Webinar

The Democratization of Fraud: Tackling New Challenges in 2025

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  Brett Johnson

  Keynote Speaker and Consultant on Cybersecurity, Cybercrime, and Identity Theft

  Former United States Most Wanted, Brett Johnson, referred to by the United States Secret Service as "The Original Internet Godfather," has been a central figure in the cybercrime world for over 20 years. Mr. Johnson built and led the ShadowCrew, the precursor to today's darknet markets. He was instrumental in developing many areas of online fraud while helping design, implement, and refine modern Identity Theft, Account Take Over Fraud, Card Not Present Fraud, IRS Tax Fraud, and countless other social engineering attacks, breaches, and hacking operations. Upon his capture, the United States Secret Service hired Johnson to work as a consultant and informant. Johnson worked with the Secret Service for several months before going on a cross-country crime spree, being placed on the US Most Wanted List, being captured again, sent to prison, escaping prison, being captured yet again, and finally accepting responsibility for his actions. With the help of many, Johnson stepped away from crime and now uses the vast knowledge he has concerning cybersecurity, cybercrime, identity theft, and fraud to help individuals and companies protect themselves from the type of person he used to be.

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  Claire Maillet

  Counter-Fraud Expert, Keynote Speaker and PhD Researcher

  Claire is a multi-award-winning counter-fraud expert and has worked in industry since 2014, having progressed from Analyst to Director within 4 years. Claire’s counter-fraud background spans risk, product, operations, and strategy, across a range of product types such as global retail, investments, foreign exchange and cryptocurrency. Claire complements her practitioner experience with academic research, currently undertaking a part-time PhD at the University of Portsmouth, looking into insider fraud within FinTechs. In 2023, Claire was awarded Director of the Year at the UK FinTech Awards and shortlisted for several other accolades including Woman of the Year and Head of Financial Crime of the Year. By March 2024, she had already received awards for her work with STUC, as well as been a finalist for Best Business Leader in Training & Education, FinTech Businesswoman of the Year, Champion for Culture & Inclusion and FinTech Leader of the Year.

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  Tony Petrov

  Chief Legal Officer at Sumsub

  Tony Petrov was appointed as Chief Legal Officer at Sumsub in 2018. He is an experienced blockchain and fintech attorney with a focus on AML and KYC compliance, data privacy and international regulator relations. Tony holds a master’s degree in Transnational Business Law from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California. He also studied IT Law at the University of California, Berkeley. A certified CySEC AML Compliance Officer, Tony is the author and host of the "Sumsub for experts" YouTube channel. Tony’s expert commentary and interviews have been published in Financial Times, Cointelegraph, The Paypers, StreetInsider, Yahoo Finance, Benzinga, Fintech Finance, Gambling Insider, Casino Guru, FinanceFeeds and more.

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  Pavel Goldman-Kalaydin

  Head of AI/ML at Sumsub

  Pavel is the Head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Sumsub, a global full-cycle verification platform. With an extensive background in software engineering, Pavel has worked in AI and ML for over 10 years. At Sumsub, he oversees the development of digital fraud prevention technologies. Prior to joining Sumsub in 2022, Pavel was the director of AI at one of the largest digital banks in Europe. He also led research at a social media company with a user base of 100M+ users, where he founded a scientific lab focused on natural language processing (NLP) research. Leading the AI/ML team at Sumsub, Pavel is in charge of AI-generated fraud prevention and automation in Sumsub’s products. Thanks to Pavel, Sumsub’s Liveness solution was upgraded to 99.98% deepfake detection accuracy in 2023. Pavel also supervised the launch of For Fake’s Sake, a publicly available set of models developed by the Sumsub AI/ML Lab, enabling the detection of deepfakes and synthetic fraud in visual assets.

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  Thomas Taraniuk

  Host of What the Fraud Podcast

  Thomas Taraniuk is the Partnerships Manager at Sumsub, where he has been expanding strategic partnerships and driving go-to-market initiatives across Europe and the UK since 2023. With experience in Fintech and SaaS on the buyer-side, Thomas’ remit is to build strong relationships and foster collaboration within the space to bring innovative change to digital services.Thomas has spoken on partner and client panels, led roundtable discussions, and hosted 16 episodes of the "What the Fraud" podcast, engaging with industry leaders from Fintrail, CEX.io, Accenture, Chainalysis, Mettle, Enfuce, and more.