In 2022 a charming, 34 year old, art dealer named Inigo Philbrick was jailed for what would become known as one of the largest art frauds in history.

Philbrick was sentenced to seven years in a US prison, with two years of supervised release and an order “to pay forfeiture of over 86 million dollars. Proving that like many of the rarest fine art pieces - you really can’t put a price on freedom.

But how do you value anything that doesn’t have a price? And why does the intangible nature of art attract some of the dodgiest dealers?

Today on Collared, we’re hearing from Tomasso Di Ruzza about the delicate balancing act required to regulate the art world.

But first…

When you hear the word Hollywood to you, you’re probably thinking of, we red carpets, box office records, glamorous stars and creative powerhouses.

But what if we told you that behind the scenes, there can be a completely different kind of creativity at play. It’s estimated that the global film industry generates over 100 billion dollars every year through box office sales, streaming, licensing and home entertainment.

So from Hollywood, to Bollywood, Nollywood and everywhere in between - massive sums of money are passing across borders through web-like corporate networks. While this complexity drives blockbuster entertainment, it also creates the perfect smoke screen for high-stakes financial crime.

From indie passion projects to Oscar-winning epics, cinema has inadvertently become a premier destination for washing dirty cash.

To help us untangle this web of scripts, screens, and dark money, we are joined AML Intelligence’s Managing Director James Treacy.

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The Pirates of the Caribbean movies portrayed the region as a haven for rogue sailors and pirates in the 18th century. More recently it has been seen as a luxury hideaway for the Jet-Set and their money - as told in many novels by the likes of John Grisham. But is this reputation accurate or fair? Elisabeth Lees co-founded Claritas Legal and previously spent over a decade as an in-house lawyer for the Cayman Islands government. She spoke to Collared about the country's ongoing compliance architecture overhaul and its efforts to balance regulation and reputation.

Cryptocurrencies have suffered from a similar bad rep. For some it’s digital gold with the promise of huge returns. For others, it is the perfect vehicle for moving, hiding and laundering illegal proceeds from everything including scams, frauds, drugs, human trafficking and terrorist financing…

The challenge for regulators is how to oversee a financial system that is opaque and anonymous by nature. AML Intelligence's EU correspondent Carlo Boffa talks to us about the increasingly divergent approaches to digital currency regulation on both sides of the Atlantic.

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The term “Dead Internet Theory” was first used in 2021 on a message board in the depths of the internet. It’s not a hugely auspicious start for a concept that, only 5 years later, would be discussed in mainstream media and academic texts around the world.

The theory asserted that we were approaching a point when the Internet would consist primarily of bot activity and automated content manipulated by algorithmic curation. And what might that mean for online crime, fraud and scams? Dr Shlomit Wagman explains.

Plus...

Not so long ago, creating a deepfake of a person was quite the technological feat involving videographers, SFX specialists and potentially even actors.

Today, there’s multiple applications that will do all that work for you in a matter of minutes - so long as you can input some social media content, a video clip or an audio recording or two.

Which makes identity theft and online scams much easier to pull off. In this episode of Collared we explore how AI is shifting our perception of reality and the landscape of fraud.

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