Crime

2025 has been the year of AI and AI hype from Agentic AI to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to Robots, chatbots and more but, for me, it has been the year of Deep Fake AI. It all started with the story of the French woman who got duped into a fake AI relationship with Brad Pitt…

Half a century ago, people thought that the average person wouldn’t remember a six-digit PIN*. A quarter century later, we got usernames and passwords by the bucketload. Now, we have so many loads of buckets, each of which are meant to have their own individual access codes, none of which we can remember, that the…

Someone asked me this week: why isn’t digital identity working? After all, there have been numerous attempts at tackling the issue. Specifically, in finance, we have onboarding, compliance, AML, KYC, PEP and more … and yet none of it is working. If it was working, there would be zero criminal activity in the financial world….

One of my friends just sent me an interesting article all about trust, fraud and cryptocurrency so, as a Christmas present, I wanted to share it with you. Here goes … With the digital revolution, crypto has become a global financial phenomenon. Blockchain technology has changed how we make transactions, interact with clients, and use…

Thinking about the Big Tech firms, most of them are enabling commerce. Amazon and Apple are building specific structures to make buying and selling easy. But one company is enabling fraud, scams and criminal activities. Meta. Meta runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as many other ventures from augmented reality to their X-like idea…

After yesterday’s chat with Dan McCrum of The Financial Times who broke the Wirecard story, wrote the book about it, helped create the documentary on Netflix and is an all round good guy, I wondered whatever happened to the key instigator, organiser and mastermind behind the fraud, Jan Marsalek. Dan: It did feel quite dangerous…

I’m talking about KYC and client onboarding again in a February 1st webinar, hosted by American Banker. The onboarding of clients is the worst part of financial services, because it has an overly onerous requirement to gain proofs. Proof of address, proof of identity, proof of existence, proof of life. You name it. It gets worse…

For years, we have debated privacy versus identity. I am all for privacy, but governments are all for identification. If we can identify you, we can tax you. If you are private, you’re off the grid. It’s a balance. The most private way to deal with money is with cash. Cash can be transacted off the…

Fifteen years ago, I had a presentation entitled All Bankers Are Criminals. It’s a great title, and was basically all about corruption in the City and how to stop it. Corruption takes place every day. Just as criminals and cybercriminals are trying to steal the money, so are employees and partners. These are the things…

We’ve seen failures of systems in Zimbabwe, Venezuela and other nations. What if it was here? You think everything is stable, secure, reliable and resilient, and then suddenly it isn’t. Does this sound far-fetched? Well, it’s not. It could happen anywhere. I’ve been lucky enough to be in mostly positive worlds, where governments have ruled well…