Collared

In 2022 a charming, 34 year old, art dealer named Inigo Philbrick was jailed for what would become known as one of the largest art frauds in history.Philbrick was sentenced to seven years in a US prison, with two years of supervised release and an order “to pay forfeiture of over 86 million dollars. Proving that like many of the rarest fine art pieces - you really can’t put a price on freedom. But how do you value anything that doesn’t have a price? And why does the intangible nature of art attract some of the dodgiest dealers?Today on Collared, we’re hearing from Tomasso Di Ruzza about the delicate balancing act required to regulate the art world.But first…When you hear the word Hollywood to you, you’re probably thinking of, we red carpets, box office records, glamorous stars and creative powerhouses. But what if we told you that behind the scenes, there can be a completely different kind of creativity at play. It’s estimated that the global film industry generates over 100 billion dollars every year through box office sales, streaming, licensing and home entertainment. So from Hollywood, to Bollywood, Nollywood and everywhere in between - massive sums of money are passing across borders through web-like corporate networks. While this complexity drives blockbuster entertainment, it also creates the perfect smoke screen for high-stakes financial crime.  From indie passion projects to Oscar-winning epics, cinema has inadvertently become a premier destination for washing dirty cash. To help us untangle this web of scripts, screens, and dark money, we are joined AML Intelligence’s Managing Director James Treacy.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Pirates of the Caribbean movies portrayed the region as a haven for rogue sailors and pirates in the 18th century. More recently it has been seen as a luxury hideaway for the Jet-Set and their money - as told in many novels by the likes of John Grisham. But is this reputation accurate or fair? Elisabeth Lees co-founded Claritas Legal and previously spent over a decade as an in-house lawyer for the Cayman Islands government. She spoke to Collared about the country's ongoing compliance architecture overhaul and its efforts to balance regulation and reputation.Cryptocurrencies have suffered from a similar bad rep. For some it’s digital gold with the promise of huge returns. For others, it is the perfect vehicle for moving, hiding and laundering illegal proceeds from everything including scams, frauds, drugs, human trafficking and terrorist financing…The challenge for regulators is how to oversee a financial system that is opaque and anonymous by nature. AML Intelligence's EU correspondent Carlo Boffa talks to us about the increasingly divergent approaches to digital currency regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The term “Dead Internet Theory” was first used in 2021 on a message board in the depths of the internet. It’s not a hugely auspicious start for a concept that, only 5 years later, would be discussed in mainstream media and academic texts around the world. The theory asserted that we were approaching a point when the Internet would consist primarily of bot activity and automated content manipulated by algorithmic curation. And what might that mean for online crime, fraud and scams? Dr Shlomit Wagman explains.Plus...Not so long ago, creating a deepfake of a person was quite the technological feat involving videographers, SFX specialists and potentially even actors.Today, there’s multiple applications that will do all that work for you in a matter of minutes - so long as you can input some social media content, a video clip or an audio recording or two.Which makes identity theft and online scams much easier to pull off. In this episode of Collared we explore how AI is shifting our perception of reality and the landscape of fraud. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There’s an old saying in the world of property that you’ve probably heard - that the only three things that matter when buying one are location, location, location. So if geographic placement is the key indicator of future appreciation and value - what do places like London, Toronto, New York and Sydney have in common? Well according to the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index - they’re among the most attractive places in the world to launder money through real estate.Today on Collared we’re hearing how and why some locations have become hotbeds of this type of activity, what governments are doing to halt it and how ordinary housebuyers are affected by a distorted market.Plus...According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), money laundering through real estate is one of the oldest known ways to move and hide illicit funds. So to understand just how prevalent this type of crime is today - we hear from CEO and Managing Partner at Turn Advisory, Tommas Kaplan about how criminals are infiltrating the property world and how they operate within it Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.