Engineered to Exploit

What the finance sector needs to understand about sextortion, romance fraud, and the victims being failed

When financial crime professionals think about sextortion and romance fraud, they tend to picture individual bad actors: someone behind a laptop, running a script, targeting the naive or the lonely. The reality is considerably more uncomfortable than that.

The infrastructure behind these crimes is organised, cross-border, and professionalised. The victims are not defined by vulnerability in any traditional sense. And the systems that should be catching, stopping, and supporting when things go wrong are largely failing the people who need them most.

That was the central truth at the heart of We Fight Fincrime Association Q&A, where Tony Sales and Kirsty Guest joined Jonathan Greenstein to take practitioner questions on sextortion, romance scams, and exploitation-led fraud. Kirsty is not just an advocate. She is a survivor of romance fraud who built Speak to Be Heard to give voice to people who have experienced what she experienced, and who now works across corporate, banking, and safeguarding sectors to prevent it happening to others. What followed was one of the most direct and important conversations the association has hosted.

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