Exploring fraud and technology in a changing world

Fraud touches nearly every corner of modern life — from the scams that target individuals to the complex schemes that infiltrate businesses, supply chains and governments. Yet despite its reach, content about financial crime is often inaccessible, overly technical, or detached from the real human impact.

The FinCrime Times takes a different approach. This new publication format from Themis moves beyond traditional reports and white papers to offer something more engaging and visually compelling. It combines investigative depth with the readability of quality journalism, designed for anyone curious about how fraud operates, evolves and affects the world around us.

This first edition examines fraud through the lens of technology, exploring how digital tools and artificial intelligence are reshaping deception; and how they can also be used to fight back. Across five distinct investigations written by Themis’s Insight, Intelligence and Marketing teams, the magazine reveals how modern fraud is interconnected: geopolitical propaganda fuelling investment scams; human trafficking sustaining online fraud networks; and AI generating convincing new identities that blur the line between human and machine.

Each article stands alone as an in-depth exploration of a single fraud typology. Together, they form a broader picture of how criminal networks adapt and exploit vulnerabilities across borders, sectors and technologies.

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What’s Inside

• Burkina Faso and the Cutting Edge of Propaganda
  How AI-powered disinformation campaigns are reshaping geopolitics and enabling gold mine investment scams across West Africa. Discover how Russia’s “firehose of falsehood” has evolved with generative AI to create thousands of bot accounts, fake infrastructure projects and deep-faked world leaders - all in service of a military junta’s image and resource extraction deals.
• Pig Butchering Investment Scams: The Victims on the Other Side
  The devastating human trafficking operations behind cryptocurrency romance scams, where victims exist on both sides of the fraud. British citizens alone lost £97.4 million to these scams in 2023, but behind every fraudulent message is often a trafficked individual trapped in a fortified compound, stripped of their freedom and coerced into exploiting others.
• Uncertainty, Fraud and Knowledge Gaps in the Illegal Wildlife Trade
  Where environmental crime meets financial fraud in the $48 billion illegal wildlife trade. Explore how criminals exploit regulatory and scientific grey zones to launder endangered species through legal markets and how innovations like isotope analysis and AI detection tools are helping to fight back against caviar fraud, timber mislabelling and wildlife trafficking.
• Identity Fraud and the Blurred Edges of the Self
  Synthetic identities, deepfakes and the commodification of personal data in the digital age. With more than 118,000 identity fraud reports recorded in the first half of 2025 alone, discover how fraudsters are constructing plausible digital personas that belong to no one; and how a $38 million deepfake video call pulled off one of the most sophisticated corporate frauds in history.
• Case Study: The Human Cost of Digital Fraud
  Inside the sophisticated infrastructure enabling global fraud operations and the unwitting service providers who make them possible. From CRM software to payment processors, explore how scam centres operate with the efficiency of legitimate businesses, extracting at least $275 million from 32,000 victims while hiding behind a network of professional intermediaries.