Back in April this year, we found ourselves at a bit of a loose end. We'd just finished our film Teenage Riot, the student protests had died down, and as a result our lives were quiet and dull again. Then we remembered that during the filiming of Teenage Riot, our friend Graham Johnson had introduced us to his mate Tony. Tony had just got out of jail after spending six years on the run from the police, which would normally make meeting him a pretty intimidating prospect. Except Tony had been a wanted man because of his role as one of Britain’s biggest fraudsters. Since fraud is the victimless crime that doesn’t hurt anyone, we were really happy to meet Tony and thought it’d be quite fun. And as it turned out, we were right.He wasn’t a tough, scary criminal at all. He told us funny stories, like the one about his mate who blew two hundred thousand pounds on a massive, cocaine-fuelled bender, and how Tony felt so sorry for his mate, that he raised two hundred thousand pounds to pay off the drug dealers who didn’t find the story as funny as we did. It was then that we realised that more people would probably find this stuff interesting, so we started hanging out with Tony in South London as we put together a film about London’s fraud network.Fraud is the fastest growing crime in the world. It costs the UK thirty billion pounds a year, and costs the world three trillion dollars a year, so it’s a pretty big deal. The act of defrauding someone seemed a lot easier to pull off than we’d expected, too.It turns out that if you want something, what you need isn’t money to buy it, but credit. And getting credit by pretending to be someone else is exceptionally easy. Especially when sales people in mobile phone shops and department stores are incentivised to issue as much credit as possible, have no idea how to determine whether you are who you say you are, and have the ability to issue you thousands of pounds worth of credit on the spot.We spent a lot of time with Tony at his lock-up and in the surrounding area, where being around Tony was a bit like walking into a restaurant with Henry Hill in Goodfellas. Only Tony was drinking those tiny, dark bottles of Dragon Stout instead of doing bumps of cocaine with Joe Pesci.When Tony offered to introduce us to some other people he knew of who were connected to fraud in London, we thought it would be a good idea. And it was: We met Mr. Gold, who showed us the meaning of ‘wash wash’; a teenager who put ex-girlfriends in debt for deleting him on Facebook; and also went round to Dave Courtney’s to have a look at his sex dungeon. All that stuff's in the film, too.The whole thing was fairly surreal, and it was hard to reconcile Tony with the image of a gangland criminal. But when Tony told us that, during his six years on the run, even his own wife thought he was working as a law-abiding van driver, we didn’t feel so dumb for expecting him to fit the stereotype of a fraudster. But then, being a career fraudster, he's probably pretty good at making people feel at ease.The first episode of our new film Rule Britannia: Fraud goes live on VICE.COM tomorrow. To see the whole thing before anyone else, head along to the screening at this year's Raindance Film Festival in London – more details on that, here.
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