I am stubborn, but not that stubborn. For about 19 years I have been conducting a social experiment without the awareness of most of the participants. You thought you were reading a website about the risks faced by comms providers and their customers, and I suppose you were. I was conducting an experiment in human motivation. Can the repeated hectoring of a niche audience provoke people to fix the failings of businesses in ways that reduce the probability of those failings reoccurring in future? The answer is sometimes a qualified ‘yes’, but only sometimes. As pleasing as those occasional victories have been, I intend to move to a new home soon, and the time spent packing boxes has prompted me to rethink how much I devote to Commsrisk. Also, being threatened by the UK’s most notorious libel lawyers did make me question my appetite for waging further war against the villainy that most industry insiders know about but hardly anyone likes to speak of. Previously I would have guaranteed new output every weekday by simply writing and scheduling more articles ahead of a holiday or other interruption in the time I can spend at a keyboard. Now I am going to permanently reduce my workload, with the hope this will help me to keep going for longer than if I continued at the current pace and burned myself out. I will still write sufficient content to put out something new every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If new articles go out on Tuesdays and Thursdays it will be because somebody else contributed them.
It was not easy to decide to reduce the output of Commsrisk, even though I look forward to giving more to other aspects of life. Most of us spend too much of the day staring at screens, so I expect many of you will sympathize. Judging by the harassment I receive on a regular basis, the villains will also be glad that my pace is slowing. However, I want to sincerely apologize to those of you who have made reading Commsrisk part of your daily working routine. I know how many of you there are because I can see it in the data. It does feel like I am letting you down. You have already motivated me to keep going far longer than I originally thought possible. If Commsrisk was a film, TV show or rock band then it would be said to have a ‘cult’ following. Its popularity falls well below the giddy heights commanded by a Star Wars, a Breaking Bad or a Taylor Swift, but the loyalty of this website’s followers makes me think of Clerks, Twin Peaks or the Pixies. Never mind if you have never heard of the latter three; you just need to know that some people love them. ‘Love’ is another word that is rarely used in a professional context, especially among people who like to talk about technology, but I have felt the love for this website and that is why cutting back is painful.
I am slowing while the world keeps accelerating. It has been a paradox that the comms sector now endures so many data breaches, scams, screw‑ups and breakdowns that it is no longer possible to cover them all. This makes me fear for the future, and encourages me to retreat from networks as often as possible. Mainstream publications match the geography of news to the geography of their audiences. They ignore most of the news that relates to people who live elsewhere, or they present a slanted perspective on the inhabitants of other countries that matches the prejudices of their readers. Communications is a global business. It makes no sense to analyze what is done well and what is done poorly without trying to survey the whole. I like to think much of the criticism I write comes from a desire to live in a more meritocratic world. Not everybody can be best at everything; some of the pretenders deserve to be shoved aside. I have been increasingly teasing American readers by observing the information they receive through other channels is too narrow, which can make some of their representatives seem arrogant when they seek to give advice to audiences outside of the USA. On the other hand, many professionals are so lacking in knowledge about other countries that they have no idea about the best work, the worst work, and where their work sits between. This is a gift to charlatans who claim to be experts and leaders. It also explains why many of Commsrisk’s most popular articles have taken news from countries where English is not a native language and recycled it so English-speaking audiences broaden their horizons.
This international phenomenon has been elaborated further in recent years because audiences are using automated translation to read Commsrisk. The use of SMS blasters to propagate smishing scams offers a prime example of how audiences have an appetite for news that originated in another language. The high-profile bust of an SMS blaster gang in Paris led the French to sing songs about IMSI-catchers years before English-language newspapers started recycling old news about a single SMS blaster in New Zealand for the simple but inane reason that New Zealand’s newspapers are also written in English. Regular Commsrisk readers now understand why Chinese is the native language of SMS blaster crime syndicates. So when Commsrisk highlighted the story of SMS blasters sending Chinese-language scam messages in Japan, a topic that first became prominent through Japanese social media, having received barely any mainstream coverage even within Japan, a record number of Japanese were simultaneously visiting Commsrisk to learn about SMS blasters being used by fraudsters in other countries. I may write in English, but that language is merely a transportation protocol for information that arises in one language and is then absorbed by audiences that read another. AI is accelerating this positive development. There is also the downside to AI that it is being used to amalgamate low-quality content from around the world into many more articles than any human could possibly write in the same time. Commsrisk cannot compete head-to-head with the sheer volume of slop being produced by machines, so we need to cope with the world’s acceleration by being smarter instead of working harder.
My colleague James Greenley rarely gets mentioned on these pages because he has never written a single article but he is the driving force behind the Global Fraud Dashboard, a different method of pooling information from around the world and then efficiently disseminating it as graphs, maps and other charts that are automatically updated. There will still be a need for a narrative analysis of data, but I cannot keep pace with the growing number of narratives written by both people and machines, and circulated via websites, social media and email. Some of these narratives are trustworthy; many are not. Doing a better job of collating and visualizing the raw data is going to be our way of redefining our niche while countering misinformation and staying true to the same principles. The dashboard is our best bet for continuing the Commsrisk experiment. Instead of hammering audiences with the sheer number of words I can produce, James will be hammering them with the sheer number of charts that tell unbiased stories about international trends. This industry either accepts the objective truth that is found in unbiased data or I finally admit defeat. We will never cure our ailments if we cannot acknowledge where the pain lies and which treatments have proven most effective.
Taking the dashboard to the next level requires another test of Commsrisk’s cult following. There is a long history of indie filmmakers and alternative rock bands that scrabbled for pennies to finance a new movie or album that subsequently proved to be a gem. As I cut my working hours, so the income for Commsrisk will be further constrained. James is a supergenius who should be constructing moon colonies or researching life-extending elixirs. He at least deserves a living wage in exchange for the work he puts into the Commsrisk Fraud Dashboard. We will soon launch a crowdfunding drive with the intention of securing the finances needed to run and expand the dashboard during 2026. In other words, I will be begging for money from you. I appreciate this is an unprecedented revenue model for a website whose audience is mostly comprised of professionals. I know many will want us to fail; the truth is not a friend to liars. But I am hoping that the love which has sustained us this far can take us further. James is vital to the repositioning of Commsrisk as a website that presents accurate and objective information from around the globe without fighting word-for-word against an army of rival narratives, but I cannot ask James to make some of the sacrifices I have made over the last two decades. The value he can produce would greatly exceed the cost of his work. The challenge to overcome is the same as it has always been: how to sustainably finance good impartial work without permitting it to be compromised by corporate interests.
Crowdfunding the continued development of the dashboard is another social experiment. I do not know if we will succeed. If not, then I will erect a hammock. I feel pretty tired, and could do with some rest. The 2.3 million words I have written for Commsrisk have already met my quota. But even though I must slow down, with James’ help the best may be yet to come.
