The Pirates of the Caribbean movies portrayed the region as a haven for rogue sailors and pirates in the 18th century. More recently it has been seen as a luxury hideaway for the Jet-Set and their money - as told in many novels by the likes of John Grisham. But is this reputation accurate or fair? Elisabeth Lees co-founded Claritas Legal and previously spent over a decade as an in-house lawyer for the Cayman Islands government. She spoke to Collared about the country's ongoing compliance architecture overhaul and its efforts to balance regulation and reputation.

Cryptocurrencies have suffered from a similar bad rep. For some it’s digital gold with the promise of huge returns. For others, it is the perfect vehicle for moving, hiding and laundering illegal proceeds from everything including scams, frauds, drugs, human trafficking and terrorist financing…

The challenge for regulators is how to oversee a financial system that is opaque and anonymous by nature. AML Intelligence's EU correspondent Carlo Boffa talks to us about the increasingly divergent approaches to digital currency regulation on both sides of the Atlantic.

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The term “Dead Internet Theory” was first used in 2021 on a message board in the depths of the internet. It’s not a hugely auspicious start for a concept that, only 5 years later, would be discussed in mainstream media and academic texts around the world. 

The theory asserted that we were approaching a point when the Internet would consist primarily of bot activity and automated content manipulated by algorithmic curation. And what might that mean for online crime, fraud and scams? Dr Shlomit Wagman explains.

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Not so long ago, creating a deepfake of a person was quite the technological feat involving videographers, SFX specialists and potentially even actors.

Today, there’s multiple applications that will do all that work for you in a matter of minutes - so long as you can input some social media content, a video clip or an audio recording or two.

Which makes identity theft and online scams much easier to pull off. In this episode of Collared we explore how AI is shifting our perception of reality and the landscape of fraud.

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There’s an old saying in the world of property that you’ve probably heard - that the only three things that matter when buying one are location, location, location. 

So if geographic placement is the key indicator of future appreciation and value - what do places like London, Toronto, New York and Sydney have in common? Well according to the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index - they’re among the most attractive places in the world to launder money through real estate.

Today on Collared we’re hearing how and why some locations have become hotbeds of this type of activity, what governments are doing to halt it and how ordinary housebuyers are affected by a distorted market.

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According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), money laundering through real estate is one of the oldest known ways to move and hide illicit funds. 

So to understand just how prevalent this type of crime is today - we hear from CEO and Managing Partner at Turn Advisory, Tommas Kaplan about how criminals are infiltrating the property world and how they operate within it

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In the 1964 movie The Bedtime Story, two con-men played by David Niven and Marlon Brando go head to head to earn the affections (and trust) of heiress Shirley Jones. 

The caddish Brando takes the romance approach while Niven poses as a prince to earn reel her in - in a cruel competition to  swindle her family soap fortune. 

If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because the film was remade in 1988 as the hugely popular Dirty Rotten Scoundrels starring Steve Martin and Michael Caine. Since then the characters have found their way to the broadway stage in 2004 and were reworked in 2019 again for film - with the fraudsters played by women this time around.

So it’s clear that this take on confidence men (and women) is tale as old as time - and one that continues to be rewritten to this day. And while the tricks of the trade might not change the tools most certainly do. 

So today we’re hearing from Jim Lee, the Global Head of Capacity Building at the blockchain analytics and investigation firm Chainalysis about how the playbook has changed and what the future of scamming might look like.

Plus, a recent report by UK Finance showed that increasingly elaborate investment scams involving gold, cryptocurrencies and wine have soared in the past year with more than £220m lost to the fraud. 

And while that may sound like the storyline for one of the Hollywood movies we’ve just been discussing - the reality is a lot more mundane. 

Kathryn Westmore is UK Finance’s Director of Financial Crime and Interim Director of Fraud Policy. She spoke to Collared about the rise in online fraud, UK’s fraud victim compensation scheme and why social media companies might be asked to step up

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Pat Lordan is a highly sought after consultant in the world of financial crime having spent decades working in leadership roles for An Garda Síochana - Ireland’s police force. As former head of both the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau and the Irish Financial Intelligence Unit, Pat was responsible for numerous high-profile national and international operations - including the one which broke the Black Axe gang. He knows a thing or two about how fraudsters operate and share who they target and how. 

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“Wanted: Money Spark is seeking a Financial Transaction Control Analyst to join their exciting technology start-up company.

Key roles and responsibilities will include receiving and processing of incoming cash funds and transferring of funds to accounts indicated by our managers.

We offer; speedy career progression, training specific to the role, performance related bonuses, flexible hours and a work from home culture."

If this sounds like a job you might be interested in applying for - you’re not alone. When Santander published this fake job advert as an experiment in 2018, they were looking to gauge how likely Britons were to apply for a job as a money mule. But with more and more jurisdictions taking a hard line on this type of criminality - they might be in for a rude awakening if they did. We hear who the likely candidates are, what the job entails and what the consequences are for getting caught? 

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When we hear the word 'slavery' it conjures images of slave ships in the 18th century, crossing the Atlantic packed with human cargo bound for the Americas. But in reality, there is more human trafficking and slavery now than there ever was in history. With an estimated 50 million people living in modern slavery today, the practice generates nearly $250 billion in profit every year. And it’s happening in plain sight - in the very streets where we live.

But all too often the victims are hidden, faceless or hard to perceive which is why why CEO Andrew Wallis (OBE) called his charitable organisation Unseen when he first set out to tackle the problem in the UK nearly 20 years ago. He'll help us unpack what forms modern slavery takes, who the people most vulnerable to being exploited in this way are and who's doing the exploiting.

In addition we take a look at another financial crime with very human victims - some of them not immediately obvious. One area which creates a huge amount of human collateral is the world of scams. Perhaps you’ve fallen victim to one or you’ve simply stopped answering unknown callers because of how prevalent they are, but did you know that the person making those calls might also be a victim themselves? Paul O’Donoghue, Senior Correspondent with AML Intelligence, takes us through the growing problem of scam factories.

For more information on the work of Andrew and his team at Unseen UK, visit www.unseenuk.org

Host: Dee Reddy

Guests: Paul O'Donoghue (AML Intelligence) and Andrew Wallis (Unseen UK)

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As the World Cup kicks off we’re taking a look at the sport which is estimated to have over 4 billion followers across the globe. Unsurprisingly with a fanbase that large - soccer now operates on an industrial scale. In fact, it’s valued at about 200 billion dollars. 

It’s no surprise then that the sport sometimes referred to as “the beautiful game” can attract an ugly underbelly. So has the evolution of football in Europe left it vulnerable to bad actors and what will new AML regulations mean for agents and clubs?

Plus, as the World Cup kicks off this week across Canada, Mexico and the USA, AML Intelligence’s Paul O’Donoghue explains why events at this scale are so attractive to criminals looking to defraud fans, traffic victims or move dirty money across borders…

So what are the main financial crime risks presented by a global event like this?

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Money laundering, fraud and scams, and the people behind it, don’t recognise international boarders. So tackling these sophisticated international criminal networks requires law enforcement to rely on international and inter-agency coordination.

Europol is the intelligence agency based in the heart of Europe, working alongside and co-ordinating with local and regional law enforcement operations. 

Jean Phillippe Lecouffe, Deputy Executive of Operations at Europol, spoke with Collared recently and gave us an unique insight to the agency. We also speak to Tommas Kaplan about his early career combating terrorism and terrorist financing as an undercover police detective.

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The field of financial crime detection has changed a lot in three decades and our next guest has observed this evolution from a unique vantage point. Jim Lee started his career in the 1990, working as a special agent for the IRS where he ultimately became Chief of Criminal Investigations before leaving the organisation in 2024 Today, he is Global Head of Capacity Building at Chainalysis. In our conversation, he reflects on the remarkable pace of change he’s observed and his work leading the teams who have unraveled some of the most complex financial crimes the world has ever seen.

PLUS AML Intelligences Senior Correspondent Paul O’Donoghue explains exactly what FATF’s Grey Lists and Black Lists are, how they work, their economic implications, and what it really means for a country to be put on one of these lists.

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In the social media age, our understanding of influence is utterly and the idea of influencers has become pretty commonplace for most people. And it’s not unusual that they might turn to a trusted voice on their platform choice to get advice on what when they’re in the market for tech, hair or household appliance they should buy. But what if the product or service they’re buying is financial? We recently spoke to Beth Harris, Head of Financial Crime at the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority to hear about the growing problem of Finfluencers.

We also hear from AML Intelligence Co-Founder and Chair, Stephen Rae and Senior Correspondent Paul O’Donoghue about Narco States. What are they? How do they occur? And why is this a growing problem?

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