In the 1964 movie The Bedtime Story, two con-men played by David Niven and Marlon Brando go head to head to earn the affections (and trust) of heiress Shirley Jones.

The caddish Brando takes the romance approach while Niven poses as a prince to earn reel her in - in a cruel competition to swindle her family soap fortune.

If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because the film was remade in 1988 as the hugely popular Dirty Rotten Scoundrels starring Steve Martin and Michael Caine. Since then the characters have found their way to the broadway stage in 2004 and were reworked in 2019 again for film - with the fraudsters played by women this time around.

So it’s clear that this take on confidence men (and women) is tale as old as time - and one that continues to be rewritten to this day. And while the tricks of the trade might not change the tools most certainly do.

So today we’re hearing from Jim Lee, the Global Head of Capacity Building at the blockchain analytics and investigation firm Chainalysis about how the playbook has changed and what the future of scamming might look like.

Plus, a recent report by UK Finance showed that increasingly elaborate investment scams involving gold, cryptocurrencies and wine have soared in the past year with more than £220m lost to the fraud.

And while that may sound like the storyline for one of the Hollywood movies we’ve just been discussing - the reality is a lot more mundane.

Kathryn Westmore is UK Finance’s Director of Financial Crime and Interim Director of Fraud Policy. She spoke to Collared about the rise in online fraud, UK’s fraud victim compensation scheme and why social media companies might be asked to step up

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pat Lordan is a highly sought after consultant in the world of financial crime having spent decades working in leadership roles for An Garda Síochana - Ireland’s police force. As former head of both the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau and the Irish Financial Intelligence Unit, Pat was responsible for numerous high-profile national and international operations - including the one which broke the Black Axe gang. He knows a thing or two about how fraudsters operate and share who they target and how.

Plus...

“Wanted: Money Spark is seeking a Financial Transaction Control Analyst to join their exciting technology start-up company.

Key roles and responsibilities will include receiving and processing of incoming cash funds and transferring of funds to accounts indicated by our managers.

We offer; speedy career progression, training specific to the role, performance related bonuses, flexible hours and a work from home culture."

If this sounds like a job you might be interested in applying for - you’re not alone. When Santander published this fake job advert as an experiment in 2018, they were looking to gauge how likely Britons were to apply for a job as a money mule. But with more and more jurisdictions taking a hard line on this type of criminality - they might be in for a rude awakening if they did. We hear who the likely candidates are, what the job entails and what the consequences are for getting caught?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When we hear the word 'slavery' it conjures images of slave ships in the 18th century, crossing the Atlantic packed with human cargo bound for the Americas. But in reality, there is more human trafficking and slavery now than there ever was in history. With an estimated 50 million people living in modern slavery today, the practice generates nearly $250 billion in profit every year. And it’s happening in plain sight - in the very streets where we live.

But all too often the victims are hidden, faceless or hard to perceive which is why why CEO Andrew Wallis (OBE) called his charitable organisation Unseen when he first set out to tackle the problem in the UK nearly 20 years ago. He'll help us unpack what forms modern slavery takes, who the people most vulnerable to being exploited in this way are and who's doing the exploiting.

In addition we take a look at another financial crime with very human victims - some of them not immediately obvious. One area which creates a huge amount of human collateral is the world of scams. Perhaps you’ve fallen victim to one or you’ve simply stopped answering unknown callers because of how prevalent they are, but did you know that the person making those calls might also be a victim themselves? Paul O’Donoghue, Senior Correspondent with AML Intelligence, takes us through the growing problem of scam factories.

For more information on the work of Andrew and his team at Unseen UK, visit www.unseenuk.org

Host: Dee Reddy

Guests: Paul O'Donoghue (AML Intelligence) and Andrew Wallis (Unseen UK)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.