A new year brings ambitious new projects, and so the Sentinel Team is preparing for the next version of Sentinel. It will contain specialized tools and technology that will help you with your work. The first step is a security upgrade to bring Sentinel in line with Zero Trust Authentication, a security framework that will help keep Sentinel data safe. Your login procedure will therefore change: more details will follow later this winter.
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Preparations for the Sentinel Data Book are underway. The 2023 Data Book will be posted on our agency’s website upon completion. It will have aggregated information about what consumers told us last year on the full range of fraud, identity theft and other consumer protection topics. The agency has also released the 2023 Do Not Call Data Book, showing a continued decline in consumer reports. And if you missed it, the agency released a study on scams orginating on social media. One quarter of victims reporting since 2021 say that the scams began on social media, with losses of $2.7 billion.
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The FTC welcomes nine new sources of data. These sources include businesses such as AT&T, Best Buy, Discover Bank, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, and Rent Group, Inc. They also include the non-profit organization National Council on Aging, Petclassifieds.com, and the government web portal USA.gov. These entities are providing quality consumer reports in areas such as business impostors, online shopping, and unsolicited emails and texts to consumers.
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Sentinel has consumer reports on artificial intelligence. Contact sentinel@ftc.gov to learn more on how to find those reports. The agency has also announced an exploratory challenge to protect consumers from the misuse of AI-enabled voice cloning for fraud and other harms.
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New to Sentinel or just need a refresher course? The next online Sentinel training session will be on Tuesday, January 9th at 12:00 EST; the following one will be on Thursday, February 8th at 12:00 EST. Please contact sentinel@ftc.gov to register or find out about future monthly sessions. The Sentinel Team also looks forward to training the U.S. Postal Inspection Service Mail Fraud Class this month.
The FTC now takes in consumer reports in multiple languages. Consumers can find advice in a dozen languages at ftc.gov/languages. There they can learn how to avoid a scam, what to do if they paid a scammer, and how to avoid scams targeting small businesses.
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