're from New York. It’s the middle of COVID. Florida's wide open and we came here because we can do whatever we want. Then, while we're here, here we go."

Very few people said that they came for the Super Bowl itself. Flipside, think about it like this, if I'm a trafficker in Houston, say Austin, and I know the Super Bowl is in Phoenix and there's going to be 5,000 cops arresting everybody, I'm staying here. I can make more money, supply and demand, and I don't have to worry as much.

One of the other things to do is look at the Super Bowl in LA, 500 human trafficking arrests. Very similar to Tampa. If you file a Freedom of Information Act request as I did and get the names of everybody, you would find that about 450 of those arrests are women for selling prostitution.

So we're really doing more damage than good when we put all these cops there to make all these arrests because we're not really arresting traffickers. The Super Bowl in Miami only had three trafficker arrests.

Penn Parrish

I apologize. I think that's what I meant that there was quite a bit of that going on at these events. Not so much the traffickers themselves.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I would say buyers probably increase a little bit. Anecdotally, the only thing that I really noticed personally in the months leading up to Tampa, for instance, I didn't realize there was a strip club next to my hotel, till Superbowl.

I was driving to the hotel and I was like, "What in the world was going on here?" I saw that increase. So definitely more patrons to strip clubs. But does that equal an increase of trafficking? It's really hard to tell.

Robert Hansen

We're talking about the more adults that get rescued, or at least people who are, let's say, teenagers. But what happens for the infants and very young that get rescued? What is their life after?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Well, it's tough. You talk about trauma even predating birth. There's tons of studies that are out there. I recommend a lot with Brené Brown and her podcast and just talking about trauma. There's plenty of data to support the fact that it happens.

You're suffering from trauma prior. So at four years old, three years old, is there trauma that that's going to occur? Absolutely. Are they going to deal with that for the rest of their life? Absolutely. There's no two ways to get around that.

But when we really start looking at that age, statistically speaking, again, it's a very small percentage of children at that age that are being trafficked. Extremely small. One thing you find a lot, and especially in news and with law enforcement, the Missouri Attorney General is real big on this, we rescued a four-year-old.

The four-year-old's mom is a sex worker. We didn’t rescue the kid from anything. Probably a bad home life, but not trafficking. So it's tough. It's tough all the way across the board.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. I know we kind of discounted the border towns as being an avenue for some of this. But surely there is some amount of human trafficking going on at the border. Is that such a small number you don't even think about it these days?

Because there are millions of people coming across the border. And from what I gather, at least some of them are being used purely as sort of a decoy and saying, "This is my child," even though it's not my child. Now, what happens to that child afterwards is anyone's guess.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

They go back south and then they get recirculated. Border Patrol can turn around and say, "This kid has crossed eight times with eight different people."

When it comes to trafficking on the border, it's an interesting beast. Most politicians will tell you about how horrible the human trafficking is on the border. We have a smuggling crisis. We have a human smuggling crisis. There's no doubt, it's mind blowing.

It's really interesting. I was doing some stuff in McAllen. And when I was chatting with potential sex buyers, when I introduced the thought of a kid, I had not a single one willing to buy kid. Not one. If I do the same thing in Beaumont, 40% generally, end up in arrest for somebody trying to buy a kid.

Robert Hansen

Why is it so different?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I don't know. No idea.

Robert Hansen

Just the cartels say don't do it.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I think cartels run a lot of stuff in the border. That's why some of the cities are so safe. Honestly. But I don't have that answer.` I can tell you that my concern is not an increase in sex trafficking as a result of the border crisis, I don't think it's increased. I don't think it's going to increase significantly.

Where my concern lies is, over the next five years, what's going to happen with all these people who came here for a better life and are being exploited through labor?

Penn Parrish

That’s where it's going to happen.

Robert Hansen

The labor portion of it. So they're going to get here, they're going to be so poor, and they're going to be looking for their next...

Penn Parrish

That's why they're here, right?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

The women are going to see low-hanging fruit.

Robert Hansen

That's how you end up with prostitution below 35 down here, let's say. That was an interesting eye-opener for me living downtown. I saw there was some amount of sex work going on. And on the surface, I don't really care that much that someone wants to sell their body.

But what happened around that was very interesting. Now you start seeing the drug dealers come in, and now you start seeing territorial disputes. There's a lot more going on there than just that one human. It might be completely consensual from their perspective, but it's sort of this ancillary network of people that has to be there to make that whole thing work. That's where the real crime starts really popping up. Even if you could say that that is 100% consensual.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I think, again, consent is such a difficult thing under those circumstances. I've never met a person engaged in commercial sex that say that their first choice in life was to become a sex worker. So why are you here? We can really evaluate that for everything it's worth.

Generally speaking, there's reasons why they are there. So consensual, I don't know. But when you look at what you said, all the crimes circle it. Ask most trafficking victims, who's the most violent person in your life? It's not the trafficker. It's the buyers.

So when you look at the amount of people that are physically assaulted, murdered, beaten by somebody as a result of that commercial sex, it's usually the buyers not the traffickers.

Penn Parrish

How many of those get reported?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Very few.

Robert Hansen

A woman has no incentive to stop that person. They’re just never going to go out with him again.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

They'll definitely communicate to other women, “Hey, don't answer this number.” But let's be real. I can't tell you how many times a woman has reported a sexual assault. How are you sexually assaulted, you're a prostitute?

It's crazy, as law enforcement, it's mind-blowing. I mean, this person is not a victim of crime because of the circumstances they're in. That's crazy. But I've seen two where they get arrested for doing their role in that crime and you're like, what about the guy who actually committed the crime?

Penn Parrish

They've been horribly brutalized.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

A lot of times by the system. So why do I need to trust you? I saw an arrest in Wichita Falls and it made me sick. They put this girl's mug shot on the news. And throughout the story, they had arrested her for prostitution. She was exchanging sex for some kind of little cinnamon fries for breakfast from Sonic.

How good do you feel by yourself if you arrest this person who's trying to literally eat? That is mind-blowing. Why would she ever report a crime to the Wichita Falls Police Department at this point? No reason. And I get it. There's no reason to trust them.

Robert Hansen

I have a personal story about my involvement and why I care about this particular thing. Once upon a time, I watched this movie Sleepers. I don't know if you've ever seen this movie. I watched it with my dad and he basically said to me, “Why don't you or why doesn't somebody just get online and start finding these people?”

Its seems like you should be able to do that, especially since I was a security guy. I am a security guy. I thought it was a good idea so I found somebody, a friend of mine, to co-start an organization called EHAP, Ethical Hackers Against Pedophilia.

We basically went into a bunch of chat channels and underground forums, anything we could find, we can think of, Usenet groups, and so on. And very quickly, we found a lot. This wasn't a many-day-long expedition down the rabbit hole. This is pretty much right away.

We had a couple of interesting mishaps where we were actually hacking each other at one point, which I thought was really funny. But for the most part, we were doing exactly what you would expect us to do. We were finding the bad guys and tracking as much as we could about them.

Now, they were all using encrypted forms of communication, even back then, and this is 20 years ago now plus. So we couldn't actually see most of the material. It's actually quite rare that we could see anything, if ever. Occasionally, someone would mess up and it would be publicly accessible. But for the most part, it was all encrypted.

What we were doing was just monitoring the unencrypted communication, which is usually just how they set up the encrypted chat or how to communicate in ways that can evade the police. You're following that part of the chat, which is all publicly accessible because they need the next person to understand how to do it.

This is an organization called Pedophile U, as in, Pedophile University, as in they teach you how to be a pedophile, which is pretty awful. I actually ended up being the guy to bust them because it turns out that one of the heads of this thing was using communication unencrypted to another guy saying, “Hey, you probably live down the street from me. Hell, you probably are my next door neighbor.”

And I'm like, “How would he know that?” There's nothing about this communication itself. But I realized the headers of the of the document had his IP address, and I realized that the guy I was after was using a VPN and protecting himself. The guy who was new and who wasn't trained yet, they're right next door. That's how I ended up breaking the case open.

So it was a bust of like 37 people or something like that, which was at the time, I think, the largest bust in history. Now Innocent Images just blows this away. Those numbers are rookie compared to what they do these days.

I learned a lot during that process, a lot about both the law and how things work in the background, and some of the awful things that happen like pay-per-view child rapes and all kinds of insane things that, even by today's standards, are pretty insane that such a thing it would possibly exist 20 years ago, and yet it did.

There it was and there's all these very technical people helping out, trying to make it better, and internet innovation at its finest. So I came out of that with a bunch of different feelings about it.

Number one, I definitely get the idea of why even a single image should be considered illegal. I totally get it. Although, obviously, I had a different purpose in mind and it was really gut wrenching to watch this go down.

Number two, we actually ran into one of the women who had her images publicly accessible. We had something run on the news at one point. She got in contact with us and said, “I'm one of those people and I can see my images out there. I know where they are. I'm seeing myself being raped over and over again.”

Then number three, I realized I never wanted to do that ever again. I never wanted to spend another minute looking at that stuff, or thinking about it outside of conversations like this because it was just awful. It really turned my whole brain inside out. Massive depression.

How do you feel about your job? Obviously, you've been doing it for eight years just this particular thing that you're doing now. How do you feel about this industry?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I love it. For me, I'm really good at compartmentalizing things. I remember I had a new guy that was working with me several years ago. And he told me, these images that we'd done this case on, “Man, it's messing with me. I'm not having... with my wife and whatever.”

I told him, “What you're looking at is not sex. Don't confuse the two. What you're looking at is rape and you're looking at evidence.” It's all it is. It's evidence. When we really start digging into it, for me as law enforcement, I can put you in prison for burglary, theft, homicide, child sexual abuse material, trafficking.

I don't like burglars, but it's not my thing. So I look at it and I'm like, "Where am I making the biggest impact?" And for me, it's in dealing with those people because they're truly the most heinous evil pieces of crap that walked the face of the earth.

Penn Parrish

They really are.

Robert Hansen

To that point, in that particular pay-per-view child rape, the mother was holding the child down while the dad was doing the thing. This is a family organization.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yeah, very common. Same particular case I just mentioned. I remember as I was scrolling through the images and the videos, I came across one that looked homemade. And when I clicked it, the child was obviously being raped and he said the man's name, my suspect.

At that point, I knew like, this is a hell of a victory. This guy is going to go to prison for the rest of his life and now we can get help for this kid. Nobody would have ever known if he never cried out.

To me, is it fun? Absolutely not when it comes to that side of it. But to me, it's a tremendous impact that I wouldn't find in burglary investigations.

Penn Parrish

It's the same thing with me. I deal with it not every day like Joe does. But as I write about it, as I speak about it, as I do my charitable work...

Robert Hansen

And meet more victims too, you're meeting a lot of people.

Penn Parrish

A lot of victims, and you have to compartmentalize it, like Joe said. Do you want to take out every one of these bastards? Yes, I do. Can you? No, you're not going to be able to do it. But as Joe is doing it, he's doing it one guy at a time and he's doing a hell of a job.

Robert Hansen

Sure. I was more of a black hat than a white hat hacker at the time that I started this whole thing. That is the reason I became a white hat hacker or I would say more gray. You CAN never be completely white.

But the reason why is I just could not look myself in the mirror and think, during the evening hours, I'm saving kids. And during the day, I'm doing something bad. I couldn't make that work in my brain. So that was pretty much the last time I did anything even vaguely interesting.

It also made me quit the organization. I couldn't reconcile all these things that were going on in my head at the same time. I'm like, I just need to step back. It went on and it continued to run for years after my departure with some very great people, by the way. But I personally had to take a big step back.

What's the attrition rate on these types of things? Are you seeing people in your organization just run for the hills? Are they in it to win it?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Some departments will limit you, say two years. You can only do two years of this and you move on. I don't agree with that. I don't think you, for one, even know what you're doing for the first year and a half.

I get why they do it, but I think if you have people who can do it and can do it and it not affect them in such a negative way that it's a problem. I've had people work with me for six months, walk in, hand the phone, and say, "I'm done."

I've had people that we've worked together for years. I think it's just each individual person, as you stated, looking at that stuff is traumatic. How do you deal with it?

Penn Parrish

Joe has a passion. It's obvious.

Robert Hansen

I have a very good memory. I think that's part of the problem. I just can't forget it.

Penn Parrish

Well, to your point though, technology has got to advance. We've got to get more technology involved in hunting these predators. Again, some of the things that are being done with artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping. But there's a lot that needs to be done.

For example, looking at pictures online, you can't tell whether the girl is 12. Sometimes you can. But you can't tell whether she's 12 or 19. So that goes undetected.

Now, there are certain sites that say, "This is for 12 and 13-year-old girls. But more advancements need to be made on that front, and more busts need to be made, which he's spearheading, on pornographers. They're despicable.

Robert Hansen

Let's talk about the duty to file or duty to announce that I've found this evidence or whatever. How seriously does the government look at that retroactively and say, "Well, we saw this thing posted, who did see this on Facebook?"

Because clearly someone saw it. Was it five people? 100 people? Then backtrack who those people are and say, "Well, even if you didn't enjoy this material, you had a duty and you failed to report this thing." How seriously do you take that?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I think it would depend on the amount of images. If you have somebody that we can show that they viewed an image, we don't know if it was intentional or accidental, especially on something like Facebook. If you start getting in the dark web and you're digging around, you know what you're doing.

But if you're on Facebook and you come across it, that's one thing. The way most laws work, filing for not reporting a felony isn't as easy as you think. There has to be very certain parameters within that.

Robert Hansen

Sure. What are they? Give me an example.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

For one, we have to be able to prove that you are in no danger by reporting it. What is danger to you? I don't know. If I came across it, my first offense would be a fine if I was somebody that came to me, I'd be like, “Look, I saw it. I didn't know if this was Russian organized crime and now they know who I am. My IP address, my Facebook account. I didn't know what to do. I panicked and clicked out.”

Barring, what Penn just said, if I asked you, "I didn't know if that person was 12, or 15, or 17. I just didn't know. It made me uncomfortable so I clicked out."

Now, if we have that 20, 30, 40 times, you're not accidentally poking around. One thing that we always talk about when we're interviewing people for child sexual abuse material is I always try to provide them an out, "What did you accidentally click that led to this?"

"I think I was watching Pornhub and I clicked this." You don't go from Pornhub to child sexual abuse material that easy. So really, you have to evaluate everything for what it is every single time.

Robert Hansen

One thing that I think is interesting about that, though, is there really is no carve out for citizen vigilantes like I was once upon a time. Or citizen journalists or whatever who aren't at all interested in the material but definitely interested in either what's going on in the culture. What's driving people to it? Or trying to find them and report them or whatever.

What's your personal take on that? I realize what the law is, but where do you stand on that? Let's put it this way. If someone came to you and said, “Hey, I ran my own personal investigation and I found these three child pornographers.” Are you going to go, “Hey, let me look at your hard drive and bust you.”? Or are you going to say, “I get what you are trying to do here.”?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

That would really have to be evaluated for what it's worth. The thing is, most people, that's the number one excuse when we kick a door. "I found this. I saved all these images and I was going to bring them to you." It's the number one excuse. Absolutely. 100%. It’s almost the same song and dance every time.

The question is, what really was the intent? If you're downloading 100 images, I'm sorry, but I’m not really buying this. Also, looking at what the background is. Are you a cyber-person and this is your background, you're trying to ethically hack?

It goes back to one thing, though, people don't want to look at children being raped. Nobody wants to see it. So if you're intentionally going and looking for it, for whatever purpose, there's something there that is not right.

One of the things we see is a lot vigilante organizations and anti-human trafficking, we do our rescue, we're going to bring all this. If you want to be the police, I’ll show you where the Police Academy is. You can go, you can learn all this stuff, learn how to do it, come on and do it. But you don't get to do this whole....

Penn Parrish

Leave it to the professionals.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yeah, it's such a dicey issue there.

Robert Hansen

All right. There's so much to unpack there. I actually have an interesting story about this number one excuse, get out of jail free card.

One day, I got a ping from this old chat forum that I had set up like million years ago. Basically, a way to get in touch with me. I forgot it was even working. No one ever went there. But I got this message. I'm like, “What is this?”  It says it's from the DHS. Yeah, right. So I tried to trace them back and I'm like, Oh, crap." DHS was actually is trying to get in touch with me.

I reached out to this detective, Homeland Security. He's like, “Hey, we need to come by your office. We need to talk to you about some stuff.” I'm like, “Okay. Well, here's where I work and whenever.

These agents show up. A number of them show up in my office and they have questions for me, which is extremely awkward because I worked at eBay at the time. This isn't some hole in the wall somewhere. This is parading people through this  Fortune 500. It was very awkward anyway.

They basically said, “Hey, there's this guy who claims that he knows you and he claims that you told him to download a whole bunch of child pornography and then put malware in there. Then he would then upload it to the servers. Then they would execute the malware and he would know who they are or something.”

I'm like, “You've got to send me whatever information you can on this guy. I don't know, maybe I did talk to him at some point. I talk to a lot of people. Please send me whatever you have on the name or whatever.” They did.

I did everything I could to figure out if I’d ever talked to this guy. Name never appeared anywhere on any... Back then, I really did have every email that I ever sent thing, multiple drive failures ago. But anyway, nothing and I had proof for it. I can show them if they actually want to dig through my email or whatever. I'm like, nope.

Furthermore, the exploit that he was talking about didn't come out until after they busted him. His excuse didn't, timewise, jive with the exploit that he was talking about. I proved that to them and like, unless he's the guy who wrote the exploit or had some other knowledge, there's no possible way this guy is doing what he said.

I sent that to them. They were like, “We need to come to your office.” I’m like, “Oh, jeez. What now?” I mean, I was getting a little nervous. They're like, “No, everything's good. Do you want a job?” I'm like, “No, I do not want a job.”

That was one of those where I got a taste of your exact anecdote there about it being such a common out. Oh, I was just downloading this for evidence or whatever. But on the flip side, your other statement there about leaving it to the police. Obviously, if I had left that to the police, the police would not have done that bust. Maybe eventually or years down the road, some other tip would have broken or something.

But honestly, I don't have any reason to believe that's true. These guys were very smart. They were doing everything right except for this one off-color comment this guy made. This very small mistake.

Another friend of mine, has a long time decided he's going to be a vigilante. He's the guy who's out there with body armor and actually going and doing busts. Fully armed. Deep undercover. The whole thing.

Now, the local police where he lives basically look the other way for the most part at the most senior level. The people on the ground have no idea who he is, though. He does get arrested on site. Basically, he said, “Here's my get-out-of-jail-free card. Call this guy.” They call the guy and he's like, "Yep, give him his body armor and gun back. Let him out back on the street."

That’s his life. That's what he does. He does enjoy it yes. And yes, he has made some fairly enormous busts in the past. His frustration is this comment. He’s like, "I need more help. I need more money to go do these things. I need more resources." The police aren't doing it. For whatever reason, the police haven't done these things that I'm seeing all around me.

I can report them all day long. Maybe a year from now, they'll finally get around to it on the long laundry list of other things they'd be dealing with. But a lot of the crimes he goes after are so minor on face value that there isn't much of a case there. But he knows what's going on under the hood. It's like, look, no one's going to drool over this case. But there's something much deeper here.

He's gone after some very large organizations, including ones online. Dating sites that are clearly not actually that. They are something much worse. What is your feeling about that? He's out there doing something. He's making a name for himself with a hit on his head, for sure.

Penn Parrish

The way I look at it is, he could be hindering good work that's going on by professionals.

Robert Hansen

Quite possibly.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I had to have that conversation with somebody pretty recently. He wanted to be a vigilante. I told him, “If you interfere with something that I have going on, even if you don't know it, you will go to jail. I am doing this properly, correctly.”

The other issue you run into is, I always ask people, "What are the Texas rules of evidence? Tell me about it. Tell me what's admissible. Tell me what's not admissible. How do I get the Facebook screengrabs that you have into court? Did you know I have to have a business record affidavit from Facebook authenticating that?" "No."

So it's dicey. We worry, obviously, about blue on blue. I don't want to be stinging a cop. I also don't want to be stinging a civilian because I can tell you right now, if I come around the corner and there's a civilian with body armor and a weapon, we're not going to have a civilian anymore. It’s tough. I would discourage...

Robert Hansen

You'd advise him not to.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I would advise him and anybody thinking not to do that.

Robert Hansen

He's an interesting character. I think you'd really like him as an individual.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I'm all for gray. I love dancing in the gray. Again, if he's out doing it, and he needs more funding, why not reach out to the police department and say, "You know what, I'll go to the police academy. I'll be a reserve officer. I'll volunteer for you guys. Just give me the badge."

Now you have somebody who is credentialed, who's working with law enforcement to be able to do this.

Robert Hansen

Understands the trail of evidence. He's a longtime security guy as well. He, I'm sure, is very aware of how to make evidence admissible. I'm sure he has hidden cameras everywhere and so on. Anyway, I do get your point.

I think for anyone watching this who really, this gets their hackles up and they want to go do something about it,  I would discourage them as well.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yeah. You go back to the camera issue. Think about what happened with the show Live PD. Now, you're telling me that you've got this camera over here that has evidence of a crime on it. Guess whose camera that is now? It's not yours anymore. It's dicey. You really set yourself up for failure. "I recorded on my phone." "Well, thanks for the phone."

Robert Hansen

Well, he has enough money, I think, he's not that worried about that issue. But the kinds of money he needs is more like hundreds of $1,000 to fly and do these operations. Much bigger money than you might get just from a paycheck.

About the one image per bust situation, this is one of the things that worries me the most about our law. Because my job is getting things on computers that shouldn't be there. And I have ways to get every single cell phone, every single desktop, laptop, computer on the planet, and every web server to have any image I want, at any time I feel like doing that.

It wouldn't cost me very much money and infrastructure to make that happen. If I can do that and I can do it once, that means I can do it twice, 10 times. So whatever threshold you say is the minimum, what you would decide is the minimum bar, I could easily exceed that. No problem.

To me, what seems like is missing from the law is intent. There's one thing about having something on a computer. A very good example of this is a friend of mine used to run an ISP. One of the problems he runs into is someone downloads a bunch of child pornography on his computers.

They are his computers but everyone knows what's going on here. He has the problem of now that is evidence and now you need to physically remove drives. Those drives have everyone else's data on them as well. Now his computers are going offline and all this chain of evidence basically nukes his company.

He's managed to stave off completely going offline a couple of times but it was by the hair of his chin kind of thing. Phone calls to people who can make things happen kind of thing, like, pulling strings sort of a deal.

There's one thing about stopping this, which I totally understand. There's one thing about having a big collection and it being yours. Totally understand. But there's this weird gray area where it's like, yes that is his, but it's not his. Yes, that's on your computer. It could have gotten there in a million ways and there's no proof at all that you were interested in this. How does that play out for you in court?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It's really the totality of the circumstances. What is it? Obviously, there's interviews that take place. More often than not, like I said, they'll tell you, “Hey, this is what I was doing.”

Robert Hansen

I was watching child pornography for you.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

In the state of Texas, intentionally or knowingly possess. I know it's there, I'm not getting rid of it, technically, I've met the element of culpable mental state. I would argue that people that don't want it would immediately delete it and not store it.

Robert Hansen

For instance, it's on the blockchain right now. There is child pornography on the block. So anyone who is downloading Bitcoin, the whole the entire ledger has child pornography on their computer.

Penn Parrish

A lot of the pornographers use Bitcoin as the currency now. It’s not traceable.

Robert Hansen

Well, they use it while it’s traceable.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

The question is this, though. When you look at people who generally possess child sexual abuse material on thumb drives, iPad, you name it, if you can tell me this is how this happened and it's here and no intent. Once it touches a thumb drive you intended on keeping it.

I think, again, it goes back to everything you have to evaluate based on the circumstances. Your friend as an example, said, “Look, this is what's going on.” It makes sense. Now, if it's on his thumb drive, that starts changing the game. It goes to a million different things.

When was it downloaded? May 17th. Okay. Can you tell me that? Okay, well, this is what happened. May 18th. May 19th. May 20th. We're intending on downloading it at this point. So everything has to be evaluated for what it's worth.

Robert Hansen

So you really do look at the totality of all of the evidence?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Every single individual case.

Robert Hansen

That's pretty brutal. That’s a pretty onerous task for you.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

But if you don't do it, my biggest fear has never been not arresting somebody who committed a crime, it's been arresting a person who didn't commit a crime. If I'm not doing my due diligence to determine whether or not you committed the crime.. I actually was asked by a defense attorney on the stand one time, “Do you think you are judge, jury, and executioner?” I said, “Absolutely.” “What grants you that authority?”

I'm like, “Well, if I'm not convinced that this person committed a crime, why in God's name would I put handcuffs on them and put them in the criminal justice system?” Again, it breaks down to every individual criminal investigation.

Penn Parrish

In the world of child pornography, how are you able to or are you able to track these offshore sites that are growing daily? Those are examples of where Bitcoin is being used quite a bit. Are you able to?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

As an example, we fairly recently worked a case that stemmed from Australia. My person downloaded peer-to-peer from Australia. So we'll go through his, find out everywhere that's gone, identify everybody and send it. It may be India. It may be in UK, whatever. That's the beauty of being able to work so closely with Homeland Security is that there are attachés everywhere.

Now I have this case that now touches Germany, for instance. I can send it to the German government. We actually sent one yesterday to the Spanish government. We had a case that touched Spain. Yeah, it's definitely doable. It's painstaking. It takes a while and obviously we're missing a good chunk. But we can definitely do it.

Robert Hansen

I know you're making a dent in this problem. But do you believe there is a way to actually, maybe through technology down the road, to actually decrease this whole problem and either make it diminished entirely or reduce it to the point where it's such a rare event we barely hear about it.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I personally don't. I think that…

Robert Hansen

This is the way things are going to be.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I think it is. I think that we're at the tip of the digital spear. What's going to happen next? We've got kids that are growing up knowing about OnlyFans and watching pornography. They’re eight, nine, 10 years old. What is that doing to their brain? By the time they get to 30, 40, what are they going to be seeking out?

That’s difficult. It's like anything else the more technology evolves. Think back as a kid, the worst thing you saw was probably dad's Playboy magazine. Then it evolved into Penthouse and Hustler and got worse and worse and worse. Then we moved to VHS and DVD and streaming. It's just blown up. I think we're always going to be one step behind.

Penn Parrish

Absolutely. And as it applies to trafficking, there's a move afoot to legalize prostitution. That's not going to put a dent in it. There's a big move to make everybody arrest every john out there. That's not going to put a dent in it. It's the dumbest thing that’s ever said. But it's true, it's the oldest profession on the planet. You got to deal with it.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It's interesting too looking at criminality, like you brought it up. I'm for decriminalization of selling sex. But the only reason I'm for that is because the law enforcement is criminalizing victims of human trafficking. I really feel we need to take that ability away. It's dicey when you start talking that.

Robert Hansen

For the audience's perspective, that's a very important point there. Your concern is that people who are otherwise just victims are actually going to go to jail because they get caught in a sting.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

By and large, that's what happens.

Penn Parrish

In most cases.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I always challenge people. Before you start clicking "Share" because somebody did this huge operation, look at the mug shots. The mug shots are 90% women. We have a huge problem. That's primarily what you see. Getting away from it now, cops are getting smart.

I've noticed one of the police departments in Texas, I'm not going to say which one, it's the largest, got away from posting pictures of women. So I always challenge people. Check the mug shots versus the number of arrests. How many mug shots are there? There's 30 mug shots in 75 arrests. There's a reason for it. We're criminalizing victims of trafficking at rates that are astronomical compared to traffickers.

Penn Parrish

It's part of the problem.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It is.

Robert Hansen

It seems almost counterproductive because now these victims, it's not like they're free of it. Now they're institutionalized. They're going to come back out potentially much worse. And the market demand is still there. The trafficker is going to have to find someone else to put in their place.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Well, the thing is, you put a girl in jail for prostitution, she's going to go down there, and she's going to get a $1,000 bond. He's going to show up. He's going to pay 150 bucks. He's going to get her out. Who's actually paying for that money, for that bill? He's not.

She's going to get turned back out to have to make that money back up. She's probably going to be in trouble for getting caught and her quote is not going away. So she has to make $2,000 a day. She's going right back out. So really, we're putting them in increased vulnerability. We're creating an environment where the trafficker is the truth teller.

Robert Hansen

Quota. I'm so used to that in the traditional sales term, like, you've got to make your quota. Otherwise, you don't get...

Penn Parrish

That’s exactly what it is.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

You do not come home tonight until you have $2,000. I don't care if you have to make it till 10 PM or 7 AM. You can't come back home without that money.

Robert Hansen

I have seen Innocent Images division of the FBI. I don't know how closely you work with them or whatever. But one of the things I've seen them starting to do is arrest 100 people at a time, and it's exactly the number 100. It's not 101. It's not 99.

I think that's got to have a deep psychological impact on the child pornographers, or whatever who are around them. Because they've got to be thinking, "I probably just skated by. I'm probably 101 and I'll get in the next bust."

That's got to be terrifying. It's a strong psychological... It's not just a nice round number. It's also, they had to choose to not include people in that cohort. It could have been me. That's going to put a scare into a lot of these people I would have to imagine. Is that intentional or is that just a happy consequence?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I think it depends. When it comes to trafficking operations, where we're at, we're very big on arresting buyers and we'll put the buyers on the news. What it has done, it has decreased the amount of trafficking we have going on. It's very obvious.

Yeah, there was a NIJ study that was done in Atlantic City that was showing that if you specifically target buyers, very focused, it can reduce trafficking by 75%. Just looking at what we're dealing with, I believe that 100% because that's exactly what we've seen. Because if you're a buyer in Waco, Texas, you have to be afraid that not only are you going to jail, but that you're going to be put all over the internet.

Penn Parrish

It's a very tight-knit community.

Robert Hansen

Once you're on sex offender list, you can't do anything really without being…

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Well, they're not actually sex offenders when it comes to soliciting prostitution. You don't become a sex offender. But now what you're looking at is now it’s a felony in the state of Texas. We're the first state to have that.

Robert Hansen

I’m surprised that isn't a sex offense since it is related to... Well, if it's aggravated, is that considered?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

No. Solicitation of prostitution, the penalty increases every time. Now you go to a state held facility, the next one is a third-degree felony. So it increases.

Penn Parrish

That generally applies to pedophiles.

Robert Hansen

That's generally what the word aggravated tends to mean in this context, right?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Not necessarily.

Robert Hansen

Not always?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

No, it depends. For me in the anti-trafficking world, aggravated means more than one trafficking victim. If it is some sex case, generally aggravated insinuates that there's a weapon that was used or something that caused serious bodily injury and things like that.

When it comes to child sexual abuse material, it's the distribution. The beauty of the law in the state of Texas, anyway, if you have three or more images, it's presumed that you are distributing. So, obviously, very quickly it puts everybody under that umbrella.

Penn Parrish

An example of a victim, and we all know this victim, was trafficked and was at a party or something where the girls were working the party. The party was interrupted with gunfire and people died. This young lady was arrested for murder. It's still on her record.

Robert Hansen

I'll get her on the podcast at some point if I can. I think that's an interesting case. I get your point, though, that we're going after the wrong people here. We’re going after the victims of this. That's pretty terrible. Is there a move? Is there some momentum about changing these laws?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Depends on where you're at. There are places that they're 100% hell bent on locking those girls up. They committed a crime and they're not going to tell me about that crime, therefore, they're a criminal. I disagree with that. I think it's crazy.

No other crime in anybody's Penal Code do you get criminalized for being the victim of. We don't arrest people for being a victim of burglary. We don't arrest domestic violence victims and tell them, “Look, we're doing this for your own safety.” But that's been the practice by law enforcement when it comes to anti-trafficking work for years. It's the accepted norm.

The other thing is, I got into an argument one time with a vice cop from the largest city in Texas. He said, "Look, this girl came and she told me that had I not arrested her, she would be dead. I saved her by arresting her." I'm like, "You know what, that is actually a wonderful story. Really, it is. But how many women have you arrested for prostitution? Like 200. So 0.5% of the time, you got it right. 99.5% of the time, you're ruining somebody's life. How do you justify that?"

Hopefully, it made his head spin a little bit. But cops are an interesting beast. Ego is a hell of a thing. So telling somebody what they're doing is not right when it's been the norm for the last 30 years of ICE operations is difficult.

Robert Hansen

That's one of the reasons I think law cannot be perfect. If it's too perfect, if it's enforced too well, then you don't give any room for things to change. I think it’s a very good example of where this law feels like it does need to be changed.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes. Part of the deal is we have the age-old, "I didn't write the law, I'm just here to enforce it." Well, my question is, are you a public servant? Are you here to enforce every law?"

One thing I always ask is, “Do you arrest people for possession of marijuana?”

“No, I dump it on the side of the road and send them on their way."

Same level offense is prostitution. Why is this so egregious at the same level that you are so compelled that you have to enforce the law when you let others walk all the time. You have that discretion. Why are we doing this? That even gets into a bunch of gender issues I think.

Robert Hansen

You might be right about that. There's something about legislating from the bench, but there's also legislating from the cop car. I think that does happen very frequently.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

100%.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. Let's talk about sextortion. This is something does happen. In fact, it's becoming a booming business. I think it's a fast way to find these victims online. It’s just find some sample of material that they've already uploaded and leverage that. Or get them to send it to you under false pretense. Then it just starts to spiral.

Are you seeing that? Is that a thing that is happening more and more in your world?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It is definitely increasing. There's no doubt. Generally, what we're seeing, though, is against males. Somebody, if they're female, or pretending to be female, will befriend a male, get them to send explicit photographs because, generally, we think with the wrong head. Once we can get them to do that, then they're turning around and they're like, “Hey, here you are on Facebook. Here's your wife. Here's everything. I need X amount.”

Generally speaking, those are coming from Nigeria, from other countries. Where we see it in the trafficking community, it's interesting. There's a ‘former trafficker’, which I wouldn't say he's a former trafficker if he's doing this, but he'll go try to track down the people involved in the commercial sex, who their families are.

Then start, “Hey, I'm going to send this picture, this video that I found on OnlyFans to Jim Jones, your daddy. I need X amount of money.” We do see that from time to time, but it's way more prevalent when it's male victims of sextortion.

Robert Hansen

To me, this feels like a huge national security threat. Because if it's that easy, I believe you. Many young men thinking that they might have a chance with a lovely lady might go out of their way to do something extremely dumb. But as soon as they're weaponized, as soon as they're turned by that minor threat, what else are they're willing to do?

That can become enormous and very dangerous very quickly. Have you encountered that yet? Is that a problem that we have yet to see?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I haven't. I agree. It's a huge national security issue. Spies, usually, come in the form of a woman who's meeting somebody at a bar.

Robert Hansen

Now you don't even have to go to the bar.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yeah. I think it's huge. Part of the other issue is how many apps people use. We're using face app, taking pictures of ourselves, apps that are in China, or Russia. That makes zero sense to be doing that. We're dealing with foreign governments that are what they are. I could see it as a huge issue.

Robert Hansen

I remember this one time, I was having drinks with some friends. And there was this guy. Everyone seemed to be corralling themselves around this person who I had never met, knew nothing about them, didn’t know from anywhere. Turns out he's a billionaire but I didn't know this at the time.

I go over to him and he's just talking this big old game, "Oh, I've got nothing to hide. All these privacy walls, they don't know what they're talking about." Again, no idea who this person is. I’m like, “Can you give me your wallet, please?”

He looked at me. He starts reaching back to his wallet like he's about to do it. He's like, “Wait, why?” I said, “Well, I'm going to take every single card, front and back out. I'm going to take photos of the front and back and I'm going to put them on my Twitter feed.” I’ve got 30,000, 40,000 followers or something. I'm going to tell them that, “This guy doesn't believe anything bad can happen to him or his family if I do this.”

He put his hand back out of his pocket. He tried to change the subject a little bit. I'm like, "No. You do have things to hide. You have many things. It might just be something as simple as wanting to protect your children or something. It could not even be you which I don't at all believe."

But broader point, let's say I do get malware on my machine. Well, they might not be after me but they might be after someone I care about who's underage in the household. Even if you don't believe that you have anything to hide in that traditional sense, you certainly need to have some level of protection.

This just drives me crazy when people don't take ownership of their own security and privacy. I think this is a really good example. This extortion thing where it's like, well they may not be after me. But they could easily be after the person right next to me.

Penn Parrish

I have several friends who are in their late 70s and early 80s. They seem to be targeted more than anybody by these people.

Robert Hansen

How does that end up working?

Penn Parrish

The people that I know are single, either by divorce or by death. They prey on them as Lonely Hearts Clubs. I've seen some of them fall victim to it. A young girl gets on and says, "I want to be your friend." If you're a lonely guy at that age, yeah, I need a friend. I'd love somebody to talk to.

They get in and they start talking, "Oh, I need some gas money. Can you send me gas money?" Or, "I need this, can you give me your credit card so I can do this?" They're drained.

Robert Hansen

I have some very good friends who more or less started the internet. They have some weird thoughts about how things have ended up. I feel personally responsible for how things have become. It wasn't supposed to be this. This was supposed to be a way for us to share information. Now, it's just turned into this morass.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It's like anything else. Everything that starts good has people that are willing to exploit it.

Robert Hansen

So self porn: this one I'm a little more on the fence about. Some 12-year-old boy wants to send some pics to his female friend who's approximately the same age. I have a hard time thinking that that kid should go to jail or that the girl receiving it should go to jail or whatever. No matter how many photos they send to one another.

Obviously, I don't want them to have sex. I mean, I don't think they're ready for it. But I don't feel like that should be a crime personally. What is your feeling?

Penn Parrish

Once again, that's where parenting has to come in.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I don't think it should be a crime.

Penn Parrish

It shouldn't be a crime, but parents should step in and see what their kids are doing.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

In most states, it's not. Back in the day, we used to get cases where just what you said. Primarily, it was the girl's parents that were fired up, "He's got pictures of my 14-year-old girl." We would tell them, “Hey, I can arrest him for possession of child pornography. I can arrest her for manufacturing child pornography.” Then obviously they don't want it.

But that’s the days of old. No, I agree. It does go back to parenting. For me I would be getting child protective services involved. Why are you doing this? Were you sexually abused and now you're acting out? We just never know. But I'm there with you on that. I think there's got to be a line.

Robert Hansen

This falls into the next thing where kids these days, and myself, and every security person I know, uses ephemeral messaging. They use it on Signal. They use it on Wickr. They use it on Snapchat. Ephemeral messaging is just the wave of communication in the future. I think everybody has now agreed that it's just better. Obviously, it makes your job way worse.

It is much harder when the material just disappears after a day. Just don't unlock your phone for a day while you're in custody and it's all just gone. I think that there's something to be said about people being able to have private communications. I think there's something very important about that.

I don't think laws should be completely set in stone because I think there are some bad laws out there, really bad laws. For instance, prohibition was a very bad law. A lot of people went to jail. The mob, more or less, came out of it. It was a very bad idea.

We need laws to be able to be changed. We need people to be able to protest and be able to do illegal things under those bad laws in order to get them overturned. Or at least be able to talk about it privately.

Also, I totally understand why that would make your life a living hell when you know it's there. You know that they're involved but you just don't have the evidence.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yes. I think we can still develop the evidence. I've yet to see somebody that I have arrest for CSAM material who didn't possess. I may not get the messages.  There may be plenty of disappearing and all that. They're doing something to keep that.

Robert Hansen

A trophy.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Absolutely, yeah. It's a collection. You absolutely come across that. Again, I may not be able to do everything I would like to do, but also, we can skin the cat a different way.

Robert Hansen

I tend to be more of a privacy absolutist because I know how bad governments can get. The day that the government decides that they want to come after whatever random group of people they don't like, that's the day we're all going to go, “I'm really glad I had ephemeral messaging.”

To that point, we were talking a little bit about Facebook earlier in the show. Facebook has an algorithm. It's based on, I believe, Microsoft's software that they have, PhotoDNA, if memory serves. I'm pretty sure that's right. That basically just does fuzzy matching, and says it's approximately child pornography. It may pixel with a little different color or whatever, but it's the same thing.

As you said, they report a vast majority of all of these cases. In that sense, it makes a lot of sense that they're able to see this material. It makes sense that they can watch the wire and see this messaging going on.

I just see that as, ultimately, what's going to end up happening is everyone will just leave Facebook. As soon as that gets socialized amongst these people, they’ll just go, “Okay, we'll go somewhere else.” We'll go to ephemeral messaging with Snapchat, for example.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It's happening.

Robert Hansen

It is happening. It already is happening. The other one that's along those same lines,  Apple has software. They call it NeuralHash. It’s the same thing. If you have photos on your phone and you upload it to the iCloud, approximately along that path, it's actually on your phone, but in the process of uploading that material to iCloud, they basically say, “Hey, this person has some amount of things that match”.

Not just one, that's probably just an anomaly. But when it gets to 50 or 100, this is your collection thing you're talking about. Then flag this person, flag this individual. And they know exactly who you are, where you're located, and all these things because they have iCloud connected.

The problem I have with that is now you've just told people don't back up their phones, don't protect their data, or whatever. Because the problem is NeuralHash and PhotoDNA could easily be weaponized by a government to say, "Well, find anybody who protested for this cause." Or, "Find anybody who attended this set of conferences."

It's very easy to turn this very benign, and I agree with you, probably both, good cause into something awful very easily. A guy like me could very easily turn that into a weapon.

What do you think? Should we be doing more of this stuff? Less of it? I feel like government should have their hands nowhere near anything like this technology. But also, I totally get why they want it.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Obviously, I feel like we should. But I'm all about privacy, too. I don't want federal government in my inbox. But when it's specific to this, I think it's a good thing. We can always say that in the United States, things can be weaponized.

My hope is that as long as somebody is trying to do that, there's plenty to counter it. I don't know what that looks like beyond this particular topic.

Robert Hansen

I don't need to talk about regime changes. Okay, let's take regime change off the table although I don't think that's off the table. Let's just say a company gets acquired. Grindr, for instance. They got acquired by a Chinese company. Now, millions of American men who are homosexual have all of their information owned by the Chinese military. It's a national security threat.

Penn Parrish

You don't think they're not going to use that against us? That's why they're buying it.

Robert Hansen

Of course. We don't really have to talk about internal issues, we can just talk about normal M&A activity that a company might decide... And companies have a very dangerous way of thinking about things, like, Dropbox, for instance. I do think that they're starting to do this type of analysis as well.

They, at one point, were like, “We don't want to be able to look inside people's Dropboxes. There's really no reason for that.” Just give them a certificate on their phones or whatever. It's all encrypted between them. If they want to be it unencrypted to communicate out that's up to them.”

So the technology exists for them to support that today. But the marketing team said, “Yes, but what if one day we want to be able to look inside these messages? What if we want to be able to market to these people?” That's a very slippery…

Penn Parrish

That crosses a line to me.

Robert Hansen

Of course, it does. It should infuriate anybody who thinks about that. That's the problem with this technology. As soon as you say, "Oh, it's just for looking at child pornography," it never is just that. It's always then five other things.

Penn Parrish

It's like you said. Everything gets created and it's created a good cause most of the time. Once the bad actors get a hold of what's being used for a good cause, then they will find a way to destroy that.

Robert Hansen

It’s very concerning to me. I don't see enough people talking about this as the consequence of this. Obama was in town and he was talking about backdoors encryption. I think he was expecting a rousing applause at that part of his presentation. It did not go over well.

I think people just don't want the government looking at their stuff whether it's child pornography or not. It doesn't matter what we're really talking about because of these regime changes. They’re like, "I don't care what political side you're on. Imagine the other side had that data and wanted to do something with it. Would you feel comfortable with that?" It doesn't make me feel good.

Okay. I think we beat that one to death.

How are child pornography cases and sexual slavery or trafficking prioritized these days? Is that is that top of the list? Low? How much funding are you getting? How are you being treated in the department?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I think I'm blessed. My departments, I can walk in..

Penn Parrish

His Sheriff supports him 100%.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I can walk in today and say, “Hey, I need to go to LA", and he's like, “Why are you standing in front of me then?” We're an anomaly.

I think it's high priority. I think it's high priority for the wrong reasons. With most law enforcement agencies, I think it's high priority because it gets clicks and likes and shares and comments as evidenced by the fact that we're arresting the wrong people simply for likes, clicks, shares, and comments.

Robert Hansen

It inflates the numbers.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It inflates the numbers, it makes things look great. Again, there's a yearly Operation Rebuild Reclaim statewide in California. Just look at the mug shots. I think there are very good officers out there that are really busting it, trying to do the right thing. But I think generally, the bean counters are to blame for that.

The government throws money at problems. I actually lost federal funding because I was too high functioning. That’s what I was told. That's the most federal government excuse I've ever heard in my life. We’ve got to give it to somebody who's not doing a good job. Makes a lot of sense.

But the state's been wonderful to us. We're funded through the state of Texas by the Office of the Governor, the child sex trafficking team. We could go on all day about that. I do think it is much higher priority law enforcement-wide than it was 10 years ago. But I also think that in many ways, it's high priority.

Robert Hansen

How about federally? Are you getting a sense of how they're prioritizing things?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

It's really interesting. It's high priority on the federal level. Federal agencies are not very good at human trafficking investigations. That's just is what it is. They're not designed for it. They're not set up that way.

Robert Hansen

It seems like they'd be perfect because they're dealing with literal cross borders of all kinds.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Yeah. But you're also dealing, at the very macro level, with state laws that they can't really enforce. The underlying offense for anything is the prostitution. We just don't arrest for prostitution. We then target the promoter or the trafficker.

You also got to remember that everything with the federal government gets clunky. We do operations literally with two to four people. That's it. A full-on human trafficking operation, two to four people. You walk into a federal trafficking operation, state-level trafficking operation, you're going to have 60 people here.

Penn Parrish

Who don’t know half of what they're doing. I will say you are to be commended on the highest level because you have taken the awareness to a new level. The job you have done is outstanding. Tim Tebow has helped quite a bit in that level. But I think Joe has created more chatter and more good than any one human being in this country.

Robert Hansen

That's high praise coming from you.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I appreciate that.

Robert Hansen

You feel like it's earned? Have you lived up to the hype?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Here's the thing I learned years ago and I ruffle feathers. But what I tell people is, "As long as we're not calling it out, we are as guilty as a trafficker." I was in a meeting one time with Andrea Sparks and some other high-level administrators. They were talking to pat everybody on the back about this particular operation.

I called it out very bluntly. Everybody who clicks like, everybody who shares this, everybody who did anything like this and continues to make this acceptable, you are as guilty as the person that is trafficking. You are criminalizing these people. It just needs to be said sometimes.

Accountability is such a huge deal for me that I think I don't care if I make friends in law enforcement. The way I look at it, that person is being victimized. If you're truly here as a public servant, revictimizing and celebrating revictimization is doing nobody any good.

Robert Hansen

Well, I personally love people who ruffle people's feathers. I'm all about it. Basically, every single person who's sat in these chairs ruffles people's feathers. So you're in good company.

At EHAP, we had this weird rule because Penn mentioned earlier. At some point, you're like, there's a 12-year-old, but is she 18 in pigtails? I can't really tell.

So we just had a standard rule that if it looks like even a teenager, just drop it because we can't know for sure. We just went after stuff we knew for sure, so 12 and under. Do you have a different prioritization depending on age or is it just whatever comes across your desk?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Whatever comes across my desk. I was contacted by the FBI yesterday actually. They wanted to do an operation to recover minors. I told them, "This is why the FBI fails miserably at recovering minors because you're looking for minors."

My question becomes then, when we look at children, and I'm not saying we should not be going to find children. I’m 100% for that. But let's take a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old. Why is one life more valuable than the other? Let's take a 16-year-old and a 55-year-old.

Let’s take a 16-year-old, blond haired, blue eyed, Christian, Caucasian female, and a 55-year-old Asian female who's staying in this country undocumented? Why is one life more important than the other?

As it comes, we're doing our job. Are we out looking for kids? Absolutely. Are we out looking for adults too? Absolutely. I think if you focus so much and so narrowly on one, you're going to miss the big picture. That's what we…

Penn Parrish

A lot of it gets swept under the rug.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Nobody in the sex trafficking world is going to post an ad that says, "I have a 16-year-old." That would be crazy. If you're not looking at the 19-year-old, you're never going to find the 16-year-old.

Robert Hansen

I think that probably my biggest takeaway is how much the over-18 crowd or 18-plus crowd drives this entire industry as well. It's an enormous part of this industry. Probably the lion's share as a matter of fact.

Penn Parrish

Joe, in your massage parlor bust, were there many underage girls?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

No, I've never seen one ever. I've never seen an underage person in an illicit massage parlor. I always tell people, you're not going to find one. You're just not. Where we have seen them is in Latin-based where you'll find juveniles. They're typically younger. But even generally then they're still adults. But that is where we have seen the potential for some minors.

Penn Parrish

Are the majority of your busts Asian oriented?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Absolutely. For a while, Korean organized crime was really big in the IMBs. It's all shifted to, predominantly, Chinese-based.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. These are Chinese citizens or American citizens?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Generally, what we're finding is either permanent residents. You find some overstays. They come on a tourist visa and they'll just overstay. The overwhelming majority in this day and age are seeking political asylum. They'll come on a visa and they'll go straight to an immigration attorney and seek political asylum for years.

Penn Parrish

They're in the system.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

They're in the system. Yeah, they're here. It doesn't grant work or anything like that. But the overwhelming majority are seeking political asylum.

Robert Hansen

Well, gentlemen, I want to thank you for doing this. Where can people get a hold of you if they find stuff that they probably shouldn't be looking at? How do they get in touch with you guys?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Don't go digging. For me, you can go straight to the McLean County Sheriff's Office website. There's a section under there for human trafficking. There's an anonymous tip reporting deal there and it's completely anonymous.

Robert Hansen

What if they don't live in Texas? What if they're outside the United States even?

Detective Joe Scaramucci

I'm on LinkedIn. I have a public Facebook page as well so either or. It's super easy to find me. Google my name, it'll pop up.

Penn Parrish

I'm on LinkedIn. In my book, it will have an email address to reach me.

Robert Hansen

I'm assuming there's some hotlines or some websites out there that people can read up on this some more. Do you have anything that stands out as being particularly good resource?

Penn Parrish

Blue is a great site that the government operates and very educational.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

There's a couple. Under the Homeland Security, Blue Campaign is a really good one for anti-trafficking. Polaris, the National Human Trafficking Hotline, is obviously something I would encourage people. There's a training series called NetSmartz on the National Center for Missing Exploited children's website that is really age-appropriate information for kids with internet safety.

In this movement, I tell people to use caution more than just finding things. As much as I hate to say this, and I'm a veteran, many veteran-based organizations are absolute garbage. I don't know why that is. I've got my suspicions. But I generally tend to avoid those type of organizations and anti-trafficking movement.

I would always say, I don't care what organization it is, do your research. Research where the information is coming from. Not just because they say it, where is the cited source of the information? Evaluate that. More often than not, you would find it's not very good.

Penn Parrish

I would highly encourage your listing base to give money to the charities that are helping the victims.

Robert Hansen

Such as? Do you have anything?

Penn Parrish

The Austin 20, Nicole's Place, Collective Liberty, The Lighthouse. There’s a bunch of them.

Detective Joe Scaramucci

Unbound Global is a phenomenal one, Traffic911 is wonderful. The Refuge in Houston, phenomenal. There's a ton of good organizations out there. My only point to what I said is just do your research.

Penn Parrish

Do your homework.

Robert Hansen

Gentlemen, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Penn, Joe, this has been great. Thank you so much.