Tag: fraud

2023v14, Sunday: A little. Late.

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It’s nice to see a government at least pretend to take fraud seriously. It’d be nicer for them actually to do so.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

It’s almost 20 years ago that a senior police officer handed me a sheet of paper. On it was a table showing the number of specialist fraud officers in every police force in England and Wales.

Adding up the columns, the total force strength of fraud investigators didn’t even break four figures. Out of 100,000-plus officers, not even a single percentage point.

I remember writing about it for the BBC at the time. And then about the Fraud Act and Fraud Review, two years later. I left the BBC in 2007, but stayed involved in investigating and preventing fraud first at the Financial Services Authority and then in two international banks. And now, of course, as a barrister dealing both with civil and criminal fraud is still part of my daily life.

Throughout those two decades, fraud’s only got bigger. More common. Easier for fraudsters. More damaging for individuals. More prevalent. More endemic. More expensive.

One thing hasn’t changed, though.

We – that is, the UK government – still doesn’t take it seriously.

Grand plans

I’m writing this now a week or so after the very, very long-awaited Fraud Strategy was published.

It talks tough. Several hundred new officers, in a new National Fraud Squad. Making fraud an official policing priority. Using the intelligence community. Leading the world. New reporting mechanisms.

Great. Big stuff.

The scale of it

But let’s put it in context.

Getting on for half of reported crime is fraud.

The latest Economic Crime Survey fraud and corruption review (I’ll resist the urge to comment on the fact that this in fact dates back from 2020 – published this month with no word as to why we’ve had to wait three years, although of course the numbers are starkly embarrassing) says one in five businesses had suffered from fraud in the previous three years – and that’s not counting the hundreds of thousands of individuals who’ve lost sums ranging from small but painful, to life-changing and catastrophic. (The ECS notes that fraud accounted for 41% of recorded crime in the year ending September 2022, with 6% of adults being a victim. UK Finance’s fraud report gives a further small flavour of this.)

Not to mention what is to my mind one of the greatest harms caused by rampant fraud: the wholesale destruction of the trust on which any properly-functioning economy rests. The faith – let’s call it that – that on the whole, when you do business with someone, you don’t have to assume they’re going to try to rip you off.

So even with these new numbers – and ignoring the parlous state of the criminal justice system, which gets no new resources here to enable anyone investigated actually to be successfully prosecuted amid crumbling courts, staff worked to tears, and lawyers often paid less (when you count up the hours and then honestly account for expenses) than minimum wage – we’re still staring at something which barely exceeds that single percentage point. If it exceeds it at all.

This isn’t taking fraud seriously. This is doing the bare minimum. It’s buzzword bingo. Not real solutions.

If not now, then

I’m not saying this isn’t worth doing. It is. Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the “at least it’s something”. If the alternative is nothing, I’ll take this.

But it’s astonishingly uncreative. Unambitious. People have been talking, shouting even, about the effective decriminalisation of fraud for two decades. There are lots of ideas, from better prosecution techniques, to public-private partnerships, to incentivising private sector asset recovery, to … well, many more. Lip service is paid in the Strategy, but that’s as far as it goes. There’s scarce sign that anyone’s been listening.

And worst of all: it’s hard to see anything here (other than the stuff about online harms – because, of course, those didn’t exist in the same way in 2004) that couldn’t have been done at any point during these past two decades or so. If only someone had had the will. If only someone had cared.

Had fraud started being taken seriously back then, as it is in many other countries, we’d be in a very different place. Instead, we’ve had inertia, spinning wheels, – no, worse: neglect. While fraudsters have had 20 years to get better. To learn. To evolve.

We’re starting now, perhaps. At long, long last. But from way behind the line.

Who cares?

And that’s deliberate political neglect.

Starting with Labour, to be sure: I remember sitting round a table in the Law Officers’ Department as the Fraud Review was launched, a seat or two along from the great Joshua Rozenberg, as he and I and others hammered away at the abject lack of meaningful resources being offered to confront what, even then, was clearly a grossly metastasizing problem. But the past 13 years of neglect has been the Tories. Ignoring the problem. Even when the crime figures finally showed just how huge it really was.

I don’t know why this has been such an also-ran. It always seemed to me like an open goal, popularity-wise: after all, who doesn’t have a relative, or a friend, or a neighbour, who’s been left with empty pockets, or cleaned-out bank accounts, or a gaping hole in their pension – and, even worse, that mortifying (and I stress wholly unfair) sense that since nobody’s taking it seriously, and since they must have been a mug to get taken in, somehow it must be partly their fault?

So I’ll take what’s on offer. But I’d love to see someone make this an issue when the next election rolls round. Surely it’s a vote-winner?

But then, what do I know. I’m just a lawyer.

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2022ii6, Sunday: Sheer dishonesty.

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Politicians shade the truth. Fact of life. But that’s different from deliberately seeking to mislead. Option one is excusable. Option two isn’t. Kwasi Kwarteng: I’m looking at you.

Lord Agnew, demonstrating what honour in office means: “Given that I’m the minister for counter-fraud, it seems a little dishonest to stay on in that role if I’m incapable of doing it properly, let alone defending our track record.” Screenshot from the House of Lords broadcast of his speech.

Expecting politicians to be wholly straightforward is a mug’s game.

That’s not to parrot the common canard about them “all being the same”, or that “you can’t trust any of them”. I wholly disagree with that. In my experience, it usually comes from someone with a strong affiliation, or at least voting tradition, in favour of one party. If that party causes them disillusion, this is what you tell yourself to justify not even considering voting for someone else.

No. It’s that politics, and in some ways still more government, can’t work if you’re telling the whole truth all the time. I expect my political leaders sometimes to shade things. If you’re negotiating a treaty, you can’t do that in the blaze of sunlight, for instance.

But shading the truth and outright lying, bullshitting or gaslighting are wholly different. Breathtaking intellectual dishonesty and taking the voters for mugs falls firmly in the second category. Politicians who engage in option one can still deserve trust. Those who exploit option two have sacrificed it. Usually for ever. And don’t deserve ever to occupy a public office, ever again.

Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, is now firmly in box two.

Why am I being so dismissive of him? Because he’s just said something which is both flagrantly intellectually dishonest, and falls squarely in one of those few areas where I can actually boast some specialist knowledge.

I don’t watch Sunday morning political TV. Life really is too short. But according to Politico, which for its faults is usually accurate in stuff like this, he was asked this morning about the fact that his boss, our embarrassing (at best) and shameful (more likely) PM, had been rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority for misquoting crime stats. Johnson had told the House of Commons that crime was down 14% – but the UKSA pointed out that this was only true if you leave out fraud and cybercrime, which together in fact amount to about a half of recorded crime and had in fact risen 47% in the period in question.

In other words: a bit like saying that violence is down as long as you only count crimes which don’t involve a weapon.

Kwarteng’s response?

“When people talk about crime — I think fraud is really really important — but people are talking particularly about burglaries, about personal injury, about physical crimes, and I think in that context we’re seeing lower crimes.”

Bollocks. Utter bollocks. Kwarteng is a smart person. He must know this is bullshit. Both in the sense that it’s a wholly misleading number to have used (let’s not get into the fact that Johnson too must have known he was lying to the House) and to defend it at all is dishonest; and in the sense that to imply (as I think he did, with explicit intention or not) that fraud is somehow less harmful, less damaging, less serious for its victims than violence or physical theft is not only wrong, but deeply insulting to those victims.

No surprise, of course. As you’ve heard me rant on about probably far too often, the gross under-resourcing of fraud investigation except where it affects the public purse has been shameful for years. Only this past week or two, we’ve seen the minister with responsibility for fraud resign at the dispatch box (seriously, listen to his speech) because of his sense of shame at the government’s counter-fraud ineptitude, in a demonstration of honour and character which both elevates him and shows too many of his former colleagues to be without either; and we’ve seen a report from the Treasury Select Committee which underscores the poverty-stricken mess that is fraud investigation and prosecution in this country.

The point being: fraud affects millions. It doesn’t just rob them of money. It also can do terrible damage to their psyche. Their ability to trust others. And, just as importantly, their confidence in themselves. And the entirely justified impression that there’s no point in reporting it because no-one will lift a finger to help only adds insult to those injuries.

(This story in Wired – although it deals with the US experience – gets absolutely to the heart of what happens to people when they’re taken by a fraudster. It’s wrenching. And, in my experience, it’s bang on the money. Unfortunately, it’s for subscribers only – but if you do subscribe, do read it.)

So it’s for those reasons that, as far as I’m concerned, Kwarteng has just thrown his honour, his character, his credibility and his fitness for public office on the bonfire. I can understand an urge to try to protect one’s boss. Even if that boss is as venal, shameful, shameless, narcissistic and – put simply – an utter disgrace to his office as this one. But to do so in such a demeaning, insulting and downright dishonest way? No. Hell, no.

As I’ve found myself saying far too often about members of this low administration, whose dishonour discredits us all: for shame.

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2021viii19, Thursday: A failure of trust.

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A brace of Court of Appeal cases highlight both some fascinating litigation points – and why charitable trustees need to trust themselves, and their friends, a little less.

Like many people who’ve spent time in counter-fraud, I have a firm but nuanced view of fraudsters.

Nuanced, because part of the classic fraud triangle is “rationalisation” – the fraudster’s ability to convince themselves that what they’re doing isn’t really wrong. Not really. Not when looked at from the right angle, in the right light. (Albeit possibly only at 4.13pm on the second wet Thursday in October.) And not often, but sometimes, there’s almost genuine pathos in that rationalisation – particularly when it’s linked to a necessity which is caused less by greed than by some personal or family disaster.

But firm, because when you get down to it fraudsters are still essentially stealing someone else’s stuff, usually by lying to them or otherwise betraying their trust. And screwing with the trust someone places in you is, to my mind, one of the worst betrayals there is.

I could go off on a long tangent here about fiduciary obligations – for the non-lawyers, the term for the duties which arise in special kinds of relationship where you’re obliged to put someone else’s interests before your own, and not simply balance yours against theirs. Directors to their companies. Trustees to their beneficiaries. Solicitors to their clients. And so on. The tangent is tempting, not least because of a long talk with a client recently which I spent trying to convince them why what had been done to them, while patently wrong and immoral, wasn’t a breach of a “fiduciary” duty; and that calling it that would hurt their case, rather than helping it.

(We play with words, we lawyers, and forget sometimes that – as with any jargon – legal cant can seem to be a touchstone to the uninitiated, rather than a vessel of specific meaning.)

But I won’t, because what I’m really interested in here is a particular kind of fiduciary obligation: that of a charitable trustee. 

Because more than once in my career, I’ve seen charitable organisations – or those which, while not actually a charity, are non-profit and trying to do good – get taken. Badly taken. And while my primary visceral hatred is directed at the crooks (and, I admit, occasionally fools) who took them, there’s a small pipette of bile reserved for the idiots who let them.

Yes. Let them.

One example? A religious charity – an independent pentecostal church – whose affairs I investigated a decade or so ago, after they entrusted their money (that is, the money gifted by the faithful) to a friend of the pastor, who said he could produced a 60% annual return.

The return was indeed about 60%. Minus 60%. More than half the money was lost. Because the trusted idiot – and I think he was a fool, rather than a crook – had convinced himself and the pastor that contracts for difference were the right way to gamble with the church’s money. And because he was the pastor’s mate, none of the church elders lifted much of a finger to stop it happening. 

This kind of “we’re religious, so we should trust because our leaders say we should” is dangerous. It’s at the root of affinity fraud, the kind of fraud which rips through a community once the fraudster is inside the circle of trust, and which strikes religious groups particularly hard (but of course isn’t limited to them). And it’s particularly pernicious in the kind of religious groups with charismatic (small-c, I stress) leaders, tithing traditions, and few controls. Yes, ultimately it’s the fraudster’s fault, and yes, perhaps people should caveat the emptor just a bit. But in line with my core belief that certainty is not to be trusted, any leader who gives off a vibe that discourages his (usually his, rather than her) followers from doing their own due diligence is simply dangerous, unprincipled, arrogant and – put simply – in the wrong job.

That particular church case inspired me to put together a one-day course for pastors in training, as part of a ministerial training course run by a friend of mine. I only ran it once, but it centred on the vital importance of audit – and the idea that “trust, but verify” was the exact opposite of unfaithful.

Misplaced trust

All this was a long time ago, but I was reminded of it recently by a brace of Court of Appeal cases involving a genuine financial and legal tragedy. They involved a venerable law firm in Yorkshire, Dixon Coles & Gill, the Bishop and Diocese of Leeds, and four well-known national charities. 

And the former senior partner of the law firm, who over the course of a couple of decades stole millions – yes, millions – from the firm and its clients.

To tl;dr the background: the firm, DCG, had been around some 200 years. It was forced to close in 2016 after its two other partners discovered to their horror that Linda Box, their colleague, had systematically been bleeding funds not only from its client account but also from funds she personally held for several charities (including the Church). Unsurprisingly, the Church and the charities sued. Since the firm was an old-fashioned partnership instead of a more modern LLP, the two other partners – who, it should be said, were wholly innocent of deliberate wrongdoing – were in principle on the hook with unlimited liability.

In fact, the Court of Appeal allowed the remaining partners to benefit from the usual six-year limitation period, overturning a ruling in the High Court in Leeds that they should be found to have been “party or privy” to Mrs Box’s fraud under s21 of the Limitation Act 1980 – but it also dismissed an appeal from that same court’s ruling that the firm’s insurers were liable to pay out on all the claims (if the claimants were successful), rather than being able to limit total liability on the grounds that all the claims essentially arose from a single series of related acts.

They’re fascinating cases: in particular the first, for anyone interested in limitation (and that should include all lawyers involved in contentious litigation).

But I mention them in particular for a startling detail in the first-instance claim. At paragraphs 42 and 43, HHJ Saffman notes that the remaining partners suggest Mrs Box – in handling a substantial proportion of the Diocese’s money – was acting on a personal rather than professional basis. And he points to a 1995 letter where a past Bishop of Leeds seems to have allowed Mrs Box to have sole signing authority on a Church fund – a fund in relation to which he was (as Mrs Box wrote to him in 1995) “under no legal duty to divulge the accounts to anyone“.

I find this shocking, and frankly disgraceful. As some will know, I come from a Church background. My late father was a vicar, then a canon, then a bishop – retiring in 2011 after 15 years as Bishop of Winchester, one of the largest dioceses in the Church of England. I’ve met plenty of priests and bishops who took a pretty autocratic view of their rights, and of how they should be allowed to fulfil their obligations, although my dad – a believer in sunlight as the best guarantor of probity – wasn’t one of them. (Not for him the clergy equivalent of “I find your lack of faith disturbing,” although I’ve seen variants far too often.)

So I’m sure there are plenty of funds held by priests and bishops in the CofE with similarly – ah – opaque oversight structures. 

But to take such a fund, and give a single individual who isn’t even the office-holder the unaudited power invisibly to handle the cash? It’s insane. More than that: given that the funds are charitable, or at least the fruits of faithful labour by many hands and the generosity of many hearts. it’s simply immoral.

This simply shouldn’t be. No more should there be unaudited funds for charities and churches, than that churches should be able to mark their own homework when it comes to safeguarding. 

Not because churchpeople are uniquely bad. They’re not. Most are genuinely trying to do the right thing. 

But because they’re people. And in my view, it simply isn’t fair to put people in a position where – if they find themselves at risk of yielding to temptation – there’s nothing in place to hold them back.

Trust, but verify. It’s only sensible. But far more importantly, at least for people of faith like me: it’s un-Christian to do otherwise.

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2021v19, Wednesday: Thingification.

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The first of a series about what happens when we make things out of stuff (and ideas) that we shouldn’t. And: why grift isn’t good.

Short thought: I’m not always a fan of neologising. (Is there a word, akin to onomatopoeia, for “doing the thing you’re just criticising”, since I’m not convinced that there’s actually a verb that derives from the noun “neologism”? Oh. Yeah. Hypocrisy. Oops.) 

But a pair of posts (first one here, second one here) – neither terribly new, but fascinating – do the job beautifully. 

The word? “Thingifying”. 

They’re all about the process by which we tend, as humans, to treat all that we see and experience as objects: specific, manipulable, concrete. How that obscures ideas and concepts. How it shrinks actions and processes to snapshots.

And perhaps most importantly, how it can obscure – often deliberately – agency.

The example in the second of the two pieces, which I won’t spoil more than this sentence, is “umbrellas are non-refundable” – as if this is not so much a choice, albeit probably an entirely fair and sensible one, by a store-owner faced with people returning umbrellas once it stops raining as though they were just for rental, but instead some intrinsic quality of umbrella-ness.

But think beyond this. “The situation is regrettable.” By whom? Why? Is that just how it is, or has someone done something dumb, damaging or malicious to bring the situation into being? Echoes there of “mistakes were made”, or “unfortunate circumstances”. Ouch.

Just reading these two pieces has sparked half a dozen lines of thought into thingification – some arising from my own experience, some from things I’ve read, and one or two which even relate to law and advocacy (honest). Over the next few pieces, I’ll try to break it down a bit. 

If this sounds turgid beyond belief, I’m genuinely sorry. (This is not a non-apology “sorry if you’re thin-skinned enough to feel offended” quasi-insult; honestly, I apologise that the next few pieces might not work for you, but this is an itch I feel really compelled to scratch, and I’ll try to spread the net wide enough so there’s something for everyone.)

I genuinely think there’s something interesting going on here, with significant ramifications. Stay with me. Let’s see where it goes.

Someone is right on the internet: While we’re mulling that one, as usual (this one’s a sorry-not-sorry, I have to admit) my thoughts stray to fraud.

Or rather to grift. An excellent piece of writing by Can Duruk highlights the key distinction between fraud and grift. And there are interesting and uncomfortable parallels to the distinction between lies and bullshit. Can points out that a true modern grift…

…is not run behind closed doors. Instead, you do it fully out in the open, screaming about it from the mountaintops. While greed is about focus, grift is about shamelessness. With greed, the game is to find the path between the rules with the most profit. Grift, on the other hand, ignores the rules altogether, armed with the knowledge that with shamelessness comes zero social costs, and with absent enforcement, no real legal risk.

One of his examples is Elon Musk, in which context he points to what amounts to a pump-and-dump scheme of publicly backing Bitcoin, riding the resulting surge as a bunch of techbros who hang on his every word jump aboard the HODL train, then selling a chunk of Tesla’s BTC holding before declaring that oh, yes, actually it’s an environmental nightmare not entirely in keeping with the noble business of making electric cars. Nice.

Or, as Can puts it:

Look, I am struggling to string together words into legible sentences here. Just like there’s no real person that thinks Bannon deserves his accolades as a wellness warrior, no one who doesn’t put laser eyes in Twitter bio thinks that Elon Musk didn’t know about the environmental horrors of Bitcoin. Or that he could not get away with a pump and dump scheme as blatantly run as this one. I know we are all amused by his antics, and as a car-guy who doesn’t even drive, I have somewhat of a soft spot in my heart for the Model S. But the grift here is so, so obvious and run so transparently that it becomes borderline paralyzing. I do wonder if I am not getting something here?

This also sparks thoughts about the Online Harms bill which the UK government published last week. In amongst the publicity was a comment that the bill would include: 

Further provisions to tackle prolific online scams such as romance fraud, which have seen people manipulated into sending money to fake identities on dating apps.

Well, lovely. Three big problems, though:

  1. The bill only deals with user-generated content. So anyone running a scam and willing to pay for it to be advertised is just fine. Rather missing the point, therefore.
  2. I’ve been through the bill, and I can see precisely nothing that deals expressly with any kind of fraud or scam. At best, it might be in clause 41, which defines “illegal content” to include content amounting to a “relevant offence” – further defining that as either an offence whose intended victim is an individual (although not one which concerns “the performance of a service by a person not qualified to perform it”) or one which is defined in further regulation. Honestly, I’m baffled. What have I missed?

That’s only two problems. The third is too big for a numbered paragraph. And it’s the old favourite: fraud is a huge problem. It hurts huge numbers of people, terribly. And yet, as always, no-one’s actually coughing up to resource dealing with it properly. 

To be fair, the Online Harms publicity does promise a “Fraud Action plan after the 2021 spending review”. And apparently the DDCMS is going to consult on “online advertising, including the role it can play in enabling online fraud, later this year”.

Reassured? Me neither.

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2021v1, Saturday: What’s measured matters.

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When measures become targets, they’re useless as measures. But when something isn’t measured at all, it’s invisible…

Short thought: a rare day off yesterday with spouse. So nothing written. Catching up today, I spotted one of the terrifying number of tabs I currently have open and awaiting attention, which dealt with Goodhart’s law. And that took my mind to fraud.

Yes, I know: for me, that’s a fairly short leap from practically anywhere. But bear with me for a moment. Goodhart’s Law, named after economist Charles Goodhart, holds that “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” Or, more simply and pithily: measures become useless as measures once you start using them as targets.

Why is this? Because measures are diagnostic: things that help you understand a situation. They’re therefore only any use as long as they’re objective. And as soon as people start being graded according to that measure, it will be gamed. Think hospital waiting lists, or A&E waiting times, or paying teachers (or funding schools) by kids’ school grades. Or stack ranking in workplaces.

Which means I have mixed feelings about this story in the Times (£, sorry). It talks of six metrics by which police forces will be ranked. None of them, predictably, explicitly deals with fraud – the single largest crime problem the UK faces, yet the one with probably the least amount of focused resource and attention.

This brings back memories. In 2007-8 I spent a short amount of time working with people at what was then the (short-lived) National Fraud Strategic Authority. One thing that passed across the NFSA’s desk was a proposed set of police performance indicates. There were 147 of them, I recall – and not a single one dealt with fraud. Most were obviously chosen because they were things that were easy to count, rather than things that would genuinely make a difference in the effectiveness of policing.

So on the one hand, having just six – and high-level at that (homicide, serious violence, drug supply, neighbourhood violence, cybercrime and “victim satisfaction”) – is a step up. As is a Home Office source’s comment that “I wouldn’t classify them as targets.”

So not a Goodhart problem, then?

Hardly. Because the next sentence is: “It’s about tracking progress — we’re giving forces extra officers and now we want to see outcomes.”

So it’s directly a Goodhart problem. As has been the case before, forces will game their resource spend to make sure the Home Office is happy.

And fraud, as ever, will be forgotten. As will its millions of victims. Because, to be cynical, their problems cost too much to fix.

(Yes, yes. “Cybercrime” could be interpreted to include a lot of fraud. But it’s not the same thing. And how is “dealing with cybercrime” to be measured? I have no idea, and I’m pretty sure the Home Office doesn’t either.)

Someone is right on the internet: This is the third piece in a row in which I’ve mentioned the Horizon scandal. I won’t apologise. This is disgraceful, and it deserves a lot of noise.

So today I’ll simply point to someone who, if we had Pulitzers in this country, would deserve one for his coverage of this: Nick Wallis. This piece by him in Private Eye describes the scandal in great detail. Read every word. And then get very angry. And then decide how the issues that arise herein might arise elsewhere – and start thinking about who should be held to account for not making this a priority.

One quick sideline: I should have mentioned when writing about Horizon that the Post Office – shortly before Mr Justice Fraser tore Horizon to shreds – agreed to a £58m settlement of many postmasters’ claims. You can make your own mind up as to whether sociopathy on this level can be satisfied by that, or whether individuals should also be held to account.

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2021iv16, Friday: The king of the Ponzi?

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Madoff’s dead, but fraud lives on. A short history of the Real Book. And the importance of prioritising economics over culture wars.

Short thought: Very briefly, because of a hearing earlier today, it’s worth marking the passing of Bernard Madoff, by far the biggest Ponzi schemer ever unearthed.

I say “unearthed” because although all Ponzi schemes have a shelf-life, the numbers in the Madoff scandal were never entirely settled; and the sheer weight of skulduggery around these days, particularly in some corners of the crypto world, does sometimes make me wonder what else is lurking.

As the piece linked to above notes, fraud isn’t a victimless crime. Financial losses are life-changing in themselves, causing despair and sometimes suicide. And the loss of trust is just as damaging. Fraud is corrosive to societies as well as individuals, just as its close relative corruption.

Madoff’s passing is also an excuse, once more, to bewail the UK’s utterly disastrous approach to fraud. We haven’t had a single, big-bang Madoff here. Instead we have huge numbers of victims, losing billions each year to multiple fraudsters via scams which – to be honest – aren’t that sophisticated (often affinity frauds, of the kind Madoff specialised in), and spend (comparatively speaking) next to nothing in investigating and prosecuting them. A disgrace, and one which the Powers That Be remain singularly uninterested in tackling.

Someone is right on the internet: As I’ve mentioned once or twice, I play jazz piano. Note I’m not calling myself a jazz pianist. I’m nowhere near good enough for that. But I try. And I love it.

Anyone who’s ever played and studied jazz will have spent time poring over chord charts of standards old and new. And most of us will have, either on paper or as PDFs, a fakebook or two: a massive tome full of single sheets, with a melody and the chords, for everything from Round Midnight to Chameleon.

I know I do. I’ve even got a couple of fakebooks for specialised areas such as bossa nova. 

But I knew, to my shame, nothing about their background and history. This filled me in. It’s a short read, and points out that fakebooks aren’t without controversy, risking (as some fear they do) the ossification of an in-the-moment art form. But for anyone who’s ever squinted at a chord chart in a dimly-lit club or basement somewhere – trying to keep the line as the atmosphere of the jam fills your soul with a joy and spirit you just can’t get anywhere else and guides your fingers to do things you never knew they could – it’s a good one.

Someone else is right on the internet: Simon Kuper, at the FT, is a great writer. Thoughtful, humble, interested and therefore interesting. Even when he writes about football, I’ll read his stuff. And I can’t say that about anyone else.

In today’s FT (paywall – sorry) he makes a point that many have made – but he makes it really well: 

There are always people who go around missing the main story of their times. No doubt some thought leaders in Paris in 1789 or Petrograd in early 1917 were getting all fired up about sideshows. Something similar is happening now: an obsession with “wokeism” and culture wars at a moment of economic transformation.

By which he means: shouting about culture wars has a huge opportunity cost. The economic damage of Covid, or the benefits of the shift in US economic policy under Biden (which is turning out to be far more progressive than most would have expected), is going to be consequential for everyone.

Meanwhile:

Today’s identity-based point-missing is often deliberate. Every morning, nativist politicians scour the news for a wokeist outrage — in a big world, there’s always one — and then spend the day banging on about it. This is an old phenomenon, explained by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972: a conservative attempt to drum up a moral panic about a group of young people defined as “folk devils”. The “woke brigade” is only the latest in a lineage of folk devils that stretches back through Islamist terrorists, “superpredators” and hippies to early 1960s Mods and Rockers. Rightwingers exaggerated the dangers of all these groups.

Now, Simon is talking about the right-hand side of the aisle. I think the ailment stretches across politics. I imagine he does too, although I agree with his underlying point that the right is generally more effective in using it (perhaps cynically) as a cover for getting on with other priorities while “firing up the base”. 

Me? I’ll continue with my policy of ignoring anyone who decides to push buttons with straw-man terms like “woke” or “gammon” instead of trying to engage.

And keep trying to stop my brain atrophying, by reading people like Simon.

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2021ii3, Wednesday: Getting away with it.

JSJ1 Comment

Fraud hurts huge numbers of people, hugely – yet it’s a law enforcement also-ran. When might that change? And, staying with crime, fantastic writing about my favourite detective author of all time.

Short thought: For anyone involved in dealing with fraud – as an investigator, an insurer, a lawyer or otherwise – the past couple of decades have been frustrating beyond bearing. Those 20 years have seen the resources devoted to investigating and prosecuting private-sector fraud dwindle to near-nothing, while fraud grew to half of reported (if not always recorded) crime (as the online environment both created new attack vectors and exposed a huge population of potential targets) and losses estimated by some in the hundreds of billions.

Some blame banks. And they’re not beyond reproach: the schemes set up to repay victims of authorised push payment or APP fraud (where someone bamboozles you into making a payment to the wrong recipient) have been dogged by reluctance, under-resourcing (again) and a tendency by some institutions to pin the blame on the victim far more than may be entirely justifiable. 

But there’s a fundamental tension here, as exposed in the recent case of Philipp v Barclays Bank [2021] EWHC 10 (Comm). A bank’s primary duty is to carry out its customer’s instructions, not to police those instructions on the off-chance there’s a fraudster behind them. There is a duty to act on reasonable suspicion of fraud or dishonesty; it’s called the Quincecare duty. But it’s of limited application, and (as the Court found in Philipp) doesn’t apply where it’s the customer themself, rather than an agent or someone purporting to act for them, who’s delivering the instructions. The public policy trade-off between the mandated duty and fraud protection is a real one, not something which can simply be refashioned on the fly.

So what about the regulators? Most fraud isn’t undertaken by regulated institutions. No doubt regulators such as the FCA could do more to police the perimeter of their powers – and as Dame Elizabeth Gloster has found in relation to the London Capital & Finance fiasco, it has often been shortsighted at best in how it approaches that task. But it’s not a complete answer by any means.

I’m not sure there’s a simple answer. (Which calls to mind HL Mencken’s maxim: for all complex problems, there’s an answer that’s clear, simple and wrong.) But a recent report by RUSI suggests a re-framing of the problem which I like, and which I think puts the emphasis where it belongs. 

RUSI sees fraud as a national security issue. It takes the UK’s three national security priorities – protecting our people, projecting our global influence, and promoting our prosperity – and points out that fraud does serious damage to all three. It impoverishes and immiserates the people of the UK. It damages our standing by making us seem to be a paradise for untouchable crooks (including substantial involvement by organised crime) and launderers. And it undermines our prosperity by leaching from the public purse and leaving us with a financial system and economy where transactions can’t be trusted. 

Taken together, it posits (I think rightly) that fraud imposes a uniquely damaging disruption not only financially but on society as a while

It suggests what it calls a “whole-of-system” approach, whereby non-criminal justice state actors including intelligence services work together with the criminal justice system to tackle the issue. Unsurprisingly, it calls for significantly enhanced funding – not just for existing specialist forces such as the City of London Police, but nationally. And it makes the case for clearer accountability and leadership.

Of course, you could say we’ve heard this all before. And yes, we have: the 2006 Fraud Review said some of these things, albeit in a different way, and a retrospective 10 years later found little had changed. 

But the losses are now staggering. Everyone knows someone – a relative, a friend, a business partner – who’s lost sometimes significant sums to fraud. The pandemic has created huge new opportunities for fraudsters. And if the government is even slightly serious about “levelling up”, or “building back better”, then keeping billions in honest circulation rather than in fraudsters’ pockets has got to be a good idea. Aside from anything else, the well-known principle of loss aversion indicates that if someone loses cash to fraud, they’re even less likely to spend what they have left. Not a great help to a pandemic-stricken economy.

And that starts, inevitably, with resourcing it in line with the huge harm it does.

Put more simply: if not now, when?

Someone is right on the internet/things worth reading: I’ve been a sucker for a good mystery all my life. As a kid, I thought Poirot and (later) Miss Marple were the best. Lawrence Block’s Burglar books were a later unashamed pleasure. I haven’t quite read all of Rebus, so I’ve gone back to the beginning and started over before reading the latest ones.

But if you backed me into a corner and said I could only have one detective fiction creator, there’s no contest. Dorothy L Sayers was, is and probably ever shall be the one for me, and Peter Wimsey is my sleuth. Five Red Herrings takes the cliche of train timetables and makes a masterpiece from it; Murder Must Advertise gives us a glorious double life; and Busman’s Honeymoon somehow combines mystery and romance into a piece of sterling literature.

But Gaudy Night is special. The point of view changes to Harriet Vane, initially a secondary character (in Strong Poison) but now a co-star in her own right. And – as beautifully explored in the New Yorker (sorry, paywall – but this could be one of your monthly freebies; it’s worth it) – an exemplar of how Sayers laid the groundwork for today’s flowering of superb female mystery authors. The article’s worth a read. And the books? Just go for it.

(I should also mention the supremely well-done BBC Radio adaptations – all available on Audible, with Ian Carmichaelas Wimsey and Peter Jones, famous among geeks for being the voice of The Book in H2G2, as Bunter. Not quite up to the Sherlock Holmes standard set by Bert Coules with Clive Merrison as Holmes and Michael Williams as Watson – but really, really close…)

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2020i5, Tuesday: Lifting the shell.

JSJ1 Comment

Again, it’s a busy week. So two quick hits: a potential AML game-changer, and catnip for Apple geeks.

Short thought: Those who are calling it “groundbreaking” aren’t wrong. One of the more frustrating loopholes (and when I say “loophole” I mean “something the radius of the Channel Tunnel”) in the global anti-money laundering and counter-fraud architecture has long been the ease with which anyone can set up anonymous shell companies in the US.

Congress’s override of Trump’s veto on the US defence bill in the waning days of last year – he’d blocked it ostensibly because it didn’t have anything tacked on to deal with Section 230, the bit of US statute which gives social media services some immunity for website publishers from liability for third party content – also allowed through the Corporate Transparency Act. This, agreed after years of campaigning, makes it mandatory for anyone registering a new company anywhere in the US to disclose the name, address and date of birth of its beneficial (i.e. human) owners, as well as an ID number such as driver’s licence or passport; and for existing companies to produce this info within two years.

No time for in-depth analysis, and obviously the proof is in the pudding – and (thinking of the widespread and largely unpunished abuse of Companies House requirements in the UK) in the enforcement. But campaigners and writers aren’t wrong to call this “the most sweeping counter-kleptocracy reforms in decades” aren’t wrong. Big news.

Someone is right on the internet: For long-term Macheads like me (I’ve owned precisely two Windows devices – a Surface which I resold and a cheap Windows Phone just so I’d know what it was like – and two Androids, a Nexus 4 and a bargain Nokia I’ve since given to a relative, against several dozen Apple devices between me and the missus), Jason Snell’s series on 20 seminal Macs has been a joy. As he’s explained, it’s not necessarily the best machines, but the most notable. And the utterly deserved winner is the iMac G3, the machine that set Apple on the road from mess to megacorp. The whole series is pure comfort food for Apple nerds. Perfect for a New Year’s Day kickback and relax.

(I never owned an iMac G3, although I had one on loan from a client for a while. My personal fave on the list was also the first Mac I ever bought, the PowerBook Duo. I still have one in the house. Time, perhaps, to see if it still boots. Although if it doesn’t, as we found was the case with the – jawdroppingly-beautiful, even 20 years on – family Pismo the other day, it’ll hurt…)

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Lies and freedom. They don’t mix.

JSJ4 Comments

“All politicians lie,” so they say. No; all human beings lie. What matters is what lie, when – and what it does to your ability to choose.

I’m a sucker for a series.

By which I mean a sequence of books (for preference) or a good serialised TV show. Genre, of course – you can critique me all you like, but good fantasy/scifi/etc, written with love and care, can’t be beat.

Pratchett’s Discworld*. DS9 – particularly later seasons as the story gained pace. The Broken Earth. B5, of course, and Farscape. Aubrey/Maturin. Rivers of London. And Dresden.

A long-running tale is part of it, to be sure. But the key is writers and creators who let their characters grow and change over time, rather than remain stable as the world shifts around them. It’s a privilege to be part of that.

My problem, particularly with books where there’s been a long gap between instalments – and I recognise this may just be me – is a tendency to want to re-read the whole series before diving into a new one. Which, with the Dresden Files, is taking a while.

Sometimes, though, doing this unearths gems you may have missed the first time round. There’s a couple buried in Ghost Story which hit me squarely between the eyes – and made me think about what I respect, what I despise, and why I make the distinction.

Late in the book – and I won’t spoil it with too much context for the uninitiated – the main character, Harry Dresden, is talking to someone far mightier, but also far gentler, than he. That person’s mission in life is to preserve people’s right to choose, because good and evil mean nothing unless that fundamental human right is preserved. He notes that a particularly vicious misfortune which befell Harry was born of a particularly well-crafted and well-timed lie: convincing him that what was, wasn’t, and making him think he had no choice but to walk down a bad road.

And the character says this: “When a lie is believed, it compromises the freedom of your will.”

That sticks with me. We all lie. Yes, we whinge about politicians doing it – but we all do. Mostly for self-protection. But there are big lies and little lies. And the difference is found not in the extent of the untruth, but in the anticipated consequence.

So a lie designed and intended to sway the world, to destroy the chance to make an honest decision: that’s the lie that’s unforgivable.

Perhaps this is why our profession’s greatest sin is to mislead the court. Sure, represent your client. Highlight the truths that help. Play down those that don’t. Tell the story in the best way for your side – the most believable way. But to mislead the court – even by hiding a relevant authority that doesn’t help – is to rob the tribunal of its chance to make its mind up. It’s not persuasion. It’s a con.

It’s also why I reserve a special hatred for con artists. Sure, I can admire the artistry bit – sort of. But the most successful cons which turn their marks into their best salespeople. Whose self-esteem has been warped by the lies, such that it can scarcely survive if the lies are challenged.

And that inevitably leads me back to politics. As I said, all politicians lie. They’re human. Sometimes to make life easier. Sometimes to protect secrets – whether for fair reasons or foul will depend on the circumstances. Sometimes to protect a confidence.

But outright lies, told to sway and shape opinion, when it’s clear on close inspection that the teller knows perfectly well what they’re doing? That’s treating people as pawns. Playthings.

As marks.

Some thinkers take this further. Harry Frankfurt’s famous essay (and later book), “On Bullshit“, made a distinction between lies on the one hand – where the liar at least placed some value on the truth, prizing it in the act of obscuring it – and bullshit, where the teller simply didn’t care what was true and what wasn’t as long as it served their purpose. It’s a distinction that has been often criticised.

I’m not sure where I stand. I see the distinction, and we do seem to be swimming nostril-deep in particularly noxious and damaging political bullshit in recent years. (Brexit, Johnson, Corbyn, Trump, so many others. Lord, the list goes on. And a special mention for Michael Gove, whose Ditchley speech was an example of extreme – and, I can only conclude, calculated – intellectual dishonesty.)

But I think I care less about the lie-vs-bullshit axis than I do about this question of choice. Whether in politics or people’s personal lives – think of abusers warping the world to rob their victims of a vision of anything different, for instance – robbing people of the freedom to choose feels like the big differentiator.

Dan Davies, author of a wonderful book called “Lying for Money”, put it particularly well, in something he wrote getting on for a couple of decades ago entitled “Avoiding projects pursued by morons 101“. Seriously, read it – it’s not long. But it boils down to three rules, all of which focus on lies and testing them:

  • Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. (If people won’t buy into them without being lied to, that tells you everything you need to know.)
  • Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless. (You can’t mark a liar to market. You can’t hope to fudge their numbers towards reality. If a liar says “this is what will happen”, the only safe thing is to assume the opposite.)
  • The vital importance of audit. (Any time someone won’t let their predictions or their advice get tested against reality, or moves the goalposts mid-game, run. Immediately.)

Put differently: If you catch someone deliberately lying to you, so as to change your mind about something important: that’s it. They’re done. Stop listening to them. Now.

You can accept lies as a fair form of discourse. Or you can – while accepting that we’re human, and so we fail – focus on the right to choose with your eyes open.

You can’t have both. And anyone who favours option one? Don’t trust them. Ever. About anything.

* I’m gradually re-reading the whole Discworld saga. Taking it very, very slow. Essentially to leave till the last possible moment the time when I pick up the Shepherd’s Crown – because it will be the last new Pratchett I ever read. And that hurts.