You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand, KFI AM sixty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. On any given day in southern California, hundreds of investigators are working more than ten thousand unsolved cases. That's thousands of friends and families who have lost loved ones, thousands of people who got away with a crime, and thousands of murderers who still walk the streets. Killers who may be your neighbor, go to your church, or could be dating a close
friend. For the next two hours will highlight cases that have gone cold, baffled investigators, or just needs that one witness to speak up. This is a solved with Steve Gregory. In this episode, we go where no journalists have gone before, the inner sanctum of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Departments Fraud in Cybercrimes Bureau. The campus is well hidden and serves as the nerve center
for monitoring cybercrime, conducting investigations, and training. We were invited by Sergeant Pete Hish, a team leader who also became the handler for the region's first electronics detection canine. And You're not going to believe what these dogs can do. It's part of our ongoing crime Fighter series. Sergeant, thank you for joining us. Welcome, great to be here. One of the things I
wanted to talk about. First of all, let's get an overview of what your role is here, and then I want to get right in to one of the coolest pieces of tech that you have, which really isn't high tech but does a high tech mission. But first give us an overview what you do here. Sure, I'm a sergeant here with the Department. I supervise our cyber Fraud Crimes Team, and basically we investigate everything cyber if it has to do with the Internet, we get the cases and we investigate it.
We have a team of seven detectives. Another sergeant, my partner, Sergeant Sergio A. Reyes, He is also a part of the team and supervises our North part of the team. We do cryptocurrency investigations, we do cyber fraud, we do extortions, We do online narcotics and gun trafficking cases, and basically anything that has to do with the media or correction with the with
the Internet, we we deal with. Well, when you when you talk about with the media, you're talking because media is also not only is it journalism, but it's also like you you call hard drives and whatnot, that's also media. Oh yeah, that's all digital media, all digital media. So that's what you're dealing with. How busy are you? Extremely busy.
It's it's incredibly big, and it is getting busier exponentially as time goes on, and as technology advances and makes it easier for criminals to do things, they do it more frequently, easier, and they are really fleecing the citizens of La County out of a lot of money. Going back then, historically, sergeant, do you remember and recall when this bureau came to be.
I do recall it was called the Commercial Crimes Bureau before that was forgery, fraud, then Commercial Crimes Bureau. Then several years ago the department saw a need to include the cyber portion of it because that was becoming more prevalent. This is fifteen years ago or so. When this occurred, it started to becoming more prevalent. You know, we're seeing crimes in cyber. So they changed the name again to the Fraud and Cyber Crimes Bureau and started a cyber
mission as well. And along the way, in addition to you having to keep an egle eye on how technology has evolved. You've got to keep up with that too. Not only are you keeping an eye on what the technology is out there, but you also have to figure out a way to combat that tech being used for bad And so what kind of challenge is that? Keeping up with the bad guys? It's a huge challenge. There's a couple aspects to that, and one is getting a detective onto the team who is
first of all, a good detective. And that's not the hard part because these detectives come up through the department as detectives in other places. When we get them, they're good detectives, but they don't have the cyber background, and that's where we start. We have to get them the cyber training. And that's not something you can just learn overnight. It takes years sometimes to learn certain aspects of cyber to be able to be an effective detective at it.
And it's not only time consuming, it's very costly. The training that's out there that we need to get our detectives to can range from maybe one thousand dollars up to ten thousand dollars for a one week class, and that becomes expensive One of the things I want to talk about what really draws me to your agency is the use of a canine in your department and your bureau.
Now. I did a new story a long time ago, but I don't think people truly understand that you have a canine program here talk about that. Yes we do. And quite honestly, I was where you were thinking dogs and cyber Wait a bit, how does that go together? How does that mix? You got the oldest dogs on the planet and you know that species next to some of the most high tech stuff in the world, exactly, And like you opened up the show with, it's not a high tech
thing. It's very low tech. It's very traditional. We've had canines doing hunting for things and using to work to do jobs forever, right, and now we're have them in the digital age, and they're quite honestly, very effective. And it surprised me at first. I was kind of apprehensive at
the whole idea, is I really can this happen? When I first heard about them a few years back, and I started doing research and seeing stories put out by other places that these dogs are actually becoming a valuable asset to those departments and coming up with with valuable evidence that's being used to convict people
criminals and put them in jail. So I decided to do some research into it and educate myself on the program and see, you know, how this whole program works, and and wrote up a plan to be able to get it here at the Sheriff's Department. Where did you first see it in motion? Well, I didn't see it. I heard it the Homeland Security Investigations.
We were doing a mission with them unrelated to K nine's, and one of the special agents came up to me and says, hey, did you know that there was a program out there that can assist your department in obtaining a trained K nine and using them? And he kind of let me in on the program and who this nonprofit organization was, and so I did some research on them and they and after a while I contacted them and said, hey, you know we might be interested in this. Can you explain to
me what how this works? They did, gave me all the information they they gave me, and I wrote up the plan and presented it to my chain of command all the way up. They very apprehensive too, like I was like, wait a minute, we never heard of this what's going on right? Right? And but after a while they warmed up to it and
just give it a shot and see what happens. And that's a good thing about our department is we're very we always try to look for the leading edge, even if we're going to take a chance on something if it can help the community, if it can be something that's going to set our department, you know, ahead, let's give it a shot and see what happens. And what year were we talking about? This was twenty twenty is when when
we started to put all this together a few years back. Yeah, I'm trying to remember, yeah, because that was right at the forefront of the pandemic, correct, Yeah, And I think I did my first story on it probably in twenty twenty one, twenty yeah, I think so early twenty one, maybe like that. Yeah, yeah. And so what we're talking about is Satoshi. Yeah, and tell us who Sitoshi is. Satoshi is our dog, my dog. He's a black English Laboratory Retriever at male and
I've had him for about two and a half years. He was donated to us by the nonprofit that I spoke about, Operation Underground Railroad, And I don't know if many people know about this organization, but they're a nonprofit who works in combating human trafficking and child exploitation and they if you've recently, there was a movie that just came out, the Sound of Freedom I believe it was, and that movie is based on the founder who was who was a
Homeland Security special agent himself who left that agency to start this organization and they've been very a very good partner of our department. Okay, we're going to talk more about that and dig deep and we want to know all about Satoshi. But first, this is Unsolved with Steve Gregory on KFI AM six forty. You're listening to KFI A M six forty on demand AM six forty live and on demand on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Steve Gregory and this is Unsolved.
Welcome back. We are at the La County Sheriff's Departments Fraud Cybercrime Bureau. We've been talking with Sergeant Pete Kish, not only about the bureau itself, but part of the tools that make them one of the leading sort of crime fighters in the cyber fraud and cybercrimes industry. Sergeant. Before the break, we were just getting into your black lab Satoshi and talking about the nonprofit
that sort of makes it possible. You did the research. When was the first time you actually saw either either Satoshi or one of these dogs in training and it convinced you that it was going to be valuable. No, I didn't. It was all on a leap of faith. I didn't see an actual dog do this job until I flew to Indie to where the trainer is for Satoshi and watched the dogs actually do the job. I went on video
on YouTube. If you go on YouTube or any other video online, you could look these dogs up and there's demonstrations on there and things like that that I looked at just to see, you know, how these dogs work. But I didn't see it live until I went to the training. So it was a completely faith by myself and by my department and the executives to to, you know, to do this and so do you how does it work?
Because I know nonprofits a lot of dogs like the accelerant dogs at La County Fire has the other knines that are on tactical with LAPD that I know. I mean, they've all got very specialized training, but the handler has to be a part of that training too, is that was that the case with you, Yes, that's very much the case. These dogs are quite different in the way they work then you would see a narcotics dog or a
gun dog or a money dog. They work differently, and the training the handler has to have to be able to work a room or an area its specific way is quite different than how another type of dog would work. It's a little bit more intimate, a little bit more detailed in the way you find things, because, quite honestly, the odor that these devices emit is very minute, it's very small, and it's very very difficult for a canine
to pick up this odor in most circumstances. So it's very important that the handler is trained in a way to be able to see the room and work the room in a particular way to give the dog the best opportunity to pick up these scents. In that sense, it's a very faint scent. And if memory serves it's the coating that's on the hard drive right correct. The manufacturers of these chips that store the data coat the chip with a particular chemical
that keeps it from overheating. So every device that can store data into it has this coding on it, and that's the chemical that these canines are trained to identify. Now, who came up with that, you know, I don't know who came up with that, however, Uh, the our trainer, Todd Jordan out in Jordan Detection Canines, I believe is his company's named out in Indiana, refined it. He took the skills he knew from an accelerant dog and incorporated them into just and just for people to know. An
accelerant dog is what fire departments use. They sniff out like gasoline and paint thinner, and they they sniff out like petroleum products. Correct, They are used to start fire. Correct if you have an arsen arson dog. Yeah, if you have an arsen in the house and the person who started the arson port kerosene in a particular corner, they sniff that out correctly, give the detective a way to start investigating that arsen. Yeah. I just wanting
to make sure people knew what that was going correct. Yeah. So so yeah, so they So he kind of transitioned an excel dog into a electronics dog because of the chemic the chemical sense. They're not similar, but it's kind of the same process In training a dog. It's a whole different thing when you get a brand new green dog and you have to train them to smell something and tell you that they smelled it and here it is. So
that's a whole process that took four to five months. So Toshi had to do that four to five months without me in Indiana to learn how to identify that smell, link it with his reward, and then tell me where that smell is exactly, pinpoint it where it's at. So when did you meet Satoshi? I mean, how does that partnership work or how do they partner
you up with a dog. So the trainer, prior to me arriving in Indiana, sent me this questionnaire about me, my personal life, what I do, my family, all these different things, and he picked a dog that he thought would match my personality and that way that increases the chances of that dog bonding with you. The bond that that dog has with the handler
is highly important. It can't that these dogs can't be switched around from handle to handler because there's a certain bond that these dogs achieve with their handlers that they will they'll jump through fire for you, really and they'll they'll do a lot for you, including trying to find that scent because of that bond, and what kind of questions were on that questionnaire, like what hobbies do I have? What's my family life like? Do I like to drink? Do
I like to party? Or do I like to you know, sit on the couch and watch TV? Am I am? I am I outdoors person? You know, all those kind of questions about me to try to kind of like a profile about me, so that way he can say, Okay, I have ten dogs here, which dog is going to go to Pete? So are they always black labs? You don't have like a Chihuahua or a pommer. You know, I don't know that a chihuahu would have the the I want to do this job. Predominantly the dogs that come out of
his organization are laborator retrievers. He did try to work with golden retrievers, but I don't know that they worked. As they worked, but they didn't work as efficiently as a black lab our dogs. Here are Sotoshi's an English laborator retriever. The difference between an American lab and an English lab they're quite significant. If you could think in your head a lab. You think of a tall, kind of thinner dog with a pointy faced, right, that's
an American lab that are trained to hunt. You know, you should have bred out of the sky. The dog goes across the lake and picks the dog up, the bird up for and brings it back. Right, that's a sporting dog. These guys are are English labs. They were bred in England to assist the fishermen back in the eighteen hundred seventeen eighteen hundreds, to pull nets out of the water for the fishermen. So they're very they're very stocky. They have a broadcast, a big head, very strong dogs and
very low profile to the ground. And their work is what they are. That's what they want to do. And when you first met Satoshi, what was that like? It was interesting. I drove up to the day the first day of training. I haven't met Sutoshi since before that, and I drove up to the trainer and the Satoshi is in the back of his tahoe in a cage and he lets him out and Satoshi jumps out, looks at me and he's like, who the heck are you right? Like, what's
going on here? So and Todd the trainer hands me the leash and says, here you go. Here's here's your dog. And his name wasn't Satoshi at first, his name was Bear. But I could tell you a little bit if you want to know why or how we came up with his name. Good, then let's hold on for a second. There. We've got to take a break. When we come back more with Sergeant Pete Hitsh. But first, this is Unsolved with Steve Gregory on KFI AM six forty.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand kf I AM six forty live and on demand on the iHeartRadio app. This is Unsolved with Steve Gregory. Welcome back. We're at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Departments Fraud and Cybercrime Bureau were at an undisclosed location in South La County talking with Sergeant Pete Hish Before the break, Sergeant, you were telling us about Satoshi, the electronic sniffing dog, the first that you had in the Sheriff's Department here. But something
I didn't realize is that his name wasn't really Satoshi to begin with. It was Bear. Why was that correct? Yeah, his name was Bear when we got there and I thought about it, and if you don't know, there was an incident several years back where it was a pretty publicized incident where Jared Fogel was arrested for for a oh, the subway guy, the subway
guy, the subway guy. It was a child pornography case. Well, this trainer, Todd Jordan, trained up Bear, the initial Bear, not not my dog, but the initial Bear that he used to test and to figure this whole electronic detection thing out, and took his out to where that crime scene was, the house, and tested it on that and tried to find other evidence on the Jared Fogel case, and he did the The dog actually located a storage device hidden behind a socket, a plug plate socket in
the wall. Really yeah, and on that media was evidence that ultimately led to the conviction of Jared Fogel. So in the electronic detection K nine world, I guess Bear is kind of an iconic dog. He was the first one high profile case. So I was like, you know what, I don't want my dog to be Bear too. The show nby one Bear in this industry, right, So I told the trainer I want to rename him I said, what do you want to rename him to us? I don't
know. What I want to do is give that task to my detectives and say, he detectives, we're getting a dog. You guys name them. Whatever you guys come up with is going to be his name. So they got together and they came up with Satoshi. And the significance with Satoshi is it's a cryptocurrency reference. The alleged pseudo name of the person who invented bitcoin was Satoshi Nakamoto. Oh right, So we wanted kind of a name to have a link to cyber in a way. So we said, they came
up with Satoshi. I'd liked it. It's different, it's a unique name. There's no other dogs out there named Satoshi. So that's it. How do you so the dog was young enough to but the dog was answering to bear and then you decided to change its name, and it and it took. Any dog will listen to whatever you call them as long as you pet them and give them food. Oh that's it. Do that a few times and long enough. Oh he's calling me Satoshi, I giving me food.
My name is Satoshi. Now I'm good. Yeah. So then you a Satoshi, I presumably did you drive all the way out there? Did you fly? No? We flew. We flew well, I flew out to Indiana by myself, met Satoshia, and we both flew back together. How much time did you spend together out there before he came back? Two weeks? Two weeks? Yeah? The first day I showed up the training, got the dog, and we did some very basic things in training for the
whole day, very you know, introductory things. And then the trainer was like, okay, take them to your hotel room, see yea, And sure enough I took him to the hotel room, got as bowl of water as food there and it was time to go to bed. It laid down on the bed and the cup pops up on the bed with me. Okay, I'm gonna sit here, lay here with you. Okay, cool, that's a good sign. Right. And then just day after day that was his program. And after that two weeks, the bond was already starting to
form. You know, I was the only one handling them, I was the only one feeding them, I was the only one giving them attention. So after a while, these dogs are very very like, they're loyal to their to their person, whoever that might be, and after a while, that's your that's your dude. So that relationship, that bomb that you created early on in the beginning. Did you have a dog already back home or is this your first dog? Or I did? I had a huge poodle.
He's probably the big large the large sized poodles right at home. And so I brought Satoshi home and just introduced them slowly at the front door and took maybe five minutes, and they're running around best friends. Sotoshi has that there's not a mean bone in his body. He wants to play with kids, he wants to play with other dogs and all that, and he really gets along with whoever. So you've got Satoshi now back here in La County. And was that the first dog of its kind in the region? It
was in La County. Was the first one in La County? Yes, the FBI had one around the same time, and I knew the FBI had one. Her name was Ginger. Unfortunately she passed away a couple of years ago, but that was another dog that was being used as well, but then she passed away. And as far as a state or local agency, this was the first dog that was working for the state and local agencies, and how long after you got back before your first call. It was almost
immediate. It was a case where deputies got in a vehicle pursuit and which switched off into a foot pursuit of some sort on the bank of a freeway, and the freeway the bank went straight up a lot of bushes and stuff, and the suspect went up there. The deputy went up after them, and the deputy lost his body worn camera up there somewhere. So I'm like, okay, this is our first time, and you want Mia Satosha to climb that hill and try to find a bodywork camera that's bit up there for
a week already somewhere. I'm like, you know what, we'll give it a shot. I don't know if it's going to work or not, but we'll give it a shot. And Sutoshi went right up the hill with me. When we went up and looked around, we didn't find it, unfortunately, But that was the first actual call out that we did to find one of our own devices that got lost. Was it ever found? It was?
I don't believe it was. I'm not sure. I'm not sure, but I'm not sure then then how soon after that on the next call, and then I mean, and then when was the first call where Satoshi had a hit? It was I remember one call. I don't know if it was the very next call, but it was in that first few months of us being working. And what year are we talking again? This was? This was late twenty twenty. Okay. The FBI called this out for a secret service, and FBI believe it. It was a It was a fraud
case where the person was using electron electronics technology to defraud people. And they served a search warrm at a house and the entire house and found what they found. But the dog went in after them to try to find as a
backup to see if they missed anything. Well, we're going through the house and Satoshi hits on a magazine rack next to the bed of the suspect where the suspects sleeps next to his bed there and if you can imagine, you hit a magazine rack where it the magazines just stand upright and there's like ten or fifteen of them in there's next to each other. Well, in there
was a very thin laptop computer in the middle of these magazines. It looked like a magazine and Satoshi went by there hit on it, boom, and so I was like okay. The investigated further and sure enough, there's a laptop sitting in there. The FBI retrieved that laptop and it turns out that that laptop was the suspect's laptop and had evidence on it that was important to the case. More with Sergeant Pete Hissh from the La County Sheriff's Department's Fraud
and Cybercrime Burea. But first, this is Unsolved with Steve Gregory on KFI AM six forty. You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand KFI AM six forty live and on demand on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Steve Gregory and this is Unsolved. Welcome back to the Los Angeles County Sheriff' Departments Fraud and
Cybercrime Bureau. We're in South Los Angeles County at an undisclosed location. We've been speaking with Sargeant Pete hisch who has been telling us about one of the best tools that the Fraud Cybercrime Bureau has, and it's Satoshi, a black lab who was trained in Indiana and who has been partnered with Sargeant hish Now for gosh at least three years, and you were telling us about it the first time that you recall where Satoshi got a hit and went through and found
a thin little laptop nestled between all of these upright magazines and you we realized that this had the evidence you were looking for. That must have made you feel pretty cool. It did it? Did it? It just reinforces why we have the dog while we're out there and what we do, and it it reinforces it with the detectives as well, or with the FBI or whoever is investigating that case. It's like, wow, this resource is really good. We would have missed that if the dog didn't find it for us.
So and it hopefully it led to a conviction. And you know, and this person doing these crimes to get some prison time. Yeah, because that's kind of kind of what you do. You just you just helped gather the evidence, but you don't you don't ever see it all the way through. You're just you're just there to in the gathering phase, right, correct. Majority of our callouts are are just in the in the gathering phase of find
evidence. We do to play our dog on our team as well when when our detectives have a case, we'll to play the dogs there as well, and those I could follow through. But I would say eighty percent of our callouts are with other agencies. State and local agencies call us out, the federal agencies call us out, Probation calls us out. Just a big list of agencies that use US search and see if I can ask us the right way. Has there ever been any kind of a challenge to having a canine
looking for evidence? And does the canine have to be certified in any way? And you know when it comes in the court As far as the court's concerned, there hasn't been a challenge in court yet. However, different than a narcotics dog, a narcotics canine has to be certified a specific special way
because they can generate probable cause to search. So if you run a dog around a car and that dog hits a drug, dog hits that if that dog certified properly, that dog gives that officer or deputy the probable cause it searchs that car right. Well, in this case, it's not illegal to own a flash drive or a or a cell phone or a laptop. It's not illegal in and of itself. So basically, what the dog is to us, if you can imagine, is basically like us use it a flashlight
inside a house trying to find something. It just basically tells us here, here's a place of interest. This is where you want to look, and we'll go and look and find the device. So, but you're only going in when you have a warrant, correct, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, all the keys of the castle apply. As far as search and SIES is concerned, we just don't go in and search, just walk into someone's
house in search, we can't do that. And you were talking about eighty percent of your call outs or other agencies, and do they reimburse your agency when they No, No, we don't charge other agencies for our services. We're a state funded task force, like I said, and what part of our charter is to assist everybody. We're not just all about our selves. We want to make sure that crimes crime and if it doesn't matter if this police department or this Fed agency catches the guy, as long as we could
do justice somehow or another, we we will help him. And and that's that's satisfying. What was the cost in Because you say a nonprofit helped you acquire Satoshi. So what was the total costs for him? I believe the nonprofit with with the dog and the initial training was about eleven thousand dollars for the dog and my training and everything. Initially, that doesn't seem like a lot for what you're getting in return. Huh No, I thought that was. I mean, we didn't pay it. They did, but still it
seemed like a very good reasonable price to get a dog that. He was a year and a half when I got him, so you know, he could work for six, seven, eight years. So that's a lot of work that we're going to get out of Satoshi before he retires. And how does that work? Then? Does Satoshi have to be who? God, how can I say this recalibrated? Does he have to keep going through more training or and then as technology changes and maybe the coding changes, will he
have to be retrained? Sure? Yeah, he trains with us here all the time. We run through different training scenarios all the time. Once a year we go back to Jordan and do a recertification. The certification isn't for legal purposes. Basically, it's for the trainer to take a look at us, because it's just if it's just me and the dog, I might not be seeing things that I'm messing up on or I could make I could do better. So it's basically an opportunity to go back to the trainer and get
tightened up on certain things and refresher or refresher. Yeah, and maybe some new new skills that the trainer has developed that he wants to teach us. This last time, we taught Satoshi how to find a cell phone underwater by eighteen inches of moving water in a stream. Really, yeah, it may I didn't believe it, but he did it. And the scent comes up through water. It doesn't cut well, it does, but I guess dogs
smell in a different way. He was tasting the water. So I would start him downstream from where the device was and work upstream, and I would give him the commands that would normally do to start searching, and he would start searching and sticking his nose in the water tasting the water. Boom boom boom, and then he'd pick it up and then work himself right up to the phone and sat down in the water right where the phone was, and there it was. Yeah, I'll be damn. Yeah, you say that
eighty percent of call outs or other agencies. So I'm it's it's probably a safe bet that you're busy, very busy. We yeah, I started to get a lot of call outs. I was. I was running all over the county from from Palmdale all the way down to out to Wallet, all the way down to Marina Del Rey. It was just everywhere, you know, even outside the county. We get called by other agencies outside the county, UH to help help them, and we would help them. About how
many cases a week are you on right now? I'd say currently a week. It's not several a week. I think it's because remember I run an investigative team as well, so so Toshi is a collateral. It's not my only job, right So I'd say maybe two or three a month is what is what I'm getting called out on usually, and those are all day events when when we get called Yeah. Yeah, but then on top of your
other duties, on top of my other duties. So let me ask it this way, how many cases a week does your bureau handle in total? We I can't even come up with a number, it's so many we get case I have cases in my buffer right now and then that I need to look at. I probably have twenty of them in there that I need to to to do something with, something with instead of see you're talking with us. Yeah, well no, I love talking to you guys. You're great
guys. I mean, I guess you know, but but you keep very, very busy, and you have a lot of unsolved ones. We do a lot of and that's one of the things with cyber crime. If the cyber criminal is good enough and does his job the right way, it's extremely difficult for us to catch them. So a lot of our cases go unsolved. Okay, when we come back, we'll talk more with Sergeant Pete Hitch. But first, this is Unsolved with Steve Gregory on KFI AM six forty.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand I AM six forty live and on demand on the iHeartRadio app. This is Unsolved with Steve Gregory. Welcome back. We are inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Departments Fraud and Cybercrime Bureau, undisclosed location, South LA County, talking with Sergeant Pete Hish and we've been learning about Satoshi one of the new secret weapons inside the Fraud and
Cybercrime Bureau. And before the break, Sergeant you we were talking about in the very beginning, you would get called out to maybe three maybe three calls a month. But we were talking during the break and you said that now, because everyone wants in on the action, you as many as twelve calls a month. That's correct. Yeah, initially it was about three to four. But as the word spread to other agencies and got out there about the
effectiveness of these dogs. Yeah, currently we're running between nine and twelve deployments a month, and so is out too much for one person and one dog? It was getting to be, Yes, it was getting to be. It was getting to the point to where I was away doing that more than I was here supervisor managing the investigative team. I mean, that's an awful lot of work for just one person, one dog, right, Yes, it began to become quite burdensome on our deployments. So I was away doing
deployments more than I was here. So at that point is when we went back to the drawing board and added another dog the team. So when would this have been This would been about a year and a half ago about is when the second dog came on board. So in twenty twenty two, twenty twenty two, yes, okay, so how did you decide you needed another dog? It would just became a necessity based on the workload that we had. We needed to be able to have two dogs to pick up the work
that we were generating. And not only that, as I became more versed in how to work these dogs and how to deploy them, it became evident that with these particular dogs in the way they work, it was there was two reasons. One is having two handlers in the room when one dog is working, because a second handler also knows how these dogs work and can pick up certain things that this dog is doing when I'm paying attention to other things.
So it gives us a better a better opportunity to pick up very very slight behaviors that the dog might do when it thinks it might have smelled something, but not sure. Like I said, it's a very faint smell. So sometimes a dog will come across it and maybe just move his head or eyes to a particular direction real quick, and then and then discount it and keep on going. Well, that's a clue to us that that dog picked something up but wasn't. It was so faint that they weren't sure and it
kept moving. Well, the second hand will pick that up and then we'll readdress that particular area. So if I understand this now, whereas you were one team with one dog, one handler, now the call has two dogs, two handlers. Correct, And another reason why we did that, Yes, we would roll two dogs to a location, especially a bigger house. If the house's twenty five hundred score feet three thousand and four thousand square feet.
These dogs, like I said, that odor is very faint, So these dogs are exchanging a lot of air and working really hard to pick up these scents trying, and what that does is makes him tired really quick. So we can actually run a dog through a couple of rooms, then go put him away back in the tahoe, let him relax, cool down, and bring the second dog out and continue the mission and then swap him back and forth. And it makes it's more efficient at doing it that way.
And how would you know that the dog was fatigued? They lose interest in doing the job. They're breathing really hard when they're not trying to detect something they maybe they don't want to jump up onto an object that we want them to jump onto to smell. Different things like that. We can tell just by knowing the dog. Yeah, you know, I know this dog. I know how he looks when he's motivated. He was ready to go, and I know what his mannerisms are when he's fatigued. You know, there
is an indirect connection to Satoshi and this show. In fact, the very first episode of Unsolved with Steve Gregory, episode one zero one was Anthony Velasquez and his father and well the father and son that were charged with the murder of three people. And I remember being on scene in East La very early morning, and there you were with Satoshi. Do you remember that call?
I do, Yes, I do. That was when our Homiciberia called us out to system on the service of some search warrants that they had related to a murder their investigating, and we rolled out there and they had us look through a house I believe, and a couple of cars out there. Yeah, do you remember If I don't want to jeopardize the investigation, because I believe it's still being adjudicated, I don't think. I don't even think it's going to trial yet. Memory serves, But do you remember if that was
a successful day for you guys. I do remember the dog did alert on some things. We found some things. Whether or not they were collected as evidence, or if they were, they had any evidentary value on it, I don't know. That's one of the things about our job is we'll go out there and find this stuff for the investigators, but a lot of times we don't hear back as to what the result of that fine was. Sometimes
we will. We've gotten an email up. We just got one recently from a Long Beach PD that UH that told us that we assisted them two years ago on a case where it was a child a child pornography case and the suspect so socially found some stuff in the suspect ended up getting twenty four years in prison behind that. So she was she fed us back information as to what happened, you know what the outcome was. But a lot of time,
most of the time, we don't hear back. So you know, in one of the common themes that you've described, even going right up to I guess dog zero or canine zero bear UH has to do with child pornography. That seems to be one of your bigger call outs. It is. Yes, a lot of our call outs. I would say the majority of our callouts have to do with child exploitation, child abuse like child sexual exploitation and things like that. The organization, oh you are who donated the dodgs
to us, they're they're they're anti human trafficking organization. So they uh, their main, their main charter and purpose for these dogs is for that. And if you think about it, somebody who is dealing in child pornography they
call it c SAM now is a new technical name for it. Is they'll hide them on little micro SD cards and things like that and tape them up under a table or put them somewhere where a human being going into a house, a three thousand square foot house looking for one micro SD card, it's not gonna happen. You're just not gonna find it. If it's if it's really secreted a place to where that suspect doesn't want you to find it. But the dogs come in and they find it. So so it's uh,
it's child pornography. A child exploitation is a big, a big part of our our mission. When we come back, I want to talk about some more cases that Satoshi and uh in your new dog. What's your new dog's name? Our new dog is Zeifer. Zipher. Yes, and Sergeant Sergio Reyes is the handler for Zeipher. Male or female. She's a female. She's about a year younger than Sutosha. Got a boy and a girl. Now got a boy and a girl and they're best of friends. Okay,
very good. So when we come back, I want to talk about some cases that your canine team has helped solved. But first, this is Unsolved with Steve Gregory on KFI AM six forty. You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand, kf I AM six forty live and on demand on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Steve Gregory, and this is Unsolved. We're at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Departments Fraud and Cybercrimes Bureau. We're inside of a building
in an undisclosed location in South La County. It's all part of the Southern California's state funded high Tech Task Force. Joining us now Sergeant Sergiolrayes. He's the handler for Zipher, the latest addition to the canine program here at the Fraud and Cybercrime Bureau. And as you heard Sergeant his say before the break, Zipher is a female dog and now they have a boy and a girl on the canine unit. Sergeant, thank you for being here, appreciate it,
Thanks for having Sergeant. Let's talk a little bit about Zipher's addition to the canine unit. Did Ziper find you or did you find Zipher? Well, there's a funny story behind that. Cipher actually try to bite my face off the first time she met me. Really, she did, much like my partner Pete. I met my dog for the first time when I went to Indiana to pick her up and my flight was delayed, so the handler taught how already dropped off the other dogs for the other handlers, so I
had to drive over to his house to pick her up. I got there a little late, so when I got there, he said, Okay, I'm gonna introduce you to Cipher, and he brought it from his garage and she was on a leash and as soon as she saw me, she started to bark, and you know, Todd told me, hey, just start talking to me. Make sure that you don't look menacing make sure that everything you know that she realizes that everything's going to be good. And this dog
would just not break. She just keept barking and barking and barking and growling. And I'm looking at her like, oh man, this is going to be interesting. Todd looked at Cipher and and I was like, look, I've never seen this before. I have another dog if you want, And I said, nah, this is going to be my dog. I like her already, So put her in the kennel, give me a bag of food, and off we went. So, yeah, Cipher, try to
bite my face off the first time that I met her. And now I assume you're much better now, Yes, that dog, like my partner said, and the previous segment will go through. Find my dog. Actually I told her to climb up a tree. We were a dog park. I messing around, said get up the tree. She got up the tree and I literally had to bring her down. Wow, sergeant, how long have you been at cybercrimes? About two and a half years. Two and a half years. And where'd you come from? I came from the majority of
my career has been gangs, and so what attracted you to cybercrimes. Well, I promoted, and since I've been a detective, I I wanted to run a detective team, and cyber it is something that I knew. It was an up and coming crime, and a lot of the gangsters nowadays they're actually dabbing pretty deep into cyber because it's a lot easier to get a lot of money and just one hit. So did you know when you were promoting and coming into this unit that you were going to be a canine handler or
was that something you didn't find out till you got here. I had no idea, and once I got here, that's what happened. Now it sounds like you're having a good time with it. Oh, I'm having a blast. Yeah. Tell us about your first big case with cipher. Well, my first big case is the one that actually my partner spoke of earlier. I want to talk about one where it was a little more specific, just
my dog. Oh okay, sure. My partner was busy with the teams, with the detective team, and I deployed on a federal probation case. Federal probation people there on federal probation for se SAM possession of c SAM. They are allowed to have electronics as long as they disclosed them. And talk again, remind everyone what se SAM stands for. It stands for child sexual abuse material. Okay, that's fine, and which is short for child porn
or yeah, okay, right, got it. So they are allowed to either have one device that is monitored or this want this particular case, he was a podcaster, so he was allowed to have multiple devices as long as he disclosed them. We went into the room. His room. He lived in an apartment in the Hollywood area, and it was a small six hundred maybe five hundred square foot apartment, pretty small studio apartment, but it was
riddled with electronics. Not only was he a podcaster and he had the electronics to do the podcast, he also had he was a collector, so he had all the Nintendo's, all the PlayStations he had. It was just electronics calore in there. I looked at the room, looked at the case agent and said, I'll help you search, but my dog's gonna do that's not
gonna that's not gonna do us any good here. And the reason why is because when she gets in here, she's gonna be inundated with so much scent that she's just gonna probably sit in the middle of the room and tell me here it is. Find it, because there was just smell everywhere. So I looked at the room, and my dog has to and on the world, on the canine world, the dog has to be rewarded every time they get deployed. If not, it kind of becomes mundane to them. So
I sanitized the bathroom. I went in, I stashed the device, and I went in there and I led her there to go find it. So she went and she found the device, she got her reward. It was all good. So I went as soon as I opened the door to the to the bathroom, she ran towards the closet and took a hard dive into the corner. And I kind of got a little shocked because I said, hey, anybody checked here. One of the agents said, yeah, we checked there, and this is there was a box full of something boxes like.
I couldn't really tell what was in there, so I figured with the room being full of electronics, it was probably other electronics. So I took my dog out and I went to the car, put in a towel so she can relax, and then I thinking that coming back down the hallway. I said, that was that was a pretty hard dive for for that box. So I went and I looked, and when I found in those boxes where there was a tuner like for guitar, my dog wouldn't have that kind
of reaction for a guitar tuner. So I started to, you know, pad down the shirts and I found hold on, We're gonna take a break. When we come back, Sergeant Rays is gonna tell us exactly what he found because of his dog, Zeipher. But first, this is Unsolved with Steve Gregory on KFI AM six forty. You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand k I AM six forty live and on demand on the iHeartRadio app. This is Unsolved with Steve Gregory. We've been talking with Sergeant Sergio Reyes
at the La County Sheriff' Department's Fraud Cybercrime Bureau. And before the break we kind of left the cliffhanger you to set the scene again. You and your dog Zeipher was just the latest addition to the canine program here at Cybercrimes. You were in a small apartment in Hollywood. A podcaster who was sort of
on it was parole, probation, probation, excuse me on probation. And you say that Zeipher literally dived at a closet in the corner and you found a guitar tuner, and you thought that was a very, very unusual thing for your dog to pick up on. But I guess there was something else going on, right, Yes, So, because I know my dog's behavior and I trained with her constantly, I knew that that particular dive was a little strange for her to just have done for a guitar tuner. So I
wanted to explore a little bit further. I pulled out the guitar tuner. I started looking at it, and I was pretty convinced. I wasn't why she went back there to try to find that stuff. So I started to pat down the clothes and when I patted it down the clothes, there was this jacket. And I patted down the jacket and I felt what it appeared to be a phone. So I called the case agent and I said, hey, did you guys check over here? Come take a look at this
jacket. So the case agent came up and opened up the jacket and retrieved a phone. The phone was one of those phones. It was Samsung style phone, but they had put tape on the front camera and on the back camera in itself a little weird. The guy had multiple phones of his own, but this one was security in the jacket hidden. It turns out down the line about two three weeks later they were they were able to crack that phone and found several videos containing se sam and several, if not thousands of
images. So now this guy is looking at approximately thirty five additional years for possession of that on that particular phone. And wasn't that a red flag when he said he had multiple phones of his own, Well, that's kind of a red flag, isn't it. It is? But he was disclosing those So those phones were monitored and he disclosed those phones. That phone was not disclosed and was since his possession. And was there ever an idea of why
he had the cameras covered. I didn't interview him, but I can assume, would you assume, Well, he was paranoid, He's he thought they were watching him. Okay, interesting, So that was a that was the success story for you. But it's kind of funny though, because Zipher kind of went one way and then you just took it and kind of went in, you know, to its completion. Correct. Yeah, So which is better, the female dog or the male dog? Well, they both actually,
they both have their strengths and weaknesses. My dog will destroy a room because she has a semi aggressive alert and she will have You could put a device in the middle of her room on a table with multiple stuff around it, and she will clear the table out, take that stuff and throw it at you. Soshi won't, So Soshi will will come around and very take it, very very just very gingerly, like here, it's right there. Cipher's also better out in the open, and so Soshi's better out in like
small confined spaces. So Toshi doesn't like to climb high stuff. Cipher doesn't care. She'll go where I tell her to go. So they have the strengths and witnesses. And that's why we my partner and I are such a great team. And we sometimes we'll sweep our room twice just to make sure that we didn't miss anything, because we want to make sure that we take everything out of there. Are you ever told what the what the dog was up to or a previous owner before you get it? Yes? As a
matter of fact, both of our dogs are second career dogs. My dog was a She was trained to be an assistants dog, but she failed out of the program because she's extremely protective of the handler. I can sit here talking to here. She was laying here and someone came up behind, she will probably try to bite them, which is what she was doing when I was introduced. When yes, and so I know exactly what it is,
you know, to be on that end of cipher. So Tooshi was trained to be a CE and I dog, but he has this affina for cats. So you can imagine what happens if he is leading someone on the road and there goes a cat. It could be very bad, a little crazy. Yeah. So about how many cases do you think you've handled since you've been on board with the dog? Well, since I just tagally since May.
I mean, I can't give you an exact number since May, because I just happened to look at this, and I know there's been thirty eight cases that I've handled since May. Thirty eight cases? And how many of those are La County Sheriff's cases as opposed to outside agencies? There is only two sheriff department? Wow? Really yes, I would think you guys would be a lot busier with the county. We would, we would like to
be, but unfortunately we are not. I think a lot of it has to do with just the fact that this is all new and we we are we have a hard time adapting to new things that work. We've I would like for the department to uses more, However, we can't force them to, so we make our services available to whoever wants is you know, I guess you're only subject to being called out by either homicide or major crimes or somebody right, correct? Yeah, yeah, correct? And then are you
subject to being called out at all hours of night? Yes. We make ourselves available to whenever they need us to. Generally they give us the courtesy to you know, hey, we're planning this, we're planning that. Are you available for here? Available for that the particular days we're going to do a search one or to do a probation. However, if it happens to be an emergency, which has happened a couple of times, we will roll out on the drop of a hat. Sergeant. When you know, when
the dog is sniffing for electronics. And it's all based on that faint scent that is emitted from the hard drive of the device or the hard drive. Does that scent ever dissipate over time or is it always stay the same? You know there is residual there will be if it will gradually dissipate. Yes, And that's where having two handlers will help, because when my partner talked about earlier Sergeant p Hish, where the dog would look one way or maybe
turn its head. We call it a fish hook. It catches the attention of the dog, but the dog is going to go for where they're the stronger odor is. So if there's an order is further down that particular, that secondary alert is what we call it. It's what I would particularly if if Saitoshi is searching and I'm there with my partner, I will focus on that to try to see what's on there that got his attention. So yes,
in short, the scent will dissipate. But then if it's if the memory is activated again, does that re energize the scent, Well, it's not. The sense just the scent doesn't have to be heated, it doesn't have to be working, it doesn't have to be connected. It's just the chips are coated with that particular chemical gosh. So, just like anything, if it sits in an area for too long, it's going to impregnate that scent on that area. Eventually it will dissipate, but the dogs are still
able to pick it up. Got it. So if you set your phone on your bed, my dog will go hit there because that's where the phone was. Got it. Sergeant, I really appreciate your insight. Thank you so much. Welcome. When we come back, we're gonna wrap up with Sergeant Pete Hish. But first, this is Unsolved with Steve Gregory on KFI AM six forty. You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand I AM six forty live and on demand on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Steve Gregory,
and this is Unsolved. We're at the Los Angeles County shriffs Departments Fraud and Cybercrime Bureau. We are at an undisclosed location in South Los Angeles County. This is the heartbeat of the cyber Crimes and Fraud Suppression and Investigative Arm for the LA County Shriff's Department, but it's also part of a state funded Southern California High Tech Task Force, which means they basically work for anybody who asks for help. Is that right, yes, sir, Yeah, they call
us, we will help them. We're talking with Sergeant Pete Hish Now. We started the show with him. He's been a longtime friend to KFI News, He's been on the show before. And what we wanted to do was sort of highlight the tools in the toolbox now for cyber crimes and also child exploitation, sextortion and all these other just really nasty crimes that are going on out there. But I just love that you're using the lowest of low tech
a dog. And I mean that in the best possible way. But now they are trained to do something remarkable, and that is to sniff out the faintest of odors coming off of electronic devices, and they're able now to detect them in as we heard the sergeant before, you talk about a room full of electronics, and yet with just the right focus and calibration, that dog can go right to where you need it to go. I just think it's absolutely fascinating. This has got to be pretty rewarding for you. It's highly
rewarding. It's actually when we get our dogs into a room and they find something that's a that's a very uh like high level reward for us. That's that's that makes my day. They find something, my day is complete. You know, we've been talking about some of the cases. That's some of the more interesting cases that you've solved over time. But there are some unsolved cases in your bureau. Do any kind of just jump to the front of
mind for you. There are a lot of unsolved cases, and it's getting to the point nowadays where it's almost a crisis with the financial fleecing of citizens in La County and I shouldn't even say a La County. In the entire nation. Cyber is being used to steal a lot of money from people, and it's uh. In my opinion, it's getting to the point to where it's almost a national security risk with the way it's depleting people's life savings and
investment and things like that, and it's becoming an issue. There are a few different ones that come to mind. One of them is pig butchering. I don't know if you know that term or what kind of crime that is or how it happens, but it's an investment scam where somebody is using a dating app, let's say some kind of dating app, and they're on a dating app talking to people doing their thing, and they get contacted by somebody
on this dating app. And initially it might be a normal conversation like, you know, learning about each other, whatever, But then the suspect will switch from that kind of conversation into investments, and usually it's cryptocurrency investments. Hey, have you heard of cryptocurrency? Another person might say, oh, a little bit or not much or whatever. Hey, let me show you this information on how you can double triple ten times your investment over a short
period of time. So that other person gets interested. It's like, wow, I can do that. Yeah, all you got to do is download this app or go to this web page and make an account. And you know, I know we're only online, so you know you haven't met me. So just to be safe, just invest one hundred dollars and see see what happens, and then if if you like it, then keep on going.
So they'll invest one hundred dollars and they'll see increases in their investment and over time they'll be like, oh wow, I have four hundred dollars in it now. Can I get it out? So they'll they'll say, I want to get my four hundred dollars out there out of there. Sure enough, here's your four hundred bucks back, and they get the four hundred dollars
back. Well, the reason it's called pig butchering is because the name pig is really the suspect saying, Okay, they're being greedy, they're they're they're they're getting sucked into something that's too good to be true, and they keep on doing it. So that person, the suspect reapproaches them and says, hey, why don't you invest more money? Put a thousand dollars through ten thousand dollars, And then they're looking at their dashboard and on their website.
It's a fake website, and it's going up and up and up, ten thousand dollars and now twenty thirty put more and put more in, four or five hundred thousand dollars. Now you have a million dollars in there. You investor four hundred thousand dollars. And when it gets to those levels of money, when the victim tries to take that money out, it doesn't come out. It's gone. And that's a big one that's a big series of cases
we have. We have hundreds of those of those cases just here in La County where a big victim demographic in that in that arena are Asian Americans living in LA County that get sucked into that. Why why that's why that demographic Well, I don't know exactly why it's Asian, but I do know that the end result is the people who are perpetrating this crime from the highest level
are in China. So maybe they understand the culture that maybe they understand how interact approach correct, and they suck these people in and they're losing life saving millions of dollars. We've had cases where people have lost a million dollars one point five million dollars in big money. We're just not talking about dollars and cents here. We're talking about big money. And that's a big problem. Right now, I'm just going to ask you what countries are the most offenders.
This isn't something where someone down the street from where I live is doing these cybercrimes, right correct. And the interesting part about it is, aside from ce SAM and child pornography, is take the child sex sexual exploitation element out for a minute and just talk about financial exploitation. The people doing this are not Americans. There are people in other countries victimizing Americans. Very rarely
will we have an American victimizing an American. It's usually starting from other countries India, Russia, China, those types of countries where we have poor to non existent diplomatic relations with those countries. And they know that even if we track them down in China or Russia or some former Soviet block country, we're not gonna be able to do anything because they're they're out there and the continue to do it. In the last few seconds we have left, Sergeant,
what are things people can do to protect themselves? Yeah, First, if it's too good to be true, it's not true. Just accept it. If you want to invest money, go to a regular investment company like Charles Schwab or or one of those kind of companies. Investor money there. You don't do these online things. They're one hundred person. To be clear, you're not endorsing Charles Schwab necessarily, that's an example. That's things. No, I'm not. I'm just using that right, that's what I have.
So I'm just like, okay, whatever, But Yeah, just use use a reputable investment firm when you're when you're doing this stuff. Don't do this online stuff because it's not true. Have strong passwords, don't click on anything in your emails or your text messages that are going to lead you to another website. Be very diligent in what you're doing online because these actors, the cyber actors, have become very good in manipulating things and making things appear legitimate
when they're not. It's a big problem right now, and it's a big It all comes down to the education of the citizens to be able to protect themselves from this. Sergeant Petehish, always a pleasure, great information, and thanks for all the great background on Satoshi. And good to meet Sergeant Rays as well. So keep up the great work and thank you for your time. You got to Steve, thank you for having us. And that's going to do it Unsolved with Steve Gregory. The radio show is a production of
the KFI News Department for iHeartMedia, Los Angeles. The program is produced by Steve Gregory and Jacob Gonzalez. Our field engineer is Tony Sorrentino and our technical director is Raoul Cortes. If you have a tip on this or any other case we've highlighted a comment or a case, Just press pound two fifty on your cell phone and say the keyword unsolved. Or if you're listening live on the iHeartRadio app, press the red microphone icon and leave us a message. KFI A M six forty on demand