LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 214 Ft. Raul Aguilar

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

In this episode of the LPRC CrimeScience Podcast, Cory Lowe speaks with Raul Aguilar, Senior Director of Law Enforcement Partnerships at the Auror. They discuss Raul’s extensive law enforcement background at HSI, the various law enforcement and retailer collaboration operations, and an examination of the technologies used to help identify criminal networks. Listen in to learn a little bit more about restroom protection strategies!

Hi, everyone, and welcome to crime science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners as well as other professionals. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. My name is Corey Lowe. I am the Director of Research at the LPRC, and I'm joined today by Raoul Aguilar, who is with Aura. Roel, thank you for joining us on crime science today. Thank you for the invitation.

Really looking forward to our conversation, brother. I am too. As soon as we got to talking about this, I was super excited to be able to talk to you because there's very few people with your kind of experience out there in the industry. For those of you who do not know who you are, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved and what you're doing today? Sure. So obviously with ORA now as a senior director.

of law enforcement partnerships here. Love the job. But before I came to ORA, I was the deputy assistant director for Homeland Security Investigations for the last two and a half years of my career. I was after 25 and a half years, I retired at the end of 2023. Those last two and a half to three years of my career leading the financial and fraud division of HSI's criminal investigative program area. And then the organized retail crime initiative that we will get into today was under that program. So obviously got a head start of really getting my name out there to work with the community, work with retailers, work with law enforcement, AG's attorney general, state attorney generals, and really got to know the community, got to really take an understanding and a deep

respect for the hard work that is out there already. And that's where I came from. And it's really giving me a head start here with ORA because of those, you know, two and a half to three years of working in the field, attending conferences, meeting folks like yourself, meeting different associations that spend a lot of time and effort in trying to make safe stores and getting repeat offenders identified and just really making that ecosystem work together. Excellent. In your time with HSI, your focus was on transnational criminal organization. I don't think that many people really understand, you know, all the types of serious crimes these organizations are involved in.

You know, what are some of the trends that you think, you know, law enforcement should be aware of, but also that retailers should be aware of so they can detect some of this activity as they see it in their stores? Yeah, it's a good question. So I'll take a quick step back. When we looked at it from the federal response and HSI's purview of this crime is related to the illicit finance avenue, the ability for these criminal networks to make money through a variety of different threat factors or associations to criminal networks. And so we took a step back and said, what can we do to throw the government response to this and then work collaboratively with the interagency? So we are, for lack of a better word, we're the largest criminal. investigative division of Homeland Security. We consider ourselves, and when I was in the agency,

some of the best money laundering experts in the industry. So we looked at it from that angle, and we immediately realized that there was a lapse in connectivity to the financial sector. So we partnered up with a couple associations. We immediately created a 50-page guidebook where we identified transactions through the banking sector that could potentially be identified on the front end are the back end to be shared with law enforcement, that these were suspicious activity reports that would typically go unnoticed. Every day, banks work with us with federal law enforcement, with law enforcement across the country to identify narcotics and human trafficking, but never had we seen anything

on organized retail crime. So we worked very, very hard initially with some associations with RELA, with Lisa, and with Ben, and really produced that. That opened up the aperture for us to realize we were dealing with a multi-hundred million-dollar, billion-dollar industry. And then we opened up the toolbox and said, hey, this is associated to cargo theft. This is associated with labor trafficking. These are South American theft groups that are coming in specifically through the visa waiver program and utilizing that avenue to commit crimes in the U.S. and havoc and hurt people.

and then utilize all those resources that we provide through the banks to move their money and go on with their criminal network. So that was the starting point for us, and that's how we got support from our leadership at the time. And then really, we went out on a community engagement plan to meet as many different folks from different industries to attack the problem. Excellent. So you've already gotten to the point of financial crimes and money laundering. So let's talk a little more about that.

As you said, y'all, you wrote that report in collaboration with RELA and Clear and ACAMs, right? Great report. If any of you have not read it and if any of the listers haven't read it, they need to get out there, read it. If you ever need to explain ORC to your leadership, that first half of that report is fantastic for it. The second half of the report is fantastic for understanding financial flows. a very, very good report, one of the most important to be published in several years. But my question is, is you increase the involvement with the financial sector. You know, where are there still opportunities for retailers to work more tightly with the financial sector?

Yeah, so what we did is we did a national campaign. You had the privilege to speak with Ben and my colleague, Lauren, who was with Akins at the time at the national conference in Vegas. We had the main stage and we really broke down how money moves from fences to brokers through the banks and identified the suspicious activity opportunities and red flags and threats. But then I saw kind of a lapse in local engagement through banking, you know, either partnerships or meetings or quarterly meetings. So really it hasn't broken out into subdivisions of the United States having their own, right? because we did a national conference and we walk away and everybody goes home. And what we were hoping was that it would engage the AGs and the state AGs and ORC task forces.

So it's coming back now in this last 18 to 22 months that I've been out. I'm starting to see more talk about how money flows and the importance of attacking the money, whether it be through a specific lead that a retailer is looking and or retail investigators that I've met, Corey, across the country from multiple big box stores getting certifications through the same certifications that we would have got at HSI or some of my brothers and sisters from FBI or IRS becoming experts in how to trace money, either through crypto certifications like TRM or chain analysis or going back to the well and going to study and getting an ACAM certification or another certification that gives you a deeper knowledge of how to track money.

Because what we're facing, in my professional opinion, is the future of money and the anonymity to transfer money through technology is what's going to open up Pandora's box and really make it very hard for us as investigators to track that money. Thank you. Before we got started today, we were talking about some of the legislation that's being considered up on Capitol Hill, including the court. bill right um inform uh was the inform act was uh past a couple years ago now um and it had a lot provisions in it but most of those were to be addressed through civil courts and not so much criminal courts um can you tell us a little bit more about you know where how corka you know builds upon the inform act yeah well i was in the beginning stages i was very fortunate to help uh not only edit and read and draft and work with our legislative affairs, including all the participants

with Corka and did some congressional staff briefings when I was on the job and still continue to be loosely involved as needed, you know, when they call me. And I absolutely agree. You know, a center of excellence would be something that would definitely help the problem set. It would help bring industry partners together very similar to how we attack intellectual property right violations and the IPR threat and counterfeit threats. We attack it from the money flows, from the brand protection, from the safety and wellness of the folks that buy products. And the same should be held true to organize retail crime. How do we verify that the products are being bought online or through brick and mortar are safe for consumers to use and or put into their bodies if they're ingesting some of these products?

So I think that that's what's going to help bring a consolidated effort. inform act pushed the the online marketplaces to work closer together it did in my opinion bring some federal resources to start looking at the problem even more so right before i retired i had the privilege of speaking to multiple federal agencies and i spoke to special agents that were working on cases and bringing down some of those networks that were operating on their platforms and you know it was a couple million dollars here a case of a hundred and fifty thousand to three hundred thousand in this online platform. So, you know, it made it easier for law enforcement to get those critical details because of the reporting requirements for Inform. Was it a silver bullet? Absolutely

not. It's going to take multiple industries to care, to do more, but it was a good first step. And I think using Inform, hopefully getting Corka Pass, getting the support from DHS to take it on, along with DOJ, that'll definitely help, as I saw the testimony today, of our friends on Capitol Hill today. Yeah. And you've got quite a bit of experience with some of these very large operations and investigations. One being the Operation Boiling Point, which has done a lot of really awesome work. Can you tell us a little bit more about Operation Bowling Point, the objectives and some of the outcomes? Yeah, sure. So, of course, nothing gets invented in Washington, D.C. It's just rinse and repeat, right? So we looked at a model from our intellectual property rights response to the COVID relief fraud response that Homeland Security did with the interagency. We said, you know what, we could duplicate this for organized retail crime. So we created some pillars. I won't bore you with all the pillars. But really the important thing was collaborating and getting real-time leads and intelligence to the field. And then creating a a media campaign, which was very foreign to some of us in leadership as far as putting ourselves out there on LinkedIn and doing webinars and doing interviews, because a lot of us like to,

you know, operate behind the scenes when we're obviously in law enforcement, but this one really caused us a marketing campaign and it pushed us in the limelight. What did that do? It brought the full bearing of the federal government to engage with its resources. Our partnerships teams, our public and private partnership leadership on HSI side worked with our DHS teams. We included and were invited to FBI's incredible partnership program and vice versa. We did it to them. So it really helped us come together. I did countless interviews and webinars like this. And I think what it did is it got the industry aware that here comes the federal government, not to take over, but to partner and to learn from the state and locals, to work with retailers and see the great work. I give a lot of credit to the retail investigators that I met and I continue to meet today.

Some of these folks, this is their life's work. They're incredible investigators. They're doing surveillance in the middle of the night. They're working on leads that are sometimes very serious as far as they've been their. employees have been assaulted. They have internal investigation. So as much as the federal government, HSI could come in and learn with them and partner, that's what we wanted to do. And that's what the four pillars were, what really what they did. The last piece we did is we used some of our existing internal resources to take the leads from the investigators. And we invited them to share those

with us. And then we took a deeper dive and de-conflicted them with our DHS systems and see if we could tie them into other networks. And of course, that's what happened. And we found that some of the targets that the retailers were looking at were targets of other criminal networks. Could they be fraud, passport fraud, marriage fraud, they could have been tied to drug rings or to gun sales or drugs. So I think those and that information was scrubbed and then fed back to the retailer in close partnership with a prosecutor and an HSI agent guiding them. And in the end, we didn't even care if HSI didn't prosecute them. We just wanted to get them that information, put the package together, get that intelligence and that linking, and get it to prosecution somewhere in the United States. Wow. That's pretty awesome stuff that y'all were working on there. How did that operation lead to other initiatives?

Yeah, great question. And it continues today. Yeah, so, you know, privileged to have a great team around me. I know that you said I started and I appreciate what. What I did is it provided the executive leadership. It took it very serious every single day because I saw folks getting hurt in the community and retail crime being affected in every industry. And I said, you know what? So we're going to do this the right way. And I think that led us to some incredible opportunities with some big box stores that were dealing with financial crime, gift card fraud in particular.

And I was in the infancy stages of those initiatives with my good friend Adam Parks and the HSI team out of New Orleans. And they have taken it to a whole other level. They created a coalition that now is working collaboratively with the interagency, with retailers. You know, and I think RELA is doing a great job with that. And I think that coalition is breaking down those silos of whether or not we want to report what's happening in our stores, bringing that knowledge of what's impacting the stores, putting it together, collaboratively sharing in an environment where people can look at who is affecting their stores, who are these networks, how are they influence, trading to get the gift cards in our stores. What's the next iteration of the crime if we're talking to tap to pay or cyber intrusion or a variety of other cyber threats? And then getting that knowledge

out so they can prosecute these cases. I believe some of the stats on Operation Red Hook of what it's called now has been really astronomical when you look at where it was two or three years ago. And that continues today in that coalition, and I give a lot of credit to Adam and all the executive leadership from the coalition that committed resources and being on those webinars, being on those monthly calls to share that data and making it a collaborative effort. Yeah, the campaign, because I want to go back to the campaign where y'all were really trying to engage with industry. I think there was a lot of things that did. I mean, one was it made everyone realize how seriously you were taking the issue, but it also helped you build those networks out. This is a two-way street. So the retailers have to be doing the same thing.

Sometimes they're not as good at that. What can retailers do to build those connections with federal law enforcement and, you know, be the ones taking the steps to engage with you all? Yeah, I appreciate the question. I mean, that's why I landed at ORA in full transparency. I think in the day-to-day operations that I see, I get to do some of the same things I did at HSI, and I love it. I love the fact that we can identify repeat offenders through structured, documented data that comes in every day from the retailers. The way ORA operates is that intelligence is being linked to multiple retailers. It can be identified even through competitor retailers, and then it gives them an opportunity to say,

hey, we have a suggested opportunity to work together. You decide whether you want to share. It also opens up the door for immediate communication to law enforcement through our portal. And then, you know, the reason why I'm up here in New York talking about the retail crime hub that we'll get into later, it's really an avenue to identify the top offenders, top vehicles, and how crime intelligence is documented at the source, and then give an avenue for law enforcement to work with them to retrieve that evidence in a secure way through evidence.com integration. and then really getting it to prosecution so we can identify these networks as soon as possible. You know, it's not only identifying the criminal networks, it's making the community safer by providing that information right back to the retailers so they can utilize that to stop folks from coming into their stores, identifying them outside through an LPR hit,

or working collaboratively through their multi-state ORC task forces to bring down larger networks. I think that's the benefit that I get every day from being hit at ORA or here at ORA and then seeing that crime linkage and in the collaborative casework. I saw one today on LinkedIn. I won't mention it because it's going to be out on its own. But it really was exactly what we talked about. A retailer hitting up a law enforcement officer saying thank you for identifying and ORA was utilized to make that link. Excellent. So you covered a lot of ground just now.

You talked about the retail crime officer. Evidence.com, being able to ingest all different types of intelligence from different sensors out in the networks of sensors that retailers have, and law enforcement has. Let's start with just a retail crime up. What is that? And what role is it going to play in the future of organized retail crime investigations? Yeah, it's the future of law enforcement on the LE side, on the law enforcement side as we see it. So it's a perfect. opportunity to have your own dashboard, your own integration with understanding that we don't have to go back to retailers with a thumb drive and with a CD or send multiple emails to secure

evidence like we did in the last few years. I used to do that when I was running around chasing the bad guys as well, trying to get video of certain events. And it just gives you a seamless opportunity to transfer that evidence. And then really the whole plethora, you like that word, They're going to make fun of me for using that of the safety, of the ability to use ORA's platform into that dashboard and to give that opportunity for law enforcement to have it in one secure platform. And then they can see their top offenders, they can see the top vehicles that are affecting their area, they can establish a response, immediate response by requesting additional information in the platform in case something is missing from the case. in case they need more specifics on a target. And like I mentioned earlier, this is all coming in from ORA's structured data

that comes in from the retailers that are already on the platform, documenting these events every single day and adding to the ecosystem of what is the ORA platform. Gotcha. So you mentioned it. And the law enforcement side probably,

they're all very familiar with Evans.com. Yeah. But you have the retail crime, hub, and then you have evidence.com. Evidence.com, just explained to everyone what that is, who might not understand what piece of that. Yeah, so evidence. I'll give you a quick layman, sir.

So ability to get evidence from the law enforcement agency that has a secure way to get evidence from different locations. So if you're talking about video evidence from a robbery, you get an account, it's securely imported in there and then they can extract it and use it to build a case. So that integration is already existing. That is being used by many, many, many agencies across the country. We have now formed the partnership and that secure partnership. What it does is it gives you an opportunity to transfer that evidence from the retailer right through Evidence.com, exported into law enforcement and you don't have to wait. You don't have to send vehicles over to get that information or, you know,

bring those thumb drives and CDs any longer. So that's the best way I can describe it. Thank you. Yeah. There's just two pieces there. I want to make sure we kind of disentangled so everyone was clear on how this workflow kind of works. And I think that it's pretty awesome stuff that's happening because we're finally getting with the times and not dealing with thumb drives and manually traveling from place to place to get video. There's an easier way to do all of this. You've had a long and luxury's career in law enforcement, and now you're on the private sector side, making your legacy there. I wanted to have a conversation about leadership. So what principles have guided you as an individual throughout your career, not only in law enforcement, but now also in the private sector?

what principles drive your leadership style and your approach? Yeah, it's a great question, and I appreciate you bringing that up. I take it very serious, the better part of my last seven years as an executive leader in D.C. I spent a lot of time learning and taking reflection time and really trying to prepare myself to deal with the responsibilities of leading a large team and large teams and conflict resolution. And so I say all that to, I had my, my trials and tribulations throughout my career, but really took it serious, you know, maybe the last 10 to 7 years. And that's extended into retail and into my position today. What are the principles? Number one is accountability and ownership of my own actions.

And that includes to the way how I treat people. I don't yell. I don't scream. I try to stay as calm as possible. and I just kind of remember some of the basic concepts that we probably learn from our parents, you know, treat people the way you want to be treated. But that comes with also some responsibility. And it's lead by example.

It's come in early, stay late. It's learn people's names and check in on them as family members as humans. It's provide the resources and take accountability when there's a loss or when something happens and be front and center as a leader to take ownership and say, look, we need to learn from this mistake or for whatever happened, and we need to do better. And that means me taking that step forward. So that's what I tried to do at HSI, extensive trainings and cohorts with executive teams and took it very serious. And even though it's a different scope here on the private side and aura has been very gracious and allowing me to speak about it on a couple different media

forums, I take it very serious. And it's about action, controlling your actions and being responsible for your actions and then leading from the front and then just really using that as a day-to-day appreciation to do the best job you can and whatever leadership role you have. because I often people think that you have to be a leader of 20 people to actually make a difference. And no, you can lead yourself every day by saying I'm going to own what I'm doing. I'm going to own my impact. I'm going to do the best I can today. And I'm going to help other people along the way because it's not about me.

It's about we. So that's my mantra. It might be a little corny. But that's what's got me through my career. And that's how I try to lead my life and my personal life and with my job. it makes a ton of sense building on that you know law enforcement and the private sector have a lot of differences I have some similarities but there's a lot of differences there what do you think that the private sector could learn from law enforcement that

would that would make private sector efforts better well I think is a fight against ORC? Yeah, there's some learning lessons on both sides. I'll give credit to what I've seen on both since I've been able to play in both sides. I mean, I think that the federal coordination centers that are in existence already are a great playbook, the state infusion centers across the country that attack other threats besides ORC, drugs, fentanyl epidemic. There's some great learning lessons there. The partnerships with the banking side on how to address these threats are great learning lessons for the retailers. But, on the other side, you know, the organized retail crime associations and, and the stand-up

task forces that have come up in the last three to five years, that's an immediate impact of what they've done in Florida, Pennsylvania, California, and Texas. Absolute a learning example there for law enforcement to put down the badge and say it's not just about my agency and it's not about my credit. It's about how do we make a bigger impact to dismantle this network. Really, you know, the line that I love at our job here at ORA is It takes a network to defeat a network. I used to use it with our DEA and FBI brothers when we were chasing the bad guys on the drug side when I worked at a Deconfliction Center seven, eight, nine, ten years ago. So that line has meaning for me. And I think it's very simple to break down. You build those relationships to bring down those silos. And I think on both sides, there's a learning opportunity. We cannot do it alone. We can't prosecute our way out of this organized retail crime problem.

There's a humongous education piece that I think you guys have started over the last 30 years on the education side on academia. You and I get, you know, we can get a little nerdy together when we talk about, you know, studies and what I did before with some other universities. And I think I've introduced you guys to other branches that we're targeting this threat. And I think that's what it's going to take. It's going to take, hey, University of Florida is doing great, but maybe you should see what University of Georgia is doing or vice versa something in Kansas. And I think as you guys are meeting new players, same thing for us in law enforcement, same thing in retail. It can't just be us that knows the answer. Who else in that ecosystem can help us make a bigger impact and how do we do it so everybody feels like they inputted their best foot forward and they made the best approach to attack that network?

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that. Well, Roel, thank you very much for spending some time with me. Thank you for spending some time with us today and, you know, walking us through what it's going to take to solve some of these problems moving forward. It's been a fantastic conversation. Thank you, everyone else, for listening for joining us today. We will see you on the next episode.

Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast, presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at LPRsearch.org.

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