It’s always a tricky filming day when you sit down with victims of any scam. My primary objective is always to make sure people feel comfortable in telling their story without feeling they will be judged. I don’t know if you’ve ever been affected by a scam but most people believe they’ve somehow been foolish - and maybe they have, but they mostly feel embarrassed, and having to sit down and retrace their journey is always difficult with the benefit of hindsight.

My plea to them is always the same:

The difference with romance scams is that victims have not only lost their money but they’ve lost trust in humanity. They have opened their heart to a stranger who they thought was doing the same. They shared feelings, thoughts, vulnerabilities in order to build an intimate relationship. These people weren’t being greedy, after a cheap deal or clicked on a dodgy link - no, they were looking to make a connection with another human, they worked hard in getting someone to love them. They spent weeks, months, sometimes even years, planning a future alongside this person, someone they are deeply in love with. They are the Kate Winslet and Leo Di Caprio in Titanic, whose forbidden love thrives against all odds, only in this version, not only does the ship sink but the movie turns into The Night of the Living Dead.

The deception is brutal. How can you ever trust another person again? How can you share a secret with anyone, ever?

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I have a huge amount of admiration for the people that survive this and come forward to talk about it. People like Ava, divorced and living alone, she lost her £67,000 inheritance in less than a year to a scammer calling himself David West and posing as an American oil-rig worker.

Unfortunately, her case is all too familiar. In the last thirteen months, the City of London Police have recorded 13,375 cases and £133 million lost to romance scams. That’s £360,000 every single day lost to scammers breaking victims hearts. Remember, these are the cases we know about, there will be hundreds if not thousands more that go unreported because the victims feel too ashamed to do so.

There are so many heartbreaking stories out there. An unnamed man from Northern Ireland lost more than £200,000 in a romance scam to a woman he met on a dating app. He said:

“This entire experience has had a devastating impact on my whole life, both financially and emotionally…I felt ashamed that I had let myself fall victim to this fraud.”

An unnamed man in Cumbria, who had lost his wife, was tricked into sending £30,000 to scammers on dating apps. Sarah, from Swale, had suffered a bereavement and was tricked by scammers into believing that she was in a relationship with an American serviceman who told her he needed help with food and medical expenses. She sent them £100,000 and lost her home. She told the BBC:

"I lost my house, I lost my car, my furniture, I lost my self-respect."

I also spoke to Shirley who thought she was communicating with Austin Butler on Instagram. She reached out as a fan and surprisingly ‘he’ replied from different account. ‘He’ said this was his personal account and the official one is run by his people and is not actually him. This is a common ruse scammers use to convince victims they are talking to the real celebrities. They got to know each other. Shirley felt close to him as she had lost her mother to cancer and it so happens that Butler’s mother also died of cancer. The scammers then started asking her for money that ‘Butler’ would donate to cancer charities. In total Shirley lost a thousand pounds. She said:

“I felt so stupid. I felt like my whole world crumbled and it just didn’t make sense. I was trying to work out how he could do that, how anyone could do that to anyone. No, it wasn’t really fair what he did.”

It’s easy to read these stories and have very little sympathy for the those that fall for them. After all, who sends money to people they’ve never met? Why would a Hollywood A-Lister be asking you for cancer donations? These people are stupid and gullible. I have met dozens of victims like Shirley and I can tell you not once did they come across as either of those things.

I’ve written and carried out over 500 scams and I could be scammed on my way to the studio tomorrow. These scammers have spent thousands of hours perfecting their techniques. To give you an idea of how much detail they go into, I remember speaking to a scammer from Nigeria, I asked him how he chose his victims. He said he looked for older women, divorcees and people of faith. So far, so logical. Then he said he would always target women with pets. When I asked him why, he said: “Proof of disposable income.”

These scams are very hard to trace. If you follow the money, it quickly disappears in multiple accounts around the world and if it goes into crypto it just vanishes. What we do know is that most of it is organised crime. Most of the information we get is when so-called scam compounds are shut down. These heavily guarded often razor wire protected compounds are essentially scam factories.

Hundreds of employees, some of them trafficked into modern slavery are sat in front of screens with headsets on furiously typing away. Imagine a call centre dedicated to fraud but the employees cannot leave. I have seen screen shots provided by former workers who managed to escape that show purpose built apps which can control hundreds of chats on messaging platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp. With the help of AI the scammers are typing into the app in Chinese and the message is instantly translated and sent in English or any chosen language.

Romance scams sometimes develop into what criminals call ‘pig butchering’. The idea being you fatten up the victim before bringing them to slaughter. The fattening up in romance scams is the honey moon period. No demands for money, just building trust and finding out as much as possible. Do they have a car? Do they own their own home? How much do they have in savings? And then, when the time is right, the demand for money becomes incessant. It can manifest itself as money for an emergency, travel or a sure fire investment scheme - usually crypto, but they won’t stop until all the money is gone or they get found out.

As you can imagine fraud on this scale requires people working 24/7. Sometimes, for each victim there will be several handlers all working off pre-arranged scripts and case notes for each target. One handler will pick up where another left off. Occasionally a low level scammer will make initial contact and will pass on the communications to a senior handler to close the deal. This is very similar behaviour to traditional boiler room scams and even some legitimate high pressure investment companies.

Arguably the hardest part is the approach. How do you pick up someone online? How do you flirt with someone in a language you don’t speak and a culture you don’t associate with? Below are some examples of intercepted scripts used by romance scammers.

As you can see nothing is really left to chance. It is all a process, and with large language model AI this has become child’s play.

Ultimately though we have to ask the question of why these scams are so successful? When we look closely at the victims, one thing becomes very obvious. Loneliness. Look at the examples we’ve mentioned - Ava, divorced lived alone, unnamed man in Cumbria, lost his wife, Sarah, from Swale, had suffered a bereavement, Shirley, lost her mum. This is crucial in so many romance scams. Loneliness is at the centre of most of the cases I have come across. For many of the victims like Ava, daily communications with their scammers were sometimes their only interactions with another human that day. Let that sink in.

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The levels of loneliness in the UK are staggering. The latest Community Life Survey carried out by the government for 2024/25 showed that 7% of adults in England alone (aged 16+) reported that they felt lonely often or always. That’s 3.2 million people. In Scotland roughly 4% experienced feelings of loneliness ‘Most, almost all or all of the time’ in 2024, in Wales 13% of people were lonely in 2022 to 2023. That’s a lot of people, roughly 4 million adults feeling lonely. It’s an astonishing statistic considering we live in the most ‘connected’ time in history.

Now imagine if only a small portion of them started looking for company on dating apps and social media platforms - fruitful hunting ground for scammers.

So, what can we do about it? This is one of those occasions where people not involved in the scam have a big part to play. Keep a close eye on your friends and family. Check in on them as often as you can. It would be impossible to keep on top of all communications and financial transactions, so the biggest red flag to look out for is when they start isolating themselves or are shutting down any conversation into who they are speaking with online. This is because the first thing scammers do is try and isolate their victims from the people that can help them. The script is usually something like this:

If someone is refusing to talk openly and candidly about someone they met online you should start to worry.

Finally, if you are looking for love or companionship online, do keep a look out for some typical red flags:

• Moving off platform - if your newfound love wants to quickly move from the dating app to a messaging service, that’s is often to avoid scrutiny from the dating websites and because their software is designed to be used on messaging apps.

• Reluctant to meet in person - if they offer phone and video calls that still may not guarantee legitimacy. See here for video calls.

• Check the photo - Scammers no longer have to steal other people’s photos as AI generated ones are so easy to come by. This website generates them for free and is very easy to use. However, they do get sloppy and use existing photos so it is always worth doing a reverse image search with PimEyes or Google Lens

• Request for money - any request for money from a person you have not met in real life should be treated with extreme suspicion. Just don’t do it. No matter how convinced you may be, don’t risk it. If you are determined to go ahead, then do me a favour, before you do anything, tell your best friend, your close relative or neighbour, and if you’d rather not tell them, that’s your gut telling you you’re doing something you shouldn’t be.

It’s easy to judge people as stupid or gullible when you hear some of these stories but we all have our weaknesses. Theirs was finding a partner, for others it’s financial gain. We are not so quick to judge when we hear of people losing their pensions to Ponzi schemes or life savings to clever investment scams and yet romance scams follow exactly the same pattern and are carried out by the same scammers often from the very same locations. So, let’s check in on each other and if in doubt share your story with your nearest and dearest, if you’re not seeing the scam it’s likely they will.

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The scam is very simple and always starts like this - you get a message addressed to Mum or Dad, this can be on any messaging platform and it reads: “Hi Mum, I’ve lost my phone. This is my new number please delete the old one and start using this one.” So far there’s not a lot here to arouse suspicion. The scam begins in earnest within a few minutes when said child starts asking for money. The reasoning is often very convincing. A recent victim I spoke to who thought she was talking with her son described the exchange.

That cost her £4,500. Just like that. Even in its simplicity there’s a lot going on here. Yes, the scammer gets some help when Mum asks which child this is and is able to get away without having to identify themselves by name, but the ask for money is very realistic and psychologically irresistible. Once the parent-child relationship has been established the introduction of a medical issue taps into the maternal instinct of concern, followed by the relief of “I am fine. All came back normal”, which becomes the perfect moment to ask for help. Heartless, but easy money.

This scam has been around now since the early 2020s. Exact numbers of how much money has been lost are hard to pinpoint, especially since many losses go unreported but it is thought to have taken tens of millions of pounds from UK victims. In terms of where it’s coming from, it could be anywhere in the world: scam compounds in Southeast Asia or closer to home. It is almost certainly organised crime, rather than some chancer randomly sending out texts.

In my last series of Scams: Don’t Get Caught Out on Channel 5, I met with Maureen in Liverpool. She was recently bereaved, with two daughters living abroad when she got a message from one of them on WhatsApp. The scam started in the usual way but when Maureen asked if this was Jenny, her daughter in Canada, the scammer’s profile picture changed to one of Jenny alongside her husband. That’s pretty convincing now right? Maureen is looking at her phone, showing a photo of her own daughter, how can she refuse her money for a new laptop? Once the scammer received the £1,400 for the laptop, they asked for more. Maureen sent more. This would have continued had Maureen not started to worry about having to settle the bill for her husband’s funeral. In a fit of panic she texted her daughter saying she needed to get back the money she’d lent. By a happy accident she texted Jenny’s old number and the scam unravelled.

So what happened there? Most likely Maureen’s number was on a ‘suckers list’. These are lists available cheaply online and contain numbers of what scammers would deem ‘easy marks’. People who have either been victims of scams before and could pay out again, or are considered a soft touch, easy targets. The old, vulnerable, widowed, living alone etc. In this case the scammers were able to find Maureen’s Facebook profile, quickly look up her daughter Jenny and use her photo for their WhatsApp profile pic. Cruel but easy money.

This year, Ofcom reported, four in ten (40%) UK mobile users over the age of 16 received at least one suspicious message on their mobile phone in the past three months. That’s 55 million people and suggesting around 100 million messages. With the average loss to the ‘Mum and Dad’ scam of £1,242, according to Barclays you only need a small fraction of people to send you money and you’ll be coining it. If only 1 in 40,000 people send money each month, the scammers would be taking home millions every year.

What lies at the heart of this scam underpins one of the biggest problems we have in security. Verification. Who are we communicating with? Who’s on the other end of the text message, the email, and now the phone call or video?

Identification generally happens in three ways:

Something I know - a password, PIN etc

Something I have - a fob, a key, ID card etc

Something I am - biometric, Face ID, thumbprint, iris scan etc

Ideally, we should be using all three at the same time but apart from high-security government-level environments or the military, I am not aware of everyday consumer environments where we do so.

According to the UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 we lost £92.4 million to impersonation scams. This is scammers pretending to be the police, banks, and other trusted institutions. That is not to say that we don’t have good security we can rely on. Banking apps have done some excellent work in blocking out scams in the last few years.

However, we need to start asking ourselves — who am I really talking to here?

In July 2025 Sharon Brightwell received a call from her daughter, April Monroe, who was in distress. She told her mother she’d hit a pregnant woman with her car while texting and driving. A man then took the phone and claimed to be Monroe’s attorney. He told Sharon he needed $15,000 cash to pay her bail. She sent the money. Soon after she received another call from another man telling her the unborn child had died and the family were demanding $30,000 cash or else they’d sue. The scam was uncovered when her daughter texted her son who was with Sharon at the time. The money was lost. We cannot be sure that AI was used to replicate Sharon’s daughter’s voice but she insisted:

“There is nobody that could convince me that it was not [her voice] … I know my daughter's cry, even though she's an adult, I still know my daughter's cry.”

You can now generate perfect sounding AI voice fakes. As little as three seconds of someone’s voice can be used to create a convincing fake. Get hold of someone’s best-man speech, lecture, YouTube interview, self-tape and you’re in business. The tools to do this are inexpensive and available to everyone without the need of any technical know-how. Again, easy. Ruthless.

So, we’ve moved from just texts, to photos and now voices. You know what’s next don’t you?

In January 2024, Arup a British multinational design and engineering company behind world-famous buildings such as the Sydney Opera House, was scammed out of $25 million. An employee in their Hong Kong office received an email from the UK-based chief financial officer asking for help with a “confidential transaction”. Ironically, the employee thought it was a phishing scam and was ready to ignore it until he was invited to join a video conference with the CFO and other colleagues from the company.

On the call they all appeared and sounded just like colleagues he recognised. They were all AI fakes. Now be honest — this would have worked on most of us. Pretty sure it would have worked on me.

Unfortunately, we have reached the point where you cannot trust your eyes and ears with absolute confidence. So, if the scams are getting more and more convincing, how on earth are we meant to keep safe? If your instinct is to rely on technology, I’m afraid that’s just wishful thinking. Yes, the tech is getting better at detecting fraud but the fraud is becoming more sophisticated. Instead of waiting for some tech company to fix it, and most likely charge us for it, we can do much better by using our own ability to tell if something is ‘off’. Some call it the ‘smell test’. Others, like my old show The Real Hustle used to always end with the phrase “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” I’m a huge fan of asking yourself — is this likely?

As a species we may not be the best at noticing small details but we are very good at knowing what’s normal. A little drop in your home or office temperature, you’ll notice. A strange smell, an unusual sound, a friend not acting quite like themselves. We are very good at picking up on things out of the ordinary and the truth is, for scams to succeed, something out of the ordinary has to happen. A child that has lost a phone, a daughter that’s been in an accident, a boss that wants help with a strange looking transaction. Had the victims asked ‘Is this likely?’ at any point, they might have saved themselves a whole lot of trouble.

Of course that may not be enough. These scams are very convincing but if it’s out of the ordinary then you must take extra steps to verify what is going on. If you are dealing with live video as in the Arup case asking someone to wave their fingers in front of their face could expose the fake image. Although, inevitably this has is now been dealt with by scammers as the tech has improved. Nevertheless, now that we know what is possible some extra verification steps need to be introduced — especially if you are being asked to send large sums of money to anyone.

In the case of the ‘Mum and Dad’ scam, or any scam which involves close family, calling the original number is the first step. If that fails then a pre-agreed ‘safe word’ is the next best thing. This can be a word, a phrase, anything that only you and your family have agreed together. Avoid pet names or anything that is in the public domain that scammers can get hold of from your social media.

Do this now. Make it obscure and random but memorable. It can really save you a fortune.

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One last plea, do report all the texts you get. It’s very easy to do and the authorities do shut the numbers down so you could be helping prevent a vulnerable person from being scammed. To report messages, please forward them to 7726, it spells ‘spam’ on your numeric keyboard.

Finally, if you are worried that you may have sent money to scammers, report it straight away. This gives you the best chance of getting your money back. Simply dial 159 on your mobile phone and the menu will direct you straight to your bank’s fraud department. No faffing or looking up numbers, just dial 159.

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It’s the question I get asked most often: ‘Does my phone listen in on me?’ ‘Is it eavesdropping on our private conversations?’

We’ve all been there. You are chatting away with friends about something totally random. Someone mentions bouncy castles. You have a laugh and proceed to bore everyone rigid by telling them how a new electric car can inflate a bouncy castle with its battery— yes, I filmed this for a TV show, yes, I really am boring enough to mention this in conversation. The next thing that happens is your social media is flooded with ads for bouncy castles. How can this be? You didn’t search for it on your phone? You didn’t watch any videos or follow accounts talking about bouncy castles. How can advertisers know you were talking about bouncy castles? Your phone must have been listening to your private conversation. It is the only explanation isn’t it?

All the big tech companies like Google, Apple, TikTok and Meta insist they don’t target us with ads by listening in on our conversations. Unfortunately for them, over half of UK smartphone users don’t believe them.

To help us get to what is really going on, I want you to think about those nearest and dearest to you in your life. Out of them, who do you think knows you best? Is it your parent? Your best friend? Your partner? Your soulmate? OK, now whoever you ended up with, do they know you better than your phone? Before you answer that, here’s what your phone knows about you. It keeps track of where you go and who you go there with. It has a record of every question you’ve asked online, including the ones you deleted. A list of all communications, who you spoke to, when and for how long. If there’s wearable connected to it, it has extensive health data about you. Your phone knows what you like doing in your spare time— is it scrolling or jogging? All these data are used to create a ‘digital profile’ containing: your income, your politics, your desires — things you never told it and might not have told anyone. Still think it’s your soulmate? Really?

Your ‘digital profile’ is at the centre of the online economy. This is what makes the whole thing work. It’s why social media platforms are free. This is why many useful apps are free — because you are the product. Every time you land on a web page, there is an auction between advertisers to see who gets to show you their ads. It takes milliseconds and it is all based on that ‘digital profile’ that follows you everywhere as you are tracked around the internet. Why are you tracked? Because you agree to it when you land on a page. When you accept the cookies, you also accept a whole load of things including trackers.

Have a look at one of the most visited news websites. The Daily Mail online. Here’s what they want you to agree to when accepting the cookies.

Yep, they work with 1389 partners who may be interested in your data.

So, how did we end up in a place where our phones know more about us than those we love and trust? How can apps connected to companies most of us have never heard of have access to so much of our private data. The answer is we agreed to it. Every time you download an app you agree to its terms and conditions. That may include giving it access to your location, your camera, your contacts and your microphone. Some apps may genuinely need access to your location, Google Maps for example would be pretty useless without it but as this data is gold dust to advertisers, many apps really do take the piss.

An early case of overreach was The Weather Channel app which was accused of misleading their 49 million users into thinking their location data would be used only to provide them with ‘personalised local weather data, alerts and forecasts’. A privacy lawsuit brought against them claimed that:

‘Once granted permission by the user, the company allegedly tracks, collects and maintains records of their precise locations and movements in real time, regardless of whether the app is open.’

It went on to claim the data collected was sold into ‘the $21 billion location targeting industry, where information about where and when consumers live, work, play and dine is of great value to marketers and advertisers.’ The Weather Channel settled the case and agreed to change the way users were informed.

The problem is everything you buy now comes with an app. An air-fryer now has an app and that app that wants your address, your post code and your date of birth. Why? Because on top of the money you’ve spent on the kit they also want to make money from your data.

There are of course people who don’t mind their data being used for profit. In their minds they are getting a service in return and targeted advertising means they see things they are genuinely interested in. However, there are other more sinister and worrying side effects than just ads following you around the internet. Times journalist Matilda Davies requested all her data from Facebook. She was astounded at what they knew about her.

“March 14, 2022, was an ordinary day. I snoozed my alarm at 7.15am and then again at 7.30am. I checked on a prescription at 10.25am, scanned my bank balance at 2.40pm and bought a birthday card for my father at 4.05pm.

I didn’t record these mundane actions, but Facebook did.”

They even tracked her visiting NHS websites looking for information on bowel cancer and they knew she was searching for mental health councillors. It is important to remember that it’s not just what we like to read and watch on TV or buy online that is sold to data brokers. Sensitive issues like victims of rape, men who suffer from premature ejaculation, patients who suffer from HIV, people who have lost a child, all this is fair game in the data market. If they know what makes you vulnerable or scared or angry, they know what to sell you.

I don’t know about you but I think that’s a very high price to pay for being able to watch kitten videos on Facebook.

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‘That’s all very well but how do they know I was talking about bouncy castles with my mates?’ I hear you cry. ‘Is my phone eavesdropping? Because if it is I’m screwed!’ The bottom line is if you have activated the ‘Hey Siri’ or ‘Hey Google’ function on your phone then it is absolutely listening in.

It is waiting to hear the command to launch the digital assistant, so it has to listen in. Famously, an Apple whistleblower claimed that Apple contractors where able to hear ‘drug deals, medical details and people having sex’. Apple claimed that those recordings were used to help Siri dictation and understand users better, recognising what they say to prevent accidental activations. Similar cases have taken place with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. We have been assured again and again that big tech companies are not listening to us for advertising. The truth is we have no way of being absolutely sure but to this day there has not been any proof that they do.

So what’s really going on? The closest we can get to is something called ‘proximity advertising’. It’s the assumption that you will have similar interests with people you chose to associate with. Remember our phones are always very busy doing things without our knowledge. Let’s go back to the meeting with your friends where the subject of bouncy castles came up. Say you are in a pub, your phone will ping the WiFi network even if you don’t connect to it. That becomes location data apps and trackers can use. Couple that with your friends’ phones doing the same. Now one meeting is not enough but say you and your friends meet regularly. This now becomes an association. Advertisers can use that. One of the group has been obsessing about bouncy castles, they’ve been googling them and looking to rent one. Your ‘digital profile’ may include that you have children based on your purchases. Advertisers take a punt thinking you may have similar interests with your mates, result is you get to stare at bouncy castles whenever you go online until you finally buy one to make the ads go away.

So what can you do to minimise the amount of data you are unnecessarily sharing?

• Never sign into anything using your social media accounts; you’re just handing them too much data.

• Think if you really need an app for your fridge or your bloody air-fryer?

• Always reject cookies if you can. Why agree to more trackers following you around?

• Switch off the ‘Hey…’ voice activation for Siri or Google. Are you happy having live mics in your home and in your pocket at all times?

• Instead of scrolling one evening. Go through your settings and check which apps have access to things they don’t need to on your phone. Does your banking app really need access to your microphone at all times? Does your toaster app need your location? Check which apps have access to camera, microphone, location, Bluetooth, etc.

In an ideal world, data collection should not be the default. People should have to opt in to share their data. It’s a much more rational system. You wouldn’t need to waste time and go through the frustration of having to say no to cookies every time you visit a website. I know, it sounds like a pipe dream. It reminds me of years ago when I spoke at an internal event at Facebook’s headquarters in Covent Garden. I finished my talk with a suggestion that to better protect their users every new account should come fully locked down and the user should have the choice of setting who can see their posts. I got some very strange looks.

It is a little bit strange that most of the people in the U.K. don’t want things like I.D. cards because they are worried about government overreach. And yet, they’re very happy to share their most intimate data on social media or with apps that control their air fryers or toasters. It doesn’t seem to make sense. What really doesn’t make sense is that we’ve yet to grasp that our data, our names, our addresses, what we do, where we eat, where we travel, all that information is possibly the most valuable commodity on the planet and we’re just giving it away for free.

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The truth is the space for consumer protection is narrowing. Broadcasters are increasingly weary of investing in consumer shows as the return on that investment is negligible at best. You cannot sell consumer shows around the world and Netflix are not going to come calling for them. The programs also go out of date fairly quickly so channels cannot keep repeating them to fill their schedule.

However, shows that educate the public on how to protect themselves from crime are needed now more than ever. Just look at the numbers. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics there were 4.5 million incidents of fraud in the year ending March 2026. That number was 4.2 million in March 2025 and 3.2 million in the same month in 2024. So, we are going the wrong way. When it comes to the financial cost, the amounts are eye watering. The latest figures from the Home Office estimate the cost of fraud in year ending March 2024 were £14.4 billion — £9.2 billion affecting individuals and £5.2 billion affecting businesses. There’s your defence budget shortfall right there. I should add that when I see these figures I am always assuming that the true cost is much higher. There is so much fraud that goes unreported either because the amounts lost are low or people are too embarrassed to go public and just chalk it up to experience.

Whatever the real number is, having that much money handed over to scammers is frankly obscene and as a nation, we should be more pissed off about it, and our government should be doing a lot more about it. I have long been of the view that we need a minister for fraud. Wait. Turns out we have one. His name is Ian Steel.

Just kidding - but I bet I had you fooled though. Our actual minister for fraud is David Hanson, Lord Hanson of Flint, Ian Steel was my pseudonym on The Real Hustle because all my fake IDs read “Mr I Steel”. I know, pathetic but it made us giggle a little. The point I am trying to make about Lord Hanson is that the minister for fraud should be one of the most public and well known figures in the country. They should be spearheading public awareness campaigns and acting as the figure head for their ministry. They should be accountable if fraud goes up and praised if it goes down— just like the health secretary deals with waiting lists for the NHS. My point is Lord Hanson— and this is no criticism of his character— has fraud as one of his thirteen other responsibilities, including ‘departmental finance’, ‘overseas territories’ and ‘the Union and devolution’. This is bonkers. The country needs to take fraud seriously enough to appoint a dedicated minister whose sole job is to stop the country haemorrhaging money to fraudsters, scammers and serious organised crime who are running some very profitable scam compounds across the globe.

So, yes, I’m a little cross because I’ve spent enough time around victims of fraud. Their lives have been decimated, and they have very few places they can turn to. I’ve seen enough money handed over to scammers that ends up funding serious crime including drugs, people trafficking, and even terrorism and it feels like we’re losing the battle.

However, despite all that, I feel optimistic. For the last fifteen years I have been speaking to companies worldwide about scams and how they can avoid them. No matter how complex they get or how technologically advanced they appear, scams rely on one thing—us. Scammers are the hackers of human nature. The psychology behind every scam can be broken down and used as a red flag to recognise and avoid fraud. Feel rushed into making a decision? Found an offer that sounds too good to be true? Well, that’s two classic scam elements right there— time pressure and the ‘good deal syndrome’.

So, this is what this Substack will endeavour to do. Warn people about the latest scams, explain how and why they work, and give useful and practical advice to protect you from fraud. Along the way we’ll hear about some very clever criminals who really did turn scamming into an art—hence known as ‘con artists’ and we’ll also learn a trick or two, things conmen use all the time to their advantage that we can start using to ours.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

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