Never Trust a Handsome Soldier: Becky Holmes on the Past, Present and Future of Fraud

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. A couple of weeks ago, we had, a British academic, Anja Shortland, on the show talking about corporate fraud. She has a new book out. Dark Screens: Hackers and Heroes in the Shadowy World of Ransomware, ransomware being a particularly lucrative form of fraud in our online culture. And we're continuing a theme of fraud with another British writer. This one is very well known for a book that came out a couple of years ago, on romantic fraud. The book was entitled Keanu Reeves is Not in Love with You, the Murky World of Online Romance Fraud by my guest, Becky Holmes. Becky has a new book out. It's called The Future of Fraud, although much of it deals with its history. And Becky is joining us from Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare Country. Becky, I don't suppose Shakespeare was very much into fraud, was he?

00:01:35 Becky Holmes: I think everybody's been into fraud at some point or another in history, and who knows? We don't even know who he was. So, make of that what you will.

00:01:44 Andrew Keen: Maybe it was a fraud. So the F-word, Becky, you've just written a book about it. What does the word mean? I did a little bit of research, and, of course, when you ask AI, you come up with all sorts of definitions. What's your working definition in this new book, The Future of Fraud?

00:02:02 Becky Holmes: So I would say fraud is any act, really, where somebody is getting something from another person, by not telling the truth. I mean, the language of fraud is a is a bit of a sort of sticky one even to start on because there's a lot of debate within the counter fraud world between even the words fraud and scams. You know, there are quite a few people fighting on either side as to whether we should even use the word scam, for example. So it's, every time there's a definition of something, there are always people fighting against it.

00:02:41 Andrew Keen: Slippery one then. As I said, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Anja Shortland's work. She teaches at King's College London. Her new book, Dark Screens, is about the shadowy world of ransomware. Came out in the UK with a title, I think, We Know You Can Pay a Million. What is it about British women and, fraud there, Becky, that attracts them so much? Why did you get into this fraud business? I know you do a lot of public speaking on it. You've written a couple of books now on it. Is there something personal about it, or you're just intrigued by this idea of fraud?

00:03:16 Becky Holmes: It started off as, I guess, personal because it started off when people were trying to defraud me. When I started a Twitter account during lockdown, I was sort of inundated by, all of these very handsome soldiers, and they were all

00:03:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And the name of your Twitter, now called X, is Becky Holmes Hates Spinach, which is a great title for an X page.

00:03:44 Becky Holmes: It is. The handle is @deathtospinach. I set this account up way before I knew I was gonna be doing anything in fraud, and now it's just sort of stuck. So, entirely unrelated. But I started to become sort of involved in and I really wanted to learn more about romance fraud because kind of messing around with romance fraudsters like I was doing. I became somebody who actual victims of romance fraud would contact and speak to and, you know, want to share their stories. So it became a real area of interest. And I started sort of becoming known for the, for knowing a bit about romance fraud. And then naturally, things just broaden out, and suddenly people are talking to you about other types of fraud. And I suppose I've always had one of those minds where if somebody plants a seed of something, I want to know a little bit more about it. And in the world of fraud, there is so much to know. You know, I could be sitting at my desk for the next ten years and still not learn everything there is to know. So it's, yeah, it's one of those things where it's now just in me.

00:04:53 Andrew Keen: When it comes to romance, fraud, as I said, you dealt with it in your in your well known book, Keanu Reeves is Not in Love with You. Is there a gray area? I mean, when it comes to romance, everyone exaggerates, hides stuff. No one puts the stuff out there that they think their partner won't like. Where does the line end when it comes to marketing oneself and pure fraud?

00:05:27 Becky Holmes: I like the idea of marketing oneself. I've been on, online dating sites, so I've done some of that myself. I think it's motive, isn't it? So let's say we're talking about romance fraud in the traditional sense, which is financial. If you're going into a relationship knowing that actually what you want from that other person is money, then that's fraud. There are other types of romance fraud. So, a great friend and colleague of mine, was the victim of romance fraud where no money actually changed hands at all. This guy was living a double life, and the fraud for him was all about sex and power.

00:06:09 Andrew Keen: I have to be upfront. I am never gonna date you because I love spinach. What's wrong with spinach?

00:06:17 Becky Holmes: Oh, do you know? I just I never understand why people ask me that. How is it just

00:06:22 Andrew Keen: to be so boring, but what's wrong with spinach?

00:06:26 Becky Holmes: But how is it even in question? It's absolutely disgusting. Raw in a salad, delicious. I can eat it out the bag. As soon as it starts to look like anything that's floating on a pond, that's a no from me. I'm horrified that anybody even would allow it in their house.

00:06:45 Andrew Keen: So you would you would never date Popeye. Right?

00:06:48 Becky Holmes: Certainly not. Certainly not.

00:06:50 Andrew Keen: So coming to the future of fraud, I know the book is as much a history as a future. What I mean, it's a it's a relatively short book, very readable in your in the Becky Holmes style. But what's the history of fraud? Where do you begin?

00:07:10 Becky Holmes: In the book so the history of fraud, I have become a real fraud nerd because I found this so interesting. So the history of fraud, the very first recorded instance of fraud was in ancient Greece, where basically two guys decided to try and pull an insurance scam, And they were going to, sink a boat halfway across its journey, but they got caught. And one of them decided to jump off the boat and drowned, and the other one had to end up going and kind of facing the music. But that's only the first recorded instance. It would have been happening, you know, from day one. The second that two humans met, they would have been trying to get something out of each other. That is just our horrible human nature. But there's really interesting things like so Michelangelo, for example, who we know for being one of the best sculptors, painters of all time, there was in the fifteenth century, there was a guy over in Florence connect collecting Roman antiquities, and Michelangelo took one to him and this guy bought it. It turns out Michelangelo had forged this. It was a fake. He was just so good that he'd managed to defraud this guy. But rather than be sentenced to prison for it, this the man who actually bought the statue said, god, this is actually amazing. You're so talented. Not only am I going to become your patron, but I'm going to commission two more statues from you. So there's really, really sort of interesting little bits of fraud that have led us to where we are today. And there's a saying that a lot of us say in the counter fraud world, which is that there's no such thing as new fraud. There's just new ways of doing it. And when you look at the history, you realize just how true that is.

00:08:56 Andrew Keen: When you look at the history, our fraudster our fraudsters sometimes treated, if not as heroes, certainly, Anja talks in her book, Anja Shortland, about, hackers who have often been, admired, certainly amongst young people. Is there an element of admiration for an effective fraud for Michelangelo who pulls off a successful heist, particularly since fraud often, although I'm sure not always, doesn't involve violence in contrast to other kind of crimes?

00:09:34 Becky Holmes: Yeah. It's interesting when you start looking at how the film industry has depicted fraud. So for example, Catch Me If You Can.

00:09:43 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Thinking of that.

00:09:45 Becky Holmes: Yeah. So Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale who led this very glamorous life, essentially defrauding people going on airplanes and whatever. There's a lot of films where fraudsters are seen as living very glamorous lifestyles and kind of sticking it to the man as it were. You know, the little person defrauding his way into success. So it can be seen like that, but the problem is that 99% of fraud, there's nothing glamorous about it. It's people at home having lost their entire life savings, you know, at risk of homelessness, losing friends and family. There's it's that thing, isn't it, with where a lot of subjects where Hollywood makes it a lot more palatable than it is.

00:10:37 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The glamour of Catch Me If You Can, and it was a 2002 movie, very popular one. Combining your book about romantic fraud and this history of fraud and the future of fraud, is there a certain heartlessness then that perhaps combines or defines fraudsters? If, if you're ruining people's lives, if you're ripping I mean, you don't always ruin people's lives, but you're ripping them off, if you're stealing all the savings of old people. It implies or suggests a degree of heartlessness. Is that fair, Becky?

00:11:18 Becky Holmes: Do you know it's a difficult one because some people would say we all do what we can to survive. And I think it's one of those situations where you look at each thing and it's on its own merit. If you are somebody who has decided that you can't be bothered to work properly and therefore you're just gonna sit at home and you're gonna make phone calls to people, defrauding them out of their money, then absolutely it's heartless and it's horrific. There is a relatively new type of fraud, let's say, which is horribly called pig butchering fraud. And, it's called that because where it originated from, which is in China, they used that term to denote fattening up pigs for slaughter. So in other words, the victims were the pigs. Now this is where, people are it's a sort of a combination of romance fraud and investment fraud. People, it's a very long game, and they are encouraged to put money into investment platforms that don't exist. Now the reason I bring this up is because the people the perpetrators of pig butchering frauds are actually victims themselves. So they have been trafficked, human trafficked into scam compounds, normally in Southeast Asia, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia. So you've therefore got somebody who is committing the fraud, but they're also a victim. The fraud landscape is sort of far too complicated now to be able to make a statement to say that it's heartless because the landscape is so huge with every conceivable, situation within it.

00:13:02 Andrew Keen: Although it sounds and I wanna come to maybe talk a little bit more about those types of frauds, that those people don't have a lot of choice. There seems to be an element of ownership, even slavery about people who are, first of all, ripped off and then forced into perpetuating it themselves.

00:13:22 Becky Holmes: Absolutely. They've got no choice. They have quotas that they have to meet each day. And if they don't meet those quotas, they have there's severe consequences. They're beaten, even electrocuted. So, yeah, absolutely no choice. It is it is completely 100% modern slavery.

00:13:42 Andrew Keen: So you've talked about Michelangelo as an interesting example of an early fraudster. We've talked a little bit about the Greeks. Was there a moment, Becky, when fraud became modern? Was it the beginnings of capitalism, a monetary economy, maybe in the eighteenth century? You're talking to me from Stratford-upon-Avon, the heart of the industrial capitalist revolution in the eighteenth century, nineteenth century.

00:14:10 Becky Holmes: Do you know what? It's a good question. I haven't thought of it. I'm not sure there was a point when it became modern. I mean, define modern. Maybe it was when we started doing things online. You know, not even

00:14:23 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wanna come to the online stuff is obvious, and I wanna spend a lot of time talking about that. But pre online, I mean, we take for granted that online always existed. It didn't exist, of course, before the nineteen nineties. With the stock market, for example, with the birth of a, the a stock market kind of capitalism, I'm assuming that lends itself to all sorts of new potential for fraud.

00:14:50 Becky Holmes: Yeah. Of course. I mean, the stock exchange was actually built as a way to, overcome, fraud, which was which was happening before that. The stock exchange was made so that people only regulated people could actually trade, to stop fraud. Of course, that hasn't quite worked because now, you know, there's gonna be tons of fraudsters, all over the place. But I think it's probably, when the media came in, that added a bit of it when we sort of started putting out stuff that other people could read, when we started putting out newsletters that people could, could see and get ideas from. I think with so many things, as communication as the way to communicate to more people, increases, so does the ability to defraud because your audience gets bigger, which is obviously I know we're gonna go on to talk about online, but you look at the snake oil salesman, for example. These things happen because communication happens. Some letters go out to say that this is happening. This will help you. You know, there's all these every time you can send a wire send a telegram to somebody, there's a possibility for fraud.

00:16:08 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I wonder whether modernity is bound up in this in the sense that when people didn't move around a lot, when we didn't have mobility, when everybody lived in the same place, they were born and died in the same place, maybe in a place like Stratford-upon-Avon where you lived, before it becomes a lot more difficult. I mean, you talked about the Hollywood movie Catch Me If You Can. It requires a character like DiCaprio to be moving around a lot and to be inventing and reinventing yourselves. Perhaps no surprise then that America is the home, in some ways, of modern fraud because of the mobility of the population? Or do you think even in villages where people were born and died in the same place and they knew everyone growing up, there's still a potential for fraud? Or does it require a degree of anonymity of not knowing the other person?

00:17:01 Becky Holmes: Well, I think we learned quite early on that there needs to be some an anonymity. So, of course, you know, times gone by when people did live and, you know, born, live, die in the same place. Fraud, of course, still happened, but I think it would generally be that it would happen once per person because somebody would be then known to be untrustworthy, unless, of course, they then left on horse and cart and went to the next village. So it would have been a lot less prolific. And you're right. The fact that people now move, you can get on a plane. I could get on a plane and be in Spain tonight. Nobody knows me in Spain. I could do something there that's illegal and then come back. And, again, with modern technology, we can all be anonymous. You know, we can be anonymous within our own town, within our within our own friendship groups if we want to if we want to, you know, set up a fake number and message our friends. Being anonymous is incredibly easy these days.

00:18:05 Andrew Keen: And does it also lend itself to large cities? You're a couple of hours or three hours north or maybe many more hours if British transport doesn't work very well, north of London. Our big cities the beginnings of big cities, nineteenth century London, Paris, New York, these are perfect places for fraud, aren't they?

00:18:27 Becky Holmes: Yeah. They certainly are. Yeah. You've got a huge number of people squashed into a relatively small area, so you've got, I guess, easy pickings for a fraudster, and you can go between one or the other, and you can sort of you know, let's say you can put London into four quarters, and you can pull a scam in each of those quarters and then move off to somewhere else. So yeah. But, you know, why not do London and then move your way up the small towns on the way up to Birmingham? I think in days gone by, yes, it sort of mattered that you were somewhere where you could do the same thing over and over again, and it was big enough so that you weren't seen. But I think now, you know, I work from home in this office. I don't leave this office for days sometimes when I'm doing stuff, and I can be whoever I want to be online.

00:19:21 Andrew Keen: Britain is also not just the place where modernity was born, but also where the idea of perhaps modern criminality was born and then people who tried to figure out crimes. As Sherlock Holmes, of course, is the quintessential British detective. In a sense, I wouldn't say you're Sherlock Holmes, but you're in that tradition of trying to figure out, fraud. In your future of fraud, in your history of fraud, Becky, do you talk about those people who fight fraud, whose careers are based on seeing through it from Sherlock Holmes onwards?

00:20:04 Becky Holmes: I haven't looked at any fictional, characters actually, which perhaps was an oversight because it would be quite interesting. There were so many of them. But then it's one of those

00:20:15 Andrew Keen: Holmes comes to mind. I mean, he's the classic.

00:20:18 Becky Holmes: Of course. Yeah. But then

00:20:19 Andrew Keen: like a

00:20:20 Becky Holmes: You know, you look sort of into the nineteen seventies, and we've got Columbo, which is over in the US, which is my absolute classic. Yeah. There are there are so many. It's one of those things where when you're writing a book that has to be very small, it was, you know, purposefully concise, you have to omit so many things. And unfortunately, the fictional characters became it. But, yeah, I'm a big fan of Sherlock Holmes. He's my namesake after all.

00:20:47 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Maybe you're related. So let's get to the Internet. It's always seems to be the subject that we talk about, we end up talking about on this show. It doesn't matter we're talking about politics, economics, crime, culture, identity, loneliness. What is it about the Internet that has compounded, fraud? What is it its anonymity? Is it its ubiquity? Its borderlessness?

00:21:17 Becky Holmes: I think it's all of those things. The fact that you can have an account in any name that you want. You can put up anybody's picture to pretend to be yourself. You can do absolutely anything, under somebody else's name or a made up name or your own but with a different picture. And it is borderless. No more do I you know, I wouldn't have to go and, knock on somebody's door to commit a doorstep crime, for example. I wouldn't have to go and knock on a door to swindle somebody out of their money. I can do it online. I can reach thousands of people in the click of one button. So the problem with technology is that it's made fraud very, very profitable and relatively easy.

00:22:06 Andrew Keen: The problem with technology is it hasn't resulted in us becoming any less credulous. I mean, your first book was called Keanu Reeves is not in love with you. There are presumably people who believe that the Keanu or the person who claims to be Keanu Reeves online is actually in love with them. Why haven't we kept up with technology? Why are we so credulous?

00:22:32 Becky Holmes: Gosh. Why haven't we kept up with technology? I wish I could answer that. We love technology, don't we? We love sort of anything new, anything that we can play with. And I tend to feel — this is just my own personal view, that we get ahead of ourselves. So we invent things without really thinking about the implications. Well, I know we're gonna get onto AI, but I would very happily turn AI off. So I think we can't keep up with technology because we've made our own demise. You know? We're creating all these super clever, whizzy things, and we're all getting overexcited with it. But we haven't given any thought to actually the further implications of that, and fraud is case in point with this. You know, look you know, look at AI is incredible. It's amazing. But from a fraud perspective, it's terrifying. The same as cryptocurrency. Very, very clever. I don't understand it, but it's very clever. But it's, you know, fantastic for fraudsters. The same with social media. We all love social media.

00:23:47 Andrew Keen: Well, I think I don't, but you many of us do.

00:23:51 Becky Holmes: I do. I think it's been so good for so many people. As with a lot of things, though — at the same time, it's great for fraudsters. So we don't keep up with technology because we've made it what we what it is ourselves.

00:24:11 Andrew Keen: So in a sense then, it's a kind of mirror. We wanna believe stuff. We wanna believe some famous, wealthy, beautiful person is really in love with us. We wanna believe that this deal of land in Miami or crypto free cryptocurrency or this deal or that deal or this free opportunity in the Gulf, especially for us, we're just not very not very smart, are we, Becky?

00:24:39 Becky Holmes: I don't think it's a case of not being very smart. I mean, god, there have been some absolutely incredibly clever people caught out with various different frauds. I think it's that at some point in every single day, every single one of us, there will be a point of vulnerability. So, something I say in the book is when Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2022, I sent money to an animal charity, which turned out to be not an animal charity at all, just a man with nothing to do with animals. It was a fraud. And I genuinely just walked into that because it hit me here. It really sort of hit me, and I thought, oh my goodness. And I didn't do any due diligence. I just sent that money. And, you know, this is what I do for a living. It's

00:25:26 Andrew Keen: it's And I have to admit, I'm not as smart as I like to think I am. I got I wasn't defrauded, but I got sucked into a fraud. Someone emailed me and asked me to do a speech offering me lots of money. I've done lots of speeches like you, and I believe them. And it was clear in the end that it was a fraud. I didn't lose any money. Talking about, Russia with Shortland, she noted that, in Russia, it's not even a crime. Ransomware isn't a crime. Does that change things when you have entire countries, Russia, North Korea, perhaps Iran, where fraud is legal and often used as an instrument of the state?

00:26:11 Becky Holmes: Yeah. Of course, it changes things because it's difficult enough the way that we operate in the over here in the in the UK and in the US in that it's very difficult to work with other jurisdictions depending on the jurisdiction, but it's hard. If somebody in the UK has money stolen from a fraudster by somebody in, let's say, West Africa, it's incredibly hard, to actually find to get that back. Now you might be successful if the police force that you're dealing with really wants to cooperate and you put together some concerted effort. If you're dealing with a country where they could not care less, then the chances of ever seeing any justice for a victim or ever getting any money back, well, they're absolutely zero, and you may as well not bother. And that's a terrible thing.

00:27:05 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I it's always easy to brush everything under the carpet and blame everything on the Russians or the North Koreans, but it seems as if fraudulent characters like Donald Trump are acquiring more and more power and credibility. Is there any coincidence, Becky, between the increasing amount of fraud and the appearance of characters like Trump in public life who often don't even hide their own fraudulent qualities or lack of qualities?

00:27:38 Becky Holmes: Donald Trump is a is a constant source of intrigue for me, because, you know, he was the one that started coming up with fake news. He was calling everything fraud. You know, it's fake news. It's not what I said even though it's on tape. I think the fact that people like him seem to be willing to publicly lie on record and then deny it and claim that it's fraud, that somebody has said it. That is one thing. That is bad enough. However, there are millions of people who are happy to suspend their disbelief and ignore that. Ignore that fraudulent behavior. That to me is very, very worrying. It shows that humanity, we've sort of developed a lack of critical thinking. We just believe what we're being told to believe if we like that person. We have stopped thinking for ourselves. And in terms of fraud, that's kind of that's one of the worst things. As soon as you stop questioning things, you're it's almost like you're fair game.

00:28:55 Andrew Keen: Now you're beginning to sound like me. Of course, Trump's family is very much involved with cryptocurrency. I've always been deeply skeptical of that. I have a background in technology. It's crypto, exhibit A, in the fraudulent nature of our digital culture. What do you make of it? Is it always? Is it always, a scam, a fraud? And is it any surprise that Trump and his two sons are so heavily involved now in it?

00:29:28 Becky Holmes: Well, interestingly, a few years ago, Donald Trump said that he thought cryptocurrency was the biggest scam that had ever been.

00:29:36 Andrew Keen: And coming from him, that was quite a statement. Right?

00:29:39 Becky Holmes: Wasn't it just? And now and now suddenly, he's all over it because he saw that, you know, that there was gonna be some, financial merit in it. Crypto for me, I've called it in the book, it's half genius, half terrifying. I want nothing to do with it because I think it's because I'm middle aged, and I'm sort of I like my thing I like my money in the bank. It's a really interesting thing that there's a guy called Nick Furneaux did a book called There's No Such Thing as Crypto Crime. And, actually, he's completely right. There isn't. It's just the vehicle through which a lot of existing frauds take place. But it's so easy with crypto because in so in the United States, for example, they have crypto ATMs. A couple of states actually have now banned them over the last few weeks, which is great. But these crypto ATMs let's say that I'm talking to somebody who I think is in love with me, and they tell me they need some help. They will say to me, there's a crypto ATM in a shop down the road from you. Can you put can you transfer me some money using that? It'll come to my crypto wallet, and I'll be able to feed myself, clothe myself, whatever it is they're saying that they need. You do that, and your money is gone. There's no bank transfer. There's no way of knowing who that's going to. It's a it's a fraudster's dream. And it astounds me that it's not I know the whole point isn't is that it's not regulated, but people are having millions of pounds stolen through crypto. And yes—

00:31:28 Andrew Keen: Tens of millions, I think. Sometimes even billions.

00:31:31 Becky Holmes: Yeah. And I know that I know that it's a real thing and that people have made money from it. And I know people who work in the crypto industry, and they're very clever, intelligent people, and they talk about the pros of crypto quite rightly. But for me, as a normal person who has no knowledge of crypto, I think it's frightening.

00:31:51 Andrew Keen: Do you think that there may have been a point in history, though, when someone said the same thing about money? After all, when we exchange $20 bills, they're not really worth $20 billion, $20 million, or — sorry — $20. So it requires a degree of abstraction, which is taken to an extreme with crypto.

00:32:16 Becky Holmes: Yeah. You're right. And, also, if you think about it, you know, I give somebody I pay somebody in cash for something. There's no more, any proof of that than there is sending crypto to somebody. But I think the thing is, as humans, we're very good at putting value to something we can see. So,

00:32:40 Andrew Keen: And touch and put it on top of it.

00:32:43 Becky Holmes: So here's a case in point. I used to have an addiction to online gambling and but never I can now go to a casino. In fact, I was in Las Vegas recently, and I will put physical money into a machine. But when I've spent what I want to spend and no more, I can walk away because I've been putting physical money in. I know how much that is. When it was online, I couldn't see it. I could not see how much that money was worth, so I just used to put it in over and over and over again.

00:33:19 Andrew Keen: And I

00:33:19 Becky Holmes: think that's a similar thing with crypto. We don't have that sort of part of our brain that thinks, right, that equates to this much. That's my own view anyway.

00:33:29 Andrew Keen: And, we haven't even talked yet about credit cards and both their ubiquity and the fact that we increasingly live in a in a in a in a credit card economy where we don't even use cash anymore. The fact that credit cards now dominate most people's personal finance must also compound fraud.

00:33:55 Becky Holmes: I think credit cards are such a thing now because we don't have cash. We live you know, so many of us live, not hand to mouth, but we live kind of month to month. It's harder to live. Cost of living is much higher, etcetera. So we rely on credit cards. And I think this is where the fraud comes back into it, which is that when you are in a situation where a little bit of money would help you. If somebody says to you, for example, I've got a great way to make a bit of money on crypto, it's much more tempting to do that than it would have been before we were all so skinned.

00:34:40 Andrew Keen: On top of crypto then, what are the what are the types of scams that you cover that you think are particularly pertinent that you put in your book? What two or three kinds of scams or frauds, somehow capture the fraudulent spirit of our age?

00:35:01 Becky Holmes: The fraudulent spirit of our age. I wish I'd used them. I'm gonna steal that quote from you.

00:35:05 Andrew Keen: You can have it. It's yours.

00:35:06 Becky Holmes: Okay. I've been I haven't concentrated on particular frauds because there are so many. Some that I've mentioned. So it's more, I suppose, the way that fraudsters are getting to us. So for example, there's been more reports, and I and I hate this, of fraudsters infiltrating groups like Alcoholics Anonymous because they know or churches. Because they know that when people are sitting with others who they feel an affinity with

00:35:40 Andrew Keen: Who they trust.

00:35:41 Becky Holmes: Who exactly. They're gonna trust them. They're gonna open up, and there's you know, they're ripe for the picking then.

00:35:48 Andrew Keen: Mhmm.

00:35:48 Becky Holmes: So there's that. That's kind of social engineering at its at its highest. I touch on romance fraud because, obviously, that's my...

00:35:56 Andrew Keen: I mean, that's your thing. That's

00:35:57 Becky Holmes: Great love.

00:35:58 Andrew Keen: Yeah — fake love.

00:36:01 Becky Holmes: But yeah. And, you know, and investment ones and also, I talk about the fact that I think in the future, there's gonna be a return to these old school scams as well. I think that people are too busy talking about how everything is gonna be. All fraud's gonna be online. I don't think that's the case at all. I think, you know, there's a lot of fraudsters out there who are very clever, and they will think, right. Well, everyone's got their eye on technology. Let's bring something back. People now are saying, oh, you know, I really just I don't wanna speak to AI. I wanna speak to a human. So when a human picks up the phone, suddenly, people are full of trust for this human. Well, you can't do that either.

00:36:42 Andrew Keen: And, of course, with AI, we're increasingly it's increasingly hard for us to distinguish between human and nonhuman. You mentioned AI earlier. What kind of danger does AI add to age of fraud?

00:37:00 Becky Holmes: Well, AI for me is where it all falls down. So I'm gonna use romance fraud as an example. You used to be able to say to somebody, if you thought they were involved in a fraudulent relationship, you used to be able to say, if you can't call them, if you can't do a voice message, if you can't do a video call with them, these are things to look at because that's not right. And it was often obviously because the person would be, would have a different accent, English wouldn't be their first language, etcetera, and you'd be able to tell pretty soon. But with AI, you can't say these things anymore. So it takes away all of the warnings, all of the I'm not keen on the term red flags, but all of these red flags. AI has got rid of those because you can have a call with somebody. You can have incredibly convincing messages backwards and forwards that are done through

00:38:03 Andrew Keen: But you can't meet a bot. I mean, that's not convincing. You can't have a date with a bot and get away with it.

00:38:14 Becky Holmes: You can't. No. But then, you know, a person who commits online romance fraud, there's no need to arrange to meet.

00:38:24 Andrew Keen: So what are we gonna do about this? I know that a lot of your book focuses on how to prevent fraud. A lot of it has to do with education. I don't know if you have kids, Becky, but many people, of course, are schooling their children and dealing with AI and dealing with all the problems of the Internet. Does a lot of this come down to education for people with kids online? Do you just need to educate them in the dangers of fraud online, of not trusting people you don't know? In the old days, of course, you didn't trust people you bumped into in the street. Now it's bumping into them on the Internet.

00:39:02 Becky Holmes: Yeah. There needs to be a lot more education. And I do say in the book that I think it should be more formalized as well. I don't understand why fraud awareness isn't on the curriculum, for example. Fraud is something that every single person on this entire planet is gonna come across in some way or another. So why aren't we teaching about it? For me, that just is absurd that we're not doing it. There are lesson plans and, you know, bits of literature that teachers can use, but it's still very much up to their own county or state over in the US. For me, there should be something that the umbrella departments put in place to teach people early on. And I think and, again, it's just a personal opinion. I think it should be based on what age they're on. So for example, when children start on gaming sites, when they start, you know, speaking to people online over the gaming headsets. That's been huge in terms of fraudsters persuading children to part with parents' credit cards or to become money mules. There should be fraud awareness around that. When children start getting their own bank accounts or not children, but teens or whatever, there should be fraud awareness around that. At university level, there should be stuff around credit cards and whatever when they get to 18. That should be a an integral part of what we teach young people. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why that is not any curriculum.

00:40:39 Andrew Keen: And what about when it comes I mean, it's one thing to be on a curriculum. It's another for parents or relatives to educate. What should a parent do when it comes to educating their kids about online fraud?

00:40:51 Becky Holmes: It's hard, isn't it? Because what kid listens to their parents when they start talking to them about, dangers online? I think I think it's one of those things where you've got to be you've got to understand that the that kids are gonna go online. Of course, they're gonna go online. They're gonna talk to strangers online. It's what happens now, Snapchat or God, you know, God knows what else. But I think it's that thing where you teach people not to have too much personal information on social media. You teach people to have their accounts locked down. And if somebody wants to be friends with them or to view their profile, they have to accept or deny that. There are little things we can do to keep ourselves from being quite so open to attack. And I think having conversations about that with between kids and parents is quite healthy.

00:41:49 Andrew Keen: What about a moral education in telling children that they shouldn't become fraudsters themselves? As you know, it's a booming business for better or worse. What would you tell a child about what kind of moral education would you like to give? Would you show them? Would you give them your book to I know some of your book deals with stories of people who've been defrauded, whose lives have been ruined. Is that the way to convince people not to get involved in online fraud, even romantic fraud?

00:42:22 Becky Holmes: I suppose with something like that I mean, I don't have kids myself, but I suppose it would be akin to just teaching your kids not to steal. You know, I suppose it would be a similar thing to that. It has to be thought of in terms of how the child is living. So there's a there's an example I give in the book where, there was a police force. I think it was in Ghana. They wanted to go out to schools and teach kids not to get involved in this life of fraud even though it's easy compared to, a lot of other ways of life in Ghana. And they went over and they showed a video to these kids, and it was this Western woman. And she'd had all of her money stolen, by a fraudster from Ghana. And she was sitting in a caravan. She'd lost her house, etcetera. And the kids said, well, she's fine. She's got electricity and water and shelter, and she's in clothes. So and for me, that was really poignant. I thought you've really got to kind of talk to you've got to educate people in a way that makes sense to them.

00:43:37 Andrew Keen: Finally, what about regulation? I mean, obviously, fraud breaks the law, so laws outside Russia, at least, don't allow people to do fraud. But would you like to see changes in the law, in regulation, especially online stuff?

00:43:53 Becky Holmes: Yeah. There's a lot I'd like to see different. So over here in the UK, we've got a horrible statistic, which is that fraud makes up between 40 and 50% of crime in the UK, and police resource dedicated to fraud is 1%. So I would very much like to see that change.

00:44:15 Andrew Keen: More Sherlock Holmes or real life Sherlock Holmes?

00:44:18 Becky Holmes: Real life Sherlock Holmes. Real life Columbo. You know, I would like to see the police be given more resource, so, budget, manpower, and training, crucially training. And it's the same in the US. There's I can't I think it was Minnesota, but don't quote me on that. I think it was Minnesota where there are so many million people, in that state, and there's only 10 police officers dedicated to any form of cybercrime out there. And not a single police officer is that their main job. They sort of do it on the side. So no country is giving fraud, actually, the attention that it deserves, and I would really like to see that change.

00:45:06 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. The Future of Fraud, and Its Past, by Becky Holmes, a real authority on fraud. She gives speeches on it. She writes about it, but she doesn't do it herself. She fights against it. The book is out. Becky Holmes, author, The Future of Fraud. Thank you so much.

00:45:26 Becky Holmes: It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.