The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of UK Finance or its members.

Yet discourse around it has not caught up with its modern realities. Fraud is oftentimes treated as a monolith, when in practice it consists of distinct criminal markets shaped by technology, geopolitics and vulnerabilities built into our systems.

This complexity is what motivates us at Themis to take a different approach to communicating financial crime risk. We have just launched a new publication exploring key fraud typologies and trends. Featuring recent case studies, FinCrime Times offers sharp insight into today’s evolving fraud landscape and the forces shaping the UK’s fraud environment.

Propaganda, AI and West African investment scams
The first article examines the use of AI-enabled propaganda in Burkina Faso to legitimise gold-mine investment schemes. While the UK is rarely the primary target, the underlying techniques are familiar. AI-driven bot farms, fabricated infrastructure projects and deep-faked political figures mirror manipulation tools increasingly used against UK consumers. As a Marketer working in Financial Crime, this story is super interesting. 

Pig butchering
The UK has seen a sharp rise in crypto-related fraud, with reported losses reaching a record £306 million in a year (ending 31 March 2023). Our second article examines “pig butchering”, a model that blends long-term grooming, psychological conditioning and the appearance of investment expertise. It also highlights the human-trafficking networks underpinning these scams, an angle often missing in UK reporting. 

Fraud in the illegal wildlife trade
Environmental crime is rarely discussed as a fraud issue, yet the £38–50 billion illegal wildlife trade depends on falsified permits, mislabelled goods and opaque supply chains. Recent UK seizures of mis-declared timber, endangered species and illegally imported wildlife products show these vulnerabilities are real. Fraud typologies in wildlife trafficking mirror those in other high-value commodities, revealing how regulatory blind spots are exploited wherever verification is weak.

Synthetic identities
Identity fraud remains central to the UK’s risk landscape. In 2024, it accounted for 59% of cases filed to Cifas’s National Fraud Database, with account takeover rising by 76% and SIM-swap fraud surging by more than 1,000%. Emerging trends point to the next frontier: synthetic identities created using fragments of real and fabricated data augmented with generative AI. Cifas has flagged the growing use of AI-generated documentation, sometimes sophisticated enough to pass verification, as well as voice fakes used to impersonate people during security processes.

Digital fraud
The final article maps the professionalised infrastructure that enables online fraud at scale, from CRM platforms and data-scraping tools to payment processors and social-media intermediaries. For UK firms, this raises an increasingly urgent policy question: where does service provision end and complicity begin? 

Earlier in my career, working in technology and early biometric solutions, we spent years trying to convince the market that identity could no longer be treated as static. Even then, the signs were there: behaviour shifting online, verification becoming more porous, and criminal techniques adapting faster than legacy systems could respond.

*Source: National Crime Agency.