Dolores 0:01

What if the person stealing from you wasn't a stranger? What if it wasn't someone who broke in through a window, or tricked you on the phone, or sent you a scam phishing email? What if it was someone who knew you well, knew your passwords because they had watched you type them? Someone who knew exactly how much money you had in your bank account because they grew up in the same house as you? Edward, today's episode is one that I imagine is going to make some of our listeners a little uncomfortable!

1:02

Yes, perhaps it is, Emily. And I think that discomfort is exactly the point because the story I want to tell today and the broader issue it represents isn't about criminal masterminds or faceless fraudsters. It's about something that happens inside families behind closed doors in houses where everyone is supposed to be safe. Today we're talking about child fraud. We're exploring the chilling reality that the enemy might be sleeping right down the hall. Consider this situation that I have come across where an adolescent child gained access to their younger sibling's online bank account. Over the course of a year or so, the child systematically transferred thousands of pounds from the sibling's bank account to their own bank account using the online banking apps and passwords that she had access to and knowledge of on the younger sibling's mobile phone. There was no elaborate web of lies, no offshore bank accounts, just a simple compulsive act of greed hidden in plain sight by someone who should have been a trusted family member

Dolores 2:27

Edward, please set the scene for our listeners.

2:30

I want you to picture a family, a loving, close-knit family, respectable, comfortable, two well-educated daughters. Let's call them Sarah and Kate. Sarah is the elder, around 18 years of age. Kate, her younger sister, is around 14. Four years between them, different stages of life, different needs, different worlds. Now, Kate had a junior bank account set up by her parents when she was young, the way parents do. Money had gone into it over the years, birthday gifts from relatives, small windfalls at Christmas, the occasional contribution from grandparents and so on. Kate wasn't particularly interested in the account. She wasn't withdrawing from it, wasn't managing it. She was 14. She had pocket money for what she needed. The account just sat there quietly accumulating, a few thousand pounds building up over the years. Nobody was really checking it, not the parents, not Kate. It was just there.

Dolores 3:36

And Sarah knew about it? Yes, Sarah knew about it, and here's where modern life made something possible that simply wouldn't have been possible a generation ago. Because Sarah also knew or was able to find out Kate's online banking password. These things happen in families. Phones left unlocked on the kitchen counter, passwords written on bits of paper, older siblings who are just a little more tech-savvy, a little more aware of how these systems work. And so Sarah gained access to Kate's account. It didn't start big. It never does. A small transfer here, a little top-up there. Sarah had things she wanted, clothes, makeup, the things that matter enormously when you're eighteen and trying to find your place in the world. She could have asked her parents. The money was there, but she didn't. She took it instead from her little sister's account. And because nobody was checking, because Kate had no idea what her balance should be, because the parents weren't monitoring a junior account they thought was simply sitting untouched and accumulating, it went unnoticed for a month, then six months, then a year. Over the course of approximately eighteen months, Sarah transferred somewhere in the region of twelve thousand pounds from Kate's account into her own. Twelve thousand pounds, yeah. From a fourteen-year-old girl's savings taken by her own sister. So how was it discovered what Sarah was doing? Well, the way these things usually are, a routine check. One of the parents, just glancing through the family's accounts one evening, not looking for anything in particular, noticed that Kate's balance had been almost completely drained. And the transactions told the story clearly enough. Regular transfers to Sarah's account. When Sarah was confronted, she broke down immediately. You can imagine tears, remorse, the things you'd expect. She said she'd always meant to pay it back, that it had never felt real, moving numbers on a screen from one account to another, that she didn't know what had come over her. She was sorry, that she was so, so sorry. And what happened? Well, it was handled within the family. No police, no prosecution, of course. A repayment plan was put in place. Sarah would work, save, and pay back what she'd taken over time. Kate, for her part, was more bewildered than angry. She hadn't even known the money was there, not really. But she knew what her sister had done, and that knowledge, that fracture, doesn't just disappear because someone says sorry and promises to make it right. Edward, I think what strikes me about this story is how easy it was. Technically, I mean, for the money to be taken. Exactly right. And that's the thing I want people to sit with for a moment because this wasn't a sophisticated operation. There was no hacking, no elaborate scheme, no specialist knowledge required. All it took was access. And in the modern family home, access is everywhere. We live in an era where our entire financial lives exist on a device that sits on the kitchen table, where banking apps require nothing more than a four-digit code to open, where family members share passwords almost without thinking because it's convenient, because we trust each other, because it never occurs to us that trust can be exploited by the people we love most. This is what financial professionals now call familiar fraud, and it's far more widespread than most people realize Sarah and Kate's story is not an isolated case. The pattern appears again and again in different forms across different families. And psychologists who study this behavior note something consistent across almost all of these cases. The perpetrator rarely thinks of themselves as a thief. They tell themselves it's borrowing. They tell themselves the other person won't miss it. They tell themselves they'll pay it back. The digital nature of modern banking, the fact that you're moving numbers rather than handling physical cash, makes it psychologically easier to cross a line that would otherwise feel uncomfortable. It's almost as if the technology removes the reality of what's happening. Precisely. When you reach into someone's purse and take a twenty pound note, you feel it. You know what you're doing in a visceral, immediate way. When you tap a screen and move money between accounts, it feels abstract, almost theoretical. And that abstraction is dangerous because the harm is anything but theoretical to the person on the receiving end Why do you think young people do this? To their own family? The people they love. It's rarely as simple as greed. In Sarah's case, and in many cases like hers, there were almost certainly other things going on beneath the surface. Envy, perhaps. A sense of unfairness, real or perceived. Pressure from peers. A need to maintain an image, to keep up, to have what others had. At eighteen, those pressures can feel overwhelming, even when from the outside you appear to have everything you need. There's also something worth saying about opportunity. Sarah didn't set out to steal twelve thousand pounds. She set out to take a small amount just once to cover something she wanted, and then she got away with it, and then she did it again. This is how so many financial crimes begin. Not with a plan, but with an opportunity that goes unpunished and the gradual normalization of behavior that should never have become normal at all. The first time is the most stressful, but after that it becomes easier. That's exactly it. And by the time the amounts become significant, the perpetrator has already told themselves the story so many times. It's only borrowings. I'll pay it back. She doesn't even know it's there. They've almost convinced themselves it isn't really wrong. Edward, I want ot go a little deeper into something. Because throughout this story, I keep coming back to the same question: Why? Sarah wasn't destitute. She wasn't desperate. So what was really driving her? I think the honest answer lies in psychology, specifically in something that develops very early in life, the inferiority complex. It's a term we throw around casually, but it's actually a profound psychological condition, and I think it's at the root of far more financial crime than people realize Where or when does it start? In childhood, almost always in childhood, it develops when a young person begins to feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are somehow less than those around them, less talented, less loved, less valued, less deserving. It might come from sibling rivalry and underlying envy, as it very possibly did in Sarah's case. It might come from peer pressure, from comparison, from feeling overlooked or undervalued within the family unit or in social peer groups. And here's what's changed in recent years. Social media has turbocharged this. Instagram, Snapchat. These platforms, let's face it, create a relentless stream of curated perfection. Other people's holidays, other people's clothes, other people's relationships, other people's lives, all filtered and polished and presented as reality. And for a teenager already vulnerable, already searching for identity, that constant comparison is corrosive. It tells them over and over again that they are not enough And that feeling of not being enough can lead to stealing? It can lead to all kinds of behavior: lying, cheating, manipulating, stealing. Because the underlying need isn't for money, it's for validation. It's for a sense of equivalence, of worth. Sarah didn't take twelve thousand pounds because she needed it. She took it because some part of her felt entitled to it, because some part of her was trying to bridge a gap, real or imagined, between herself and the world around her. She wanted to level the playing field. And if that's left unchecked? That's where it becomes really serious because the inferiority complex doesn't disappear when childhood ends. If it isn't addressed, if there's no intervention, no therapeutic support, no honest conversation within the family, it follows the person into adulthood. And the behaviors that started as petty theft or manipulation can escalate. We see it in white-collar crime. We see it in fraud. We see it in adults who manipulate colleagues, partners, employers, all driven by that same underlying wound that was never healed. Childhood pain becomes adult crime. The moral compass gets bent early, and without intervention, it stays bent. The person learns that deception works, that taking what isn't yours fills a void, at least temporarily. And so they keep doing it in different forms at different scales throughout their lives. So what's the answer/ How to nip it in the bud, so to speak? Awareness, early intervention, open conversations within families about feelings of inadequacy, about envy, about the pressures children are under, particularly now in the age of social media. And if a child is caught stealing or lying or manipulating, the response can't be just punishment. It has to include asking the deeper questions. Why? What is this child trying to tell us? What need isn't being met? So what else should families take away from this episode? How to protect against something that happens close to home? A few things. First, and I know this might feel counterintuitive in a family context, but financial visibility matters. Junior accounts, saving accounts, any account that belongs to a child or a young person should be checked regularly by a parent or guardian. Not as surveillance, not as mistrust, but as a responsible oversight. The fact that nobody was monitoring Kate's account is what made this whole thing possible. Second, talk to your children about money openly, honestly, and early about what accounts exist, what they're for, why they're not to be touched, not just as a rule, but as an explanation. Young people are far more likely to respect boundaries they understand than ones that are simply imposed. Third, passwords and access. Be conscious of what information family members have access to, not with suspicion, but with awareness. The convenience of sharing passwords within a household can create vulnerabilities that nobody intended. And fourth, if something does happen, think carefully about how you respond. The instinct to protect a child, to handle it within the family, to avoid the shame of involving authorities, those instincts, let's face it, are understandable. But they also need to be balanced against the message that silence sends. If there are no real consequences, there is no real lesson Finally, can you put this story into context for us, from your experience? I've been in and around financial crime for a long time. I've seen sophisticated fraudsters. I've seen calculated, cold-blooded theft. I've seen people who deceive without hesitation and sleep perfectly well at night. But the cases that stay with me, the ones that linger, are the ones like this. Because they remind you that fraud isn't always something that happens to you from outside. Sometimes it comes from with inside. Sometimes it comes from inside the house, inside the family. Sometimes it sits across the breakfast table. Sometimes it knows your birthday, your passwords, your PIN number, because it grew up alongside you. Kate got her money back eventually, in installments over years. But there are some things that don't come back in installments. Trust is one of them. And once a younger sibling looks at an older one and thinks, you chose to take from me, well then something shifts. Something quietly shifts, but permanently. The cookie jar in this story wasn't in the kitchen. It was a bank account. It belonged to a 14-year-old girl. And the hand that reached into it belonged to someone she loved. That's what makes this kind of fraud the hardest of all to talk about. Because the hand in the cookie jar isn't just about the cookie. It never is. It's about something much, much deeper. And the earlier we understand that, the better the chance of stopping it before it becomes something much harder to undo. Not a sweet cookie at all, but something far more unsavory Thank you Edward. Another thought provoking story and one that I'm sure will resonate with our listeners and stay with them for a long time. Next time on Fraud Files, Edward will be bringing us an enthralling episode entitled "Catch Me If You Can", the story of a sporting hero, a prestigious bank, over half a million euros taken. Edward explores why a man with evereything would risk it all, and asks the uncomfortable question: did part of him want to get caught? If you have enjoyed today's episode please share Fraud Files with someone you think may benefit from hearing this and our previous episodes. And if you have a story of your own something you've witnessed, experienced or want to share you can reach out to us through the usual channels and via email: info at fraud dash files dot com Until next time then. Stay Alert, stay safe.

Simon 17:44

Fraud Files is produced by Rock Solid Pods in association with The Podhouse Productions. Fraud Files is available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple and wherever you get your podcasts.