Intelligence & Reports
A clearer view of financial crime. Weekly Lab Reports, deep investigations and criminological perspectives, grounded in evidence, connected to practice.
46 intelligence briefings
Briefings
Why closing money mule accounts is not enough
Closing suspected money mule accounts is not the same as preventing harm. Dr Nicola Harding examines the FCA review, recruitment patterns and where intervention can disrupt the laundering script.
Lunchtime lecture: From tagging trains to livestreaming Transport For London hacks
On 16 July 2026, two nineteen-year-olds were sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court to five and a half years each for the 2024 Transport for London attack.
Digital-asset scams and the new enforcement networks
The theme this week is operationalisation. Last month’s declarations become this month’s memoranda, and this month’s memoranda become operating structures. FinCEN quantified the digital-asset scam problem at nearly $13 billion…
August In Financial Crime
If April was the month enforcement dismantled the architecture of industrialised fraud, May was the month sanctions bent toward outcomes, June was the month enforcement attacked concentrations, and July was the month it…
Iran sanctions and a widening enforcement net
This week the enforcement lens widened along two axes at once. On the sanctions axis, the United States launched what Treasury has branded its largest single Iran action to date, layering secondary threats onto designations…
The rollback of beneficial ownership reporting
Last week the reporting layer was on trial (Edition #18) has now been followed by the week the reporting layer was (in one significant jurisdiction) formally dismantled. On 11 August the US Treasury issued a final rule…
When banks fail to report suspicious activity
The compliance-failure question that opened last week’s edition sharpened dramatically this week. Senate Finance Committee Democrats published a four-year investigation alleging that Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan…
The rising cost of compliance failure
This week the bill for compliance failure came due, and it came due multilaterally. FinCEN issued its largest ever Bank Secrecy Act penalty against a broker-dealer , hitting UBS with $125 million and, crucially, treating it as…
Fintech licensing and the limits of oversight
This was the week the enforcement architecture began asking questions of itself . The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency delivered its first public denial of a fintech’s national trust bank charter in more than two…
Taking down the services that keep cybercrime running
The past seven days should be read as a single, coordinated intervention against the service layer that keeps organised cybercrime and sanctions evasion running. Between 13 and 14 July the United States, United Kingdom and…
Criminal VPNs and ransomware enablers in the spotlight
This we saw further evidence that enforcement is moving more decisively against enablers. In a 48-hour window OFAC designated the same criminal VPN service that European law enforcement had taken down in May, and paired it…
The UK leads FATF’s new fraud roadmap
This was the presidential handover week. On 1 July the United Kingdom took over the Presidency of the Financial Action Task Force from Mexico and, on the same day, President Giles Thomson unveiled a two-year Fraud Roadmap that…
Targeting cloud accounts and scam payment hubs
This week, the architecture of enforcement turned, again, on infrastructure, but with a different emphasis. Where last week’s takedowns targeted patronage and protocol, this week’s targeted hubs: the cloud account…
Following the money behind organised crime
This week, the regulatory and enforcement architecture reached deeper into operational infrastructure. The US Treasury moved against the financial scaffolding of Hizballah in Lebanon; an international coalition dismantled the…
Sanctions close in on the machinery of financial crime
This week’s pattern was a consolidation of the architecture sketched out across the spring: the rulebook closing around the operational layer where financial crime actually happens. The European Commission unveiled its 21st…
Dismantling the infrastructure of industrial fraud
This week’s pattern was one of enforcement against the human and digital infrastructure of industrial-scale fraud . OFAC sanctioned Nobitex and three other Iranian digital asset exchanges, severing, at least at the…
Disrupting the networks behind financial crime
This week’s pattern was one of regulators and law enforcement reaching into the connective tissue of financial crime, the infrastructure that makes industrial offending possible, rather than the offending itself. Europol and…
Focus on Synthetic Data: You can’t kid a kidder, but can you fake a fraud..?
There is an old grifter’s truism: you can’t kid a kidder. The con artist is the one person who sees the con coming, because they know the moves from the inside. It is a comforting idea for those of us who work in fraud…
The cost of looking the other way
This week brought a study in the cost of looking the other way. OFAC reached a $275 million settlement with Adani Enterprises over 32 apparent violations of its Iran sanctions, the largest non-bank Iran-related enforcement…
Financial Crime Has Always Been a National Security Issue. The Problem Is We Forgot.
Last week, the FCA’s chief executive told a London conference that separating financial services from national security has become “outdated and dangerous”. The statement circulated through compliance and fintech commentators…
Shadow fleets, stablecoins and sanctions evasion
This week, the financial system was treated more openly than usual as a terrain of state contestation. FinCEN issued a major alert on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ use of front companies, shadow fleets and stablecoins…
Taking on industrial-scale fraud
This week sharpened a tension that has been building all year. Enforcement is now operating at industrial cadence, the US Department of Justice’s Fraud Division has, for the second time in a matter of weeks, posted roughly a…
April in Financial Crime: The Month Enforcement Started Dismantling the Architecture
For most of the last decade, financial crime enforcement has functioned as a treadmill. Investigators arrest the operators, prosecutors charge the executors, regulators sanction the firms closest to the loss. The criminal…
US and China join forces against scam centres
This was the week the United States and China announced the first publicly reported, jointly executed enforcement operation against transnational fraud, with 276 arrests across nine scam centres in coordinated US–PRC action.…
Targeting the enablers of scam compounds
This was the week the United States moved against the political and financial enablers of Southeast Asian scam compounds, sanctioning a Cambodian senator, charging compound managers, and restraining $700 million in…
Fraud enforcement gathers pace
Last week I wrote that the US had restructured its fraud prosecution architecture. This week, the new National Fraud Enforcement Division put numbers on the page, $340 million in enforcement actions in a single seven-day…
A new approach to prosecuting fraud
This has been one of the most structurally significant weeks in financial crime policy in recent memory. The United States has fundamentally reorganised how it prosecutes fraud, the UK has launched its most ambitious…
74,000 Years Ago, humans were about to survive a catastrophic disaster… but financial crime is bigger.
Around 74,000 years ago, a supervolcano called Toba erupted in what is now Indonesia.
Why I Keep Coming Back to the Classroom (and Why Fraud Teams Belong There Too)
There’s something about a classroom that opens my mind and fills me with optimism. It’s right in that moment when people realise they’re allowed to slow down and think . Its a safe space to question assumptions and explore why…
What are your real chances of being scammed in the UK?
Most people believe fraud happens to other people. The careless ones, the elderly, the ones who “don’t understand technology.” Statistically speaking, that belief is… optimistic.
Procedural Injustice: The Hidden Cost of Fraud Controls
A little while ago, I did a podcast with Chris Ward for the CCMA | Contact Centre Management Association (You can find out more info or take a listen here ). Part of our conversation was about the role the contact centre has…
AI Credibility & The Loudest Lie
Everton Football Club’s first competitive match at its new Hill Dickinson Stadium generated the kind of coverage that accompanies moments of sporting transition. A new ground, a strong performance, and an atmosphere that…
Elf On A Shelf vs Transaction Monitoring
Every December, millions of children accept a peculiar premise without much protest: there is a small elf in their house, watching their behaviour, silently reporting back to a higher authority.
Personal Troubles, Public Issues
Hosting Salv ’s round-table last week felt a bit like switching the lights on in a room most people never get to see, a room where the people who carry the weight of financial crime finally put that weight down for a moment…
The Human Side of the Insider Threat
What Jodie taught us at Comply Advantage’s Catalyst event and why that stage mattered
Fighting Fraud in Real Time
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 Is Evolving Faster Than We’re Measuring It – But New Intelligence Helps Us Catch Up
Every year, we get a little clearer picture of what global fraud actually looks like. The patterns shift, the methods mutate, and the boundaries between “cyber”, “financial”, and “social” crime blur a little more. As a…
Scam Design: How Online Products & Services Are Engineered for Exploitation
Fraud is often framed as a story of villains and victims, with cunning criminals on one side, and naïve individuals on the other. But that framing misses something vital: scams are also products. They are designed, packaged,…
Economic Abuse Must Be Seen.. and Stopped
I need your help..
Fraud Prevention and the Greatest Good: Who Gets Left Behind?
Most financial crime prevention strategies rest on a utilitarian principle: design controls for the greatest good for the greatest number. This idea, rooted in the work of philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill…
Always Learning
One of the things I love about working in the world of financial crime is that you never stop learning. Criminals are endlessly inventive. Regulators keep reshaping the rules. Technology evolves faster than we can sometimes…
An Unexpected Secret Weapon for Fraud Leaders: A Criminologist on Call
Fraudsters rehearse their scripts for months. But your call centre agent might get 20 seconds. Customers replace stolen phones without telling their bank, while criminals quietly log in on the new device. And when new…
When Fraud Meets Friction: How to Design Financial Systems Where Crime Doesn’t Fit
Fraudsters are great improvisers. The moment a control closes one door, they look for the next open window. Financial services spend billions chasing these windows, layering on more monitoring, alerts and investigations. But…
Let’s Talk About Fraud [Awareness Campaigns]
International Fraud Awareness Week is coming up in November (16th-22nd November), and it’s celebrating its 25th year. So (going by the emails in my inbox), now is the perfect time to start planning how your organisation will…
Breaking Down Fraud: From Ticket Resale to Phone Theft
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…
Where’s the Harm? The problem with fraud in the UK
The UK didn’t lose the fight against fraud, it won the wrong fight. In the first episode of Where’s the Harm?, Dr Nicola Harding is joined by fraud strategist Iain Swaine to ask why, after twenty years of fighting fraud, everything feels worse.