Justice Does Not Exist in a Political Vacuum

A SCARS Institute Scam Victim Recovery Insight

You May Be Offended By The Following

But The Truth Must Be Said.

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Scam victims share a powerful expectation: justice. They expect law enforcement to investigate, prosecutors to prosecute, governments to pursue criminal organizations, and political leaders to protect the public. That expectation is entirely reasonable. Governments exist, in part, to maintain order, enforce the law, defend their citizens, and hold criminals accountable.

However, victims must recognize an uncomfortable political reality. Relationship scams and other forms of organized fraud did not emerge in a vacuum. These are not random offenses committed by a few isolated individuals against a small number of unfortunate people. They are components of an enormous transnational criminal enterprise operating across national borders, telecommunications systems, social media platforms, financial institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, and international money-laundering networks.

This criminal industry targets everyone. It reaches into cities, suburbs, rural communities, military families, senior communities, professional workplaces, churches, dating platforms, and private homes. It steals money, identities, dignity, trust, emotional stability, and sometimes lives. The criminals operate internationally, but their victims live locally. They are neighbors, family members, coworkers, and voters.

A criminal enterprise of this scale did not grow simply because technology made it possible. It grew because governments allowed it to grow. For decades, political leaders treated transnational fraud as a secondary issue. They issued warnings, published brochures, created reporting portals, and advised citizens to become more careful. Meanwhile, criminal organizations expanded, professionalized, recruited thousands of offenders, improved their technology, and moved billions of dollars through the international financial system.

The political response was not proportionate to the threat.

The Clinton, Bush, Obama, and especially Biden administrations failed to confront the expanding scam industry with the urgency, resources, international pressure, and sustained law-enforcement action it required. Agencies collected reports while victims watched their cases disappear into databases. Politicians spoke sympathetically while prosecutions remained rare, stolen money flowed overseas, and foreign governments faced few meaningful consequences for allowing criminal industries to operate within their borders.

Public awareness campaigns are not justice. Reporting systems are not justice. Advisories telling citizens to protect themselves are not justice. These measures have value, but they also shift responsibility toward the public while allowing governments to avoid the harder work of dismantling criminal organizations, disrupting financial networks, sanctioning uncooperative countries, compelling corporate accountability, and bringing offenders to trial.

During the past three decades, the first and second Trump administrations have been the only administrations to treat the broader fraud threat with significant law-and-order seriousness. That distinction matters. Political leadership determines which crimes receive national attention, which agencies receive resources, which foreign governments face pressure, and whether protecting victims becomes a genuine priority or another talking point.

Scam victims frequently express disbelief that governments allowed the crisis to become so large. Yet governments are not separate from elections. Citizens choose political leaders, and those leaders establish priorities. A politician may speak warmly about compassion, consumer protection, public safety, or helping vulnerable people while supporting policies that leave borders, financial systems, digital platforms, and international enforcement arrangements vulnerable to organized crime.

Words are not results. Sympathy is not enforcement. Political promises do not protect anyone unless they become policy, funding, investigations, arrests, prosecutions, asset seizures, extraditions, sanctions, and prison sentences.

Victims who demand justice must also examine the political choices that determine whether justice is pursued. It is inconsistent to condemn the growth of transnational fraud while repeatedly supporting leaders who minimize crime, tolerate institutional failure, resist accountability, or treat law enforcement as an inconvenience. Elections have consequences, including consequences that reach directly into a person’s bank account, home, emotional life, and personal safety.

Voting is not merely an expression of identity, loyalty, personality, or cultural preference. It is a decision about power. It determines who will enforce the law, confront hostile criminal networks, demand cooperation from foreign governments, regulate the systems criminals exploit, and decide whether victims deserve more than another warning pamphlet.

Every scam victim has the right to expect justice. Every voter also carries responsibility for choosing leaders who are willing to deliver it. Transnational organized crime will not be defeated by good intentions, carefully worded speeches, or political slogans. It will be defeated through strength, persistence, enforcement, consequences, and a government that places the protection of its citizens above political convenience.

Voting matters because leadership matters. Policy matters. Enforcement matters. When citizens choose their leaders, they also choose what government will tolerate, what it will confront, and whose suffering it will continue to ignore.

So, who will you vote for in this year’s elections? The politicians who allowed your savings to be stolen or those who demand real enforcement of our country’s laws?

Remember this. Voters are responsible for the leaders they choose. You may not personally like someone, but if their policies help to keep you and your family safe, that is where your vote belongs.

The foregoing is my personal opinion.

Excellentia Per Scientia.™

Prof. Emeritus Tim McGuinness, Ph.D. DFin.
SCARS Institute ™
Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.
Scientific Center for the Analysis and Research into Scams™
September 2026