Traci Brown: Thank you so much for being here. We just got acquainted just slightly on LinkedIn, and I’m thrilled that you took the time to come on and talk to us here. Thank you.
Tony Sales: You shared great messages, so I’m privileged to be here with you. I feel that sharing great message is what it’s all about because that’s how we really have an impact on what is going on out there.
Traci Brown: Tony, you known as Britain’s Greatest Fraudster, and that is quite a title to have achieved. I know there’s a lot that goes into it. You want to start at the beginning, or do you want to start at the end and work back? I have so many questions for you.
Tony Sales: Yes, I was branded by the British media as Britain’s Greatest Fraudster. It’s not something I’m at all proud of. In one of my talks I always say, I ended up in a life of crime. I was destined to be in it. People always say to me, “I try and think like a fraudster.” My answer to that is always the same. I always say, “I’m really sorry to hear that.” People always are like, when I say it, they go, “What do you mean by that?” I say, “I didn’t want my mum to beat me at two days old. I didn’t want to go through the sexual abuse that I went through as a child. That stuff causes trauma. Do you think I wanted to be bad or scenarios that happened created someone that became bad?” Yes, I totally put my hands up to all the crimes I committed, but now I also know that the stuff that happened to me as a child contributed to the person I would become. I’m all about trying to make people understand that firstly, that not only are these people that commit crimes out there, they’re suffering in lots of ways, in ways that they don’t even realize that they’re suffering, and it’s only when you’re really willing to open up to yourself and hurt, that you can understand it.
Traci Brown: Oh yea, being real with yourself. Everybody’s been through some kind of trauma. I actually spent a lot of time as a therapist, and I’ve heard a lot of stories that unfold and unravel just bit by bit into behavior now, to where all of a sudden you find yourself as a fraudster or an addict or whatever the case may be, not things you would ever pick, but opening up and getting real with yourself is one of the hardest things that people can do. It takes a lot of bravery. Good for you because I know you’ve turned the corner, and we’re going to get to that. We’re going to get to that. Do you think, since we’re on the topic, did you mostly do what you did to get attention at first, or was it survival?
Tony Sales: Yea, definitely attention. What happened to me was when I was 12 years old . . . I grew up with my grandmother. My grandmother was a bit older. Of course, the clothes that she was buying me wasn’t the same clothes that the kids my age would wear. I was a bit behind the times by that. I asked a girl out. I actually asked her out. She told me to go away, you tramp.
Traci Brown: Oh no!
Tony Sales: Yea. That on top of the other stuff that happened, so I had a whole series of emotions where, alright, okay, so it’s all about how I look. It’s all about what you’ve got. That set off that chain of events that then I would become relentless in my quest for money. I never, ever thought of money. I always hated people that . . . money really didn’t bother me. Even now, I have no regard or respect for money because love would always be valued at much more and a lot harder to obviously get. Yea, I learned a lot of hard lessons.
Traci Brown: Okay. How did you start? Let’s talk about that because some of the stuff that I found, it said you had, let me get the right number here, at one point, 250,000 – was it pounds? Under your bed at one point? How did you get from nothing to that? I would be happy for 250,000 pounds under my bed right now. Hopefully I got it legal. (Laughing). Tell me, how did you get there?
Tony Sales: It just starts. I started off very simply by going door to door with sponsorship forms. One week it would be a sponsored run, a sponsored jump, a sponsored bounce, sponsored whatever it was that I was able to do to take that person’s money. Then I met someone who showed me a route of credit card fraud that I just hadn’t realized was there before. I’ve always been a dreamer. I’ve always liked to dream big and think about big dreams and if the opportunity was there in the beginning, certainly at that age I definitely didn’t see anything that I was doing was wrong. I just thought it was free money and there was a way and opportunity to do it. I scoured massively to have over 300 people working throughout restaurants in the UK by the time I was 17 and ½, all giving me back on average around 400 credit card numbers that they had obtained by cloning the credit cards with the small rubbers that you used to get back then.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea.
Tony Sales: Then we would reprogram to track the information. I know you guys just only recently switched over to chip and pin, but here in the UK I would have been one of the reasons that the UK switched over very early because we were kind of taking a lot of numbers at a lot of different retail outlets throughout.
Traci Brown: I’ve got some questions about that because of all the fraudsters I’ve talked to, they’re all people . . . like they’re not introverts. It takes quite a bit of charisma to scale on that level. Tell me, how did that get started?
Tony Sales: When the girl told me to go away, I created a persona and I became comedian-like. I actually just spoke about it with a criminologist. I’m able to adapt in every situation. Of course, you’re right, charm is a massive thing, but I’ve always been quite a shy person. The real me is quite shy. I can be quite antisocial at times. I don’t always want to talk to people, but the person now that I am on stage is obviously the comfortable person who takes over from Tony that’s at home. It’s a really weird adaption but I think it’s just learning as you’re going through. You learn exactly about body language and it becomes a massive part at the start because you start looking for how someone is reacting to what you’re saying. If you learn to read all the lips and small, minute stuff that’s happening, you can then manipulate that as you’re going through to what you want them to do. That becomes a really good skill, and I’m doing that at 16, 17, 18, and learning and understanding it. There’s a really good part in Catch Me If You Can. He’s never spoke about it much, but Frank Abagnale with this film, he actually walks along, so Leonardo DiCaprio walks along the tellers to look at the bank tellers because criminals have an amazing sense of looking at a person and being able to tell what they can do to pull over their eyes. That’s the sixth sense that they have, that they’ve learned, that they’ve relied on, that he would have learned from his mum being with the guy behind dad’s back, all of that stuff attributes to all of them things.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea. It makes you good at social engineering. You’ve got to be social first. Wow.
Tony Sales: Socially, who do want to be socially? I say that now, social media is to be social when I want to be social. What do you know about social media.
Traci Brown: Right. Social media is all a highlight reel. Right. Okay, so you have all these credit cards, or credit card numbers that you got.
Tony Sales: Yea.
Traci Brown: What do you do with them? How are you turning that into cash? Are you selling them? Are you using them yourself? This was a while ago. For gift cards? How does it all come together?
Tony Sales: What we would do, some numbers, yes, I would sell back to the guy who actually sold me the rubber because at that time he wouldn’t tell us what the computer was or the software that we could use, and we would just give him back the bits and he would just load them onto, back then we had what was called Algos premier points cards so it would track the information, the magnetic strip on the back there, all those cards we would have printed on just Algos cards. They just looked like green sheet stamp cards or whatever they were. We would have lots of people internally that worked in the store, the shop, the mall, different types of places, lots of people involved in it. Lots of bars and restaurants in the West End would allow us to come in and swipe for 1,000 or 2,000 pounds at a time, and of course, we would say 50/50. If I came into your store, I’d give you a card, you’d swipe it for 2,000 and give me 1,000 back, you keep 1,000, everyone’s a winner and it cost no one nothing. Right.
Traci Brown: Right.
Tony Sales: Doing that a few times mounts up. There’s only so many you can do because the credit card companies become smart. They learn about when cards are cloned, when two cards get used in one place, a shop will send all those other cards to organizations back then. The criminal, we’re learning as well, so we’re understanding what they’re doing in trying to counteract all of that stuff and being much broader in how you do it. Then I get introduced to a guy who actually sells me secondhand blanks.
Traci Brown: Wow.
Tony Sales: They were all hologrammed. They would go underneath. The had the eagles, the victory one.
Traci Brown: Yea, yea.
Tony Sales: They were absolutely perfect blanks. I bought a punch-in sheet myself. I hand punch job. I’ve got all the tin foil. We learned how to manipulate plastic and made our own cards. Then once I figured that out, now all those numbers become ones that are going everywhere to use. I don’t need to have internal members to start. It’s much more up-scalable, and up course I can bring many more people into the team to go out and actually start to create frauds.
Traci Brown: Wow. What did you end up buying? How did the money actually come in? You had run them at restaurants, give them 50/50. How else did you bring money in?
Tony Sales: My phone would ring nonstop, my house phone. People would order. Over here we had something called Radio Rentals. People would want video recorders and they would want the latest TVs and the latest hot buys, the latest clothes, the latest everything people wanted, we would just go and buy. Everyone wants a bargain. Everyone where I come from is looking for a bargain. I come from a working-class area where that’s kind of accepted that there is a bit of booking here and that’s how it’s going to be. I entered into that market very early on and just achieved. That would last for many years going forward. My phone used to, when it got into a mobile, people used to say, you’re joking, your phone doesn’t stop ringing like that at night, it used to constantly. People would want Swedish furnishing stores stock.
Traci Brown: IKEA. Yea.
Tony Sales: Wherever it was, people always want stuff at a knockdown price and the markets always there.
Traci Brown: What were you doing, like 20% discounts on TVs and furniture? Or was it more?
Tony Sales: It was 50%. I would do always half price. Whatever I got would be half price. I’d get Rolex watches. I might get a Land Rover discovery that’s worth 25,000 pounds going out to someone in Sri Lanka. There would be loads of stuff, and then of course we found store cards and interest free credit and that’s where it really takes off. That’s where it was buying and paying everyone.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea. Wow. You went everything from TVs to Land Rovers. What’s the craziest thing you bought from someone? Did you ever buy like an elephant or something like that?
Tony Sales: No. I bought an apartment in Spain, and didn’t get caught, on an American Express card.
Traci Brown: Oh my God.
Tony Sales: A backup card. Many years. I think we got away with that for about six weeks of just having fun, just in a three million pound apartment just with champagne and a great big jacuzzi and all that kind of stuff that was in there. We could actually play football on the balcony.
Traci Brown: Oh, man. Then what happened after six weeks? Did you get out of there before they found you, or?
Tony Sales: I remember someone coming and knocking on the door, and we had to scoot. But again, we had an internal member of staff that was helping us know everything. It was kind of really easy. Money always worked with people, no matter what background they’re from. If you take someone out to a nightclub and you’re in the nightclub out there with them and you’re the biggest thing in the club that everyone wants to be around, that everyone wants to talk to, that you’re just a really nice guy as far as they’re concerned, they all fall for it, and that’s exactly what they do.
Traci Brown: Wow. Okay. Let’s see. Tell me about, because I know you moved into, or at least you had problems with getting . . . you almost murdered or what was the gang references that I ran across? It had to do something with mortgage lenders and things like that. Is that ringing a bell?
Tony Sales: Yea. I was a fraudster before I got involved in really serious organized crime. I was just a run of the mill fraudster that was just like most other kids that had been messed up as a kid that end up in crime. Then I was out working. Honestly, I’m quite entrepreneurial. I’ve always been a bit entrepreneurial. I had a good eye for spotting stuff. We’d been out working in a town out in the suburbs with some guys I worked with and on the way back one of the guys got a phone call. I remember, I’m driving, and my brother’s here. He’s actually here. I’m driving. He says, “I’ve got a problem.” So I said, oh, yea, “What’s your problem?” He says, “I took a kilo of cocaine off of. . . ” and he tells me the name of the drug dealer he took it from. He said, “I washed it all up to crack cocaine and I smoked all of it.”
Traci Brown: A kilo. That’s . . . for Americans, that’s like three pounds. That’s enough to kill you.
Tony Sales: Well, you’d think so, right. But I mean, I didn’t even know what to say to him. He said to me, “Look, can you help me? This guy is going to kill me and if I don’t pay this money to him tonight, he’s going to burn out my mom and dad’s house.” I just said, “I don’t want nothing to do with it.” I don’t want anything to do with it. We drive him back to London. It’s actually about a two-and-a-half-hour drive back to London from where we were. We must have been an hour in the journey, and he got another phone call. He came off of that phone call, and he was shaking and nearly crying. It was at that point and I said, “Okay, I’ll ring someone.” I rang someone that I know and said, “Can you help?”. He asked the name of the person the money was owed to. I told him. I got a callback five minutes later and was told to meet them in a place in Catford, which is like a real dingy part of southeast London that’s notorious for crime. It’s where the Krays and the Richardson gang that are quite famous from the UK had their famous shootout, that sort of place. I met them with the guy that done it. As we were sitting outside, they pulled up. They had guns . It was really weird because, it’s just America, that kind of stuff doesn’t happen. Then we went in and we spoke to them. I took control of the conversation and I said, “Look, can we find a fucking way to get this money back to you guys? It’s going to take me a bit of time, but I’m willing to do it. I’ve spoken to him about it and he said he’s okay with it.” They gave me three weeks to go and get the money. I think I got it in three days and went back to them. That obviously really impressed them. Then the main guy offered me some work and said, “I really like the way you operate. I’m looking to find a trustworthy guy to do crime for me.”
Traci Brown: (Laughing).
Tony Sales: Yea. That’s how I got involved in organized crime. There were many people that would happen to. I’ve been in situations where I’ve got a phone call to come and meet, come down now, yea, just come. I’m given an address and I’ll get to the room and there are people tied up, have been smashed up, beaten with hammers, there’s been lots of stuff happened to them, and they’ve stolen drugs or property of the wrong person. I would be there to, normally before I come along, those people would end up the holes in the countryside.
Traci Brown: Oh, man. Then, tell me about this, what did I read about mortgage lenders and targeting them. Tell me about that.
Tony Sales: Mortgage fraud. Right. It’s a very easy thing to happen because most people buy a house at some point, so the bank deals with many applications that are look all above board. I don’t know about in the U.S., if you check with the IRS, wage earnings and stuff.
Traci Brown: Yea. You’ve got to turn in your forms. Yea.
Tony Sales: Yea. If you get really smart about that, there are ways to make that look on paper that looks amazing. If you’ve got enough money using a criminal network, you can do loads of it. Right. What happens once you get approved for a mortgage is you get a mortgage offer. Yea. A solicitor would then draw up down the funds. Right. A solicitor has, in the UK they have an indemnity and they’re allowed to draw down certain amounts of funds, depending on how much their partnership is within the business. If I create 10 mortgage offers that are very easy to do, I can buy 10 properties and all of the properties are valued around 300,000 pounds.
Traci Brown: Sure.
Tony Sales: I create those mortgage offers. If I get a dodgy solicitor who’s willing to go on the run for a couple of million quid and just retire back to their native country normally, you can draw down a lot of funds. If you’re really smart, you can rob Peter to pay Paul and keep paying indemnity all the way through, rolling it around until it’s massive, and then go. Yea. I figured out a way of doing that in the system. I always have to get a way out of cloning the solicitor as well. I was able to clone a solicitor to draw the funds down from the bank as the solicitors, which was quite crazy at the time of stuff to do. Intercepting mortgage offers and changing over the solicitor details, the dodgy one that you’ve got. I had a guy that worked in a mortgage base at some point who would give me the mortgage offers as it came in on the fax machine. He would give me them. I would just ring up and change all the details of that person and get the funds drawn down by the solicitor I want them to draw down on.
Traci Brown: Oh, wow.
Tony Sales: That was all pretty easy stuff. It’s all social engineering over the phone. You don’t ever meet anyone. I think I went into one solicitor’s with a fake ID once and signed all the paperwork off, but that was the only time I’d ever done that.
Traci Brown: Wow. Okay, oaky. I know you had a change of heart at some point because you’re on the good side now. Before we get there, let’s talk about what can people learn, like people listening, what can they learn so that they’re not targets and victims of some of the different scams that you had rolling. Is there anything people can do?
Tony Sales: Just to be more vigilant. If I’m drilled on questions more, yea, as a fraudster, I’m probably going to fall down. When I was younger there would be much smarter people behind the counter than as I got older throughout my criminal career. We seem to have lost a lot of knowledge from the early days. For instance, if I went into a store and I gave my date of birth as January 1, 1975, what’s the counter question for that? How’s someone going to catch me up? If I haven’t done my homework, what’s my star sign?
Traci Brown: Oh, that’s interesting.
Tony Sales: We’re starting to lose the basic stuff of just being able to spin stuff off on the cuff, and always taking frauds without the comfort zone is always going to win. Once you pick one hole, you can start to see them all fall apart underneath. I actually do this as part of my work now. I do a lot of social engineering stuff with banks and all those types of businesses. There have been many calls where I’m on the call and I’m just shaking my head to myself saying, I can’t believe he just said that. They’re not even on top of it. It’s just how you do things. You’re, kind of, put in there to show people. If something just seems to be too good to be true, it normally is. It’s the same old ruse. We hear them. We hear everyone say the same stuff over and over again, but we just have to take in what that means.
Traci Brown: Well, yea. It’s about paying attention. It’s about paying attention differently and asking the questions and actually being interested in your job, for one, and also the person across from you. Isn’t it amazing how the people on the frontlines are paid so little, yet they have the keys to the kingdom.
Tony Sales: Yea. I made a documentary for high school, How to Get Away With Stealing. I actually stated in that documentary that you’ve got people that are on minimum wage in this country making financial decisions against people that they haven’t got a clue what the stuff is to look for within that. We’re seeing it now. We’re seeing it across the world now. Most countries now have a critical person policy in place. Right.
Traci Brown: Yea.
Tony Sales: Letters, ID, National Health Services badges, or whatever it is. A lot of those people that are all checking, the police, most of the police out there haven’t got a clue.
Traci Brown: Say that again. You cut out. Most police don’t have a clue of. . .
Tony Sales: Of what a fraudulent document looks like.
Traci Brown: Oh, right. Yea.
Tony Sales: They’ve not been trained in that stuff. It’s a specialty subject. If there are many people out there around the world, which I’m pretty sure there are, all using fraudulent instruments or documentation to get themselves around during lockdown, that’s a big problem already. You can see it because the people on the frontlines just don’t know who they’re looking at. The people in the supermarket that are looking for people coming in, or healthcare works that get special times in shops, all of those commodities, valuable.
Traci Brown: Oh yea. Those little papers to get us around. We haven’t had a whole lot of that here in the States. Well my husband has one just in case because he’s considered critical with his job. He builds satellites. But it’s no different than a grocery store worker.
Tony Sales: Yea. And the fact that the one I go to is close to everyone. It’s the perfect ruse for any criminal. Are you going to be able to see what the quality of the document is that you’re being shown? But onboarding that’s happening all around the worldwide now because everyone’s working from home is a massive risk. This is the stuff we never talk about.
Traci Brown: What tips would you have for onboarding in a remote world?
Tony Sales: I think you’ve just got to be really careful. Your KYC has to be really, really good by now. Unfortunately, it’s not for many, many banks out there. That’s just a harsh reality. Where do we draw the line with onboarding for our clients to get in that malicious attack when a bad actor that then comes on and uses us to money launder, the drug money that would have gone through from wherever? All those criminal impacts are continuously happening.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea, yea. Now, you had a change of heart.
Tony Sales: Yea.
Traci Brown: Tell us about that. How did everything really flip for you?
Tony Sales: I was in prison. I was on the run. I was a fugitive here in the UK for six years. Once I’d been caught, I never told my wife that she was on the run, or my family that they were on the run either.
Traci Brown: Oh, really?
Tony Sales: Once I’d been caught and she finally came to see after three months without talking to me, she came, and she was holding my son’s hand, who is now 19. He was crying. He was a baby. I realized at that point, all the stuff that had happened to me I had pushed onto him, and now he’s suffering too. I didn’t like that. I didn’t that feeling of making that happen to my child, and that was it. I kind of went back to the wing from then, and I knew that I was never ever going to commit a crime. I couldn’t let him down. I didn’t want to let my kids down ever again after that. That was it. That was the change. It didn’t go down too well when I actually got back to the wing and said I’m going to try and help in the fight against fraud. Everyone in the prison kind of looked at me really funny when I said that.
Traci Brown: Yea. I know.
Tony Sales: But once I got out, I tried a few little tricks to try to get in front of someone. Someone got me an interview, a good friend of mine got me an interview at the home office here in the UK with the UK’s head of fraud at the time, and arrogantly, I made a fake passport and beat all the systems, the security systems within there, got to the head of fraud for the government, and showed him the passport and showed him where his system was flawed. They kind of decided that they didn’t really want to speak to me anymore. He knew that this problem could exist. They were more interested in what they called gangs and kind of dismissed me away a little bit. I had a media agency digging around on me for a little while that offered me a documentary. Did I want to make a documentary? So I agreed. Then everything just snowballed it from there really. I was saying different stuff to lots of different people. I said that data was the new cash in 2012 because it obviously was. I had done so much bad I really wanted to pay some stuff back and just give a really different insight and that’s what I do today. I might be a bit rough around the edges, but most of the stuff that I say, most banks, or financial institutions, or governments now would agree with the thing I say because they understand they’re I’m totally looking at it from a different perspective.
Traci Brown: Now, what perspective do you think, like if you could lend people just a clue of perspective of how to look at their business or how to look at their internal systems like a fraudster, what would you say?
Tony Sales: I’d say what I say all the time. It’s just impossible unless you’ve been through that life, you can’t look at it that way no matter what you think because you’re only thinking about morals and it’s not that. Yea.
Traci Brown: Okay.
Tony Sales: Most criminals have been through things in their life that makes them see things in a very different way. You and I walk past a building. You’ll see the security guard at the door. I’ll see the window open on the third floor.
Traci Brown: Oh. Interesting. Okay.
Tony Sales: A very, very different way of looking at stuff. That’s what we do for people. Once you’ve had your eyes opened to it, then obviously it’s a very different thing. I sit down with very clever and successful people all the time. I show them how I’ve been taking them for billions in just moments, and they’re staggered by that because they just can’t think like that, the loss guys, the loss prevention guys. I’ll tell you a story. I got a job once for a very well-known DIY store. They had a massive problem with shower units being stolen by a Romanian gang. They couldn’t figure out how it was being done. All it was, it was because the back of the cabinet was filled with MDF. The gang had figured out was that it was held together by two little cable ties that they just popped and pulled back and just took out as many showers as they wanted.
Traci Brown: Just flattened them and took them out.
Tony Sales: Exactly right. That’s just a criminal insight. It took me, that probably took me two days of looking at the store to figure out how they were doing it. The cameras in those stores were focused on the actual aisle where the showers were, not on the pile behind it where you could actually get into the back of the cabinet.
Traci Brown: Oh, wow.
Tony Sales: It was a real scenario. I spotted it, just looking at it and thinking, wow, see what you’re looking for there. That’s what the difference is.
Traci Brown: Got it. You have some ways that people to start to really dive into the criminal mindset and really helping people because now you have an organization, We Fight Fraud. Tell us all about that.
Tony Sales: We Fight Fraud is exactly what it says. I don’t like that there are fraudsters out there going after the old, weak, and vulnerable people. Trust me, I come from a . . . I would never allow that to happen to old people. I love them. More than that, it’s just part of who I am. I feel it’s very important to kind of teach and keep people safe in that environment because that environment is really good for them, especially in times like now. We want more older people to go on the net and using it without the fear of being conned or scammed because that’s all they ever hear of it. There are so many. These crimes impact. I’ve seen victims lose their life savings now by it. That stuff really impacts down on the family because the family doesn’t get an inheritance anymore. Now, that stuff that may have helped them just achieve something doesn’t because it’s all gone. They never got paid back. The banks didn’t pay it back. That’s what We Fight Fraud is all about is trying to help those people and make them understand. We are able to talk to the consumer and businesses. We have a saying: Computers don’t make crime. People do.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea.
Tony Sales: Only people can prevent it. Right. There’s not a computer on the planet serving a prison sentence anywhere. There’s not. That means that it’s humans. If we understand that people will call us, they will try to socially engineer us to steal our money, if banks understand that people will go to the lengths of to do a sim swap, for instance, to change someone’s phone number to steal their money, we need to get a lot more joined up across industry so everyone is talking to everyone. The have protection acts around the world that restrict so many industries from talking to each other. Yet, it doesn’t help when it actually comes to the fraud epidemic that is across the world and especially now.
Traci Brown: Oh, that’s true. I hear that all the time. The fraudsters, they’re networked. The good guys can’t be because of laws. Until they can, they’re going to still have these problems.
Tony Sales: I remember reading the Fraud Protection Act the first time and saying, hold on a minute, these guys can’t share information. GE Capital can’t talk to Any Finance Companies can’t talk to Norman Rock. Norman Rock can’t talk to Clydesdale now because they’re all separate companies and all blinded by it. They’re all subprime companies or finance companies of bigger institutions anyway. As long as you know which ones are separate, none of them can talk to each other. It gives the criminal a great big advantage. They can just go through and do whatever they want.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea. Absolutely. Absolutely. Are you working with legislation to stop that? Is that on your radar?
Tony Sales: Yea. I always get asked by the likes of police or ex-CIA here in the UK, or lots of different police agencies all over the place. I always say stuff. I didn’t know that. The FCA here in the UK, I’ve actually just found something I’m quite astonished about. They actually said in this time it’s actually okay to give a self-pic to confirm ID, which that’s something I totally don’t agree with. I know how easy it is to screw the meta data on the back of an image and to create an image that I want. You know, when onboarding is in such a serious state at the moment, stuff like that, decisions being made sometimes need to be made smarter. We’re living in fear and panic right now because of this virus They spent months and weeks trying to get people in fear and panic. They already are globally.
Traci Brown: Yea. Absolutely, absolutely. Tell us about your conference that you have. It was going to be in person, and now you’ve gone virtual with it. Talk about that.
Tony Sales: It’s a virtual conference. It’s like a conference. It’s not like we’ve done a webinar and stuff that’s going on there where you’ve just got like one screen popping up. We’ve actually got a reception. We’ve actually got a networking area.
Traci Brown: Oh, wow.
Tony Sales: Booths where people can come, come and visit the people that are in the booths. There are video presentations in the booths. There are also live people in there. We’ve got a bit of a cocktail party going on after. We have the police commander of Action Fraud here in the UK, Karen Baxter, giving us a keynote speech. Myself, Andy McDonald, who’s my business partner, and Solomon Gilbert, who’s my business partner, Solomon is an ex-partner who helps lots of police institutions all around the world fight hacking and all those types of crimes because he’s amazing at it, and he’s the ex-head of fraud for the Metropolitan Police here in the UK and has a real good understanding of that stuff, and obviously myself showing businesses and consumers how to keep themselves safe. We’ve been kind of showing things in a very different way from being a building, from sitting outside, checking the wifi. Can we look for what systems are being used? And ask Cisco, why the vulnerabilities within those systems from outside a building, just showing people different stuff. If people would like to see more, please come and register. WeFightFraud.org/Live on 04/28/2020 at 2:00 pm.
Traci Brown: Got it. That’s coming up here at the end of the month.
Tony Sales: In a couple days.
Traci Brown: Wow.
Tony Sales: Very exciting. Sponsored by TransUnion and Amaiz bank and a lot of other guys. Thank you very much to those guys. The knowledge that we’re going to be able to share, there’s no one else out there in our industry who is able to share that platform so quickly with everyone that’s that influential. There’s some really good stuff there in a couple days. We will also have a mafia princess speaking on that day, Marisa Merico, whose father was an Italian Mafia boss in the 1990s. She’ll be the best in money laundering. We have a guy . . . We have Ann, who’s a PR expert, and then we have Robert Casey, who’s the head of fraud for Richmond. He’s the loss guy at Richmond. He was loss director for a while. Bob’s a good friend of mine and a great speaker. There’s something for everyone across industry there. Yea. You’re welcome.
Traci Brown: And the website for that is WeFightFraud – is it dot com or dot org?
Tony Sales: WeFightFraud.org/Live.
Traci Brown: Got it. Okay, cool. You speak a lot as well. How can people . . . can they find you there at WeFightFraud if they want you in for their conference?
Tony Sales: Yea. Go to WeFightFraud.org. The conference is there. I actually do all my speaking events through the London Speaker Bureau. They’ll also be at the event. They’ve got a booth at the event. If anyone would like, all different types of speakers, you can go there and visit those guys as well. That’d be great. Wonderful.
Traci Brown: Good. Thank you so much for taking a little time to chat with us. Your event sounds awesome and your story is just fascinating. I love that you’re on the good side now.
Tony Sales: Thanks, Traci. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. I love your posts. I love all the stuff you’ve done. I think it’s really good. Keep doing it. It’s amazing.