Last week, I published a summary of the extremely informative webinar we recently held with Jori Abraham, Managing Director of the Global Anti-Scam alliance. We ran out of time during the webinar to cover all of the audience questions, so Jorij kindly agreed to a follow-up interview to share more insights. You can watch or listen to the full interview on the links at the bottom after reading my summary of the discussion here.

The bankers as “the bad guys”

Although online shopping scams are still the most common type of fraud, if there’s one scam type Jorij Abraham thinks banks still underestimate in day-to-day operations, it’s the modern investment scam. Not because banks don’t know it exists, but because the mechanics don’t behave like “classic fraud”. The scammer’s goal isn’t to rush a customer into one bad decision and disappear. It’s to build a relationship, cultivate belief, and gradually normalise ever larger payments until the amounts become life changing.

Jorij described how these scams often start small, with transfers that look harmless in isolation. A customer might move €50, then €100, then €500, then €1,500. Only later do the transfers jump into the tens of thousands. From a bank’s perspective, this can look like a customer establishing a pattern with a counterparty. From the victim’s perspective, it feels like investing with a trusted “advisor” who is delivering results, or at least delivering reassurance and explanations.

What makes this especially difficult for banks is the psychological capture that happens along the way. Jorij noted that scammers don’t just persuade people that the investment is real; they also pre-empt the bank’s interventions by reframing the bank as the obstacle. Victims are told the bank is “the bad guy” that doesn’t want them to make money, and they’re coached on how to answer questions when the bank inevitably calls.

That flips a standard fraud-prevention move of contacting the customer, into something the victim actively resists!

This is also where Benelux institutions can get caught out: the most damaging scams often don’t look chaotic. They look calm, incremental and, from the outside, plausible.

Crypto isn’t the first step, it’s the exit route

Ask most people about scam money movement and they’ll jump straight to crypto (or is that just me? 🤔). Jorij’s view is more nuanced, and for banks it’s operationally important. Based on what GASA sees in consumer research and what law enforcement reports back, crypto is often not the dominant payment method at the point the victim pays. In many cases the victim’s money moves via ordinary bank transfers (or cards in card-heavy markets), and only later is it shifted into crypto as part of the laundering process.

That “two-phase” pattern matters. It means the window for a bank to intervene is frequently in the traditional rails: before the funds are consolidated and converted. Jorij’s description is that once scammers have collected money into mule accounts from multiple victims, they’ll move it into crypto and “shred” it into smaller pieces to make the trail harder to follow. So crypto is still central to the scam economy, but often as the mechanism for obfuscation and extraction rather than the customer’s initial payment choice.

For banks in Belgium and the Netherlands, this reinforces a slightly uncomfortable point: scam prevention can’t be treated as a “crypto problem” that belongs elsewhere. The money frequently touches bank accounts first, which means controls, customer conversations and intelligence sharing at that stage remain critical.

Awareness campaigns: necessary, but rarely designed to work

Jorij didn’t dismiss public awareness work, he thinks it remains necessary, but he was candid about its limitations. Drawing on research presented at GASA’s summit, he said most awareness campaigns are not particularly effective, and many don’t even measure whether they changed behaviour, so it’s hard to claim success. Even where there is an effect, it tends to be moderate.

The problem isn’t just the message; it’s the format. A well-produced TV campaign can be memorable in the same way a commercial is memorable, but then it fades quickly. The deeper issue is that awareness messaging is typically designed for our rational, “logic” mode: rules like “if it’s too good to be true, don’t do it” or “if you’re being pressured, stop”. Scammers, meanwhile, are skilled at operating in the emotional and time-pressured mode where those rules are hardest to access.

That mismatch is why GASA is pushing a different approach: continuous education rather than one-off awareness bursts. Jorij talked about the idea of challenging consumers weekly with scam scenarios, closer to the cadence of workplace cyber security training than a seasonal public campaign. The aim is to make scam recognition a habit, not a slogan. Importantly, he also wants it measured properly over time, because without measurement, it’s too easy to confuse activity with impact.

There’s a second, more human reason he thinks this matters. People are overconfident!

In GASA’s data, a large majority believe they can recognise scams, and a meaningful minority feel certain they can spot any scam. That confidence isn’t protective; it’s correlated with victimisation. If your self-image is “I’m scam savvy”, you may drop your guard at exactly the wrong moment. A good education product, in Jorij’s view, needs to gently puncture that confidence and replace it with practical vigilance.

Reporting and stigma: why the system loses intelligence

Under-reporting is one of the biggest structural barriers to fighting scams, and Jorij highlighted a particularly Dutch dynamic: people don’t report because they don’t think it will help. Dutch police are well regarded, but they are also candid that they can’t handle the volume of low-value scam reports, especially when the perpetrators are overseas. That honesty is understandable and, in a way, consumer-friendly. But it has a side effect: it trains the public that reporting is pointless.

From a scam-fighting perspective, the small reports still matter because of replication. A €50 online shopping scam that can’t be investigated as a one-off may become a €50,000 harm when repeated a thousand times. Jorij’s argument is that the system needs better aggregation and, crucially, better feedback loops. Even if the scammer isn’t caught, the reporter should get a tangible outcome: “you reported this site, we sent it to the hosting provider, it was taken down.” That kind of acknowledgement turns reporting into action, and action into more reporting.

There’s another layer here that banks can’t ignore: shame.

Many victims don’t report because they blame themselves and feel embarrassed. Jorij pointed out how difficult it can be to define where aggressive marketing ends and a scam begins, and that ambiguity leaves victims feeling foolish rather than wronged. When someone believes they “should have known”, they withdraw.

For banks, that’s not just a moral issue; it’s an operational one. Earlier disclosure is often the difference between freezing funds in time and writing off a loss.

Redesigning reporting journeys to reduce blame and increase clarity isn’t soft policy, it’s loss prevention.

Moving from “AI versus AI” to taking down networks

Jorij’s most direct warning on technology was aimed at a common misconception: that better detection alone will materially solve scams. He sees the industry drifting into an “AI versus AI” mindset, deploying AI to identify AI-generated voices, deepfakes, or phishing content. And while he agrees these tools are useful, he doesn’t believe they can win the war on their own.

His concern is that some forms of synthetic content are approaching a point where they may become indistinguishable. He referenced discussions with experts focused on AI voice generation who believe there may be a short window where fakes are detectable, but after that the signal may become too weak. If a phishing email is written perfectly, style cues disappear too.

So what does winning look like? For Jorij, it means making scamming less risk-free by going after networks, not just transactions. That requires collaboration well beyond banks: social platforms, telcos, hosting providers, and law enforcement, sharing signals and acting fast enough that scammers feel real operational pressure.

He also highlighted a practical gap: social platforms often let banks flag scam ads and pages, but information flow should go both ways. If a scammer is trying to buy advertising using stolen payment details, that should be stoppable before the ad runs. More broadly, he wants “trust signals” shared in a way that prevents scams from scaling: signals about reliability, provenance and patterns, not just the same bad URLs circulating after harm is done.

Why this matters commercially, not just ethically

Finally, Jorij made a point banks sometimes struggle to quantify: scam protection and victim support are retention strategies. When customers lose money, many don’t just blame the scammer; they blame the bank that “let it happen”. Banks that prevent more scams and support victims better see higher retention, because customers interpret the bank as an ally rather than a bystander.

That’s where measurement needs to evolve. Losses prevented and transactions blocked are important, but they don’t capture trust erosion or the long-term cost of a customer who feels abandoned. Jorij argued that trust metrics belong on the same scoreboard as fraud KPIs, because in countries where scams are pervasive, trust in the internet economy declines, and that’s bad for everyone, including banks trying to grow digital adoption.

The Benelux takeaway is clear: the next phase of scam risk management isn’t just about sharper detection. It’s about understanding the slow-burn psychology of investment scams, improving the context around payments so controls can’t be gamed, rebuilding reporting loops that generate usable intelligence, and treating trust as a measurable asset worth protecting.

(You can hear more from Jorij and have the opportunity to dig deeper into the topic with him in person at The Banking Scene Conference 2026 Brussels, where he will be delivering a keynote on The Global State of Scams with a Benelux flavour. Secure your seat today!).

There were a couple of things I glossed over in the summary above (otherwise it would have been an even longer blog!) so if you're interested in the topic and prefer to hear Jorij's insights directly, then watch below for the full session recording or follow along on your favourite podcast platforms here, and please don't forget to subscribe!