The New Front Lines of Financial Crime in Africa | "What The Fraud?" Podcast

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: We're here at Seamless Africa, surrounded by some of the people who are building and shaping Africa's rapidly changing payments, banking, fintech, and digital commerce ecosystem. Welcome to What The Fraud?, a podcast by Sumsub, where we go behind the headlines to understand how fraud actually works, how it's changing, and who is fighting it.

I am Chantal Lamprecht from Sumsub, and for this Seamless Africa Special, we're coming to you from the Sumsub stand here in Johannesburg. Today, I'm speaking with leaders working across telecoms, crypto, enterprise risk, iGaming, and financial crime to understand what the fraud landscape looks like on the ground in Africa and what organizations need to do next to stay ahead. So let's get into it.

Crypto has created new ways to move value across borders and a new operating environment for financial crime teams. The technology is different, but many of the underlying behaviors are familiar: scams, account compromise, layering, social engineering, and the movement of illicit funds. With me now is John Jacobs, Head of Financial Crime at VALR.

John Jacobs, VALR

John, it is so great to have you here with us.

John Jacobs: Thank you, Chantal.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Thank you for taking the time to join us today. So tell me, how are you experiencing Seamless so far? How's your day?

JOHN JACOBS: The conference is great. There's an atmosphere, there's a vibe. It's a great experience. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for the invite.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Only a pleasure. Thank you for being here. So John, you've spent much of your career investigating financial crime, and now you're dealing with it from inside a crypto exchange. What surprised you most about the financial crime landscape when you moved into crypto?

JOHN JACOBS: I would say it's very much similar to my past life as investigating financial crime, fraud, investment scams.

The timing is just different. With crypto, there's... it's borderless, it's immediate. There's no callbacks. Traditional banking rails, you deal with, there's a settlement window. You have time to react. You have time to reach out to the various individuals. With crypto, it's immediate. The landscape has changed to where the timing was you had time to wait, you had time to explore it.

It is immediate, action-packed, and you have to immediately take action to prevent losses. And in our case, it's more customer losses and funds affected.

Suggested read: What Is a Fraud Score and How Does Fraud Scoring Work?

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Well, you say the landscape, it must have been quite an adjustment, but still familiar for you at least.

JOHN JACOBS: Very familiar in the sense that it's the same typologies, same types of fraud.

It's just the scale at which crypto is being adopted in Africa, the seamlessness of it, the frictionless transaction ability to move money and move large, large sums of money at one point in time. So, very much the same typologies, with a different hat and quicker.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: So with that said, John, what are the most significant fraud and financial crime threats facing crypto exchanges in Africa today?

Are you seeing generally new types? You just mentioned now it's not really new. But you just mentioned that it's familiar schemes. Do you think they're adopting it for crypto because it's so instant?

JOHN JACOBS: I would say it's the same typology, same schemes that have existed for over the last 30 years.

The same schemes have existed for the last 30 years. It's the scale at which they are being applied. It's 2026 technology. We live in an era of AI where fraudsters and bad actors are able to scale, whereas in the past, they needed a big team.

More now, it's the scale at which it is being applied. It's 2026 technology. We live in an era of AI where fraudsters and bad actors are able to scale, whereas in the past they needed a big team and a sophisticated operation to enable and build out the tech features, the impersonation scams, the websites, and the infrastructure to scam.

With the likes of AI and the usability of which you can purchase scam kits and phishing attacks and illicit schemes and things like that, bad actors use to interrogate and manipulate individuals. The typologies remain exactly the same. We are just in 2026 with an AI world where you're able to scale, adapt to technology.

And remember, fraudsters and bad actors use the same AI tools we use to deter, detect, and identify patterns. They use them to manipulate our systems, controls, and individuals and users.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Fraud-as-a-service, hey?

JOHN JACOBS: Yes. It has become like, as money laundering has existed as a service for paying someone to professionally launder your money, now fraud is a service that you can buy on the dark web, on a phone call, on a Telegram group.

It is the ease with which the general public has access to purchase these tools that is increasing fraud and financial crime at an alarming rate.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Wow. It is wild how bad actors just keep on adapting as we adapt, isn't it, John? Crypto transactions are recorded on chain, which theoretically gives investigators a level of visibility that doesn't exist with cash.

But does that actually make financial crime easier to detect and investigate, saying easier with tongue in cheek, or have criminals simply become better at hiding their activity?

JOHN JACOBS: If you think of blockchain versus traditional finance, with traditional finance, you have different accounts at different banks, so tracing the flow of funds requires sequential subpoenas from different banks and different jurisdictions, whereas crypto traced on-chain is immediate.

Within an hour, you can be 10 hops deep. The problem and the drawback of crypto is, yes, the ledger is public, the information is public, but the attribution in terms of who controls and the owner of said wallet is the biggest challenge that we face. So it's easy to identify and follow the funds, where it was changed, where it was swapped, but attributing that to an individual and assigning an individual or controller to that wallet or infrastructure remains the biggest challenge for financial crime investigations in this time.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Yes, I can imagine that is quite, quite a challenge.

JOHN JACOBS: It is, and the problem is fraudsters know this, so there are ways to obfuscate funds through professional services like a mixing or tumbling service. But it's also, if you add a couple of unhosted wallets in between your flow, you dilute the funds.

You use generally accepted decentralized exchanges to swap tokens and coins and assets. It creates a harder trail and obfuscates the funds, and it adds another layer of finding an identity associated with the individual. So the tools that were built for innovation and seamless processing are also being used by bad actors to facilitate these transactions.

And remember, a fraudster's funds are mixed with 95% of legitimate flows that flow in between companies, and identifying a 5% or 1% transaction within a bundled group of transactions that day remains difficult.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Taking my hat off for you, John. But that's a really interesting dynamic between transparency and sophisticated concealment, and it brings up a very real challenge for your team, I assume.

But as exchanges make onboarding and trading faster and more seamless, how do you balance that customer experience with a level of KYC you need to do, the monitoring and intervention needed to actually prevent that financial crime?

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JOHN JACOBS: I think customer experience, the friction that you cause for a customer points to, if you cause friction for a customer, for 99% of your customers, your tools, processes are failing.

We have data at our disposal. Utilizing the data for indicators of first-time withdrawals, out-of-the-norm transactions, out of the normal median behavior for that activity, the account being accessed from a different IP location, different mobile device being used to access the device.

Those are all indicators that create friction for bad actors, but if applied incorrectly, it also creates friction for your 99% user base, and that is what you try to avoid because the more friction your user base experiences, the less they adopt your service and the crypto element of it. And I would say using and leveraging data at your disposal and adding friction when friction is needed, using intelligence in-house and externally, open-source intelligence.

Combining all these intelligence points creates a loop where you can quickly identify bad clusters or bad actors working in coordinated groups. Because remember, the scale at which bad actors work, it's very much a coordinated network of there's a vulnerability at exchange X. It spreads across the industry.

It's immediate. It's hard to be reactive when you're already infiltrated and there's a publicly posted exploit on your platform, on a chatter or instant chatter, Dark Web chatter or Telegram chatter.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Sure. Becomes a delicate balancing act.

JOHN JACOBS: The first experience, like you, you build a brand, you build trust, you wanna echo that trust, and customers trust you with funds. The point of breaking that trust is where you lose customers, you lose a good name, you lose out on your value.

So that is the most important thing, is protecting customers, even though in most cases, customers are the ones facilitating the payment. Because in traditional finance, you have a customer being exploited by a compromised app or account or something similar. With crypto, it's the customer agreeing or authenticating or releasing those funds, and it's immediate, it's irreversible.

There's no central authority that could intervene and assist and help you.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Sure. John, I love that the focus is very much on the customer and the experience at the end of the day, and building a brand that they can trust. Looking ahead, what do you think will make the biggest difference in fighting crypto-related financial crime in Africa?

Do you think it's better technology, stronger regulation, or more information-sharing between companies and authorities, or maybe something else?

JOHN JACOBS: I really echo with the latter. I think, in an age of information-sharing, we are in an age, and I mentioned it earlier, where bad actors have the same tools as we do.

Bad actors have the same tools as we do. They are coordinated. If we are not coordinating as an industry, locally, abroad, and internationally, as players in the crypto world, platforms, exchanges, and service providers, we are losing out on intelligence.

An account closed on any platform on Friday can reopen on a new platform the next Monday without any historic events, 'cause we have indicators showing that we had a bad experience with said customer.

The following events pointed us to an elevated risk profile. A new exchange, it's a blank sheet, blank slate, like you... They don't have any history with the client, so they could essentially hop between different providers. And I think the Africa topic is definitely interesting.

Crypto is being adopted at, it's one of the countries where crypto adoption is, I think it's top three crypto adoption globally. The likelihood of that, mixed with a lot of Third World countries in Africa and alarming rates of unemployment, is that users are prone to mule activity and are being recruited for mule activity because of a lower income base and unemployment rates.

So definitely prone for bad actors and organizations targeting not only South Africans, but Africans to open accounts, facilitate mule activity, and you're selling your identity, your banking and crypto identity to bad actors, for a once-off fee or for a monthly fee, but you are tainted with that for life.

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Chantal Lamprecht: Wow. John, those are such amazing insights. And then based on that, you said we are among the top three when it comes to emerging markets in crypto, so... And you mentioned money mule attacks because of our economy. Are there any other emerging risks that leaders should also be watchful for?

JOHN JACOBS: I think money mule is definitely topical, but your traditional scams and, you know, I touched on it earlier, but traditional typologies where you have pig-butchering scams, romance scams, task-based scams, where you're doing simplified tasks on an app, and the scammers or bad actors are receiving small chunks of payments from you for investment purposes.

I do think customers and clients should be aware that if you're unsure and it seems too good to be true, you should verify it by reaching out to the respective exchange or support channels, verifying identities, and Googling the transactions or the entity you are engaging with. There are emerging trends.

I think there's a big uptick in Ponzi schemes, not only in Africa, but globally, and it's Ponzi schemes that originate and have a face in Africa, but the funds on-chain flow to bad actors and to notorious jurisdictions that are prone to certain bad actors and organized crime groups.

Suggested read: Ponzi Scheme vs. Pyramid Scheme Explained

So I think the important part is you might have a face in a local currency, in a local country where you see a Ponzi scheme or investment scheme and buzzwords are used of AI and automated bot trading and algorithmic trading, and those are selling to the masses and words that resonate, that people read as buzzwords, topical words.

And I think that convinces the client more easily and/or manipulates the clients more easily. I think definitely the way clients are manipulated is an emerging threat. The different packages, Trojan horses that are being packaged as "this is an investment opportunity" to really sift out fact from fiction becomes harder because of the sophistication of tools, AI-generated impersonation videos and generating seemingly legit websites.

I think technology may be our second-biggest threat in the world, and AI enables bad actors to scale with minimal investment.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Sure – the social engineering, the emotional manipulation that goes with that. Thank you so much, John. It was such a pleasure having you. I've learned a lot as well within the crypto space. Thank you so much for being with us, John.

JOHN JACOBS: No, thank you, Chantal.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Across Africa, digital assets are increasingly part of a much bigger conversation about payments, cross-border value transfer, access, and financial inclusion. But adoption also raises difficult questions about regulation, consumer protection, illicit finance, and how the crypto and traditional finance systems converge.

I am joined by Larry Cooke, Head of Legal Africa and General Manager Africa at Binance. Larry, welcome. It is an absolute pleasure to have you here with us today.

Larry Cooke, Binance

LARRY COOKE: Thank you very much. The titles are very long, but it's kind of a transition period. But I appreciate being here once again with you.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Awesome. Thank you for being here. How's your day so far? Are you enjoying the energy here at Seamless?

LARRY COOKE: No, of course, of course. Visiting the different stands, juggling meetings, having back-to-backs, meeting new prospecting clients, and partners. That's also part of these types of events. I think Seamless really does it well with bringing the A-tier of the industry together.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: All in a day's work, hey, Larry? You've spoken about Africa needing regulatory clarity and greater regional alignment to unlock the next phase of digital finance. Where do you think the biggest gaps are today, and what risks do those gaps create as crypto adoption grows?

LARRY COOKE: I think crypto's yet to fully bloom. And I think the gaps that currently exist, or we're starting to see more evidence, is how the typical, I'll now use the word TradFi finance, like credit, is also being explored in crypto, and you currently don't have that regulatory overlay or that bridge. And it creates a kind of a lacuna to say, is collateralized crypto lending treated the same way as typical assets are, critical assets are.

And those are just one of, that's one of many other examples where you find that as the space matures, there needs to be a wider look of the type of regulation that's required to cover the spectrum. I think the other risks are kind of atypical or rather quite typical in the sense that it's not anything new that's been invented.

You'll always have your fraud, you'll always have your scammers, but they always filter between the gaps. And as long as there's that regulatory gap, you'll find that the criminals are the ones that are kind of navigating between there. I don't want to say more regulation, because again, with more regulation you kind of stifle innovation, but I think more thoughtful regulation needs to be applied.

You need to still have that risk-based approach, but you need to be a bit forward-looking in terms of what are the areas you need to cover, where the most vulnerable users might be perpetrated by criminals and then kind of cover that. But we are getting closer to the goal.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Thank you for that, Larry. Clarity really is everything when you're trying to build something sustainable, right? And we see this so clearly when we look at specific use cases. With stablecoins, they are increasingly being used for payments and cross-border transactions across Africa. But at the same time, regulations that we mentioned now are paying much more attention to their potential misuse.

How do we unlock their benefit without creating new opportunities for fraud and illicit finance?

LARRY COOKE: I think what you mentioned now about clarity. Clarity comes hand in hand with education. I think that's always the first layer, and as Binance, we always try to make sure that we educate our users, and even not our users, in the industry.

We have the Binance Academy, and we are seeing a lot more initiatives that are focused on education. For example, in Ghana, regulators are actively trying to educate citizens about what crypto is through initiatives such as Project NaVALI. The fraudsters are the same, but the modus operandi might just change.

But the targets are still the same. It's still the vulnerable, not-knowing individuals that they always try to target, and you need to close those gaps. Educational initiatives are important so that you can learn these new typologies where these frauds occur. But also you find that there are new types of crimes that are also emerging, like peer-to-peer fraud and reverse chargebacks where you do peer-to-peer lending and then you claim back that you never received your funds when you actually did.

And those are actually putting, for instance, merchants in a space where now they'd go to the bank to try and seek recourse, but now they've met and seen as the perpetrators themselves.

So it's quite difficult to balance that without education and educating at every single tier, so the regulators, the consumers, the stakeholders being the banks. Because at the end of the day, stablecoins, crypto, it's not a replacement of mobile money and banking. It's another layer that's integrated in between them, right? And the fraudsters know that – how to jump between different systems, and that's where you need that better regulatory collaboration so that you can stop the, or stop all and track the criminals as they try their creative schemes.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: I hear you. I like that more education is needed. One of the beautiful things is that the promise of crypto creating greater financial inclusion and freedom of money. But greater accessibility can also mean greater exposure to scams and financial crime, like we were speaking about now.

How do you think the industry should balance openness with protecting users?

LARRY COOKE: I think where it comes to introduction of new products. Some products are more easily understandable, and some aren't. And again, regulation plays its part, education plays its part, but there's also this accountability and responsibility from a corporate citizen, where you can't just introduce products that are high-risk, that are maybe customers might become too susceptible to, you know, and you need to test pilot them. You need to localize your products to a point where you're managing that risk by still doing innovation because there's no point in us, or anyone in the crypto space, releasing this product and then just creating a bigger negative narrative or stereotype for the industry as a whole.

So I think it's also that responsible innovation that's required. So while you're doing your products, while you're trying to come up with something innovative, you manage that so you're not putting customers at danger, but then you're still doubling down efforts on education and helping the regulators maybe where they don't see their blind spots.

We've engaged, for instance, regulators in South Africa and highlighted to them 'cause they were busy with their annual risk, I wanna say risk maintenance, given that it's FATF review season. And we kind of highlighted, you know, these are some of the areas where, and mentioning again on the P2P merchant side of things, these are gaps that we see that might become issues for you in the future.

Merchants aren't regulated. They should, maybe some of them think they should be, but there's no real clarity, you know. So maybe looking towards that, because those are the friction points, especially user to user where you see a lot of these schemes coming up, like, "Donate and give me X amount of money, and I'll be able to give you 4,000 in return."

You know, those days are probably gone, with the meme coin rushes. And now it's really about financial responsibility that we need to actually disseminate, not just with the institutions, but also with our users.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: That is wonderfully said, Larry. Protecting the vulnerable while giving them access is also vital across that, and also for them to have some responsibility in that, and that goes with education as well.

But we often talk about TradFi and crypto as two separate worlds, but they're increasingly converging, and I think you mentioned it a little bit earlier as well when we started the conversation. But as more traditional financial products and real-world assets move on-chain, do you think this will create fundamentally new financial crime risks, or mostly new versions of problems we already know and see?

LARRY COOKE: So maybe responding to it a bit differently is you find the banks moving into the crypto space, and you find the crypto-native players moving into the traditional space, traditional finance space. So I do think that because of understanding, they're kind of separated because we always try and take a 10,000-mile view to try and understand what's going on, but the closer we get to it, we realize that it's the same thing.

It's ultimately the transferal of value or the increasing of value, right? And the regulation maybe sometimes and the typologies might keep that segregation for good reasons until they realize that it's closer than they think. But at that point in time, you start appreciating that the problems are still the same, right?

A regulator's looking at stability. A regulator's looking at, how I protect customers. A regulator's looking at fundamental principles that no matter what the product looks like, no matter what the mechanism or the modality of this value transfer takes place, they'll still be looking for those type of risks.

So the responsibility is again on the players, the stakeholders, be it the stablecoin issuers, be it the exchangers to educate. But what we do see is that we need to also help the users become empowered, right? Not pushing them onto exchanges and other platforms that don't do proper KYC, don't do proper transaction monitoring, et cetera.

And rather work with the players that are putting their hands up, like Binance – we're the most regulated exchange in the world, yet sometimes we still need to plead our case to the regulators to say, "Please regulate us. Please give us a license so we can be regulated." Where, if you don't do that, it's like people will come to our platform or they might question and say, "Why isn't Binance licensed?"

And then they go to some dodgy exchange that isn't licensed, and they continue there, and they get scammed, and they have no recourse. And I think the layer of recourse starts all that at the point of even educating police officers. If you go to a police station now and say, "Someone stole my crypto."

I would like to hear what that conversation would sound like. Would they ask, "What is crypto?" What would that look like? And it's just the practicality of how do we start from what this, what the crime cycle is or the life cycle of when somebody reports a crime.

And every single touchpoint kind of address that. We should have banners perhaps at police stations that say, "This is what you should do when you have a crypto fraud incident." You know, go out. We do those initiatives with law enforcement agencies where we try and educate them.

This is what an investigation looks like. And then you'll track it. Because the crimes that exist get proliferated, or they get more complex. So they'll try and take it onto the banking, well, the banking channels, then they'll move it back onto crypto channels, and they'll move it back into the banking channels.

And as long as there's no clear divide or the regulator doesn't have that cross oversight between the two different ecosystems, criminals will get away with these type of things. So it perpetuates it. I think the term is pig butchering. The way they really, at an industrial level, are able to fraud, or conduct these types of schemes.

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CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Larry, it's going to be fascinating to see how the future's gonna look when it comes to crypto. If we look ahead, from an African lens, in the next three to five years, what do you think needs to happen for Africa to build a digital asset ecosystem that people genuinely trust across industry, regulators, as well as technology providers?

LARRY COOKE: That's a very good question, and these futuristic points, I've given so many predictions about the future. I wonder if one of them would be right. But I think the key word you touched there is trust. If something looks too good to be true or if something looks a bit new, we're less likely to want to trust it naturally, unless we're desperate, then we'll go with hope.

Then we'll go with faith. But, but I think it needs to be trust, and it's a reciprocal direction of trust. Like, regulators need to trust us. We need to trust regulators because in some instances, we don't trust regulators as players, as industry stakeholders because we've seen the track record of regulators as well.

Just as much as users need to trust us, we also need to trust users to say that we can give them, for instance, agentic payments, and know that they're not going to try and create something, some type of code where they will defraud or create sometimes a Ponzi scheme, et cetera. So trust is two-way. I think trust plays a more integral part of keeping the world in balance.

Second, and I can't stress it enough, is education. I do think that we will become more knowledgeable about blockchain technologies and crypto.

However, we still haven't solved the pandemic of financial illiteracy, and that's something that we always need to take cognizance of because crypto isn't isolated. As you said earlier, it's not separate from TradFi. We've been on this journey of trying to bridge the financial literacy.

If you ask somebody, "What is money?" Do they know where money is printed? Do they know what the value of money is? Those basic fundamentals are still elusive to the common man.

And we're not trying to further complicate it, so now we need to still get those fundamentals to understand what is money, what is the value of money, what's transfer, what is fiat, what is legal tender.

So that's also an important part, and I do think that three to five years we will be closer. We won't be foolproof; that's a utopia we can all dream of. But I do think there'll be a deeper level of trust, at least with trusted players. And I think we will start using the real ability and start reaping the real benefits of crypto, which is really for the consumers: cheaper payments, faster transactions, more secure transactions, and the traceability that comes with the blockchain.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: The future looks good, as you explained it. esIt's something to be excited for, and we hope that one of your predictions does come to fruition. Larry, thank you so much for joining us on What the Fraud podcast today. It was really an honor to have you here with us. Thank you once again for joining us.

LARRY COOKE: Thanks to you guys. Thanks, Sumsub. You guys are doing great work.

Mandy Alexander, SuperGroup / DigiOutsource

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: iGaming is one of the environments where fraud teams feel the trade-off between speed, customer experience, and control in real time. Players expect instant onboarding, deposits, and withdrawals, while operators have to manage fraud, payment risks, AML, and increasingly sophisticated abuse at scale. I am joined by Mandy Alexander, Head of Financial Crime and Customer Care Product at DigiOutsource, part of SuperGroup.

Mandy came all the way from Cape Town today to be with us. Welcome, Mandy. It is so wonderful to have you here with us.

MANDY ALEXANDER: It's good to be here.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: How was this morning's travel to Johannesburg?

MANDY ALEXANDER: Seamless, like the event.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: You've spent more than 20 years working across fraud, risk, AML, and payments in iGaming. What has changed most dramatically in the fraud landscape during that time, and what are operators struggling with most today?

MANDY ALEXANDER: I think, traditionally, fraud in the iGaming landscape 20 years ago was very much about protecting bank accounts, chargebacks, worrying about what Visa and Mastercard are going to do and all these kinds of things. And then, as the industry matured over the last few years, regulation became a thing, AML became a thing, and these traditional fraud teams that were only worried about chargebacks and bank accounts suddenly needed to broaden the remit of what they were protecting.

It wasn't just about transaction monitoring and screening anymore. It was transaction monitoring. It was AML governance, compliance. So I think that's been the biggest change, morphing from fraud into AML or FRAML, as I like to call it – that's been the biggest change. I think in terms of the obligation of those teams, I think the challenge within that is, has been for businesses to keep focus on still the payment fraud aspect of it, while also worrying about regulation and making sure you're satisfying the regulator.

It's sometimes very restrictive and deterministic what they expect of you. So I think that's been the challenge – juggling the two and having equal focus on either one, and getting economies of scale through that. I think that's been probably the biggest challenge.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Can imagine. A very dynamic landscape that you're dealing with at the moment. Very.

MANDY ALEXANDER: Yes.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: And 20 years is incredible, so that's a lot of knowledge, a lot of... You've seen a lot happening in that space. You've really seen it evolve. I can only imagine how customer expectations have also shifted alongside that.

So in iGaming, every additional fraud control can potentially add friction for a legitimate player. How do you decide where that friction is justified and where fraud prevention actually starts doing more harm than good to the customer experience?

MANDY ALEXANDER: What's the big thing is to know what you're protecting, know what your risk appetite is as a business.

iGaming is iGaming, but every business is different, right? And you've got to have bespoke tools. You've got to have bespoke processes to the different obligations. If you're managing one jurisdiction, it might be a lot simpler. Otherwise, you can be looking at juggling maybe 10, or 13 different kinds of licensing obligations, and you've got to have bespoke things because it's not a one-size-fits-all.

The customer friction is only justifiable if you can actually pinpoint through numbers, through analytics, the justification for that intervention, because it's all about the customer at the end of the day. We work in fraud, but it is all about the customer. The obligations on the fraud teams and the compliance teams are quite heavy because you always need to justify your actions in the context of revenue, in the context of player experience, and these kinds of things.

So you've got to have a justifiable framework in terms of your tech stack and the analytics on top of that to make sure that you can make decisions dynamically, and sometimes it can be wrong. But what makes the difference is your ability to change and immediately fail fast and move on.

So, justifiably having the right tools in place, having the right numbers, it's all about the numbers, will justify friction to the point that it is necessary.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: I like that perspective. Now, there you mentioned that there's not one size fits all, and nobody wants to frustrate a good customer, which is why being smart and efficient behind the scenes is actually key.

You've worked extensively on fraud and risk decisions and reducing manual intervention through automation. What should organizations automate today, and where do you think human judgment still remains essential?

MANDY ALEXANDER: I think what organizations or the benefit organizations have today is the benefit of hindsight.

iGaming is, to your point, I've been in the industry as long as the industry is old almost, and if I was sitting here today and had to look back, it's quite easy for me to go, "All right. Knowing what I know, what would I do differently?" And because of the different obligations, like I said earlier, there's no one-size-fits-all.

You'd have to take a very broad approach on what business problem you're trying to solve. The context of your business is always important.

When you're trying to automate everything, you want to do everything and anything, and you don't focus. So I think, focus is key, because there's a lot of shiny tools out there.

In my day – not so much. It was a spreadsheet. And it's weird. So, that's the challenge. I would actually understand my business context if I were doing that. What problems I'm trying to solve, what compliance regulations, and the remit that I'm working within.

And then also what's the cost of fraud? Fraud is a cost at the end of the day to an iGaming business, right? And what is that, what is that number that I'm trying to get to? Because you're not going to have no cost. Because then you're going to have no benefit. So, it's about balancing that.

Understanding your business is what I'm saying. Because you can go look at every single tool out there, it's what fits, and what fits for you at that point in time to actually make a difference. And then automate as much as you can from tasks that are tick boxes, if you will. I mean, we know.

You know, people talk about AI and all this. Sometimes it's just the basic things. Automate that. You know? Think outside the box literally. Automate that. Verification is a prime example of that, and one that causes friction as well. So why do we have this 10-step process for customers?

It needs to be frictionless. You don't need a human to, it's literally comparing data points to data points. What for? You don't need that. And the customer suffers in the end if it's not automated.

So it's a win-win situation. And then your first line of defense, I think, in terms of transaction screening, depending how you go about it, you can model a lot of things to make decisions with good data and bad data together, to make a qualitative judgment as opposed to someone sitting there with a human eye and trying to manifest some data in their head.

You can absolutely gain from that alone, I think, a lot. Where the human aspect still becomes important is more in the context, I think, of the regulatory obligations these days. You need to assess something. And sometimes you are reliant on third-party data, which you cannot sometimes automate within the remit of your organization, and you need to reach out, or it's different kinds of services.

So like our AML, EDD kind of processes with source of wealth and those kinds of things, it's been a challenge. It is a challenge to get really efficient at it with very little impact on the customer. Those kinds of things will remain. And then your analytics, because if you switch your analytics and you throw your powers on your analytics, you will make efficient decisions and the right ones and be able to back them, and to also change when you need to. I would focus on that first level of defense.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: I'm so glad you mentioned the human element, Mandy, because we can't lose that empathy and that intuition that you were speaking about. Although the new tech is certainly exciting, there's enormous excitement around AI and machine learning in fraud prevention.

From your experience, what separates organizations that actually get measurable value from these technologies and those that simply deploy another model, module or tool?

MANDY ALEXANDER: I think patience. I say that because, as I said earlier, there are a lot of shiny tools out there – the next best thing that everybody wants to sell you.

If you don't understand what problem you're trying to solve and what the context of that is in your business, you might find the newest, shiniest tool and get it, and then you can't integrate it because you have competing priorities in the business. It doesn't fit your tech stack. It isn't strategically aligned with everything else.

So you got to be absolutely clear about the problem you're trying to solve for your business, because there's a lot. So know that. Spend time on the discovery, spend time on the implementation, and spend time on reaping the benefits within a reasonable timeframe, of course. But allow yourself that.

Because through that you'll also learn, right? If you're plugging and playing new things all the time, you're not learning. You're not learning anything. And also, you are doing constant digital disruption. While it may be good, like not constantly. So, I would say is be patient.

Take the time to actually implement a solution properly, understand why it doesn't work, before swapping over to a new framework or model, whatever it may be.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: That makes total sense to me. It is about how you use it, not just about having it, right? It's just about knowing how and why you're applying it.

And to wrap up our chat today, Mandy, you have a wealth of knowledge under the belt. If you were designing an iGaming fraud prevention operation from scratch today, knowing what you know after 20 years in the industry, what would you do differently from the way most operators have traditionally approached it?

MANDY ALEXANDER: What you would need to do today is, I think I said earlier, the context of the business. Whereas years ago, fraud was like a... It was ancillary to the main, the main business. It wasn't driving revenue, it wasn't doing all the shiny things. It was fraud. Okay, do your job. It's like IT. I always say it's like IT. Nobody cares, it must just work, right? Today, it's more than that. It can impact revenue severely. The advancement of technology, the fraud, the types of fraud are next level. And then your compliance obligations, which are quite deterministic really. You can't use too much modeling there.

It's got to be explainable, and sometimes it's black and white, and you just gotta figure out the best journey for your customer using the best product that you have. But if you understand that it's actually part of that entire ecosystem of what makes an iGaming business tick, like your customer onboarding, your player retention, your ongoing monitoring from an AML perspective, and how you tackle those interventions and what it does to your player life cycle.

If you actually understand that, when you come to making decisions about buying a tool, implementing a new rule, or trying a different fraud strategy, it's way better placed than it would've been 20, 15 years ago. Because it was like, "Okay, fine. Fraud. Shit, we got a lot of fraud over there. Let's react. Let's go to fraud over here. Let's react." And we've been very siloed in how we dealt with fraud before in iGaming.

Whereas now, it's part of the bigger ecosystem and you gotta approach it like that. That's what I would do. I would understand that first before I even went and said, "Okay, fine. This is what my operating model would look like in terms of how many tools I'll use, how many people or my manpower, how much AI, how much of all that." And the maturity of the business. The business's maturity and obligations are key.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: Thank you so much. I really love that perspective, Mandy.

You've got a wealth of knowledge that you bring with us, and we're so honored to have you on the What The Fraud? Podcast today. Thank you so much for joining us, traveling all the way from Cape Town. It was such an honor to have you.

MANDY ALEXANDER: Thanks so much for having me.

CHANTAL LAMPRECHT: That is it from us here at Seamless Africa in Johannesburg. Across these conversations, one theme keeps coming back. Fraud in Africa is increasingly connected. It moves across channels, companies, and borders, and the answer can't sit with one fraud team, one bank, one telecom operator, or one technology provider.

The organizations that stay ahead will be the ones that combine better intelligence and technology with stronger collaboration, practical risk governance, and an understanding of how real people actually use digital services. Thanks for listening to this Seamless Africa Special of What The Fraud? If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast for more conversations with people fighting fraud around the world.