In the 1964 movie The Bedtime Story, two con-men played by David Niven and Marlon Brando go head to head to earn the affections (and trust) of heiress Shirley Jones.
The caddish Brando takes the romance approach while Niven poses as a prince to earn reel her in - in a cruel competition to swindle her family soap fortune.
If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because the film was remade in 1988 as the hugely popular Dirty Rotten Scoundrels starring Steve Martin and Michael Caine. Since then the characters have found their way to the broadway stage in 2004 and were reworked in 2019 again for film - with the fraudsters played by women this time around.
So it’s clear that this take on confidence men (and women) is tale as old as time - and one that continues to be rewritten to this day. And while the tricks of the trade might not change the tools most certainly do.
So today we’re hearing from Jim Lee, the Global Head of Capacity Building at the blockchain analytics and investigation firm Chainalysis about how the playbook has changed and what the future of scamming might look like.
Plus, a recent report by UK Finance showed that increasingly elaborate investment scams involving gold, cryptocurrencies and wine have soared in the past year with more than £220m lost to the fraud.
And while that may sound like the storyline for one of the Hollywood movies we’ve just been discussing - the reality is a lot more mundane.
Kathryn Westmore is UK Finance’s Director of Financial Crime and Interim Director of Fraud Policy. She spoke to Collared about the rise in online fraud, UK’s fraud victim compensation scheme and why social media companies might be asked to step up