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Comment by PLenz | Hacker News Reader

I mean yeah, it was kinda obvious that they busted an ad fraud sim farm but needed to pad that resume for the bosses. There's no glory in "just" fighting fraud right now.

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Ironically, the Secret Service's PR people missed a trick with the press release. They could have painted this in a way that strongly resonated with people.

Just tell people that this is the sort of setup that is used by (overseas) scammers to send messages to thousands of potential victims at a time to rope them into various scams.

Fighting scammers is a hugely popular thing with the general public. No need to dress it up with that U.N. nonsense to get the general public's approval. People wouldn't even have minded that the Secret Service ended up uncovering a scammer support operation whilst tracking down something else.

But what if they are currying favor from the administration, not the public? The POTUS had some embarrasing speech in the UN and now various Republicans call for airstrikes on the UN.

Is it within their jurisdiction though? "National security threat targeting foreign leaders and the UN" clearly is, but just fighting scammers and fraud is local LEA or FBI job

Possibly https://www.secretservice.gov/investigations/cyber

It was where they started, which was following up on threat telephone activity, false police reports directed at prominent people. For the making of which the malefactor had probably seen this kit as an ideal opportunity, but for which purpose it is massively expensive and over-provisioned.

And that's the point. No-one would have thought bad of them for following up on stuff within their bailiwick and uncovering a scam support operation. It's the old caught-the-major-bad-guy-in-a-routine-traffic-stop tale, after all.

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