VIP Café Show – Youngstown, Ohio – Local Guests with Amazing Impact to Our Community
Friendships begin based on numerous circumstances. Many are created because of similar interests and hobbies. For example, being part of the same sports team or maybe being a member of the same academic club. Other friendships are formed based on proximity or what neighborhood you grew up in. Whatever the reason, having a good solid friendship is a wonderful thing.We believe Podcasts are very similar to friendships. They are many times created by a few people who have common interests and share a similar vision. They are generally formed to help “inform” others about a variety of topics and subject matter. The question many Podcasters ask themselves is….why me/us? With so many options to choose from as a listener, what makes one Podcast better than another? We believe it all begins with….a good host or pair of hosts! That is exactly how The VIP Café Show came to fruition. Two friends, Greg Smith and Brian Blasko had a conversation while enjoying a cigar on a cool crisp January evening and the rest as they say…is history.The VIP Café Show was created to inform, educate and entertain listeners from the great city of Youngstown, OH. Although The VIP Café Show listeners reach far beyond the Youngstown area, the primary focus of the show is to highlight local “Youngstowners” and to hear their story. The Podcast also dives into a variety of fascinating topics besides Youngstown. Greg and Brian love discussing leadership, public speaking, customer care, team building, and life in general. They are always fascinated by what makes people tick and how people became (or are becoming) the person they are today! The VIP Café Show is a fun and informative program that engages the audience with every interview, conversation, and dialog that transpires.
VIP Café Show – Youngstown, Ohio – Local Guests with Amazing Impact to Our Community
E40: The VIP Café Show - Keith Faber Guardian of the Purse: Unveiling Fiscal Integrity and Economic Innovation in Ohio
Embark on a journey through the uncharted territories of government oversight with Ohio State Auditor Keith Faber and YSU trustee Rick Frida, where vigilance meets courage in the fight against fiscal malfeasance. We'll unravel the complex tapestry of the auditor's office, a bastion of taxpayer protection, where Keith's efforts have led to an impressive 117 convictions for fraud. From the dark web of cybercrime to the poignant repercussions felt by one of our team members' families, we expose the critical need for awareness and action to secure Ohio's financial landscape.
As we pivot towards the intricate issue of immigration and border control, we recount our eye-opening visit to the border, revealing the stark realities of illegal crossings and the tragic exploitation of families by cartels. This segment transcends mere statistics, bringing forth the raw human element that often goes unnoticed. Celebrating Ohio's economic renaissance, we spotlight the state's influx of corporate investments and the revitalization of vocational training, fostering a promising future for Ohio's youth. Tune in for a deep dive into the interconnectedness of governance, economy, and individual prosperity, shaping Ohio into a beacon of opportunity and innovation.
1 866 FRAUD OH
OhioAuditor.gov
keithfaber.org
Welcome to the VIP Cafe Show. I'm here with Keith Faber, our auditor of the state, and I'm here with Rick Frida, trustee from YSU, and I'd like to just open this up. I'd like to really let people know what the auditor does, what Keith does, and Rick and I are going to be the interviewers.
Speaker 2:I've never had such an august group of interviewers. There you go. It's easy to say what I don't do, so I always start off by telling people look, as state auditor, I don't audit individuals, I don't audit businesses and I don't collect taxes. What I do as state auditors get to be your watchdog over people who spend government money. And I've had to add one because of all the big property tax increases everybody's seeing. I have nothing to do with property taxes. Your county auditor does those assessments under direction of the Ohio Department of Taxation and we have no input in that at all. So if your property taxes went up, it wasn't us. What we do in government is trying to make sure that those property taxes, your income taxes and all your other tax dollars are spent reasonably and fairly and that nobody's lying, stealing and cheating with government money. That's a good thing.
Speaker 1:That's a great thing, and I heard you caught a few people.
Speaker 2:We have Since I've been auditor. Now we're up to 117 individuals that we've actually convicted At any given time. We're doing about 140 investigations, and those are people that are lying, stealing and cheating with tax dollars, and it ranges from corrupt county sheriff to county auditor and Clark County who stole $1.8 million, a metropolitan housing director stole $2.5 million and about 114 others, and so what we do is I've got men and women with badges and guns, forensic auditors and three full-time prosecutors. If you're lying, stealing and cheating with government money, we're coming after you.
Speaker 1:I said don't do that. Don't do that, that's bad.
Speaker 3:We talked a little bit about cyber fraud. Touch on that for us.
Speaker 2:Look, it is not a question of if. It's a question of when most individuals or governmental entities are going to get hit with a cyber fraud attack. It can be something as complicated as hacking the system and holding your entire system for ransom. We generally, as a governmental entity, don't encourage people to pay ransom we don't like paying terrorists but it can be something as more run-of-the-mill is what we call vendor redirects or payroll redirects. This is happening everywhere where somebody pretends to be somebody who's entitled to a payment from you or from somebody else and gives you new information as to who to pay or where to pay. That is costing Ohio communities more money each and every day than employee theft and dishonesty.
Speaker 1:Please tell us. You gave us an example of the young man who got deposited. I think that's a great example for people to understand.
Speaker 2:It's happening to Bob and Betty Buck guy all across the state. Unfortunately it's happening to our kids. I have a person on my staff whose son noticed in his bank account an extra $1,500 deposit. Quickly thereafter somebody started emailing him and communicating with him saying hey, we mistakenly made a payroll deposit for $1,500 into your account. Instead of messing with it, why don't you just Venmo us the money and we'll just call it?
Speaker 2:Even the kid knew it wasn't his money. He knew he couldn't keep it, so he thought these people are entitled to their money back. He Venmoed the money back. Guess what? What they were doing was laundering money for that they had stolen from somebody else through his bank account. He sent the money back to the fraudsters through Venmo. Let me give you a little secret the bank, when they figure out that your money went to his bank account, they're coming back to get your money back out of his bank account. The bank debited the $1,500 that he'd Venmoed and he was on the hook for $1,500 as a victim of fraud. Now that's why, if one, if it looks too good to be true, it probably isn't. Isn't true? On the other side of the equation is, if you get money in your bank account and you don't know where it came from. Don't send it to somebody else who claims it's theirs.
Speaker 1:Let's switch gears here a little bit. Tell us about Ohio and what you've. You're a part of a great Ohio right now. You're. You and your colleagues have done a phenomenal job in leading this state. Tell us what your projections are, what the future looks like.
Speaker 2:Thanks. Look, I am very proud of the work we've done in Ohio to make Ohio stronger. As auditor, I get to figure out how to make government work better, faster, cheaper. We've made a lot of improvements there, but I always get concerned long term, looking at what's happening in the bigger picture. I just took a group of sheriffs and prosecutors down to the border into the last year and what I see happening out there right now is we are literally being invaded. And look, we all want legal immigration. We need legal immigration to keep America strong, but illegal immigration has the risk of destroying the foundation of this country, and the way they're destroying it is essentially creating a new subclass of indentured servants or sex trafficking, slaves and all of the other things.
Speaker 2:When we were down there, the last group that we arrested was a family. It was a young lady who to me, looked like she was about 12. She claimed to be 19. They had a newborn baby who was less than a year old, and it was the father of the child or her husband, and they had paid the cartel somewhere between $6,000 and $15,000 ahead to get across that border. They didn't want to get caught. They were, in theory, just trying to start a new life. So that's $45,000. That's $45,000.
Speaker 2:And the question is they didn't have $45,000. They clearly didn't, or they wouldn't be coming, and so what they're going to have to do is pay back the cartel over time, and it's not one for one. They're not going to go get a job working here at Comco for $15 an hour and pay the cartel back over 20 years. The cartel is going to put them in a house someplace. It's going to control them. It's going to likely put her into sex trafficking. It's going to put him into doing jobs to the cartel, which may or may not be drug running. It's going to put them into other jobs. Maybe they have a capper who goes and puts them in a job making $10 an hour doing some other service, but they're not paying him the $10 an hour. They're going to charge him a $5 an hour service fee because they got him the job and he's illegal and he can't work. Then they're going to put him into an apartment with five or six other families and charge him $1,000 or $2,000 a month.
Speaker 2:We know that this is happening all across Ohio. Real story the city of Columbus had an apartment complex that they had condemned, boarded up the doors boarded up the windows. Just recently, the city of Columbus discovered that a bunch of Haitian illegals, undocumented, had taken over that apartment complex because their human traffickers had taken the boards off the windows and the doors and pushed them in there. Essentially was charging these people between $3,000 and $5,000 a month to live in five or six families in this apartment, without water, without heat they were using the gas stoves for heat. The city of Columbus ironically came back in and charged the apartment complex for housing these people and they weren't paying the apartment complex, they were paying the traffickers. But we know that's happening and it's happening all over Ohio. You're seeing it in every community.
Speaker 2:You can't allow between six and 15 million people into our country in the last four years and not have it reflect all over the country. Put this in perspective. I heard this today. That's more population than 30 states that have been added literally in a very compressed time period. People who do not have support networks, people who do not have social service networks, people who are being a drain on our system. God bless. People who want to come in legally. I'm all for it.
Speaker 1:And also getting priority over our own citizens.
Speaker 2:We're certainly paying for it. Well, that's a fact, certainly paying for it, and it's a problem. And the fact that the current people in the federal government, particularly the Biden administration, are denying it is just putting their head in the sand Again. We were down there. We arrested in just over a couple of nights, with just a few deputies, more than 25 groups of illegals. And again they'll tell you down there that the illegals aren't the problem, it's the cartel people, the people running the drugs and the loaders who are picking them up and running them to safe houses to be part of the modern day slavery crew.
Speaker 2:One of the officers asked one of the drivers that we arrested how's it feel to be the modern day slave ship driver? And the guy looked at him like he was funny. But that's exactly what he was doing. Absolutely, and that's the problem that we have. If people want to bury their head in the sand, we've got to stop it and, as Ohioans, we need to be aware of it and we need to empower and support our law enforcement community, who are doing good jobs for us every day out in the community.
Speaker 3:So for three years, illegal immigrants come across the border. There's no problem as far as the Biden administration says. Now, all of a sudden, it's a problem because they feel that people have short memories.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. Here's the biggest thing I noticed when we went in Cochise County in Arizona. The wall was there. The Trump wall was there, but the Obama wall was there too. Not a lot of people know that Obama was the one who started building the wall and it's the same footprint. It's the same design as the Trump wall, with one big difference. The Obama wall was 18 feet tall. Trump's had to be bigger. Trump's wall was 30 feet tall. Okay, you would expect Trump to have a bigger and better wall he did.
Speaker 2:But one of the things the wall had an important feature the wall had sensors on the wall and it had spotlights directed at the wall with cameras. When Biden took over for Trump, literally they ripped out and disconnected the sensors and the spotlights. There are in front of the border wall. That's already there that we visited. There's an underground system of conduits. We would call them old drain tunnels, or we think they're certain they're not. They're conduits in the desert to run all the electronics. They're empty because they pulled out the electric, they pulled out the sensor wires.
Speaker 2:So what's happening is you have a wall, but the cartel come in the middle of the night with a pickup truck and they grind off the wall's half inch steel posts that are about six to eight inches square, filled with concrete, and so what they do is grind through the metal, chip out the concrete and move the post back once they break it so that you can climb in between the walls, or they put ladders over the top of the walls that come across the wall.
Speaker 2:They know what's happening. The reality is, without the sensors, without the lights, you don't see it happening, so the border patrol can't react. The other problem is they pulled all of the border patrol people out of the area because they're processing the give-ups that are at Eagle Pass and the other places. There are three border patrol stations that are supposed to stop every car going north on those roads from the border to Tucson and to Phoenix. The entire time we were there five days those were never open and so and you think the cartel people don't know this they know exactly how to get across that border at will.
Speaker 3:I am first generation American here. My parents came from Poland. My dad, when he got here, became a citizen because he served in the US Army. I'd be a hypocrite if I said that I didn't want any immigrants. Just come here legally. Yeah, come here legally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if our laws are the problem, let's change the law to encourage people to come here legally, Absolutely and frankly. Discourage people to break the law. The real problem forget about the people who just want to come here and work for a better life. We know, when you have millions of people crossing that border and literally no controls, that there are bad actors that have crossed that border. Trump talks about a lot of the different bad actors, but we know that there are people who are on the terror watch list. We know that there are sleeper cells that have come across that border. There are.
Speaker 2:In just one week I heard about instances of hundreds of military aged Chinese coming across the border. We know that there are all kinds of people who, frankly, we ought to have a second look at before we welcome them into our country, because they may or may not have good intentions. God forbid and I don't want to even pretend that I'm predicting that this is going to happen, but God forbid we have bad actors in this country that want to do a homo-style attack on this country. Think about what that would do to the American idea of safety and security and literally I believe those bad actors are probably already in the country, and so we need to stay vigilant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I used to go back and forth to Norway the Oslo, norway to do talks and before they had their shooting they had a mass shooting there. People would go up to the grocery stores, leave their car running, go inside, get their groceries, come back out, just go. And they had that mass shooting where if somebody went on and killed most a lot of children it was a really bad situation and so I went back.
Speaker 1:People completely, doors are locked, everybody completely changed a society for the worst. So we have to be very vigilant in what you're saying and we have to be very aware and take care of this before it takes care of us, and I also want to. Before we wrap this up, I just want you to give us a little message of some of the business things that are happening in this state, the opportunities we have. We have Intel coming, we have some really great stuff happening and if you just Thanks.
Speaker 2:And on a positive note, Ohio has more going on by accident than most states have on purpose. And then add to that what we have going on in purpose, it's really, really doing well. We've got Intel, we've got Honda building a battery plant. We've got all of the growth and development. The one gym that I talk about all the time in Ohio is our manufacturing base that we build and make things. What you're doing here at this company is remarkable, but we need to make sure that we continue to educate the next generation of people in Ohio for that, and the one gym in Ohio's education system as much as I support higher ed and much as I talk about college credit plus our vocational training system in this state is really a gym. We have built that in the last decade or two. The legislature has invested in it, our communities have invested in it. The quality kids that are coming out of our joint vocational schools, particularly in the trades, the machining, the manufacturing, is second to none. We need to continue to emphasize that and grow that. And if you're a young person out there, I really encourage you to think about those skill-based jobs that are certainly out there and that you can be trained for.
Speaker 2:I like to leave with one other thing, Greg. I always tell people, as your state auditor, I am your watchdog of people who spend government money. If you see something that looks wrong in government, say something. The best way to do it is 1-866-Fraud-OH. 1-866-fraud-oh that's our hotline. You can also go to OhioOttottergov, OhioOttottergov, and report something to us. If you've got to talk to me, if you want to contact me, you can always reach out to me at my personal webpage, KeithFabertorg. Keithfabertorg, and God bless you for the work you're doing and it's great to be in Ohio.
Speaker 3:God bless you and thank you, Keith. Yeah, thank you, Keith.