During his 12-year criminal career, Alex Wood stole £26 million, even posing as a fake duke. Now, he shows companies how criminals exploit the very things they believe they are protecting.
Those familiar with Thomas Mann’s novel “Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man” will inevitably experience déjà vu when encountering Wood. He has charm, audacity and a talent for perfect disguise, not to mention a frightening ease in dealing with the truth. Except Wood is not a fictional character. He is a real British con man – or rather, he was.
On 2 March 2026, Wood took to the stage at the SCCE’s 14th Annual European Compliance & Ethics Institute in Berlin. At the invitation of the British compliance firm Skillcast, he recounted his life story to an audience of compliance professionals whom he wanted to shake up.
Wood was a professional criminal for twelve years. Three prison sentences. He stole a total of £26 million. He reached his peak shortly before his last arrest, stealing £1.3 million in just 40 minutes by convincing his victims that he was a bank employee. After an earlier prison sentence left him homeless and without prospects, he pretended to be the Duke of Marlborough and stole money from hotels. Felix Krull would have been delighted.
In 2022, Wood pulled the ripcord. The turning point came when the victim of his £1.3 million coup fired 40 employees the next day and fell seriously ill. Wood regretted it — this time, he meant it. He now writes for the British media and hosts the BBC programme Scam Secrets, which has four million listeners.
In Berlin, he delivered a message: fraudsters don’t look for technical security gaps – they look for human ones. The fraud triangle of opportunity, incentive and rationalisation provides the framework. However, pathological fraudsters tick differently, Wood warns. They are charming, cunning and fearless liars, and classic compliance models are hardly effective against them.
Wood also describes how he compromised bank employees: Through his contacts with drug dealers, he found out which employees were buying illegal substances and cross-referenced this information with their Tinder profiles. He says bluntly that the necessary information was alarmingly easy to obtain.
Particularly worrying are the new technical possibilities. It is now possible to clone a CEO’s voice with 99 per cent accuracy in just a few minutes. In Hong Kong, a live deepfake resulted in losses totalling $25.6 million. Fraudsters monitor LinkedIn, contacting employees specifically after they change jobs – new employees want to please their boss and may carry out illegal tasks. Money mules are recruited en masse via TikTok and Snapchat.
Wood also recounts how he wrote to companies in financial difficulty, checked their credit ratings and contacted their financial managers via RocketReach, simply introducing himself as a criminal looking for a money launderer. Around 90 per cent of them eventually signed up.
What protects us? Not high-security technology, but culture. Wood recommends adopting a zero-trust approach, fostering an open corporate culture, and cultivating the courage to ask uncomfortable questions. Compliance departments are under enormous pressure, and Wood says that this is precisely what makes them vulnerable. Those who are not permitted to address internal issues leave the company vulnerable to external attacks. The best protection is simple: talk to each other.
Incidentally, Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull never regretted anything. Alex Wood did – and that makes him a dangerous enemy to criminals today.
Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de