LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 25 – Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, and Tom Meehan

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

How is live-streaming driving e-commerce sales during the pandemic? Learn about this approach & much more including information on antivirals, LPRC’s STRATEGY@, the global economic forecast, sales data, contactless payment & associated scams, Portland’s facial recognition ban, and the VA data breach on our newest episode of LPRC CrimeScience: The Weekly Review, hosted by Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, & Tom Meehan. The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 25 – Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, and Tom Meehan appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. We use Bosch Camera's onboard intelligent video analytics to quickly locate important recorded incidents or events. Bosch's forensic search saves you time and money by searching through hours or days of video within minutes to find and collect video evidence. Learn more about intelligent video analytics from Bosch in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at BoschSecurity.com. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, a podcast that's in our weekly update series. And I'm joined by my colleagues, Tom Ian and Tony D'Onofrio and our producer, Kevin Tran. We'll jump right into it.

Always exciting to live in 2020. I guess this is only the second time in history where we've had this many named tropical cyclone disturbances, storms, hurricanes in the Atlantic area. Maybe in seventh generation Florida, I'm a little used to it, but this is a lot of storms. We know we've got an incredible amount of forest fires, particularly in the West, earthquakes in the East. We've got all kinds of invasive species coming alive, COVID-19, and then, again, some of the most violent demonstrations that we've seen in probably 50 years or so. But what we'll do is talk a little bit about COVID-19 real quickly here, the prevention, looking at dose reduction, more studies continue to come out, peer-review studies indicating again it's uh it's dose reduction

the amount that we onboard it could be zero to whatever number um and that's what drives whether we actually are infected or not and then how serious the disease might be for us um dependent on our own response so viral exposure is the key and reducing that. And that's why, you know, people, people clusters, venues like restaurants can be a little more, provide some more exposure for us. And so we've got to figure out ways to distance ourselves and be outside and do the things that we've been learning through the months to reduce our exposure, reduce to a heavy dose of virus. That's where the proximity and the angle of our head, if we're aiming right at somebody or them at us. And of course, masking and eyewear and the better filtering the mask has, the fewer particles that can make it through if somebody's viremic. And again, the percentage of people that are non or asymptomatic is almost astounding, but they're learning more and more about this disease. And there are so many similarities, I guess, to influenza or the flu, including some of the long haulers and long-term

effects. And we've been hearing so much about that. And people that I know and others have been dealing with some of that. Turns out that the flu does have the same thing. Now, this may be a little more dangerous, a little more long-term or wider variety of ailments that we might have. Also, the idea that if somebody's been exposed to some type of COVID, including a cold, then they may have some better response or even some other viral infections. Just the T cells or some innate immunity might be in this that is helping, and that may help explain also why those have been exposed to whatever dose level they are better at handling it. On the therapy front, now 316 close on 320 therapies in testing of some level. University of Pittsburgh reports using this AB8. It's a tiny, tiny molecule, tiny than most antibodies.

tiny molecule, tiny than most antibodies. And they're seeing some very good efficacy and safety profiles in animal models right now and preparing to go on. I know at the University of Florida here, they're working on multiple therapies, but a couple of them that stand out are this combination of antivirals or nukes, as they're called, to disrupt the onboarding within a cell or the replication and things like that. They disrupt the virus. They're also working on a big NIH trial on blood thinners, two different types of trials. Those that have very serious disease and are in the hospital, those have serious enough disease to be treated but are not in the hospital. The third trial will be to be treated, but are not in the hospital. The third trial will be coming up later, evidently,

where they'll be looking at different therapies on those that have the disease, but they are experiencing some longer term effects. So stay tuned on that. The vaccine front now over 200, 211 is the latest count I've been able to find on the number of vaccines in trial in different forms are coming out of mouse models and so forth. So a lot of activity going on in the therapy front.

As you can see, you know, we'll be closing on 600 repurposed or new drug therapies to prevent or treat. And some that look like might be able to do both. This ABA, for example, is one that may have that utility as well as some of these antivirals that might not only be powerful treatments for those of us that have the disease, but also prevent us from getting disease or at least minimizing the seriousness of it. Turning over to what's going on with some of the violence, one source, ACLED, it's called, has recorded over 10,600 protests, about 570 have included violence of those protests. So most are not actually violent, thank goodness, around the country.

But closing on 600 have been. You know, an interesting thing I saw too is that just looking at the month of July in 2020, we saw an increase of 42% in protests and in violent protests over 2019. But it wasn't 100% or 200%. It was 42%. So stay tuned on that. We know that's a concern for those that are in the path or can't get to their businesses or carry on commerce or need emergency services and things like that. There's some, you know, continued concern on the erosion of consequences for those that victimize others. So that'll be a topic of strategy out this year. What research do we need around the lower law enforcement numbers,

the reluctance of some law enforcement due to being exposed on social media and their families being exposed. And then as well as the waves of potential retirements due to just baby boomer generation. And then possibly those leaving to go to better paying jobs when the economy recovers that don't carry the exposure and the physical risk, The economy recovers that don't carry the exposure and the physical risk, the emotional risk, the stress, and then the scrutiny and sometimes absolute hatred that they go through every day. And we've just seen one of the more horrific things this year in 2020, the ambush of two Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies who were on break in their marked vehicle in their zone. An individual came up and tried to execute them and shot both of them. And we see the female deputy, despite being shot in the jaw twice and elsewhere as well, was able to render life-saving first aid to her partner, put out a call on the radio and describe the situation, as well as provide a defensive perimeter in case there was

a subsequent or a coordinated attack. But probably just as tragic and bizarre is the demonstration then that occurred at the emergency department, the emergency room, where the deputies were transported for life-saving trauma surgery, where individuals were trying to get into the emergency room, not sure exactly what they were trying to do, hurt or harm or kill others, as well as chanting that they hope they might die. Shocking and horrified neighbors and others have been reporting on this. Law enforcement took action. Evidently, a press person injected themselves without marking or notification into the situation and was arrested as well during the violent

demonstration. So, further erosion of consequence and the idea that we've got to better understand what's going on and how we might affect it. Now, turning over to LPRC, research continues. We're working on about 32 projects on anti-theft, anti-fraud, anti-violence. supermarket chains this week have identified some new skimmers that are taking place on indoor card scanners, card readers for transactions, sent us some video, and then yesterday actually put one of the skimmers, the new tech, into the mail. We've coordinated now with an absolute expert, a detective up in NYPD who's spoken on some of what he does at our Impact Research Conference. We're going to be turning the technology over and working with University of Florida's FICS, the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity team, and as well as

University of Colorado Boulder to better understand the technology in ways that we might detect and defeat it. So that gives you an idea on the fraud front, as well as obviously violent crime and intimidation crime research at LPRC Innovate. AI Solve, we're moving along very rapidly and looking again at the three types of data that might, the data sets that we'd like to develop for AI, computer vision, or the imagery, of course, for use cases that would provide an ROI or better protective utility in the parking lots and inside, particularly harmful behavior, aggressive behavior. We're looking at, of course, event posting online data, AI, and then, of course, natural language processing or NLP.

Looking at possible threat models like BERT and ELMO. So that's a little bit about what's going on at Innovate AI Solve. We're looking forward to the robotics project. We're continuing to work on that. We're looking forward to getting one or more of the robots into the LPRC engagement lab as soon as some of our colleagues can gain better access to their own labs on campus at the University of Florida due to COVID. Strategy at, again, excited. Record enrollment of most senior asset protection leaders.

Impact, again, record about 600 now people enrolled in Impact. We normally have 400 to give you some context there. Working groups moving full steam ahead, the seven working groups that we've got. We've got more webinars. The Knowledge Centers is continuing to grow as well as the app. So please come check out lpresearch.org to find out more and poke around and see what all is going on in LP Research and innovate.

With that, with no further ado, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio. Good morning, Reid, and a pleasure to provide a global update in terms of what's going on with the global economies and also with global retail. Let me start with a new forecast from Euromonitor in terms of what will happen this year and next year for major global economies. So the baseline actually for the third quarter has been downgraded by one and a half percent to the previous forecast in May. For 2020, GDP growth for the world will be down 4.7%. USA GDP is projected to be down 6.5%. Eurozone is actually going to be even, so Europe is going to be down even steeper at 9.4%. And China is actually the bright spot. They're

actually going to be up this year. Even with the pandemic, China will be up 1.4%. And China is actually the bright spot. They're actually going to be up this year. Even with the pandemic, China will be up 1.2%. For 2021, Euromonitor is projecting that global GDP will be up 5.3%. USA will be up 4%. Eurozone will be up 5%. And China will be up 7.9%. So it looks like a major recovery next year and still challenges this year. Also this past week, the latest retail forecasts came out. These are dated September 9, and these are from the IHL group. So right now for the year, grocery will be up 12%. Drug will be up 7%.. Drug will be up 7 percent.

Mess merchandise will be up 11 percent. Department stores will be down 23 percent. Specialty soft goods will be down 33 percent. Convenience will be down 19 percent. And restaurants will be down 26 percent. and restaurants will be down 26%. Overall, for the entire year, U.S. retail sales are expected to be down 7.6%. So that's a little bit on the year. Now let's look at the holidays. This is a fourth quarter forecast in terms of what Cantar thinks will happen with the holidays. So Cantar is projecting that for the fourth quarter 2020, retail sales will be up 5%. Online will be up a dramatic 30%. Food and drug will be up 5%.

Big box will be up 2.1%. And soft goods and home goods will be down 3.3%. 18% of consumers are planning to spend more, which is less than last year, which was 22%. 49% are planning to spend the same, which last year was higher at 56%. And 28% are planning to spend much to somewhat less versus 18% last year. So the little bit in the trend is to spend less this year. So that's a little bit on the holidays. Now let's look at what's happening to online sales. They are slowing. So the latest in the grocery sector is the spike is actually slowing.

Pike is actually slowing. August grocery e-commerce sales totaled $5.7 billion, approximately a 20% drop compared to June. The numbers are still much higher than a year ago when sales for grocery were $1.2 billion online. And this is from Progressive Grocer. The online trend is actually slowing overall. Adobe reports that USA online sales were up 47% in August, reaching $63 billion. It was markedly lower than July when online sales grew 55%.

So online sales, the curve is stores reopened. Consumers are comfortable going into stores. And let me close with a new blog that I just published for 4% of online sales in China and 1% of overall retail sales. And what is live streaming? So think of in the US of QVC and HSN, but add a lot of social media on steroids. So a lot of social media content. And really what happens is the social media influencers sell products via live streams on platforms such as Taobao, which is owned by Alibaba. in numeric terms, if there's a million people participating, 320,000 people will actually buy. So it's got a high turnover rate because of the influencer. And it was the perfect shopping platform for the pandemic. So during the lockdown in China, consumers spend 120 minutes per day on Douquan, which is the China version of TikTok, on their live streams, and only 89 minutes per day on other social media platforms.

The top three categories that were shopped online through live stream were apparel, cosmetics, and food. food. And just to give you an idea of the impact, in last year's 2019 Senkos Day, which is the world's largest single shopping day in 24 hours, out of the $38 billion in overall sales for Alibaba, nearly $3 billion came from live streaming. And to give you a really close example, to the U.S., Kim Kardashian was actually on one of the live stream with a Chinese influencer. And in 15 minutes, she sold 15,000 bottles, basically sold out the entire inventory that she had brought for sale with 13 million people joining the live stream and buying her product. So it gives you an idea of the impact. and buying her product. So it gives you an idea of the impact.

So just to summarize what that means, in 2020, live stream commerce is expected to complete a 453% three-year growth, reaching $128 billion in revenue. So think of what I just said in terms of this live stream update. And think of the sectors in apparel which I said were struggling in the US and how really that's the number one sector that is bought through live stream because the influencers can

change into a lot of different garments and show the products up for sale. So can this model actually be brought to the West and to the United States in terms of the health sector, such as apparel? So you can read more about that in my latest blog. So it's an interesting, to me, video-first sales process that is happening in retail. And I do think video is going to become an even more important channel going forward for the retail industry. So with that, I'm going to turn over to Tom. Thanks, Tony.

Thanks, Rene. All very interesting stuff. And a couple of things Tony mentioned. I'll start just kind of with the contactless payment update. And really since the beginning of the pandemic, there's been over 150% rise. I think there were some huge spikes. And then kind of as an average, contactless

payment is about 150 percent. And that's overall, that's in all sectors, not one specific. So if you're reading reports and some it's way up and some it's not. And much like probably to expect, there are some cybersecurity risks associated with that. And I know in the past, you probably have heard of when contactless payment came out, the ability for someone with a small, either near field reader or high frequency reader to be able to bump into you to get your credit card information. This is not a new phenomenon, but there's been a significant rise in metropolitan areas as people are using contactless payment and have more of

those cards. What basically is happening is someone is bumping into you or coming very close to you. They are close proximity, so they really have to touch you. But this is not to steal credit card information. It's actually to process extremely small transactions. So if you took a major metropolitan city anywhere in the world, whether it be New York City or Paris, basically these folks are walking around and tapping as many people as they can and processing very small transactions that are going in. There are some restrictions with some cards of the amount on contactless payment. Some actually even restrict to under $100, depending on where you are in the globe. So what this scam is really portraying is very small transactions. And in a crowded subway, for instance, the goal is to ring as many as they can. And then they basically watch that

money before you can dispute it. This is on the rise. There was a recent report out of Chicago that's seen a huge spike in this. And again, there's still cross proximity. It isn't a new thing. The people bumping into you or carrying a large backpack and kind of brushing it up against folks to gather transactions. In the past, it was to try to steal information. There are a lot of things that have been added to the contactless world to really make the card information not useful because of a one-time tokenization methodology. So this is really about processing small charges. And the thought process also is in some cases, customers don't even see these charges. So if you think about a charge of less than $20 on a card, you may miss it. And by the time you see it, this person's already closed that kind of shop up and moved on. So just another way that folks are taking advantage of some of the things that are occurring around what's the new normal. I don't think contactless payments are going away. I'm not suggesting at all that you take extreme measures.

There are a lot of radio frequency blocking while it's out there, really. It's just a piece of foil that does it. It's just another reminder to just to stay vigilant and stay on top of it. Unlike your smartphone that requires you to interact with it, to process it. The card really does require a tap. I suspect we'll continue to see this rise. There's a couple ABC reports around it. It is interesting news. It is not a huge, huge concern from a cybersecurity or risk standpoint, but it's something that requires a little bit of speaking about it. Switching gears a little bit to the recent news around Portland and Portland banning facial recognition. We could have a whole entire call just about facial recognition and this ban, but it's important to note that there is some fine

print there where it's heavily focused on the private sector. It does affect the public sector as well. It also has some language around what's deemed a public property versus a private property and so on. It's important to note that this is the first really extreme band of its kind. There's been 11 states that have some legal or regulations put into place. But I know we talk about computer vision and facial recognition a lot on podcasts. And I think this is a kind of a blow to the retailers using facial recognition, especially among some of the events that are currently happening throughout the globe. And I think with the upcoming election, facial recognition, I was thinking computer vision and facial recognition would really be a big benefit for retailers to have just to protect themselves. So I think it's certainly a story to watch.

I know that we had Peter Trepp on face first talking about it. My company Control Tech also has a computer vision platform. So something to keep in mind, I think Tony, myself, and Reid have talked many times that regulation is needed and will be coming. But this is one of those very, very, for lack of better words, extreme complete ban versus some language around the use cases. So just something to keep in mind with computer vision when you're looking at it, where you're going to institute it, and what are some of the regulatory concerns that could come up.

Additionally, in the facial recognition world, IBM called for a U.S. export ban on some facial recognition technologies and cameras. It's hard to, what the methodology behind some of this is. There's a lot of politics and some of the facial recognition news that's out today. But this really goes hand in hand with the Portland kind, Amazon, IBM, had made a public statement that they were no longer going to license their algorithms out to certain government offices. It was important to note that that was a limiting ban where it had some time constraints on it. And also, in some circumstances, they'd already licensed it out and didn't revoke those licenses, just said they weren't doing additional things. Just really circling the wagon here on the phased recognition is to just keep, we'll continue to keep everybody up to date on it. But it's a fluid situation.

And I think there's a lot of compounding events that are occurring that really keep bringing this to light. really keep bringing this to light. In the data breach front, there was just recently really one breach in particular that I thought would merit a little bit of conversation. One of the VAs had a data breach. There is a lot of different news about this. This is a veterans affair, potentially exposed personal information of, you know, upward of 50,000 veterans. Some of the reporting is saying it's more than 100,000. But what is certain is that there was a data breach that occurred with the VA and information was released. because of the amount of information that is gathered when you identify a breach, really figuring out when the breach started, stopped, and all those extenuating circumstances. It's just a reminder throughout this that all of those cybersecurity risks that exist continue

and really are extremely, extremely exacerbated by the COVID-19 challenges that are faced. So I think on average now we're seeing something astronomical where there's 50 to 60 breaches being publicly released every week to say that. I think people are becoming somewhat desensitized to it, but I think it's important, again, to safeguard whatever personal information you can. to protect yourself um with some of these breaches is just simply to make sure that when your credentials um for each each site that you log on to that use a different password and two-factor uh with the va breach unfortunately a lot of it is um back-end data where there's not much you as an end user could have done if you are in the VA.

But it just serves as a good reminder to take those good cybersecurity hygienes. And kind of rounded out what there's been a lot of news as retail has been opening up and the importance of cybersecurity in retail. And I think retail has always had that on the forefront. I know that our listing, sometimes our least listener base isn't, um, cybersecurity related, but just the, the important reminders of as we're getting into reopening and having more customers in, um, it's easy or it's sometimes a necessity to have to do things quicker or faster than you've had in the past.

So in lieu of policy and procedure, sometimes things have to be done to generate business. But there is a lot of talk about the vulnerabilities of POS systems, as well as the influx of Internet of Things devices, IoT devices in the retail environment. I think we are all very cognizant of that. I know in the all-power C, if you walked in the lab, you probably, 90% of the things in the lab will probably have some Internet of Things component. And as you introduce those things into the environment, there's potential for risk. And it's just some more attack vectors for someone to go after. The other thing to really think about is operational technology and how we are

really increasing the attack surface. So when you go back to 10 years ago, you had maybe 10 points. Now you might have 10,000 points of entry where there's a digital risk. So just, I think I say it every week, but it really is a reminder of the importance of not looking at risk is just your traditional cybersecurity, but overall kind of risk. And then there was an interesting report that really, there were two reports that were not the same, but had a lot of kind of similarities. So I wanted to talk about kind of the cybersecurity crisis and then the crisis around law enforcement and security professionals. There were two articles, one focused heavily on cybersecurity, the other focused on both private and public law enforcement security. And one of the key things that I don't think we talk about a lot,

and I think Reid mentions it every once in a while, is that really today, the importance of monitoring security professionals' mental health. There's an influx of remote work. You have folks that are doing longer shifts, longer hours, being subject to things they've never been subjected to. And the interesting part is that 23% of cybersecurity professionals and 31% of law enforcement professionals and then 50% of security professionals, all who were surveyed said that they had experienced greater anxiety at work and greater concern. I think when I say that out loud, I think it's somewhat of a common sense factor if you're out in the field and the front lines with all the things going on. But it's important to remember to take the time to talk to one another and your folks at work for you about the differences today than even a year ago

and the stress that it could cause on family life, on personal life, and the inherent real safety danger that's there. So I thought it was important to mention that. I know it's not the normal, typical conversation that I'd have. And in those articles, it also talked about the balance of remote work versus homework and how some law enforcement and security professional positions that are on the front lines, their support vectors are now remote. So they don't have that human interaction that they had before. There are a lot of leadership roles that are remote, yet the frontline people are still out in the field. And the importance of staying engaged and staying in contact and actually spending more time talking to folks than you would before because that human contact isn't there. So again, not something I would typically talk about, but I really thought it was worth mentioning here. And that's all I have for this week. Over to you, Reid. All right. Fantastic. Thanks so much, Tom. Thank you again, Tony, for all the great insights from both of you all. We need the broad as well as the narrow perspective to better understand and target. And to all of our listeners out there, please keep dialing in,

understand and target. And to all of our listeners out there, please keep dialing in, spread the word about LPRC's Crime Science Podcast. We're always open to your ideas, suggestions, comments, critiques at operations at lpresearch.org. On behalf of Tom and Tony and Kevin Tran, our producer, and all the team at the LPRC and the University of Florida's crime research team. We want to thank you. Stay safe. Signing off from Gainesville. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. episode you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org the content provided in the crime science podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a

substitute for legal financial or other advice views expressed by guests of the crime science podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the loss prevention research council