Many readers will be familiar with at least one of the following statistics.
Very little has changed in the last 12 months, as the world’s consumers bear the weight of another US$1.03 trillion stolen by scammers
Global State of Scams Report 2024
$442 Billion Has (sic) been lost to scams worldwide in the last 12 months
Global State of Scams Report 2025
You do not need to be a forensic investigator to detect a dramatic change in tone from the people producing a supposedly authoritative report into the scale of scams worldwide. After their 2024 survey, the Global Anti Scam Alliance (GASA) screamed ‘trillion’ until everybody had been brainwashed into repeating it in their sleep. The word was mentioned in headline after headline by GASA and by Feedzai, the co-authors of the Global State of Scams reports. Jorij Abraham of GASA went on a grand tour, telling anybody who would listen about trillion-dollar scam losses. Many continue to repeat this statistic today, despite GASA and Feedzai commissioning a follow-up survey in the meantime.
In contrast, you have to leaf through several pages of the 2025 report to find the equivalent statistic. People jump on bandwagons when they are traveling in the right direction, not after they start rolling backwards. You will be hard pressed to find anyone in GASA or Feedzai (or anywhere else) talking about the 57% reduction in scam losses that occurred between 2024 and 2025, per their figures. What kind of organization claims its mission is to share insights concerning consumer scams, but then neglects to mention that the USD442bn loss figure derived from its 2025 survey is USD588bn less than the figure quoted in the very first line of its 2024 report? An organization that offers no explanation for such a massive variance cannot be trusted to impartially explain other trends in criminal activity.
Questions should have been asked about the desirability of a survey that is designed to influence policymakers being run in cooperation with Feedzai, a fintech unicorn that has already attained a USD2bn valuation on the back of projections about how much fraud and financial crime its AI technology will prevent. The tech industry is responsible for the world having too much crime; it has given us too many irresponsible billionaires already. Now that global scams have already fallen by half, will Feedzai’s valuation also be cut in two? Or do surveys only matter when they produce the statistics that venture capitalists and private equity funds want to see?
If a politician or a government agency or an industry consortium could claim they were responsible for a 10%, 20% or 30% fall in scam losses then they would not hesitate to do so. But when the fall is 57% across the whole planet, and when most of the people on the bandwagon have done absolutely nothing to reduce scams, then the statistics become an embarrassment. Instead of revealing meaningful trends or helping policymakers to set national and international priorities, a change of this magnitude reveals the data should be ignored until a proper examination has determined the flaws in the way the data was gathered and mistakes in the way conclusions were drawn.
Or to put it another way, we collectively suck at measuring networked crime but this will never be solved by marketing goons who serve the ultra-rich. Their surveys will always reach conclusions that are meant to mislead policymakers because marketing businesses work on behalf of the clients that pay them, not because they are academics interested in establishing facts. Lobbyists promote policies that benefit the people who pay their wages, not the rest of us.
There is a fundamental divergence in the goals of two distinct groups of people who say they want to reduce crime.
- Some people want attention. They like numbers that are big, or small, or which rise, or fall, depending on the narrative that is most convenient for them. Politicians and salesmen tend to belong to this group.
- Some people want to reduce crime. It is impossible to reliably reduce crime if there are no reliable measures of crime. People in this group do not care about whether a statistic will generate attention or is consistent with an established narrative. They just want the statistic to be accurate.
Sadly, a lot of the people who loudly insist we should all collaborate to fight crime do not want anybody to:
- objectively scrutinize the misinformation they produce; and
- observe that bullshit marketing gimmicks are drowning out the lessons that need to be extracted from real research into crime.
If you live long enough, you inevitably get to see many bubbles burst. Some of you remember the dotcom bubble. Or the subprime bubble. Or the Japanese bubble. Or the Dubai bubble. The trick for greedy people is to make a lot of money as the bubble expands, only to cash out before it bursts. They could not care less about the consequences for the rest of us, whether homes are repossessed, jobs are lost, or pensions become worthless. The AI bubble will be just the same. But it takes a special kind of shamelessness for fintechs to not only be pumping up yet another bubble, but to pretend they care about protecting the public from crime, even as they circulate unreliable statistics to manipulate public opinion.
The truth is that the world does not need massive investment on expensive high-tech anti-fraud gimmicks whose real purpose is to generate rent-seeking profits from now until the end of eternity. The Western world mostly needs to be weaned off an ugly caricature of capitalism that encourages corporations to put on clown shows that supposedly demonstrate their commitment to fighting fraud because they need to distract attention from how much of their profits are dependent on crime. That Meta remains one of the most prominent sponsors of GASA, despite a string of shocking revelations published by mainstream journalists, tells me all I need to know about the motivations of the people running these events.
The rest of us keep being told we need to collaborate in the fight against crime. Who are we supposed to be collaborating with? Is reducing crime the goal of the collaboration offered by GASA? Or would we be collaborating in a marketing-led cover-up that only permits attention to be drawn to the places where corrupt businesses want the public to look?
Hans Christian Andersen wrote a children’s story about a silly emperor who walked around naked because conmen persuaded him that they had cloth which cannot be seen by fools. The emperor proudly parades in front of all his subjects until an innocent child cries out in disbelief at his nudity. The mood of the people transforms as they realize they had all been going along with a deception. The emperor continues to parade naked because he cannot admit he had been tricked.
I have wasted enough time examining fraud surveys to know most of them are as naked as the emperor in Andersen’s story. People behave like these surveys confer wisdom. They actually reveal a lack of judgment. Marketing firms and industry associations produce biased surveys all the time but the pro-tech anti-crime industry behaves as if there is never a need to question the validity of survey results. It is ironic that people who claim to be able to solve every problem with elaborate automated systems that gather huge amounts of data always want policymakers to rely upon findings taken from opinion polls.
Andersen wrote many good stories for children, but The Emperor’s New Clothes is not psychologically realistic. Once people buy into a conman’s lie they will want to maintain faith in the lie, even if the objective evidence weighs heavily against it. In the story, the emperor is different to his subjects because he persists with pretending the lie is the truth. In real life, many people would persist with the lie because they would be too ashamed to admit how gullible they are. This is a common human foible that scammers exploit. We should not be surprised that many people who claim to be fighting fraud also have the same weakness, even if they refuse to admit it to themselves.
The innocent child is the hero of Andersen’s story because the child unwittingly challenged authority when adults were too scared to do so. Challenging authority tends to be costly in actual practice. I have some experience of paying this price! But if you really want to reduce crime, then the reduction of crime must be the single objective that overrides everything else. This objective is too often made subordinate to the goal of being popular.
Popularity is a route to wealth and power, and GASA’s marketing has allowed them to attain a lot of popularity, and a lot of funding, in an exceedingly short space of time. How many of the people flocking to their events have stopped to examine the qualifications of the people involved, or the quality of the information they supply? How many have asked about the organization’s policy on barring unscrupulous businesses that profit from crime but which will be tempted to throw money at GASA to whitewash their reputations? How many of GASA’s ballooning workforce would be keen for cutbacks and layoffs if a major sponsor was shown to be profiting from fraud?
I can publicly ask these questions because I do not need the millions of dollars of funding from private sector enterprises that GASA now requires to keep going. The modest audience for Commsrisk is comprised of people who care less about the popularity of a message and care more about the accuracy of facts. Those are not qualities exhibited by GASA.
