Last week, I was a Keynote Speaker at Sardine Con in San Francisco, where I had the privilege of speaking alongside some of the brightest minds tackling fraud today. Following Erin West’s powerful keynote on pig-butchering scams and the human trafficking that fuels them, I wanted to bring the conversation home to a different set of challenges: how fraud looks on the ground in the UK, and what it teaches us about global vulnerabilities.

Fraud is often thought of as somebody else’s problem, particularly when the criminal actions involved fall within the cracks of social media, money laundering, scams, and often cross-border payments. However, fraud affects everyone, everywhere. The trouble is, because of the multi-layered reality of fraud and scams, it often ends up belonging to no one – organisations’ silo responsibility, regulators can often lag behind, and costs are quietly passed on to consumers. My role as a criminologist is to untangle those hidden dynamics, often by listening directly to people with lived experience of fraud – whether they’re victims, offenders, or sometimes both.

Case Study One: Ticket Resale Fraud

In the UK, ticket resale is already the single largest scam category. Yet, in response to concerns about touts and inflated prices, the Government is considering price caps on resale. On paper, that sounds consumer-friendly. In practice, it risks multiplying fraud fourfold.

Why? Because capping prices will push resale away from semi-regulated platforms into the unregulated chaos of social media, where consumer protections vanish. When tickets are sold peer-to-peer on Facebook or Twitter, victims are not just more likely to be scammed, they’re also far less likely to get their money back.

My team tested this directly by attempting to buy football tickets in Liverpool (where resale is banned altogether) and gig tickets in Ireland (where caps already exist). Out of seven test purchases, all were illegal in some way, and most were outright scams. Criminals operated openly, using tactics like follow-up “name change fees” to extract even more money.

The lesson here is simple: well-meaning policies can backfire catastrophically if they don’t account for criminal adaptation. Demand doesn’t disappear when you prohibit something – it just goes underground, where it’s riskier, less visible, and more harmful.

Case Study Two: Smartphone Theft and Financial Exploitation

The second case I shared focused on London, where smartphone theft has surged. At first glance, this looks like an old-fashioned street crime. But once you follow the trail, you find a perfect storm of digital exploitation.

Young people are being groomed into stealing phones – and more importantly, harvesting PINs through quick tricks or social engineering. Once a phone is stolen, the chain reaction begins: fraudsters add their own biometrics, override security, and access banking apps.

When I tested UK financial apps, only one institution successfully blocked bad actor access after a biometric change. Others defaulted to PIN verification, and because people often reuse the same PIN across phone, card, and apps, a single compromise opened the door to multiple accounts. The kicker? Open banking means that some accounts display linked accounts from other providers, essentially advertising which vault is worth cracking.

This isn’t just a story about opportunistic theft – it’s about systemic vulnerabilities across policy, product design, and people. Criminals iterate quickly, testing processes like software developers. Financial institutions, meanwhile, too often operate in silos: fraud teams don’t talk to product teams, who don’t talk to customer service, who don’t talk to PR. By the time anyone spots the pattern, consumers have already paid the price.

Breaking the Silos

What connects these case studies, ticket resale and phone theft, isn’t just the scams themselves, but the way responsibility is diffused. Policy choices in one sector (sports and entertainment) land squarely on the financial sector. Design decisions in banking apps inadvertently empower street crime. And all of it plays out against a global backdrop where scam tactics spread at the speed of a TikTok trend.

Fraud is systemic, and systemic problems need systemic solutions. That means:

• Holistic, cross-industry approaches that connect merchants, banks, tech platforms, and regulators.
• Better integration inside organisations, so fraud isn’t just one department’s headache.
• Designing intentional friction into processes, even when it’s unpopular, to disrupt criminal playbooks.

Fraudsters are agile, networked, and inventive. If we want to keep pace, we need to be too.

Written by Dr Nicola Harding, Founder of The Financial Crime Lab

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