An email fraudster’s comeuppance & the age of the multi-centiBillionaire

If there is such a thing as an iconic fraud, it’s probably the Nigerian 419 scam. If you had an email account 20 years ago, you’ll recall the emails, which came in by the dozen: “I am the widow of President Sani Abacha, I have hundreds of millions of dollars, can I borrow your bank account to put them in? I’ll give you a cut” kind of thing. 

If you replied — “I’m sorry for your loss, of course you can borrow my bank account, I look forward to my cut” etc., etc. — then a correspondence would begin, and the scammer would eventually require you to pay a fee to arrange the transaction. If you paid the fee, the scammer would vanish, and you would be left wondering how you could have been so foolish, and lamenting the fact that your money was now in a bank in Beirut.

Until now.

The most random piece of New Year’s good news I’ve seen in some time is that “the Serious Fraud Office”” (SFO) has successfully recovered more than 400,000 pounds to be returned to nine fraud victims almost 24 years after they were defrauded.”

Abdullah Ali Jammal was the fraudster in question, but fled the UK before he could be convicted, so the SFO seized his money. Normally, if there has not been a conviction, the money goes to the government, but — in this case and, hopefully, in future ones too — it will go to his victims instead, who were laboriously traced in several different countries by law enforcement agents.

This is all very munificent (though it will be interesting to see if the UK’s generosity continues when larger sums of money are on the line), but the most interesting conclusion to draw is just how long financial crime cases take to come to any sort of conclusion. They are complicated, multi-jurisdictional, frequently packed with political and diplomatic complexities, and almost invariably feature defendants who can afford armies of lawyers.

My own personal favourite example is the case of Pavlo Lazarenko, a spectacularly corrupt Ukrainian politician who fled to California in 1999 when he fell from grace. This was an unwise choice of destination (there are reasons why they normally go to Russia or Belarus) and he was promptly arrested, tried and convicted on money laundering charges.

It is now 2026, he has been out of prison for more than a decade, but U.S. authorities have still not succeeded in confiscating his assets. Whole generations of lawyers have come and gone as the case has ground its way through the courts, yet Lazarenko fights on. I almost admire his tenacity, though I’m not quite sure what he is holding out for. Perhaps he is hoping for a pardon? To be fair, if he did receive one, he would be far from the least worthy recipient of late.

Money makes money and the money that money makes, makes money

Many thanks to the good folks at the Institute for Policy Studies for doing the sums on how U.S. oligarchs fared in 2025. “The biggest gains were among the top 15 U.S. billionaires, those with assets over $100 billion. This elite group saw their wealth surge to $3.2 trillion at the end of 2025, up from $2.4 trillion a year ago, a gain of 33% (more than double the S&P 500 increase of 16%),” the IPS said. 

I know we’ve all got used to this, and we’d all rather think about something less depressing like climate change or the return of gonorrhoea. But it is worth thinking about how weird this is. Oligarchs’ already enormous wealth is growing twice as fast as the wealth of even those who can afford to own shares, let alone the 40% of Americans who are cut out of the stock market altogether.

Five years ago, Elon Musk was worth $25 billion, which is an unimaginable fortune in and of itself; now, he’s worth $716 billion, which is a sum greater than Belgium’s GDP. But then, five years ago, the sheer idea of a centi-billionaire was so astonishing that the creation of a new one was worthy of remark. Now there are so many of them that they’re not even all American any more. 

This is bad news for democracy. No system supposedly based on equality but funded by political donations can survive for long when the richest 300,000 Americans own $19 trillion more wealth than the poorest 170 million. I am particularly concerned about how the oligarch class in the United States might copy their fellows in Russia and use the state’s machinery to maintain their grip on power if there is a backlash.

As such, I think it’s worth having a look at a report published last month from the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee on what Republicans and crypto-people call “Operation Choke Point 2.0”. In one interpretation, this is just a self-pitying conspiracy theory (named after a previous one), in which Joe Biden’s White House supposedly acted in the interests of monopolist banks and abused money laundering regulations to stop crypto firms from establishing themselves.

A more important interpretation though is to read the report and marvel at the huge amount of leeway that anti-money laundering (AML) regulations give to governments to exclude people and institutions from the financial system. Previously, this has largely affected Muslims, spuriously linked to terrorism in the UK, the U.S., Canada and indeed almost everywhere, and Russians accused of nothing much, and other marginalised groups. It has thus failed to gain the political traction it deserves, but it is genuinely a huge deal.

Authoritarian regimes have abused this power for decades and I think it deserves far more attention than it gets, so I’m actually quite pleased the Republicans are looking at it, even if they’re only doing it because it’s affected some big donors. The Cato Institute in this new report makes some very good points, not the least of which is the fact that there’s no evidence that the AML system is working anyway, so a proper re-examination of its inner mechanisms is long overdue. And perhaps with added urgency, given the question of whether you’d want those mechanisms to be in the hands of an authoritarian government with no interest in tackling corruption, but quite a lot of interest in swiping other people’s or indeed countries’ stuff.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.