Last week I joined IDnow TrustSphere event in Munich for a panel on Fighting Fraud in Real Time, a discussion that ranged from artificial intelligence to behavioural science, from document forensics to social protection.

Fraud today is not just a technical arms race. It’s a social system – an economy of exploitation that mirrors our own. It’s industrialised, networked, and scalable. And we can’t outpace it with software alone. Here are some of my reflections on where the fight stands, and where it needs to go next.

A New Generation of Criminals

When asked whether it’s speed, scale or sophistication that’s changed most in the last two years, I answered: all of the above.

We’re witnessing a new generation of offenders, people who grew up with smartphones in their hands and algorithms shaping their worldview. They don’t need to “learn” technology; they live inside it. That changes everything about how crime happens and how it spreads.

Criminal apprenticeship has gone digital. Where a young fraudster once had to earn their place in a gang, they now join a Telegram group. They can download phishing kits, access deepfake tutorials, or even buy pre-built scam platforms with “customer support” for setup. Fraud-as-a-Service has made entry effortless and scalable.

And our culture hasn’t helped. “Hustle culture”, the celebration of shortcuts, side gigs and quick wins, has blurred moral lines. Many people now engaging in fraud don’t feel criminal. They feel clever.

Combine that mindset with a justice system where fewer than 0.5% of reported frauds in the UK ever reach court, and you get a perfect storm: low risk, high reward, and minimal stigma.

Fraud is no longer something happening out there, it’s something people slide into.

Fraud Rings as the New Gig Economy

Modern fraud rings operate like micro-business networks. They’re modular, decentralised, and global, just like the legitimate gig economy. There are people who write the phishing templates, others who harvest data, others who launder funds or recruit mules. Some design deepfakes for identity bypass, others offer “aftercare” for victims pretending to be customer service.

These are not always traditional criminals, sometimes they’re freelance developers or marketers moonlighting on the wrong side of the line. And because everything’s compartmentalised, no one sees the full picture.

This “McDonaldisation” of fraud also changes motivation. Economic pressure is still there, but the real driver is opportunity recognition.

“If the system lets me, it’s fair game.”

In some regions, digital fraud has become a legitimate career ladder – complete with salaries, bonuses, and referral schemes. When crime starts to resemble employment, we’re not just facing a law-enforcement issue; we’re facing an economic model.

Human Trafficking and the Hidden Victims

Fraud and exploitation now sit on the same continuum. In Southeast Asia, police raids have exposed scam compounds where thousands of people are trafficked, imprisoned, and forced to run online frauds for organised crime syndicates. Many endure physical abuse for failing to meet scam “quotas.”

But we don’t need to look that far for coercion. Across Europe, young people are recruited as money mules, often through fake job adverts or influencer posts promising “remote admin work.” They end up laundering the proceeds of crime before they even realise what’s happened.

These cases show how blurred the line has become between offender and victim. Any effective prevention strategy must tackle both at once – by disrupting recruitment pipelines as much as by blocking transactions.

Behavioural Design: Building Systems that Understand People

Most systems still assume users behave logically. They don’t.

Fraudsters exploit the gap between actual human behaviour and designed user behaviour. Perpetrators rely on predictable emotional levers – urgency, authority, reciprocity, scarcity, fear. Once you map those scripts, you can design interventions that break them.

That might mean inserting a “cool-off” moment when a payment looks risky, or adding context-sensitive friction, small nudges that make a person stop and think without killing the user experience.

Victims, too, are predictable – not in stupidity but in humanity. Fear, shame and hope are powerful forces. Once those are triggered, rationality goes offline. That’s why messaging that preserves dignity is as important as fraud alerts that flag risk. A well-timed, empathetic message can prevent not just a loss, but a spiral of silence.

“Fraud thrives in the space between how humans actually behave and how systems expect them to behave. The closer we align those two, the smaller the opportunity window.”

Adaptive friction, behavioural biometrics, and nudge architecture aren’t add-ons, they’re the foundation of humane security design.

Education as Infrastructure

We often talk about fraud as a compliance or technology issue. It’s not. It’s a social protectionissue. When we prevent fraud, we protect livelihoods, self-esteem, and mental health. Yet financial education remains the missing link.

In the UK, there’s virtually no structured teaching on fraud or money mules in state schools, and criminals are waiting at the gates. Education is prevention infrastructure. Teaching people how manipulation works is more effective than telling them “don’t click.” If we invest in behavioural literacy as seriously as we invest in cybersecurity, we’ll finally start closing the gap between risk awareness and actual resilience.

The Data Collaboration Gap

Here’s an unspoken truth: We don’t have gold-standard data on fraud. Models are trained on suspected fraud because too few cases are ever confirmed through conviction. Without that verified loop, our machine learning systems are essentially guessing.

A functional feedback chain would take a suspicious activity report, link it to an FIU investigation, a confirmed conviction, and feed that back to the originating institution. That’s how we create accurate “labels” for training models. Instead, we’ve built silos – legal, competitive, and cultural. Fraudsters share data across borders in real time; we still debate whether we can share it.

This is not just a compliance issue anymore, it’s national and international security. If we want Europe to be fraud-resilient by 2027, we need regulatory courage: frameworks for privacy-safe, cross-sector, real-time data sharing.

Fraudsters collaborate. So should we.

Looking to the Future

If I could change one thing tomorrow, it would be to make data collaboration the default, not the exception. We need to move from reporting to prevention. From quarterly fraud reviews to live, federated signal networks that learn and respond instantly.

And while we wait for regulation to catch up, every organisation can do something simple but transformative: Know your own product inside out. Go through your onboarding process as a user. Try to break it. Find the points where emotion, confusion or convenience might override caution. When teams understand their own flows the way criminals do, they start designing for reality instead of assumption.

Knowledge, in this fight, is armour.

Prevention Starts at Home

One of the questions I was asked at the end of our session was how do we protect our own. It was here that we were all reminded that prevention begins in the living room, not the boardroom.

1. My advice? Set a family password for emergencies, a code word that confirms identity when messages feel off.
2. Utilise technology such as Ask Silverto check and educate – a safety net for when you cant always be there for friedns, family and loved ones.
3. Talk about scams openly with parents, grandparents, and teenagers. And yes, have the awkward conversations, about sextortion, romance fraud, and shame.

Because the emotional aftershocks of fraud often outlast the financial ones.

Fraud is evolving faster than any one institution, industry, or algorithm can handle. But we’re not powerless. By combining behavioural insight, technological intelligence, and collective data collaboration, we can turn the tide.

Real-time resilience isn’t about faster software, it’s about smarter systems, braver leadership, and more human design.