Strategic Fraudsters

Strategic Fraudsters

Fraudsters think the way high‑performance executives, athletes, and actors think. They act strategically and deploy operational tactics to reach strategically contextualised goals. Fraser may not know it, but they run their own version of a SWOT analysis — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats — long before legitimate operators even notice the trend line forming.

They aren’t just early adopters. They’re the first adopters.

They don’t wait for hype. They create hype.

They don’t wait for rules. They exploit the absence of rules.

They don’t wait for social proof. They manufacture it.

Fraudsters behave like trend forecasters, behavioural economists, regulatory‑arbitrage specialists, and growth hackers with no ethics. They’re not chaotic. They’re strategic. It’s as if they sit in rooms doing a SWOT analysis on every emerging trend.

The Fraudster’s SWOT

Strengths

• Speed

• No moral friction

• No compliance burden

• High tolerance for ambiguity

• Ability to weaponise narrative

• Ability to adopt chameleon‑like imagery and interactions with people. The clothes they wear, the capital‑raising documents they produce, the way they speak, the jargon they adopt, the curated glimpse of a personal life you never actually see, the imagery of wealth you can never verify.

Back in January 2022 I watched a TED‑style talk by Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos — the company that claimed it could revolutionise blood testing with a device (“Edison”) that needed only a few drops of blood. At its peak it was valued in the billions. I knew a bit about blood diagnostics. In my VC days I was helping one of our investees, Kinacia, with a side project to commercialise a device that measured blood shear — something far more complex than protein analysis. That device was an offshoot of their core anticoagulant medication, which was more stable than Warfarin.

So when Holmes walked on stage in that black turtleneck, trying to channel a female Steve Jobs, pointing to a device named “Edison” on a really cool PowerPoint presentation — a name chosen to pull the listener’s mind somewhere else so they momentarily stopped concentrating on what she was actually saying — my Pretender Radar pinged. Yes, I was sceptical of the technology, but technology had advanced since my Kinacia days. It wasn’t the science that bothered me. It was the performance. The costume. The breathy, faux‑visionary cadence. The way she projected inevitability instead of evidence. The whole thing felt engineered to bypass scrutiny. And that gap — the space between image and reality — is exactly where fraudsters operate.

• Highly adaptable in the present moment — duckers and weavers. “In the present” is the key phrase; see weaknesses.

• They enjoy their work. This always makes me smile. A small part of me admires the gleeful passion with which they rip people off. That brain‑wiring is a chapter for another day.

Weaknesses

• Short runway — they always get caught.

• They trigger instinctive reactions from “fraudster spotters” and then try harder to convince them, digging the hole deeper.

• Dependent on novelty — once everyone is wearing blue jeans and black turtlenecks, the advantage evaporates.

• When they are not present — annual leave, a broken leg in Aspen — they lose their ability to duck and weave. You can’t manipulate from Aspen Valley Hospital while the assistant accountant is doing the bank reconciliation in Wichita, Iowa.

Opportunities

• New tech with unclear rules — crypto, quantum‑adjacent claims, “AI‑powered everything”

• New markets with no gatekeepers — wellness biohacking, longevity clinics, offshore education credentials

• New cultural obsessions — clean‑girl aesthetics, dopamine detoxing, hustle‑culture spirituality

• New financial instruments — crypto again, tokenised assets, fractionalised anything

• New platforms where legitimacy hasn’t calcified — carbon credits, creator‑economy monetisation schemes, AI‑generated identity markets

Threats

• Regulation catching up

• Public awareness

• Platform hardening

• Competitors — which in this world means other fraudsters. This always amuses me. I have this exaggerated mental image of a fraudster standing at a whiteboard, drawing competitor‑analysis matrices, dissecting how other fraudsters are gaining “market share” in deception.

• Loss of novelty — the moment everyone starts wearing the same costume, the spell breaks.

Back in the pre‑GFC years my junk mail inbox was flooded with emails trying to recruit me as an American mortgage broker. I was living on a farm in Tasmania, so the idea of me papering loans in Southern California was absurd, but the sheer volume of spam puzzled me. I’d been around finance — structured corporate debt, venture capital — and I couldn’t work out why every man and his dog suddenly wanted me to become a mortgage broker in the US. Everyone straight out of college with a bit of ambition seemed to be getting a mortgage‑broker business card and buying a suit from JCPenney. Why were so many people wearing the costume?

A few months after Lehman Brothers collapsed, I found out why. The banks were peddling Fannie‑Mae‑backed securities — mortgage‑backed securities — which were essentially giant portfolios of individual loans to strawberry pickers. The loan terms were surreal: no principal, no interest, no repayments until month twenty‑five. When you’re dishing out loans like that, loans that will obviously default the moment the real repayments begin, you need an army of people in cheap suits and embossed business cards to find aspirational low‑income earners to hand $400,000 mortgages to.

I’m not suggesting for a second that the mortgage brokers were fraudsters — they weren’t. But the fact that there were thousands and thousands of people wearing the costume was, in hindsight, the biggest sign that the numbers underneath the entire mortgage‑backed‑securities market were fatally flawed.

And this is the pattern: when the costumes multiply, the underlying system is already rotten.

This is why they swarm to crypto, NFTs, EV subsidies, carbon credits, AI‑generated content, influencer culture, new payment rails, new social platforms, and new government incentives. They don’t need the trend to be real. They only need the perception of opportunity and the absence of rules.

Fraudsters are the R&D department of the dark economy. They test the edges of every new system before legitimate actors even understand the interface. They’re the first to find loopholes, exploit ambiguity, weaponise hype, map emotional vulnerabilities, and create “too good to be true” narratives that feel plausible because the landscape is new.

They’re not reacting to trends. They’re surfing the moment before the trend becomes a trend.

Fraudsters thrive in the liminal zone — between invention and regulation, curiosity and understanding, hype and reality, opportunity and oversight. It’s the same zone where engineered luck lives, except fraudsters weaponise it instead of stewarding it.

In every system, the fraudsters arrive first. The rest of us only realise it when the costumes start multiplying.

Founder of the Hadspen Foundation, Jason is committed to building frameworks for spiritual recovery that are both repeatable and personal. His writing is guided by discernment, narrative cadence, and the belief that doctrine should support—not overshadow—the human story.