If you were asked today, what's one of the most significant threats to modern society, would your answer be fraud?

In this opening episode of SCAM: Financial Crime by Design, criminologist Dr Nicola Harding explores how fraud causes real harm without force, without physical violence, and often with the victim’s cooperation. Why is financial crime so hard to see, and so easy to dismiss, until it happens to us?

This episode examines why fraud is typically framed as a technical failure, a compliance issue, or a problem of “bad people”, and what we miss when we think about it that way. Drawing on criminology, lived experience, and practice across financial services and policy, Nicola argues that financial crime is better understood as a trust problem, a behavioural problem, and a design problem.

You’ll hear why ordinary people are increasingly being positioned as the frontline of fraud prevention, how harm extends far beyond financial loss, and why focusing on behaviour before technology matters as we enter an era of AI-assisted crime at scale.

This isn’t a warning or a checklist. It’s an invitation to think differently about financial crime - and to begin building a shared understanding of how harm happens, quietly and systematically, in plain sight.