Rules for Living in a Lawless Society
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Rampant crime, particularly online fraud, is devastating lives in Britain. In 2017, fraud resulted in £193bn in losses. By March 2018, 3.2 million fraud offences were estimated, with 1.7 million cyber-related. A 149% increase in reported fraud occurred between 2007 and 2017 (105,181 to 261,943), but only 13% of incidents were reported. Criminal gangs numbered 4,629 with 33,598 members by the late 2010s, exceeding the combined membership of the three major Italian mafias. Pensioners are frequent targets, with 3,000 victims losing £46m since 2014.
Victims' stories highlight devastating financial and emotional consequences. Esme and Toby Watts lost £65,500 to a bogus investment scheme, facing bankruptcy. Riley Gill lost nearly £60,000 to a Binary Options scam, with banks unable to recover funds. Joseph, a pseudonym, lost over £250,000 in a cryptocurrency scam, wiping out his retirement savings. Citizens Advice UK reports 36 million adults were scammed in 2021, 12% via fake investment schemes. Losses to bank transfer scams totalled £101 million in the first half of 2017, with only a quarter recovered. Pension scammers targeted 253 victims in 2017, averaging £91,000 per victim. Some victims lost over £1 million. In 2011, one victim lost £400,000. In July 2023, Kent Brushes lost £1.6m in 20 minutes due to a scam, with authorities providing inadequate support. A 2022 case involved £6.5m in lottery winnings being stolen.
The human cost is immense: financial ruin, emotional distress, mental health issues, and family breakdown. The UK's ineffective response to fraud is appalling; only 1 in 1000 cases are solved. The lack of investigation and punishment emboldens criminals. Action Fraud, the national reporting centre, is notable for dismissing most cases. A 2016 study found little chance of investigation for victims outside London. Pledges to replace Action Fraud remain unfulfilled. The failure to prosecute sends a message that large-scale theft goes unpunished.
I tell my own story. I investigated SolidCFD, a scam trading platform, after losing thousands. My years-long investigation uncovered overwhelming evidence of fraud, including stolen funds and falsified balances. Victims reported unauthorized withdrawals and substantial losses. Authorities ignored my detailed reports with names, addresses, and testimonies. Despite providing substantial evidence, including a UK-based suspect's location, Action Fraud repeatedly claimed the case was outside their jurisdiction. Eventually, the FBI and German authorities acted on my information, leading to convictions in 2023. Persistence is key in fighting fraud.
In the light of my own experience, I strongly suggested to people against making any investments in UK-based companies.
I told people: Don't ever, EVER be a victim of fraud. Recovering money lost to fraud is usually extremely difficult, often impossible.
Banks didn't keep your money safe anymore and there was no effective rule of law anymore in the financial system.
Rules I would tell people to follow:
Rule number 1: Don't trust anyone with your money if you haven't already met them. Always meet up with someone and get to know them first. In fact, you couldn't really trust anyone in Britain at the time of writing, even people you thought you knew. Consider online dating fraud, where criminals use fake online profiles with someone else’s picture. Victims of online dating fraud lost an estimated total of £39 million in 2016, with the average victim losing around £10,000. Criminals in this case typically work to build up trust with a person by communicating with them for weeks or even months before suddenly having an emergency, for example, being mugged or their daughter needing urgent surgery, and asking for money to help pay for it. Nancy, a 47-year-old single mother from North Yorkshire was conned out of over £350,000 by someone pretending to be a potential partner. “I wasn't comfortable, and then I got so far in I couldn't get myself out, and I didn't want to walk away having lost £50,000 or what-have-you, so you keep going in the hope that you're wrong and this person is genuine,” she explained to the BBC. Nancy faced bankruptcy in the end.
Note: Research from Gumtree in about 2018 found that 27% of British adults had fallen for a scam online.
Note: Around 7.8 million adults in Britain used online dating sites in 2016, up from just 100,000 in 2000. But just as dating app users were at an all-time high, so were the number of people falling victim to online dating fraud. Statistics for 2016 showed that victims lost an estimated £39 million to fraudsters they had met on dating sites and apps. And you may not just be talking to one person behind each profile, you could be exchanging messages with a circle of fraudsters acting together. Some fraudsters create additional fake profiles and use them to be rude to you, all to make the main fake profile seem more desirable.
Rule number 2: Don't put all your eggs in one basket, as the saying goes. Keep your money spread out over several banks or institutions. At least five I would say if you have a lot of money. You never know if one of them will allow your money to be stolen, just go under, or just lose your money through a computer glitch. Basically, your 'money' is just digits stored on a computer. It doesn't physically exist or have any physical representation. At the time of writing, I'd heard of cases where people had had their entire balances wiped, often tens of thousands of pounds, a lot of hard-earned savings, just due to a mistake or typo made by an employee.
And do not use Cryptocurrencies. They have no physical representation and so no real legitimacy. Scammers run the whole Crypto business, from what I hear.
Rule number 3: I recommended people use a Secure Accounting System. This is where you keep most of your money in a savings account, which is more secure, but only have a card with a current account. The current account can be topped up from the savings account at the bank when needed.
But be aware that many banks may not take security seriously enough. In Britain at the time of writing, I found it was possible with some banks to use just a debit card for one account to access all your accounts with that bank. That's just one of many examples I can think of that showed very inadequate security protocols.
In 2019, I attended a talk by a retired Metropolitan Police officer about scams. He showed just how easy it was for someone to steal all your money.
In some cases, criminals use fake card reader machines that will record all your debit card details, including your pin. They will then copy these details onto a new card which they can use to access your accounts. This is known as 'cloning'. With a cloned debit card, someone could access not just the account for which you had the card, but all the accounts you had with that bank.
So they don't even need your card to steal all your money.
I therefore urge people never to use debit cards for any purchases or payments, and never to give anyone your card details.
I also urge people to cancel any overdraft policy they have. If someone steals all the money from your account, they may also put you into overdraft.
Rule number 4: Large payments should be made in multiple smaller transfers. The intended recipient should be contacted after the first transfer to check they have received it. This is because of some types of scams one must be aware of. A person may be monitoring your email account. If, for example, they are aware you are having building works done, they may send you an email, posing as your builder, and send you fraudulent bank account details for you to pay them for the building works.
Rule number 5: Before you put money into any bank or other institution, do your homework very thoroughly. Get as many second opinions as possible. Always make sure it's a real, physical institution. Actually visit the place, and meet the people you are dealing with face-to-face. Never rely on just a website. Scammers may 'state' they are FCA registered and make other such claims. If you do ever move to a new bank or other institution, start off by just putting a small amount of money in that institution to be sure you can withdraw your money. Gradually increase the amount of money you put in an institution only after you have been withdrawing money for a while so you know you can trust the institution.
Also, don't keep all your account details in one place as a burglar could steal your details and then steal all the money from your bank accounts.
Rule number 6: Just don't keep too much money in liquid cash. Buy physical land or property or even physical gold or silver. And again i must emphasise this because it's very important: BEFORE YOU BUY OR 'INVEST' IN ANYTHING, ACTUALLY VISIT THE PROPERTY OR SELLER TO MAKE SURE WHAT YOU ARE BUYING IS REAL. THERE MAY BE FAKE PROPERTY OR GOLD SCAMS OUT THERE.
Rule number 7: Best advice I can give is: Just don't trust anyone. Always suspect anyone you are dealing with is a scammer until you know beyond any doubt otherwise. Crime was rampant and everywhere in Britain at the time of writing. The rule of law was almost non-existent and you had little to no recourse if someone didn't deliver something you had paid for, refused to honour a signed contract, or refused to pay back money they had borrowed from you.
"Anything that can be stolen, will be."
Rule number 8: Become a scammer yourself. The truth at the time of writing was that crime paid in Britain and anyone who wasn't a scammer was an idiot. I know it's a strong statement, but it's the truth. The more people who realised it, the better as the situation could not continue.
Fifteen years previously, you almost certainly would never have gotten away with serious fraud. Even five years previously, few people would have considered a career in crime a viable option.
But at the time of writing, my career advice to anyone was that crime pays. The only creativity that mattered was new creative ways to scam people.
Scamming was now the most lucrative and profitable business in Britain. Scammers were doing very well and were living very comfortable lives as opposed to everyone else, who were struggling with ever rising energy bills and living costs. People I spoke with referred to wealthy parts of town as the "scammer belt" or the "scammer road", where all the wealthy scammers lived, in a similar way to how we used to refer to commuter towns outside of London as the "stockbroker belt".
Why should one work hard for an honest living when they can make a lucrative career as a criminal? Why work hard and save for a pension when you can just steal someone else's? The big money was in scams, and the police were too lazy to do anything about it.
All you needed to do was to find some way to get people to give away their debit card details. For example, you could set up a fake charity to ask for donations, a fake insurance company, or you could set up a fake dating website in which you would charge for membership.
Then all you needed to do was to wire the person's money to a bank account in say, Cyprus, and then back to your UK bank account. And if Inaction Fraud did anything at all when the victim reported it, they would just make the lazy and false excuse that it's 'outside of their jurisdiction'.
By committing Grand Larceny in a lawless society, you help establish lawfulness in the long term by showing that laws must be enforced. This idea is known as Behera. It is described in more detail in the Book of Laws.
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