Review by Annabel
I’ve reviewed three of Melville House’s ‘Futures’ series previously for Shiny, (Gardens, Energy and Trust). They are punchy little flapped paperbacks of under 200 pages, each written by an expert on the subject, and the subjects are all relevant to our lives today. Each author’s approach is slightly different, but they all include an introduction to the subject, a survey of where we are now, and where they envisage the topic is going, frequently in really thought-provoking ways.
Becky Holmes has made a career of outing fraudsters online, including a lot of romance fraud which she wrote a book about, Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud. For The Future of Fraud she widens her scope, but before getting into the nitty gritty, we get a witty history of fraud through history, and surprise, surprise, ’twas ever thus! But as we’ll see, technology has played an ever-increasing role.
From the Ancient Greeks and the Roman Empire, to the British ‘Obtaining Money by False Pretences, etc. Act’ of 1757, and onwards to 20thC Ponzi schemes and insider trading, Holmes gives some examples which are eye-opening to us these days of what these perpetrators got, or tried to get, away with. They all have one thing in common though, and this still applies today… social engineering, ‘the exploitation of human vulnerabilities’.
As she moves from historic and present day frauds to begin looking at the future, the next chapter gives us a warning, not to concentrate so wholly on cybercrime that we forget…
Behind every fraud is a human being.
Even the most convincing AI scam has been devised and implemented by a person. My fear is that we are so caught up in the obsession that we need to be safe from new tech that we are going to forget about the old-school scams.
She gives a scary scenario of a telephone scammer who couldn’t quite convince a woman in her nineties over the phone, then being able to send a person round (with card machine) to help complete the fraud, giving an even higher chance of success. An old-school scam that is increasing in the US is that of cheque ‘washing’; in the UK, we don’t really use cheques much any more, but they’re still big business in America.
The next section deals with the biggest concern on peoples’ minds today – cyber-fraud and the rise of AI, then delving into cryptocurrency. A word of warning at the beginning reminds us that it encompasses more than just the internet – it’s the ‘Internet of Things’ – all those smart gadgets offer pathways in, however, manufacturers are increasingly savvy with the inbuilt security systems. (I still won’t have an Alexa in my house though).
We need to understand that the only thing that will fight bad humans using AI is good humans using AI.
I’ve just finished watching the latest series of The Capture on BBC TV. This deepfake conspiracy thriller is scarily prescient, set against cutting-edge AI tech of real-time video manipulation and an artificial superintelligence, ‘the ultimate goal for a lot of mad scientists’. Luckily, we’re not there yet (I hope!).
This section finishes with a look at social media, the dark web and gaming. She says ‘I am certain that gaming scams are only just getting going,’ and most of us with, or who work with, school-aged children have heard of some of the scams and cyber-crimes being committed via sites like Roblox and Fortnite.
This is where education is so important – for children, parents and, well, all of us really. Holmes has some really good ideas here, like using mindfulness – using your ” ‘wise mind’ to make decisions rather than your ’emotional mind'”. She calls for ‘fraud literacy’ to start early. She also calls out for our terminology around fraud to be changed, we shouldn’t use terms like ‘falling for’, ‘too good to be true’ and ‘lost their money’. As she says,
Let me be clear – if you have been defrauded, you have not lost your money. It has been taken from you.
The final section concentrates on advice for us all on how to be more fraud-aware, and recommending some tools we can use like ‘Ask Silver’ – an independently developed scam detector for texts, emails, websites etc. Given that a lot of lower-level fraud goes undetected, Holmes urges us to ‘support one another and report, report, report.’ A two-page bullet pointed list of precautions we should all take, a list for further reading and references etc complete the book.
Throughout, I must commend Holmes on her language, explaining all the complex terms and scams so clearly from shallow fakes to blockchain. Her research for this book is impressive, she talked to many involved in the subject. She maintains a fantastic balance between serious reportage and entertaining us, making us think, necessarily scaring us a little, but providing a calm assurance on how we can help ourselves to minimise getting caught in future.
The Future of Fraud is a great addition to this super series. (I understand ‘Bananas’ will be the next – we’re talking biodiversity.)
Annabel is one of Shiny’s co-founders and editors.
Becky Holmes, The Future of Fraud (Melville House, 2026) ISBN 9781811545859, flapped paperback original, 141 pages. Thank you to the publisher for supplying a review copy.
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