At one time Britain’s most prolific and successful fraudster, poacher-turned-gamekeeper Tony Sales is now offering anti-fraud advice to the online gaming industry. Sales talks to iNTERGAMINGi about the internet, a new breed of gangster and ‘acceptable loss’.
THIRTY million pounds. That’s how much Tony Sales is purported to have generated through the use of false identities, stolen credit cards and other fraudulent schemes during a six-year period on the run.
Having eventually been caught through what he terms “stupidity and overconfidence,” Sales is now a reformed character attracting headlines for far more positive reasons. INTERGAMINGi first encountered Sales at EiG 2013 in Barcelona where, as a guest of identification and verification specialist Jumio, he took part in a workshop that saw him explain a number of simple if deviously clever scams for divorcing online gaming firms and their customers from their money.
His opening words at EiG hushed the room into an astonished silence that would last the full 45 minutes and offer everyone present considerable food for thought. “I worked for lots of notorious crime families in the UK,” he began. “They would use me to scam and recover money for them through fake bank accounts and so on. I had a team of 50 guys - with five captains - and we ran the whole team like a business.
“Nobody in the team knew where I lived and no-one beyond the captains even knew what I looked like and it helped me commit fraud over a period of 20 years.” Any misgivings EiG organiser Clarion Events might have had about welcoming Sales into the bright lights of the industry arena were blown away by this opening. Online gaming quickly realised that it had uncovered a new asset.
Read the full article in the Issue 6 of iNTERGAMINGi.
