Author: Becky Holmes
ISBN No: 978-1-68589-243-2 paperback
Review date: 10/02/2026
No of pages: 141
Publisher: Melville House UK
Publisher URL:
https://mhpbooks.com/books/the-future-of-fraud
Year of publication: 21/04/2026
Brief:
price
£16.99 $
Fraud is on the increase, says the author of a further book on the crime; and no matter how clever you think you are, a scam out there has your name on it.
Becky Holmes wrote a book about romance fraud, the engagingly titled Keanu Reeves is not in love with you, and now has written The Future of Fraud. Intriguingly, while she delves into tech – online gaming, cryptocurrency, social media – she is alive to the truth that there’s nothing new under the sun. The criminal tools may be new, the psychological tricks of the fraudsters are age-old. Scam or fraud? She uses either word. I’d suggest the two words are different for good reason – which fraud prevention professional in a bank would call themselves part of a ‘counter-scam community’?
She begins with a breezy zip through the last 2000 years of western history, and shows how fraud has always been with us (scientist Sir Isaac Newton was among victims of the British financial crash, the ‘South Sea Bubble’, which she describes as ‘a perfect storm of investment mania and fraud’, ‘essentially a Ponzi scheme’). She goes on to the actual Charles Ponzi’s scheme, involving postage stamps (younger readers may need those explaining to them), and the ‘legendary conman Frank Abagnale’, whose story was made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Things the author doesn’t bring out are why people as bright as Newton should lose money to frauds – because of such unchanging human emotions as greed; and our fascination with crime – who does not relish diddling some more powerful or rich institution such as their employer out of money, even if only by ‘fiddling’ their expenses?
The book is up to date enough to mention the second version of the UK police’s Action Fraud national reporting line, Report Fraud; like seemingly everyone else, the author doesn’t have a good word to say for it. She makes plain the sheer scale and width of the crime; frauds about insurance cover, when you’re searching for romance on a dating website, seeking investment advice or a job; it’s ‘heavily industrialised’. The future she paints is bleak. Tech is neutral; large language models can serve as an ‘instruction manual for any kind of scam’. The prospect is of a world where we cannot tell fake apart from reality; the author fears ‘a huge rise in emotionally exploitative frauds using real-time video manipulation’, someone pleading to you for money, looking like the person they are claiming to be (your child, a celebrity asking for a donation to charity?).
What to do
How to minimise (that is to say, fraud cannot be stamped out) the impact of fraud? The author offers several possibilities. Education; why isn’t ‘fraud literacy’ on the school curriculum, she asks. She has particularly interesting things to say about language – we don’t say someone falls for a street robber, so why say they fall for a scam? You shouldn’t say someone loses money to a fraud – the money is taken. And the author doesn’t like the phrase ‘if it’s too good to be true, it is’, certainly in terms of romance fraud – if a skilled, manipulative person convinces someone online to part with money, so convincing that the fraudster is male but pretending to be a young female, who’s equipped to navigate this ever more complicated reality? She also points to some pieces of tech that may combat fraud (or at least slow its spread?): biometric authentication, digital ID (‘it seems likely eventually’), behavioural analytics, and the ‘free AI-powered tool’ Ask Silver. However, she offers no prospect from her contacts in law enforcement that the authorities can get any more of a grip on the crime. If, as some suggest, a rule for mandatory reporting of all fraud came into force, the data would overwhelm police IT. She notes that the Labour Government on taking office in 2024 appointed a Home Office minister (in the unelected House of Lords) David Hanson, for fraud. She lists his priorities ‘for the next few years’; isn’t more urgency in order? Holmes is more forthright in her opinion about social media firms; most ‘couldn’t care less about the acts of fraud …. on their watch’.
If I have a quibble it’s about the author’s breezy style, which does help the reader to engage with her (she shares that she finds the Roman Empire’s army uniform the sexiest), but does grate sometimes. When she comes to cyberflashing she adds that it’s ‘dick pics to you and me’; isn’t that rather belittling the experience of someone sent such images?! She admits late on that she avoided covering the metaverse as she’s middle aged and frightened of it – an odd admission for someone setting themselves up as an authority on the future – when surely regulating and surviving inside the metaverse will be the greatest challenge for the next few, maybe many, generations. She concludes by calling for a ‘cultural overhaul’; internet police, public education campaigns, longer jail sentences for fraudsters (but what’s the point if so very few fraudsters are ever collared?) and better aftercare for those who have been defrauded. She details the possible breakdown in trust between people and any institution (if you’re sent an email that you’ve got a parking fine, is it genuine? If you get a phone call from someone saying they’re the police, are they?). The risk above all is not of financial loss, but an endless, wearying ‘crisis of trust’.
