LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 93 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

LPRC is Hosting an Open House! Ukraine and Russia Crisis Continues to Affect World! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss the vaccination numbers across the world and country, New Research in Actions are being written by LPRC Every Month, 2022 Economic Trends from Deloitte, and the Supply Chain Disruptions from Russian Invasion. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 93 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

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. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point-of-s sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP related events and leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to

improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance 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, the podcast from the LPRC. Today's our latest in the weekly update series as we race into our 100th episode coming up soon enough. Joined today by our partners in podcasting here. We've got Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan and our producer Diego Rodriguez. And I want to welcome everybody in. I'll spend just a couple minutes on describing what we're reading and seeing and hearing regarding the

global pandemic. Certainly what's going on in the Ukraine right now is devastating, tragic, completely unnecessary, and is overtaking a lot of the COVID-19 news for obvious reasons. But as I'm sure Tony can touch on a little bit, presenting other unique challenges. And I don't think we want to in any way, shape, or form or intend to downplay the horror of having your country invaded and your people murdered in their homes and in the street and beyond. So that's not what our intent is today, but also to frame it up and put it in context for us all trying to work on much better protection and safeguarding of people in addition to good commerce and trade. And we can see, by the way, the critical role that at least the countries around the world think so far that trade plays in the not just the economic health, but the physical health

of people, individuals and economies and in trying to strangle back this Putin character and his regime and what they're doing and see if that might trigger something with the people in Russia who are oppressed by these guys. So going over to the pandemic, you know, we continue to follow therapy and vaccine development, again, looking at something that's going to affect transmissibility. Are there ways to reduce the likelihood that we're going to transmit a given virus to one another, particularly a coronavirus that can affect us in the way this has globally in so many ways? 75, well, right now we're looking at about almost 200 vaccine candidates additional, again, in process. So 75 are preclinical, you know, when they use very high-speed,

powerful computers like they're doing here at the University of Florida with HyperGator 3.0 and other places simulating and very, very rapidly exposing the pathogens of different types of viruses, but particularly this coronavirus that we're dealing with to all types of candidates that would much better suppress, again, the ability to transmit from one another. Also, we know that future variants, they believe, and we've already seen this with these mutations, adapt and adjust just like we do to overcome things and overcome our native immune systems, the adaptive and the baseline immune system and responses that we're built with.

And so, again, the vaccine is designed to activate those and to also counteract any escape mechanisms that these new strains have. And that's what we're looking at in the future. They're going to develop ways to be more transmissible. And we see that with this Omicron and how that just took the world by storm, so to speak, as far as incredible transmissibility, even to those that had prior coronavirus infections, had been vaccinated or both. had prior coronavirus infections, had been vaccinated or both. It just learned how or adapted in ways that allowed that transmissibility to dramatically increase as well as the likelihood

of infection. What it didn't seem to do was increase the virulence or the seriousness of the disease. And so thank goodness we haven't seen these high death rates, particularly even with those that are particularly vulnerable for a lot of health reasons that we've heard in the past. So, you know, look forward to that with these. How does it work on reducing transmissibility? Some future vaccines and therapies that we might have work on countering the counter attacks that the virus has to escape our immune responses. And then finally, to continue to help our bodies otherwise fight through therapies and other means to reduce the virulence or severity of impact on our bodies. And we're still all learning what the impacts might be in the near term, midterm, and even in the long term of any viral infection, but in this case from the coronavirus. So, you know, again, we're looking at about 200 different new vaccine

candidates in trial right now with 17 additional candidates that are in emergency use authorization around the world. And of course, we've got a dozen with full approval after multiple randomized controlled trials in multiple countries. So that's where we are right there. The vaccination continues. We're now in the United States, just over a quarter billion Americans have now been vaccinated, a quarter million. And around the world, we've just reached the 5 billion humans have been vaccinated now against the coronavirus, against COVID-19 disease. So that's kind of where we are in a quick update. We're seeing numbers like 90% drop in monthly infections compared to prior as a rate. And so you're seeing even the Omicron viral infections dropping dramatically around the entire world, but places that were a little

more isolated, like Hong Kong and others that had incredible, almost draconian anti-infection protocols in place. There's a pretty naive population there in so many ways. And so it looks like they're getting swept by the same pathogen. And we see that in New Zealand and other places as well that tried to keep the infection out, did a good job for quite a while, but it just seems inevitable, even by restricting travel and things like that, that it's not if but when. So, thank goodness for all the good science that's gone into developing better and better preventive and recovery tactics and technologies. Switching over, we'll go to the LPRC front. tactics and technologies. Switching over, we'll go to the LPRC front. We're excited. Again, it's been high tempo as far as visitors. We've actually, as a result, and this is a good issue with the five of us on the research team, a lot of warnings. We're not there at our labs so that

we can work at our home offices or a place that we can really do deep reading. We have to do a lot of reading and thinking and rereading articles and then thinking a lot about what we're trying to do, the mechanisms, draw them up, and then put together our protocols. We've got a lot of writing to catch up on. So look for a monthly flow starting in March, which is where we are today as we record this, March 1, 2022, on this Tuesday, this dreary, rainy Tuesday here in Gainesville. But we are in the process with we'll be putting out anywhere from four to eight what we call RIAs every month, research and action briefs. That's underway. They've been written as we speak. That's underway. They've been written as we speak.

But because of all the visitors into our labs, and we welcome that, we invite you all to come in, spend time with us. But that's why our research team in the mornings particularly is rotating to get some of the deep thinking and research and writing done in the peace and quiet. And I know we all have our own ways to work. That's my preferred method, too, is to get in there and dig in my home office. I can get a lot done. So what we do invite you in there, we're having technologies every week. We've got another technology going into today. We had two different technology companies in last week installing, in addition to the retailer visits coming by. I'm headed to Orlando this week to meet with a major retailer, one of our members, to do a lot of planning and store walks and things like that. So we're getting out and about and doing the strategic thinking, the tactical deployment, the testing and things that need to be done here.

A little bit about some of our new researchers. We've got Dr. Sarah McFann, we've mentioned before, and she did just make it out of Ukraine. She's only been out of there for six to eight weeks now and lucky to get out. And of course, sad and concerned for so many colleagues and friends that she made while there under DOJ and U.S. State Department contract doing crime analysis for the Ukrainian police.rainian police um and so uh but sarah is heading up our violent crime working group and mostly going to be working in that violent crime reduction space and has a series of projects that are now underway her basha and

some of the other leaders of the violentent Crime Working Group have been planning the 2022 year as far as violent crime projects that we're working on. We would invite any of you all that are in the LPRC to think about getting in the Violent Crime Working Group. And we especially want you to think about becoming a co-leader. We have six to eight co-leaders per working group to provide a lot of planning insight to be there. If another one can't be there, you know, provide that depth, that bench strength. It's not a heavy lift. It's a 30, 45 minute planning call every 30 days. And then it's another 50 to 60 minute call. In addition to that planning and putting on a violent crime summit, this year will be in Philadelphia.

in putting on a Violent Crime Summit. This year will be in Philadelphia, CAP Index and others hosting. So stay tuned for that, what's going on. But a lot happening in that space we'll go over next week. On the C3I front, the Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence front,

we've got Orion in there, San Angelo. And Orion is a research analyst on the team. Newly minted master's coming out of the University of Charlotte. What we might know as the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. And what he's doing is working on our SOC lab and fusion that program. And that's where we look at better detection, early detection, better definition to decide both emergent and forensic events, right? So right now, for example, we're working on an active robbery crew that I've mentioned prior and looking at using, working with ESRI

and ArcGIS with map, with different ones like CAP index and other mapping technologies that we have as part of our team to better understand the dynamics of the crime, to better protect against getting ahead of it and to solve. But on the emergent front, what we're looking at is how do we better detect, define, and decide during emergent events like dangerous weather, riders or looters heading our way, uh, or they are now. And then of course, for, excuse me. And then of course, active assailant or killer shooter events. So he's working on the, the compute and connection infrastructure.

So our tech team, amazing. Uh, we've got Darren from, uh, from, uh, since dramatic JCI, we've got Ricky from axis and Edward from Bosch. We've got Eli from Serverly. We've got Mike Korkuba from TelAid and others that are helping us draw up and install a new infrastructure. It'll be fiber-based with covered switches in each lab, tearing out what they call spaghetti world or spaghetti western, depending on who you talk to up in the ceilings to provide faster smarter and more organized connection with now over 200 technologies in our labs and growing and then all that's going to be happening outside the labs in the safer

places lab environment so the compute connection infrastructure is going there, new servers going in, somebody partitions to create virtual machines. We're also, secondly, though, describing and deploying the sensors in action. And again, the way we do that is we have pathways to and from a crime event. And so whether it's a theft, whether it's shoplifting or supply chain theft or burglary or other types of employee theft and so on, what are the pathways, again, the steps and stages to be successful for the bad guy? We want to array those sensors and action tools around that. The second part of this is we want to then, after we've got the connection infrastructure, we've now described, articulated these pathways, and started to identify the sensors and action tools we want to place along them. The final step is to integrate these things and pull together the analytics

and create a single pane of glass concept, right, the common operating picture. So a lot happening. We'll continue each week to go a little more in depth into what's going on, but look forward to seeing everybody at the RELA conference. Diego is putting on an open house at the LPRC. He'll put out more details on that to everybody in our community, but you're going to be welcome to come up here in conjunction with RELA to have tours. We've got quite a few people already booking those tours. We urge you to take advantage of that if you're going to be in the state of Florida.

We're just two hours north, anywhere from an hour and 45 minutes to two hours and 15, depending on all the tourist traffic on the interstate and on the turnpike. But it's a pretty easy drive, especially with podcasts like Crime Science to listen to. So let me turn it over, if I might, to Tony D'Onofrio. And Tony, if you could take it away. Thank you very much, Reid, and good update on all the things that are happening at LPRC today. And in terms of providing more information on COVID, today I'm actually in Canada, where the restrictions have actually been lessened starting today, March 1st. Last night when I went to a restaurant, I had to show my vaccine status, the actual vaccine card, and I had to take a PCR to come into Canada. As of today, no more showing the vaccine card, and also you can just take an

antigen test to come into Canada. So Canada is also coming out of the pandemic at a different pace than other parts of the world. So let me switch to give another update in terms of some of my favorite data that I see around the world. And this week I'll report on one of my favorite reports, and this one is issued annually by Deloitte. It's called the Global Powers of Retailing, and they summarize economic and trends and also the state of the global top 250 retailers. From the 2022 edition we just came out, let me start with a summary of the economic trends for the new year, as reported by Dr. Ira Kalish, who is Deloitte's chief global economist. In his own words, we entered 2022 with high inflation

in the United States and Europe, continuing disruption of the supply chain, a shortage of labor in key markets, and a reversal of monetary policy in the United States and Europe. December 2021 and January 2022 experienced the worst outbreak in coronavirus infections with the Omicron variant since the start of the pandemic, and yet retailers have reason for optimism. Supply chain disruption is likely to abate.

Dr. Ira says that inflation is likely to recede, major economies are likely to grow at a healthy pace in 2022, especially as consumers are flush with cash. And despite political tension between major countries, trade and cross-border investments continue a pace, thereby allowing global retails to continue to globalize. He then digs deeper in terms of some of the major trends in terms of inflation and supply chains. He reports that the high rates of inflation in the United States and Europe are due largely to supply chain disruptions, as evidenced by large price increases of goods but not for services there are indications supply chain disruptions may have peaked and would soon abate

consumer spending on goods is lessening industrial production in east asia is soaring due partly to increased availability of inputs such as semiconductors. If supply chains revert to normal in the next 12 to 18 months, the rate of inflation should decline sharply. On labor markets in the United States and also in other countries, labor force participation is down and businesses face labor shortages. Reasons include potentially mass early retirements for older workers, fewer women working due to childcare responsibilities during the pandemic, fear of the virus, less migration, and a skills mismatch due to fewer low-skilled jobs and an increase in high-skilled jobs. high-scale jobs. A labor shortage would typically lead to higher wages. However, although wages have risen, the increase has been less than expected and not sufficient to drive up inflation.

Some businesses have avoided wage increase by offering sign-on and retention bonuses. Others have invested in labor savings. On physical policy, physical policy in most countries has become less expensive, with Japan being the exception. Government borrowing in the United States and Europe is likely to decline this year, putting downward pressure on yields. Even as Central Bank starts buying goods, physical parts in the united states and europe is becoming focused more on the long term with investments in infrastructure and human capital on global trade

global trade has expanded rapidly despite supply chain disruptions and tension between the united states and china global companies continue to engage in gross border investment including direct investment in China. However, they are starting to diversify supply chain from China and into India and other countries in Southeast Asia, Mexico and the home markets. The United States has been cautious about liberalizing trade with China and Europe, but it's starting to move in that direction. In terms of forecasts and some of the key economies for the United States, Deloitte

expects moderate growth slower than previously expected due to the negative impact of the immigrant variant in the first quarter of 22. The inflation should fall as the year progresses. Labor shortages are likely to persist, especially through limited immigration. Consumer spending on goods is likely to fall as consumers shift towards spending on services. In Europe, in the first quarter, the economy in Europe is likely to be restricted by Omicron, but subsequently the rate of growth and increase in consumer spending should rebound nicely.

The risk of inflation will also fall, especially if energy prices peak. And then in China, there's a reason to expect much slower economic growth in 22 than in 21, largely due to the troubles in the country's huge property market. Unlike elsewhere, monetary policy is more expensive and less concerned about inflation, which is currently low. Demographics are a major concern in China, with fewer births seen in 2020 than in any year since 1961, and there could be long-term negative consequences for economic growth, consumer demand, and the health and pensions of the healthcare system. Now, all this was written earlier in the year prior to Ukraine.

Ukraine will contribute to higher inflation, so we're in a world that's constantly being disrupted. But I want to remain optimistic that we're going to come out of this uh and that we're going to get back to normal in a post-pandemic world let me switch now to the other key parts of this report which are the world's largest top 50 retailers and i'm going to focus on the top 10 the top 10 global retailers for 2022 are drum roll please walmart is number one which grew a healthy uh 6.7 percent amazon which grew even healthier nearly 35 percent is number two costco wholesales number three retailer in the world the schwartz group which includes little it's. It's mainly Lidl. Their sales were up 10%. The Home Depot is number five, up nearly 20%. Kroger is number six in the world, up 8%. Walgreens is number seven. They're only

up one and a half percent. Aldi is number eight, up 8%. JD.com was up 27, nearly 28 percent. And Target was up 20 percent. Seven out of the top 10 global largest retailers are from the United States. Two are from Germany. And the first time ever in this research, one, and it's JD..com appeared into the report in the top 10. CVS was displaced from the top 10 and moved actually lower in the next 10. The top 10 global retailers represented nearly 35% of total retail sales for the global top 250 retailers, and on average, they operated in 13 countries. In 2020, which is when this research was done, in the physical year 2020, COVID-19 helped fuel growth at a faster pace than the previous year. E-commerce specialists saw strong growth. The total revenue for the top 250 global retailer was $5.1 trillion, an increase of 5.2%.

But not everybody had a higher year. 69 out of the top 250 actually had lower sales, which was actually 14 more than the previous year. was actually 14 more in the previous year 66 of the global top 250 retailer are in what's called the fast-moving consumer goods sector which includes uh retailers in the food and drug convenience and so on so think essentials apparel and accessories which we think a lot of only represents seven percent of the global top 250 retailers revenue. Then hard lines is about 21% of what would be the lows and the Home Depots and diversified 5%. And then this report also highlights who are the fastest growing retailers. And interesting to see that 11 of the fastest growing retailers were actually in the United States, followed by China and Russia, which had five each.

The top three fastest growing retailers in the five years between fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2020 were Kupang from South Korea, Reliance Retail from India, and Wayfair from the United States. So all this data tells you that retail is vibrant around the world, but it's got risks. So you heard Russia a couple of times here in this discussion, and Russia with what's happening in Ukraine is adding more risk to inflation and even to retail. But stay tuned to these podcasts and to the Loss Prevention Research Council in terms of where we go next. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony, and thank you, Rita. It's always great insight, and that is a fantastic

report. A couple different things. I'm going to move around a little bit, but first I wanted to talk about something that you mentioned when it first hit the news, which was the largest seizure in history. And I think it's global history. It's not just U.S. history, but $3.6 billion in stolen crypto coin. And there's a lot to this story, but I'll kind of sum it up with follow the money. This is a typical kind of investigation where the FBI was investigating for many, many years. And it directly relates to everybody here who's listening in the loss prevention field because while it is a cryptocurrency investigation, what the FBI did is they followed it for years and years. And eventually they washed the money with a gift card. That's actually how this case came to the seizure, that there was a Walmart gift card that was purchased, and they were able to follow the trail, which led back to a couple that several years ago was able to steal a smaller money of Bitcoin, which turned to $3.6 billion.

And so this is kind of exactly the same way that any financial crime would be investigated. Cryptocurrency, while it is anonymous, does have a digital ledger. And that digital ledger, eventually, if you follow it with the right tools, you can lead to the conversion. And this case I thought was really interesting.

And it came out early February, and then there was a lot of back-and-forth information. But it was a couple in New York City that had been investigated for several years, and the seizure led to $3.6 billion in funds, which is just a phenomenal amount. They actually were charged with laundering $4.5 billion of money, if you can think of that. And it was all that amount is substantial, but it all went back. It all fell apart because the elements of the crime led to washing of money at a Walmart gift card. So I thought it was a really interesting story. The details aren't super, super important, but I know we touched on it very, very early, but it kind of just alludes to following the investigative process and being patient. And I think what the FBI said is this was a several

year investigation and really outwardly said, you know, when we're doing an investigation, we're not going to stop. And they used really the same tactics that you would do in a standard anti-money laundering investigation. So I thought it was an interesting one to talk about with the group here. And then I just want to switch gears a little bit after to talk about another cyber incident to Ukraine. But Toyota has experienced some sort of cyber incident. They've been pretty tight-lipped about it. There's some news some sort of cyber incident. They've been pretty tight lipped about it. Um, there's some news even as of this morning, but they shut down production in 14 facilities.

Um, and what all of the, the global news are saying is a potential cyber incident. Um, that, so they haven't really, uh, confirmed exactly what occurred, although this morning Tech Monitor and a couple other tech-specific said that the signals of a cyber incident are pretty clear. It's important to think through when we talk about cyber incidents and we talk about ransomware and breaches and the impact it has. One of the largest manufacturers of vehicles in the world, shuts down 14 of their facilities. And it highlights really the manufacturers in general that are particular have vulnerabilities to cyber attacks. We often talk about in this call the legacy and outdated systems and some of the risks they play. But we'll definitely keep on this. And I think more

information will become available in the next two or three days. There are certainly some requirements, regulatory, for what has to be reported. But notice how I'm using the word cyber incident instead of breach. You know,ach requirements are different than cyber incident requirements, meaning there are certain regulatory requirements under data loss. There's a lot of gray area in the other areas where there might not be data loss and there's systems failure because of a cyber incident. And the incident could be a breach, could be malware, could be ransomware, could be any number of things. But I think it's important to note the magnitude of this.

And when we talk about supply chain challenges that everybody's facing globally, the automotive industry has been hit particularly hard by some of the supply chain challenges. And this further exasperates that. I'm quite certain that we'll hear a direct impact to the revenue of Toyota once we get more information on it. It's also important to note that manufacturers suffered some of the largest supplies of cyber attacks last year. They were in the top 10 industries. And we often talk, again, cyber attacks is a broad term.

So this doesn't just include ransomware, because I know that when we saw ransomware, retail was in the top 10. This is just an overarching. And when you look at the number of reported, 23% of manufacturers reported attacks last year, right next to the banking industry at 22%. So manufacturers are a ripe target. There's IP. There's a significant amount of money involved in ransom if you can take down a very large company. But as it stands right now, they've had their production shut down for a few days, which is obviously fairly significant. So we'll keep an eye on that.

We'll report on that. And then I wanted to turn some attention to the Ukraine and some of the things that we're seeing in the intelligence channels. One thing that's ultra important, I know we talk about it all the time, and this is why the LPRC created the FusionNet, is the importance of fact-checking information on social media. So about two days ago, there was a tremendous amount of videos that were published predominantly on Twitter, but all over social media. And some of these videos, and when I say some, I only know of three that I saw reports, were not of the Ukraine. They were videos that were drugged up from other things and millions of views because of what the impact of these videos were. And one of the challenges here is to just fact check and take a little bit of time to

look at it. If you're using social media to make any type of business or personal decisions, my advice would be to take a look at the video in the account and do your very best to, one, see if it's authentic, and then, two, see if it has any bearing or impact. Some of these videos were not fake videos. They were just videos from other conflicts or older. But it's super, super important that if you're using social media to make any geopolitical decisions that you understand the risk. The other thing, and this is a statement that we talk about often here on the podcast, is just because it's on the news doesn't mean that it's accurate. And what I would say by that is

there was also quite a few reports that I saw in the last couple of days where while there was no ill intention and no reason to believe that these agencies were trying to actually show mapping of military movement throughout the country, as well as social media networks activating a whole bunch of different tools to help friends and family members stay in touch. I think it's important to note that the fact-checking in this particular circumstances are so important. And because of the geopolitical climate, a lot of the information that is released in the media sometimes has missing elements. What I always recommend is take a look at multiple news agencies, both in the United States and responsible or respected outside. And you generally can come up with a conclusion based on what you're reading. But why am I talking about this here in the United States? Because we're relatively uninvolved at this point. Because as some of the economic sanctions occur, there is a potential for supply chain disruptions, as well as other impacts to the economic state. Certainly, if you look at the stock market, we've seen huge dips because of this.

We also know that Russia, unlike some of other countries that have been involved in recent conflict, has a very, very large play in the global economic community with oil and gas among actually they do export some other things. Just to give some kind of context behind this, Russia's reserves, which are traditionally held in non-Russian banks that have been not frozen or seized, but not being able to access due to some of these sanctions are with $650 billion. That's just their reserves out. Some of the other smaller countries that have been involved in the conflicts over the last 30 well as if there's any type of manufacturing that's being done in Central or Western Europe, the most common rail track from China for components goes right above or below the Ukraine, and that is a pretty common

way also through Russia. So there's clearly some concern that that could play a role. Well, I think to date, I haven't seen any direct supply chain challenges. I think that's something to keep an eye on. So we'll continue to watch it. I think we're all watching social media and the news as we probably should be here. I would implore you to use judgment before you make any business decisions based on that. And I think here at the LPRC, we will stay in tune that in the event that we see spillover that does pose a risk, that we will also activate the fusion net and make sure that we're trying to utilize the fusion net to help combat some of that information that is either false or misleading or just, unfortunately, is error. I think one of the things that's important to note about my comment about the misleading video is two of the videos, one of the folks has a fairly large Twitter following when he was challenged. He knew that the video was not accurate. So this was not a mistake in, you know, that he thought this was

the video. This was actually some of the challenges that occur when you're trying to get followers and likes. It's a lightning strike into a power station, and it was implying that there was actually a military event, and it was actually a real lightning strike. So the original video didn't say that. I'm looking at my notes here. The second one did. So just, again, stay tuned, and everybody stay safe with this, and make sure that if you have friends and loved ones that you're doing the best to stay in touch with them. And then last but certainly not least, I just think there was a lot of news last night on this. With Elon Musk turning the internet on for arguably – with his satellite Starlink over the Ukraine, they experienced a huge outage. And there was a lot of back and forth about whether or not this was the Russian government or this was due to the Ukraine. It's important to note that that satellite internet

service is relatively new. I would almost say it's in its infancy stages and does have a fair amount of outages regularly. I think it just got more attention because of what's occurring. And then lastly, related to Russia, we have seen a pretty significant increase in cyber activity in the nefarious piece from that region, really affecting everyone Western. There hasn't been any telltale exact attacks yet that we can pinpoint or that I can speak of, but the activity has increased by almost 1,000 percent is the number of attacks coming from that area, which we've been talking about probably for two or three months prior to that. So it's definitely the time to make sure your shields are up, your policies and procedures are in place, and that you look at your plan for a response in case something occurs. We will certainly keep on top of this and get back to everybody next week with it. But with that, I will turn it back over to Reid. Wow. Thanks so much, Tom, for all that in-depth information. Same to you, Tony. And as you said, the disruptions are tragic and continue for the globe and all of us.

So we'll keep in touch. We'll keep everybody informed as much as we can. We invite each and every one of you to let us know your questions, comments, suggestions. We've never, I don't think, said this before, but I understand we're going to ask you since the LPRC's Crime Science Podcast appears on really dozens of podcast platforms, though, whatever platform you're using, if you could like us, rate us, let us know what you think, especially if it's really good, or let us know what you think that we could add or change or delete. So this is for you all, not for us, all of us to communicate. Again, we invite you to visit lpresearch.org or reach out to us at operations at lpresearch.org. Set a visit into Gainesville. Let us know what you think online. Check out the website. Get involved and engaged. We've got seven ongoing, highly active working groups around product protection and

organized retail crime and retail fraud online and in-store, a violent crime working group. We've got the data analytics working group. We've got the supply chain protection working group, the innovation working group. So there's a place for everybody to get deeply engaged with dozens of other retailers, with dozens of other solution partners. Get your technology in the labs. We have visits going on all the time. We have virtual visit capability for people around the world at their convenience to come in and poke around and learn. But this is unique in all the world. And this was something started by 10 major U.S. retailers that continues with 70 plus retailers around the world and continuing to grow. More

retailers have just joined us and more on the way. So please get involved at lpresearch.org and the rest of us. Everybody stay safe and stay in touch. 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. 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.