Jeffrey Robinson

Tracing the sometimes amusing history of dirty money and money laundering, Robinson leads up to the 9/11 attacks. At this point, he says, US efforts to follow and find dirty money were sidetracked by the hunt for Bin Laden’s laundered money. Except, in those days, terrorists didn’t launder money. It was strictly a cash business. In making that mistake, the bad guys were able to pivot from traditional money laundering to trade-based money laundering, while the good guys continued to fight the last war, inadvertently creating a huge no man’s land where criminals and terrorists cooperate and thrive.

Most people believe that the major beneficiaries of globalization and the digital age are banks and financial institutions, the telecoms, and the dot.coms. Jeffrey Robinson argues that their successes pale by comparison to the benefits organized crime has reaped from these heady times, and, in telling tales of these groups, Robinson offers entrepreneurial advice to legitimate businesses. Included here are the lessons the good guys need to learn from the bad guys, the suspect individuals, and the Harvard Business School.

Over the next 12 months, every man, woman, and school-aged child in the country will be targeted multiple times by professional fraudsters; one in nine will lose money; seniors are at the most risk; and most fraudsters will get away with their crimes. What’s more, most fraud goes unreported. One reason is that people who have been defrauded are embarrassed by this simple fact: fraud is a two-way street crime. The hard truth is that the Nigerian prince who gets inside someone’s bank account is there because that person let him inside their bank account. This is Jeffrey Robinson’s ultimate guide to staying safe. It’s all about the unexpected simplicity of fraud, understanding the two-way street nature of it, why everyone is vulnerable, and the equally simple steps that everyone needs to understand in order to protect themselves.