On the consumer protection side, what are some examples or cases you can point to that demonstrate just how effective the FTC can be?

One of the things that made it really fun to work at the FTC and really effective is that it is a fairly small agency as these things go.

Given the size of the mission, it's definitely small.

And it was also, we'll talk about this more, I'm sure, but a bipartisan and rather flexible agency and independent.

And so what was really wonderful about working there is that you could see problems and try something completely new to address them.

One example of this was, we know that not every community reports fraud and consumer protection issues at the same rates.

underserved communities are much less likely to report the consumer issues they're facing.

What can you do to help consumers?

So how does the FTC shut down a scam?

Let me talk to you about the anatomy of a income scam investigation.

What we see is we get consumer reports directly from people who file a report at reportfraud.ftc.gov. We mine that data every day, and we use it to reach back out to people and find out what happened.

Who did you send your money to? How did you send it? We have authority to issue civil investigative demands, which are like subpoenas before we've filed a case.

So we can send those to folks who are involved in the transaction, the payment processors, the banks, the telephone folks, everybody but the scammer, him or herself, so that we can build up evidence about exactly where the money is going, who's behind it.And then we can go to court without the other side's knowledge.

That's called an ex parte filing.

We can ask for a temporary restraining order and say, "Just shut it down and freeze all the assets," because otherwise they might get hidden away, but we wanna be able to return that money to consumers.

Here is Katie Daffan again.