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An insight into the character, personality and passion of the leading figures in the Investigation and Intelligence industry who have shaped the way we gather, analyse and utilise information and intelligence.
The exchanges are getting hotter and hotter on the kyc, so the
criminals are getting more and more sophisticated, explaining to the
victims what they've got to do to navigate opening the account. Because they.
They do this, you know, hour by hour, day by day,
that's. They're just churning. As you, you and I know, I'm
72, I've been conned, I've been approached. I take out my
life savings of £2,000,000 of my
pension and I'm convinced to send it. But I send it to a bank
account, correct? No, no, as the fraudster,
I will persuade you, because I've persuaded you that we're investing
in digital assets. I will show you. I will show
you fake returns on some of those digital assets.
Where do I send my money? Welcome to the Intelligence
Advantage podcast, where I, Gary Miller, get to talk to the
movers and shapers in the investigation and intelligence industry
and find out exactly how they got to where they are today.
Today, I'm delighted to be joined by a good friend of
long standing, Jonathan Benton of Isanctuary.
And I am particularly lucky because Jonathan has
beaten all world records by recovering from a knee
replacement operation in a
unbelievably fast period. So, Jonathan, thank
you for joining me and welcome. Thank
you. Thank you, Gary. Thank you. Yeah, five weeks in and I'm
back rowing, so. Which is. I'm
sure the viewers will be absolutely thrilled to know that I am soon to go
in for my operation. So if I copy, I emulate
anything of you, Mr. Benton. It will be your progress
in recovering from knee replacements. I will keep you
closely posted. Biggest bit of advice, get it strong
before you go into surgery. Yes, I've been working on
it. I have been working on it. So let's hope that has
an effect now as opposed to doing what I
normally do, which is, of course, what. What else would lawyers
do? Start at the beginning and move on. I'm going to dive into
the topic of the day, the week, the century. AI.
You're out of the government for some time now.
You've got your own business. What, if any, how did you take account
of the arrival, or the pending arrival of AI when you were
developing your business in the very early days? In the outset, we
didn't, Gary, but it's absolutely, totally
embraced now in every. In almost
every part of what we do. Not
all our work, but it's playing
a part in much of what we're doing. There are a few issues with
it, so. And perhaps it's. If I sort of give you
A case example they previously
imagine if we had a massive sort of corporate fraud or something like
that and you would, you had a million emails and you
had a network of 50 companies and you
had really complicated trading and
transactions between those companies. You're trying to understand how's the
fraud happened, have they stolen the money? And
previously, yes, there's some technology that's out there
that allows us to sift and go through that. But
AI now creating sandbox and using
chatbots, we're able to teach it the way we think and
teach it what we're really interested and teach it to detect anomalies.
So the client so we're finding
people talking about trades which we're interested
in, where we know that they're lying, where we know
that's where the fraud's taking place and we get in there so
much quicker. And I don't think any of us
realized that we would go from this kind of
analog way of just searching through things,
you know, page by page by page. You know, you've been a lawyer for
decades and decades without naming names. Can
you give me a much more granular example of. I
had a case where we were looking for this and what we did is we
trained the soundbox to do X,
soundboard to do X. Just give me an example.
For this particular fraud, what we wanted to
understand was
the way that trades were taking place
between companies and then the
corresponding to try and find emails
from other staff with the corresponding transactions which
should ordinarily show all the things like
bills of Leyden and things like that for goods which would
ordinarily correspond with the volume of the trade and then
correspondence with the banks to. Because
nearly all the time there's, there's a compliance question
because of the, the value of the transaction and when you
start to teach it to narrow down and go right, we really want to
focus on this so we can understand, you know, when you've got
thousands and thousands and thousands of trades and
you're trying to go let's detect the anomalies, let's
detect where they're doing a
3,400,000 pound transaction
and actually there's no. The bills of laden
don't match up and then the information that goes to the banks.
So what was the underlying fraud? Was it the company itself
or an insider who was manipulating the process and
creaming something off or was the company set up to do fraud?
The latter. Insiders. Insiders. Insiders. You know, so
often is the case, isn't it? We're. And when you've got, when you've got
intercompany transactions like this, somebody gets
greedy starts or a group of people start to get
greedy. They work out how they can manipulate the system. They manipulate
it for a long time. Suddenly then the accounts don't start to add up
and everyone goes, there's something wrong here. And that's when you know, the likes of
us get called into. But, but back to your point, back to the AI
point. It still takes a human to look at that you.
This particular one is actually they, they talk in three different languages.
One of the. And I can't say which languages because it would deter. Would identify
the client but the languages they talk in are really complicated ones as
well. Complicated for translation. So you still need a
human to analyze the translations
in various forms and the original and to
understand really what was being interpreted by. Because
when you and I know, you know as a lawyer, I know as a,
you know I was a. I've been detect investigating financial crime for
nearly 30 years now. Yeah. I was a senior detective dealing with the
really complex money laundering cases and so on in
National Crime Agency and the police. You and I both know people
involved in this are super smart and they're really careful in what
they write, but they're not that smart. They still
make mistakes and they still have to manipulate things. So it's that
which then the machine
and the technology can take you so far. But
you still need that human eye to go. Okay, I'm going to
come to money laundering in a minute and I'll put a smile on your
face because I gave you a plug in my podcast yesterday with Jeffrey
Robinson who you may or may not have heard of. Do you know
Jeffrey? I do, I do, I do, I do. Yeah yeah, yeah. So what
I was going to ask you is how have the crooks used
AI to make life easier and
better for them? What's the latest iteration of the usage of
IT that you've come across? So certainly, maybe,
maybe you know, move Gary more over to the crypto side
at the moment and I'll give you some examples. You know,
we're dealing with multi, multi million pound crypto
frauds. Some of them with your firm in fact. Okay. And
with others who are, who I know are members of the IfG. Yeah.
Helping victims who've most of it investment scams,
etc. Where does the AI come in creation of
the. Of not, not necessarily the website because the websites,
honestly it's a separate issue. But I look at these websites and
immediately just through a trained eye and no
inexperience. I know they're a fraud straight away. You look at them
and it doesn't take a lot to even just throw a scraping tool
over them and go, look, there's mistakes here, and then find the one, it's
replicated. But then things like the
responses, the engagement with the victims, etcetera, we're
seeing AI generated voice. You
know, we did a piece on LinkedIn about this the other day. AI
generated images, AI generated backgrounds, even when you're having.
So we have a call like this to then move into the more
sort of, perhaps slightly
complex for investigation purposes is another
case we dealt with recently. Clients lost about 12
million in an investment scam. And
what we, what we saw then is,
and forgive me, Gary, are you familiar with crypto, how it works?
Enough to have quoted in vain and you'll correct me. Jeffrey
and I were talking about this yesterday and I said
to him, because I've been chatting, I can't remember it was you or somebody else
I was talking to. And I said, look, if you're a super
sophisticated crook, you can move money
in the world of crypto so fast
and mix it up, change it into stable coins,
move it into different wallets, into different exchanges that
unless you've got a, an unlimited
budget and unlimited patience, you're never going to find it. Now, that's
what I said to him and I, and, and knowing as genius
a tracker as you are, Jeffrey said, no, no, no, no, no, you can
always find it. Now, of course, what I didn't say is can you
always recover it? Because you and I know the problem is sometimes you,
you know pretty much where it was.
But unless you've got real time access, which is almost
impossible, you don't know where it is this second. But anyway, I'll stop talking and
let you respond to that. Let me go back to the AI issue and just
talk you through this example here.
Okay, what happens, right, our clients
get duped into this investment scam,
AI generated platform, which shows how their investments
are performing again, making the crooks easier. They get
the link sent to them, refresh the link. So they see it and they think
their money's making money. They think their money's making money and they think
everything's going great. But behind the scenes, of course,
when we start, because what we do is we go back to day one and
we recreate the original wallet they
sent it to. It's a little bit like going, let's go and look at
the first pound that was deposited in that bank account and
understand it from that day and that day onwards. And
of course you end up with a huge
network of transactions. But what they're using
AI to do is, is you have to move this
from one, what we call self, from a, from a wallet
that you've got a client to send it to to another self custody wallet.
And ultimately, ultimately you want to send it to an exchange, right?
Yeah, you want to send it to an exchange because you can off ramp it
via some Latvian money or doesn't have to be
Latvian, sorry, Latvian people. It's not, no, just Latvian but Ukrainian.
That can be British, it can be anybody Nigerian. It can be
a whole load of people, money mules who, who are paid to
hold these accounts, often with what was, what
used to be quite low kyc, but that's changed, I tell you. Binance
and people like that are really on it now. The, the level of KYC
they're asking for, they're kind of catching up. But what
would happen then is it would go to that money mule, the money mule would
get their cut and it get moved to a bank account where I can then
go and use it to buy my Ferrari or buy my, my night
with a load of prostitutes and champagne or whatever it is as
a criminal I'm going to do. Let's talk about this. I've nicked a million pounds
from Michigan. I go straight into. What's
the most common way to convert it into Bitcoin or to
go on to. So what you don't find, not.
They're not necessarily. The laundering will happen in
crypto. So if I, if I, I don't steal it, most
of them now are. And it wouldn't be
someone, to be fair, like Mishkom, but if it was
a wealthy individual or even a small
business, we've had businesses involved in this where you're persuaded that
you might have reasonably good cash flow, heavy
deposits. You're persuaded to put a certain amount of your assets
into digital assets because it's going to give you a 10,
15, 20 return versus a
1.5% return in conventional banking. You might
be tempted to park some of your money there. It gets sent to a wallet,
it gets sent often to a self custody wallet, Metamask wallet,
anything like that. And then the next thing that happens,
who's got access to that wallet at that stage? The criminal.
The criminal. So the criminal has set up this dodgy wallet and
induced me to, to send him money and his credit to that
wallet. Just gives you an address, just gives you
Gives you an address to put into your coin. They. They will even Gary,
you know, I know we've digressed from the air a bit, but they will. We,
we had another case with a 70 odd year old guy that we've managed to
get most of his money back now. And as there's what, you
know what one final bit we're fighting for. But he
again, investment scam. Met the guy,
fake images etc when he met him online
and had Zoom meetings and all his life savings put into
this. Right, I'm just going to pause you, I'm going to take you through
slowly for people including me and
colleagues that haven't necessarily been through it. So I am
the 70. I'm 72. I've decided I've been conned. I've been
approached. I take out my life savings or of
£2,000,000 of my pension and I'm
convinced to send it. But I send it to a bank account, correct?
No, no, I will persuade you. Yep. As
the fraudster, I will persuade you because I've persuaded you
that we're investing in digital assets. I will show you,
I will show you fake returns on some of those digital
assets. Where do I send my money? You send it. What
I persuade you to do. And I will come online and I'll have a meeting
like this with you and I will show you how to open a
Coinbase account, even to some point. And in the case I've
just explained, I am so convincing
that I'm online with you, Gary, and you're logging
into your Starling bank account and you're telling me
your passwords and everything to get into your Starling bank account. Because
I'm Jonathan Benson, this lovely man you've met, he's going
to help you, he's going to grow that 2 million to 4 million. Going to
be able to give a million to the kids. It's going to be fantastic.
Got it. You know, money goes into an account that you
have that fake JB has created. Yeah.
Can see that £2 million suddenly represented
in, in cryptocurrency. Right.
Transferred USDT. USD. So USD tethered. It could be,
it could be, it could be anything. I might ask you to buy
Bitcoin, I might ask you. But what I will do is I will get
you to initially to go from
conventional banking. Yes. To often
something like I'll show you how to create a Coinbase account or, or
a, a normal crypto account from
which you can then send the transaction to the wallet.
And this is really important. Right. Because
the exchanges are getting hotter and hotter on the kyc. So
the criminals are getting more and more sophisticated, explaining to the
victims what they've got to do to navigate opening the account. Because they
do this, you know, hour by hour, day by day, that's
they're just churning as you and I know. I get the money into my
Coinbase account, I'm then sent might be via
WhatsApp, might be via I'm sent an address
and it's that digital address is the address
for the first time it moves out of a
centralized exchange, out of something that's controlled
out of something that you know, we can
engage with to a self custody wallet. Right, first question,
what would Starling bank see on their records
when I've asked them to transfer? What will the beneficiary look like?
Coinbase. It would be a coin. Coinbase, A Coinbase
bank account or Binance or
any other, any other crypto exchange. And don't forget
the criminals are getting every
day as sophisticated in understanding the
vulnerabilities of the exchanges.
So they, they might say I, you know, I don't want to
digress too much, Gary, but I've just opened a business account with, with Binance.
Yeah. I have to say they deserve every
single bit of applause because they've made
my life hell. I've had to go through every
bit of compliance you can ever imagine. Why
have you opened it? Is it for the purposes of you being able to
deal with and understand and investigate or have your has your business?
It's for the business. It's for the business and it's for what we what how
we help fraud victims so that if they want to they can pay us also
in. Yeah, but I'll come on to that in a minute. But the
point is the criminals know the exchanges which are
weaker, much like we used to know when, when we
used to get when in old fashioned money laundering. When I was
dealing with COVID gun and gang crime
in London and the gangsters were persuading people
coming out of children's homes and things like that to open, to
open bank accounts, they knew which banks were easy
to open so that they could then start depositing money and launder money through
them, get it into the banking system. There's always a soft touch. We know
and I suspect you're not going to, you've been very kind in
giving Binance a plug. We've had our own difficulty with
them in tracking down where they are to serve them legally
and stuff. I don't know whether they've managed to clean up that particular
ad. But you could list 10
exchanges right now that you would say you would never deal with in a
million years. Right. So Gary, I put a post up about this two days
ago. Right Back to my point of
understanding to where do you do that first?
Kind of on ramping into the crypto
universe. Yeah. You get it into a self custody
wallet. And let's just jump back to the AI bit because the
AI bit here is important. And I'll come back to these issue
with the exchanges, Gary. Yeah. Because what you then end up with is a
spider web of wallets. Now many people
listen to this. If they've certainly done crypto fraud, if the
crypto recovery, they'll understand mixes, they'll understand, or
they may understand the concept of it or where coins are
changed, all in an attempt to disguise the trail.
Yeah. Now the point here is back to your AI
question right at the very beginning, Gary. What we're seeing is, is they're now
using AI to self generate new
self custody wallets. We call them Pela chains,
Peeler Peeler chains. They peel off, they
peel off, they peel off, they peel off. And what they do, what
they do is if I'm online and I'm creating a metamask wallet,
it's going to take me time and I've got to create another one. Then I've
got to remember, I've got to remember the passcode, I've got to remember the seed
phrase for it. If I'm a fraudster doing this
like a thousand times over every day, or I'm a Ford factory in
Myanmar or something like that, that's quite a
complicated operation and that's a lot of information you've got to
remember. So what they're doing is now using AI to help
generate this, retain the information and then create the next one,
the next one, the next one, back to Jeffrey's point. Yes,
we can trace it. And what we're doing now in response
to this, we've just done this actually with Mishkon at the High Court in England.
We did it first of all in the High Court of Singapore was when we
saw this happening and we know,
we know ultimately it's going to go to an exchange. I had a client come
to me with a fraud on this a few years ago. I said what I.
If we're going to, we'd already got some money off ramped and
what they'll do is they'll feed it a little bit here, a little bit there,
a little bit to different Exchanges, they will go to Gary, like you
said, htx, that's just been sanctioned by the British government
linked to the Russian sanctions. HDX
Huray is an absolute criminal enterprise. Right
I'll say that on publicly, I mean hopefully. But it's just,
it's, the criminals know that they can get it and there's a
consequence it's been sanctioned, the FCA are pursuing it that
everybody in this world and this knows the bad actors which
of course the criminals do. But let me take everyone
back to just a. We've got this
journey, we've got these self custody wallets. It's going one to the
other to the next and finally it's going to get off ramped.
We've gone to the exchanges because some of it's already at the
exchanges and we've notified the exchanges and we've said within
a, within a few days you're going to get a freezing order and quite
often they comply. And we, we've, we have a way of doing that. There is
now a really good network, we can do it in almost, you know,
minutes. But what do you do with those self custody
wallets that might contain millions and millions of your clients money?
So what we then did was we said well self custody wallet
doesn't necessarily exist on an exchange. Right? No,
it's something I've created, I buy it
offline. I've got the seed phrase for it, it's just,
it's mine, it's controlled. And now, now they use an
AI and bots to recreate. Recreate, recreate, right. So that,
but don't forget every single one has a
secure set of a seed phrase which
can now be 24 words to be able to get into that
or more which is quite, quite a lot to remember.
The crook needs at some stage to monetize
that million or 2 million that I've invested. So he's got to
sooner rather than later move it to an exchange, is that right? He
has. But what we, what we decided to do was because
some of it's gone to the exchange and it's been froze, temporarily frozen.
Our crook knows we're on to them. Yeah. Because
suddenly they don't get their money. They, they're alerted to something. In my
old world, when I was a senior police detective, we'd call
it going from the COVID phase to the overt phase. You know,
you might have been listening, watching everything else and then suddenly
we've taken over action and everybody goes hang on a minute, the police are involved
here. They've Got to be involved because why is my money being frozen?
Something's happened and the crooks then take a step back. So
what do we do with the money in the wallets, the self
custody wallets? So what that was when we please
go. It's not a plug, but it's also, it's quite important because what I'm, what
I'm trying to do, and I think members of the IfG and
listeners will get me here. Where I'm trying to go is
we said, hang on a minute, we can put the court
order, if we get a worldwide freezing order, we can put it on those self
custody wallets now. Now you might go,
well, okay, fine, if you put the court order and wrap it around the
wallet, what does it do? Does it stop the transaction?
Answer, no, it doesn't. You can't do that. It only stops
the transaction if it's tether and we can get tethered
to effectively burn it, which you can do now.
And a lot of criminals use tether.
But because you've. What I was thinking was if you wrap
the court order and we use an NFT, right, NFTs are
dead, but NFTs can still be used for good.
Now, NFTs, you, you put them on a wallet normally,
Gary, and they move, you can just move it to another wallet.
And that, the first time it was ever used that, that same nft, you could
do that. We redesigned the protocol behind it
deliberately. Because what I said was I want it to stick to it,
I want it to stick to it. And the only time I'm ever going to
remove it is if a court orders me to remove it. You know, if
the case is overturned or some, or the client settles or
sorry, the respondent settles, I want to be able to remove it.
So we, we, we coined the phrase semi soulbound
token. It's not really a proper phrase using the crypto world, but it
best describes what we're doing. And then I said I want to be able to
do that and do it a thousand times, go from wallet to wallet to wallet
to wallet to wallet. Why? Why? Because
when it finally gets off ramped, what I want
to be able to do is go to the exchange, right? The exchange have
got things like the travel rule. They're supposed to look back so many hops,
they've got sanctions advice that they're supposed to look back so many
hops. I'll say if you just look back a couple of hops, you can see
our notice, you can see our lovely High Court order that
Says, you know, X versus Y High
Court freezing order. It is an image. It's an image that appears on the,
on the ether scan. Do you know what we're getting, Gary?
100% compliance, pretty much by HTX.
It all depends on the credibility
and the desire, pretty much the same
thing of the exchange to play ball. Of course it does, of
course it does. But this helps the exchanges, it gives
clarity because people put lots of warnings on the, on the
blockchain analytics tools that people use. You can mark things,
but the exchanges don't really know what it means. We went, no, we've got to.
If we're going to put a court order on there, we're going to put a
court order. You can see what a UK High Court order is. You
can look it up online. It's, you know, it's
about as crystal clear as you can get. What it does is it puts the
crook on the back foot in the sense of if he,
if anyone legitimate has suddenly seen an order
that is diluting, if not eradicating
completely, the value of his asset, he's going to come out and say,
no exchange, you must apply or I will apply to get
rid of it. So then you've got engagement, because 99%
of frauds that you have no idea
who, who conducted it and who the actual villain is because they've
used AI identities is actually finding
the human being that sits behind the fraud. Do you know what happens when we
go to court? Tell me. We're on our own. Nobody comes and
sees us, nobody comes and says, hi, I want to defend
this. Oh, of course not. No, no, sorry, it doesn't happen. No, no, no.
But my point is they don't. So I'm supporting your point, Gary,
they just don't. So the thing is, the other thinking about this
is you might remember a case of Tulip that was in the High Court a
few years ago now, where big fraud, multi, multi million
pound fraud, laundered through crypto. And one of
the things the claimant, if I remember the case
properly, one of the things the claimant's position
was was to say, look, you have
a fiduciary duty here. The size of the transaction, the
way it went through, you have transaction monitoring, you
should have really detected this as being the proceeds of
fraud. And then, as we used to so often
do and still do with fraud, you go, you go, well, hang on a
minute. The bank failed to prevent this. Let's go and get
some form of recourse and restitution
for our Client from the bank. Well, the whole
my thinking about the notice being on chain was
also to be able to turn around to the exchange and say we could
not have made this more obvious exchange. Yet you
failed to act, you failed to adhere to this
High Court order. We contacted you immediate. We even sent
our notice into your wallet, into your exchange wallet.
We did everything we possibly could. Yet you still
decided to let our clients. What was the outcome of the Tulip case or what
was the essence of the Schulich case? I mean the essence of it was as
described. It was a huge fraud. I don't, you know,
I, I'd have to. This is a little embarrassing as I don't know what
the actual. As an example, the problem of course
as you and I know when we're looking at who are the deep pockets.
Yep. Because if the crook
has disappeared, which is in a lot
of cases is what actually happens or they are
in some obscure country where the rule of law
is, is either not non existent or can be bent to
their will, you are forced to look at you. The crook may
have said I write off, I'm going to write off X percent. It's all money
stolen, so I don't give a shit. I'll now con another sucker.
So you'll sit there, you've lost your 2 million. The only
other avenue is a deep pocket. And this is where,
I don't know whether you would agree, this is where the courts of
every country need to be more prepared I
think to scrutinize and to develop
theories of legal responsibility, duties of care
when it comes to Mickey Mouse compliance.
You and I have come across so many accounts where
even a seven year old child would have noticed that this cannot
be legit. But until the court start imposing some
responsibility, a deep pocket is only
potential. It doesn't work out to be of any value. Is that right?
Yeah, and I think, I think Gary, I don't, you know, I'm guessing quite a
lot of your listeners might be esteemed people like yourself.
You know from as in really, really experienced fraud
litigation lawyers who've who Understand
for the IfG this is for consumption to any.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and yeah, of course,
of course. And I do, you know, I think there's two sides to the coin.
There's. I know people in virtual asset service providers that
are working super hard to try and
you know, improve compliance, improve their
whole systems and processes, their kyc,
reviewing all the old accounts, which is often where the legacy issues
sitting. But some are good, some are
bad. Now Back to your point
though. I think the more and more we
bring these, these cases come to the fore. We've got
to start thinking
innovatively as to how they can be settled. And I
suspect we may also end up going
into battle with a number of exchanges over time, Gary. Because I
think what we'll end up doing is even after first
disclosure, which is a relatively,
you know, easy step to get to in a. In
most frauds, once you can prove the fraud and you, you get to first disclosure
and you ask for disclosure on the accounts and exactly as you say,
we are, you know, certainly we have, in my company, we develop, we've
got the technology that we, we know within seconds whether all the idea
is fake. We can tell you within like literally within
minutes where this is all a fake. I get it. And then present that as
evidence. Part of that is building that case. But I come back to
the tech, the technology that we developed that even
that as well being able to. Where
I want to go with it is
we've called it. And Gary, I'm. It's just for
reference really. I'm not trying to plug. We've called it Rectify.
Now you may not know in the crypto world when any of these frauds happen,
when anything like this happen. Everybody says I've been wrecked. R
E K T I've been defrauded. So we just
added ify on end and called it Rectify
and then. And then trademarked it very quickly. Investigator
and go into the marketing PR business. Yeah,
well, that's maybe the next crew when I sell the company. But
the. Can I, can I just, just go
on to this point though, Gary? I think it's a really important point we all
need to consider here. Yeah, the ecosystem is
changing. You know, I want to be able to use that token I've created it
almost what's called gasless. So it cost me
hardly anything to deploy on the blockchain. Every fraud,
99 of frauds do not get investigated. If
I can get a police notice on chain for every fraud
just with a police reference number, if I can, we can start deploying
and properly marking all these wallets involved in crime, a bit like a
Cyphas marker. As the exchanges start
to fail to comply or we see multiple
offenders as in multiple cases where
victims money are going to that exchange, I can come to you, Gary, and say,
right, hang on, let's. Where do we go now? Okay, the criminals in
Myanmar, we can't. We're not going to get. But what action
can we take against the exchange. Let's now do a bit of
double dipping. I'm going to dip into your previous experience in
Her Majesty's Fuzzy Wuzzies
and the comment that you just made. You and I know even when you
were in the force, the police didn't have enough
resources to deal with 1% of the.
Of the sophisticated private criminal
activity. Now, with bitcoin and with.
I get, as you do, an email every day, I've just lost
50, I've just lost a million. I've just. The police do not have
the resources. Maybe they don't have the skill set.
I'm asking you that question to do anything about what's going
on. It is a combination. Now, all credit to the Home Office
here in the UK and the Met Metropolitan Police, which is my former
force, they set up a dedicated crypto team.
They did that massive 5 billion seizure, but it. It wiped out
a signal. I know personally, because my friends are still there. Yeah. You know,
it wiped out a considerable part of the team to deal with a
5 billion seizure, a massive Chinese fraud.
Now, they are working on many other cases, but there is
a. Is that, by the way, is that the one where the. The
crypto was seized? It was like the lucky. The luckiest day
in the life of the Met where they picked up Madam the Queen.
The Queen of crypto. Is that the one or is it another one? It's different.
Different. And actually, actually the truth, I don't know the full facts behind it,
Gary, but I. To absolute credit to my team and my
director, Rob Eastick, played a part in the case.
He worked on that because he was part of that team. They worked
tirelessly to chase her down. They chased her. The Queen of
Crypto. No, Crypto Queen is another case.
This is the Chinese. The Chinese case. She. She
was on the run. They chased all over. They did some really,
really good detective work because the crypto Queen,
she is the one that's in custody now in the UK and it's her
600 million or billion dollars worth of
crypto that is being litigated with Lee Day
and a few others at the moment. That's not the case you're talking about. It
is the case. It's the case. The Met have seized the money,
Right? Yeah, it is a case. And others are trying to sort of,
you know, get a slice. Look, that's not. We haven't got time on this
podcast to go there, but I think a couple of things here,
the actual police detective work on that was
outstanding. Like Rob, my director of
Crypto that the final wallet she had, they
didn't have all the seed phrases, Gary. So do you know that they didn't have
the full password. They couldn't get into it. He's a
detective, right? He's not. No,
he's not the normal people that you get in.
The reason I recruited him is because he's not a normal detective. He wrote the
code. He wrote code to be able to brute
force his way into that wallet so that he could identify the
missing seed phrases and they could seize the money. Now, it was a, it was
a modest amount compared to the main, main bit, but that
is the sort, you know, there's, there's some excellent
detectives out there, do some amazing work. Well, how many people, if you went in
your office, Gary, could you say, right, write some code to solve that
problem for me? Oh, we, we have, you know, and,
and of good code. I mean, listen, you are now,
you know, it's on the verge of. Now, of course, every lawyer in
Michigans know what code is, but if there were more than two people in
Michigan that wrote code. But that's not my question. My question,
let me come back to the point is out there, of course they're not, Gary.
Of course they're not. Of course they're not. Of course they're not. Unless. So we've
got some. My point, the point I wanted to make is there's some super
sophisticated, smart, capable people, but
they are a tiny, tiny,
tiny number compared to the volume of fraud. And
therefore, you know, that remains a big
problem if my son, and hopefully he's smart
enough that it wouldn't happen to him. But if my son was defrauded tomorrow,
my confidence would probably be at zero that anything would
happen. Yeah. Other than maybe I do it myself.
Correct. And therefore. And we're coming to the end of this particular.
But I will, I will nab you again and we'll get into what I call
the, the, the nitty gritty of the JB
career because I want to go into the anti corruption
force that you created and stuff like that. But this has been such an
interesting exchange on crypto AI that
it deserves its own podcast. But I
think what I want to leave with is that tragic statement that
apart from the $5 billion crypto queen, et
cetera, the vast majority of people that are being
conned in the crypto world, they will never
see their money again because it falls into that bracket of
police don't have resources, private enterprises like you
and I, it's not viable to spend the time and
money, trying to chase it. That's the reality. There is a
paradigm shift. You know, technology is helping. We've just
developed some technology that costs nothing for us
to put on the wallets and just send alerts. We can notify
exchanges. We're working super hard to go
from a client that maybe on some occasions,
Gary, you might be looking at 100, 150 grand to get
through the doors of the court to get the case, get the wills to turn
on the case. We're now looking really
innovatively, how do we do this for a fraction,
a fraction of that, just so to get some traction. So there
is then work in this, work in this space. Last question, and we will come
back to this on the next podcast, because I'm much more cynical and skeptical about
whether this can be done effectively. But will you
do and have you done any crypto recovery cases on a
contingency basis? So we've, we, we
can do. We've done deferred fee. We're not allowed to do contingency,
Gary, as you'll know, legally we're not. You are, but I'm not.
Why is an investigator not allowed to. Because
we're expert witnesses. And, and because we're
expert witnesses, we cannot be
evidence. We cannot turn up at court. And we've had council's
advice on this. We cannot turn up at court, give expert
evidence and then for the other side,
potentially turn around and say, you've got skin in the game
on this. Sorry. On the same case, of course, that would be
unacceptable. But generally, if you weren't an expert witness,
maybe what you're going to say to me is that it's virtually impossible for us
not to be the expert witness because nobody else has got what we've got. And
I don't want to go there, I don't want to encourage. No, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So the bottom line is, at the
moment, at least, you don't. Can't, whatever the word is, do
contingency, because that is where this game is going to be
blown wide open. You're right. But we're in a legal
lacuna, really, for want of a better term, where
we are stuck, because as soon as we do the
tracing, we become witnesses. Yeah, no, I get it, I get it.
We. I would love to do contingency. I would love to be
able to look, because I can look at a case quickly and work out whether
it's got legs. I've got it. I would love to go but I can't. I
can't bring this to an end or this part to an end. This is part
one. Who knows? You are so rich of
information and discussion. There may be part. There might be, like
the Game of Thrones, we might have multiple episodes, multiple
serials. But I'm going to thank you. I'm going to wish you a
speedy, speedier recovery. And I will. I will
nab you again from part two. Thank you. Thank you, Gary,
for inviting me. Thank you so much. Take care. Thank
you for listening. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please click and
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