Under the Biden administration, Mr. Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco have made several overlapping efforts in this area. Among other things, they have tried to redouble the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute pandemic-related fraud, but the time that has elapsed has made identifying the wrongdoers and building those cases even harder. They also created a national cryptocurrency enforcement team and made changes to department policy designed to increase incentives for companies to disclose criminal misconduct on the part of their employees and to cooperate with federal investigators. Much of this is laudable, but there is clearly more work to be done.
There are many possible proposals here. Over the years, prosecutors have tried creating initiatives designed to target specific financial crimes, such as “spoofing” in financial markets — rapidly placing and canceling fake orders to move the market price for things like gold futures. I participated in the effort to curb spoofing at banks while working as a prosecutor, but for the most part, it only sucked limited department resources and ended up benefiting the billionaire and millionaire owners of the algorithmic trading firms that had been losing large sums to traders engaged in the practice. Task forces are of no use, either. We have had more than enough of those.
Instead, we should be learning from the example set in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s trial. The Justice Department’s strategy for success appears to have been simple: resources, including bodies, and focus. If you followed the government’s court filings closely, as many as five prosecutors seemed to be working on the case at a time — which, based on my experience, is an unusually large number, even for a complex white-collar case.
Of course, that effort is not remotely replicable on a larger scale. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s case was highly unusual, in large part because he became remarkably prominent in political circles and among certain members of the media. But we should be able to make progress against more of the people pulling similar scams far outside public view, often in foreign countries that are not particularly friendly to U.S. extradition requests. We can hire more qualified investigators and prosecutors in Washington to pursue these cases. Policy and organizational changes within the Justice Department may help a bit, but just as important (if not far more so), we also need to ensure that U.S. attorney’s offices and F.B.I. field offices throughout the country — particularly those in key geographic areas such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles — have the people and the technology to pursue this problem. Ideally, Congress would do its part by significantly increasing funding for hiring more prosecutors, investigators and support staffs, and by committing to this effort as a yearslong national priority.
There is a lot to be gained here. As I saw firsthand during my work, financial fraud can impose tangible and potentially dire economic suffering on people — particularly the elderly and the less affluent — and we have a moral obligation to our fellow Americans to try to prevent as much of that as we can. An even more serious push on the part of the Biden administration here might also pay political dividends, particularly given the president’s persistent challenges in persuading some segments of the public that he is doing everything that he can to alleviate Americans’ perceived financial hardships.