KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Fraud Prevention Specialist | Former Fraudster
Fee information first. Availability is normally checked once there is a concrete intention to proceed.
WHY TONY
Tony Sales gives organisations an adversarial view of fraud: how a criminal reads systems, people and weak points before a loss occurs. That perspective can help leaders test comfortable assumptions and connect digital controls, physical processes and employee behaviour into a more realistic defence.
KEYNOTE TOPICS
Sales examines how an offender searches for opportunity across a customer or operational journey. The keynote helps teams identify assumptions, handovers and inconsistencies that may appear harmless in isolation, demonstrating why fraud prevention improves when processes are tested against adversarial behaviour rather than only against the expected actions of legitimate users.
Social engineering exploits pressure, trust and familiar routines more often than technical sophistication alone. This session explores the behavioural conditions that make manipulation effective and the practical signals people can learn to notice, helping organisations strengthen judgment without creating a culture of suspicion that obstructs legitimate work and customer relationships.
Criminals do not respect the internal boundaries between online systems, call centres, documents and face-to-face processes. Sales shows how an apparently secure control can be bypassed through another channel, encouraging leaders to examine the whole experience, share intelligence and assign clear ownership where digital and physical safeguards meet.
Controls are only as effective as the people who interpret and apply them. This keynote considers how leaders can make reporting easier, reduce complacency and give employees enough context to recognise unusual patterns. The aim is a culture that combines proportionate challenge with clear escalation and learning after near misses.
Tony Sales is a fraud prevention specialist whose work draws on his former life as a prolific fraudster. After leaving prison in 2010, he moved into fraud education and advisory work, using his understanding of criminal behaviour to help organisations identify weaknesses that conventional compliance reviews can miss. He later co-founded We Fight Fraud and has worked with businesses, financial institutions and law-enforcement audiences.
His authority comes from direct experience of how fraud is conceived and carried out, followed by years spent examining prevention from the other side of the system. His book, The Big Con, recounts his criminal past and subsequent change of direction. Public work has included demonstrations, interviews and training designed to show how social engineering, identity, process gaps and misplaced trust can combine into an exploitable opportunity.
Sales's distinctive contribution is the offender's-eye view. Policies are often designed around how a legitimate customer or employee is expected to behave; a fraudster searches for the exception, the handover and the moment when one control assumes another has already done the work. Sales asks organisations to view the full journey across digital, human and physical channels and to notice where responsibility becomes fragmented.
For leaders, this turns fraud from a specialist loss category into a question of design and culture. Effective prevention requires people who can challenge routine, report anomalies and understand how their part of a process connects with the rest. Sales helps audiences think like an adversary long enough to expose weak assumptions, while keeping the focus on responsible prevention and organisational resilience.
ON STAGE
CONSIDERING TONY?
Send us the event context and we’ll come back personally with the relevant fee information and next steps.
EXPLORE FURTHER
We use essential technologies to run this site. Optional analytics and measurement help us understand and improve how it is used.
