Earlier this year, Mia Bashir picked up her phone and heard a man claiming to be a Wake County deputy. He knew her full name and her Social Security number. He told her she'd missed jury duty and now faced arrest.

For hours, the man kept her on the line, guiding her through the process of withdrawing thousands from her bank account. Ultimately, he directed her to a gas station and what he claimed was a federal payment kiosk to pay her bond. It turned out that the machine was a crypto ATM. By the time she realized the deputy on the call didn't exist, she had already lost thousands.

Her story isn't rare in Wake County anymore. It's becoming routine.

In June, North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson warned Wake County residents that scammers were targeting them with fake jury duty scams. Many of the scams involved crypto. Residents in the state lost $13 million to crypto ATMs last year.

To try and stop scams like these, Governor Josh Stein recently signed the Virtual Currency Kiosk Consumer Protection Act. This act caps transaction fees at crypto ATMs, limits deposits to $2,500 per transaction, and requires scam warnings and licensing for kiosk operators. It is a good bill, but it isn't the whole answer.

Bad actors adapt fast. Cap what someone can lose at a crypto kiosk, and the same scammers will steer victims toward gift cards, wire transfers, or retirement accounts instead. The financial medium will change. The underlying crime will not.

I served our state in the U.S. House, where I worked alongside Jeff Jackson, then a fellow member of our delegation, pushing for stronger federal tools against fraud. That taught me something I carry into this race for Wake County District Attorney: policies that fail to target criminals routinely fall short.

As DA, my priority will be making sure law enforcement here has what it needs to stop these crimes before they happen, not just prosecute them after the fact. That means training deputies on how these scams unfold, building faster ways for victims to report fraud, and treating cybercrime with the urgency we give any other theft.

But I'll be honest about the office's limits. When the individuals running the scam are operating overseas, no county DA can reach them. No state law can either. Congress has to act. And they have to get it right.

That's where I worry. I've watched lawmakers propose fixes that sound tough on crime but do the opposite. Some in Washington want to require peer-to-peer payment platforms and financial institutions to reimburse every customer scammed on their networks. The policy is appealing on paper. In practice, it does little to help address the underlying problem. It lets the criminals walk away untouched while raising costs for the small businesses and everyday users who have done nothing wrong. Just as bad, it tells scammers someone else will cover the loss, which invites more of this crime, not less.

Congress should instead fund law enforcement to track these networks across borders, build a coordinated task force across federal agencies, and press our international partners to shut down the scam centers driving so much of this crime. Those are the fixes that target criminals without catching the rest of us in the crossfire.

Wake County deserves a prosecutor who understands both ends of this problem: the local scam calls flooding our phones and the federal action needed to stop the networks behind them. I intend to be that prosecutor, and I'll keep pushing Washington to finish the job that state and local lawmakers started.