Part of the problem is our insane immigration law. After 2 felony convictions, foreigners are deported. In the case of Nigerians (they’re the most common group associated with this), they simply get a new passport with a new identity and come right back over.

It has gotten more difficult in the last 10 years to do this, but there are always work-arounds. Checks no longer “float” for a week or 10 days before clearing the Federal Reserve and the local banks, so that’s in our favor. But, overall, cyber-crime has increased, and there are few in any agency that are equipped with the education, materials, or training to investigate and prosecute it.

It’s a complicated business, and there are few with the gray matter to comprehend it. Those that can understand it are getting paid lots more money in the private sector than what they could by working for the government.

We had about 15 detectives in our unit, out of a total of about 5200 sworn personnel, allocated to investigate these things (serving a population of 2 million). The Harris County Sheriff’s Department had less than we did (serving a population of 1.1 or 1.2 million). The United States Secret Service’s Houston field office had maybe 10 or a dozen agents assigned to this sort of thing. The FBI’s Houston field office had 7 or 8 agents dedicated to this. We all (the various agencies) concerted our efforts whenever the opportunity arose because most of these rings operated across jurisdictions, as your essay suggests. I spent about a half of each month working cross-jurisdictional cases.

And we were absolutely inundated with financial crimes. Most investigators in HPD (Burglary and Theft, Robbery, Homicide, Vice, etc) were assigned about 25 – 30 cases a month. We were assigned 100 to 125 cases a month. There was no way to even read that many cases, let alone work all of them, so I cherry-picked the ones with losses in excess of $20K, and still had more than I could do anything about. While testifying at a federal trial in Corpus Christi, Texas, my case load came out in the trial. It was embarrassing, to say the least.

It gets worse. Even when we got convictions, sentencing was light – usually no more than 2 or 3 years for thefts that exceeded $100K.

Granted, this was 10 years ago, but I don’t expect much has changed except that it has probably gotten even worse.

But hey, these are “non-violent” crimes, and there are certainly sexier non-violent crimes – think about our insane War on (some) Drugs – to investigate and imprison people for.

To my mind, there is no such thing as a non-violent crime – whether the force is direct (as with homicide, burglary, etc) or deceitful (as with financial crimes), it is still force.

I’d quote some of it for you — it’s hilarious — but I immediately consigned it to spam oblivion.