How to keep up with fraud and financial crime

I read a lot of fraud and financial crime news, because we make a free monthly roundup on it. It's a field where payment fraud, AML, sanctions, enforcement and technology all meet, and it can be hard to see what matters to your work. This is what I've learned about keeping up without letting it take over your week.

The short answer: pick a small number of sources you trust, check them at a regular time, and write down why something mattered when you save it. Most of this guide is about why that's harder in fraud and financial crime than it sounds, and the ways people usually go about it.

Why is fraud and financial crime hard to keep up with?

Mostly because the news comes from several different places. A regulator may publish a fine or a new rule. Police and prosecutors may report a fraud loss or a takedown. Researchers may find a pattern in banking data. Industry reporting may explain how scams or laundering are changing. These sources answer different questions, and they don't arrive in the same format.

Look at September. FinCEN fined UBS Financial Services $125 million over repeat weaknesses in foreign-currency wire monitoring. The UK committed at least £550 million to a new AML and asset-recovery strategy. APP reimbursement had risen to 88%, while many claims were still outside the scheme. City of London Police reported £101 million in payment-diversion losses. A Nature study found signs of financial abuse in anonymised banking data. That's enforcement, policy, reimbursement, fraud reporting and research.

Some stories need careful reading too. The Nature study found patterns before formal disclosure, but it didn't test a production detection model. The APP figures improved inside the scheme's boundary, while international transfers, card payments, crypto transactions and money-transfer apps remained outside it. A headline can leave out the part that matters most to your control or policy decision.

How do people usually keep up?

Most people use some mix of these:

• Newsletters. Good for a regular overview, because somebody else has selected the important developments. The catch is that their selection may favour enforcement, scams or regulation rather than your own area.
• Journal alerts and preprint feeds. Useful for research on detection, identity fraud and financial abuse. They're noisy, and a finding may be a long way from something you can use in production.
• Podcasts. Easy to fit into a commute, and good for getting the shape of a story. Less good when you need the exact wording of a rule, fine or reimbursement condition.
• Conferences and meetings. A useful way to hear what fraud teams, investigators and technology builders are working on. They happen occasionally, so they can't carry your whole routine.
• Colleagues and communities. Often how a useful enforcement action or change in scam tactics reaches you. It works until the people who normally share things are busy, or everyone is seeing the same narrow set of stories.

None of them covers everything, so most people end up with a patchwork.

What tends to work

• Keep the list short. Three or four sources you trust are better than fifteen you feel guilty about. If one hasn't given you anything useful in a month, drop it.
• Pick a time. Fifteen minutes on the same day each week works better than catching up whenever you can.
• Write one line when you save something. Why it matters to your work, in a sentence. A bare link rarely gets looked at again.
• Go back to the source for anything you'll act on. A summary tells you what happened. For the exact figure, scope or caveat, read the original notice, order or study.

That's most of it. It takes discipline, especially when the same development can appear as a fraud trend, a regulatory question and a technology claim.

One more option

This is why I built Iris. You describe your work in your own words, something like "APP reimbursement rules and account takeover controls at a fintech", and every month it reads across fraud and financial crime and writes you a briefing on what changed for you, with every source linked so you can check anything yourself.

It's one option, and a good routine with a couple of newsletters works well too. If you'd like to hear what a monthly overview sounds like, our free monthly podcast, Keeping up with Fraud and Financial Crime is about five minutes on the month's biggest stories, with the written report and every source underneath. When you'd like one built around your own work, you can set up your own briefing.

If you work in fraud and financial crime and think I've missed something, I'd like to hear about it: joe@irisbriefings.com.