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There’s a reason online fraud elicits such a visceral response
It exploits fellow feeling and gnaws away at the foundations of a civilised society
The Beekeeper and Thelma don’t, on the face of it, have a great deal in common. The former is an engagingly silly action film starring Jason Statham that has made $152mn worldwide. Its major set pieces include a retired secret agent fighting off a group of trained assassins. Thelma is an intelligent, funny but gripping thriller that has grossed a rather more modest $9mn, starring June Squibb, an acclaimed American character actor in her first leading role at the age of 94. Its dramatic moments include someone walking up a flight of stairs.
But what links the two is that they have the same story: a leading character goes on a journey of violent revenge after a retired woman has her money stolen by a fraudster. Although Thelma is an altogether more grounded movie than The Beekeeper, in which Statham’s bloody journey of revenge involves international criminals and a plot concerning the president of the United States, the films are both driven by the same sense of wish fulfilment: that fraudsters experience physical consequences for their crimes.
In most of the rich world, violent crime is falling, whether in countries like the Netherlands which have drastically reduced their prison population, or in the UK, which is an outlier in increasing the number of people it puts in prison. But while violent crime overall is decreasing, some other forms of crime are increasing. Online fraud is one of them: in England and Wales it now accounts for around 40 per cent of all offences, and is the most commonly experienced crime in the country.
The perception of crime in most democracies is the complete inverse of reality: people think that it is rising even as it is falling. But it is not surprising that it is the crime that most people notice and experience directly — that of being defrauded — that is the subject of revenge fantasies.
Yet the widespread desire to take violent revenge on fraudsters is about more than their ubiquity. Much of this new fraud preys on our most pro-social and human impulses, including the desire to help out an injured grandchild or a stranded relative.
One recent failed fraud attempt in my own family involved an email from a relative with the words “Please help” in the subject header — foiled not because of my own sharp instincts but because I found it impossible to imagine that the relative in question would use the word “please”.
While previous online frauds, such as the famous “Nigerian” illegal money scam in which the sender promises a cut of vast, ill-gotten gains, were more likely to fool the desperate, they tended to be the subject of comedy rather than action movies because the emotion they traded on was greed. Fraud has always been destructive but now that online fraudsters are appealing to our better angels, they feel nastier.
The cultural desire for these people to face severe punishment — whether by being tied to a car that is then driven off a great height in The Beekeeper or being beaten up by a nonagenarian in Thelma — reflects, at least unconsciously, a realisation that this type of fraud targets the foundations of a successful society. A world in which requests for help must always be treated as potential threats is not one most of us would desire to live in.
But the cultural urge for severe punishments also reflects a real challenge for governments. Yes, you can meet some of this particular political appetite with long prison sentences for online fraudsters. But there is another important aspect to the crime: most fraud has an international component (this is the only respect in which The Beekeeper is more realistic than Thelma). The City of London police estimate that 70 per cent of UK fraud has an overseas element, whether because the criminals doing it operate both in Britain and abroad, or because the crime is conducted wholly overseas — although, to my knowledge, absolutely none of it has anything to do with a shadowy plot involving the American president.
This makes the battle against online fraud harder to resolve to the satisfaction of most people or to meet the desire for justice that these cases provoke. The triumphant act of revenge in the closing scenes of Thelma is less obviously ridiculous than that in The Beekeeper, but is sadly not much more likely. The new online fraud inspires dreams of violent retribution and erodes societal trust because its insidious nature can make us feel like fools for treating others with compassion. But the difficulty of fighting it also poses a threat to public trust in the ability of states to protect their citizens in a complex world.