Giles Thomson, the new president of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), has unveiled a multi-year roadmap to confront what he described as a global fraud epidemic costing $500bn each year.
According to Alessa, Thomson outlined the plan in his inaugural speech on 1 July 2026, the first day of his two-year term leading the international anti-money laundering (AML) watchdog under the UK presidency.
Alessa recently discussed how the FATF president recently unveiled new roadmap to combat $500bn fraud epidemic.
The announcement signals that fraud, long treated as a secondary concern behind money laundering and terrorist financing, is now a central FATF priority. For compliance teams at banks, credit unions, FinTechs, and payment providers, the roadmap previews new typologies, best practice guidance, and potential changes to how the FATF applies its existing standards.
The roadmap will unfold in two stages. Through October 2026, the FATF will collect detailed information on fraud typologies from banks, regulators, and policymakers, with particular attention on scam compounds, the industrial-scale operations behind much of the world’s romance fraud, investment scams, and pig butchering schemes. The second stage shifts from evidence gathering to action, with recommendations due by February 2027.
FATF president Giles Thomson said, “We will very quickly then move on in a second stage, to look at what is working well, best practices, and how we can scale those.” An implementation phase is then expected to run through to June 2028, alongside a “Global Response Against Fraud” event planned for spring 2027, backed by a new private sector consultative group.
The scale of the problem underpins the urgency. FATF president Giles Thomson said, “The scale of the threat from fraud costs $500 billion a year across the world.” He noted that fraud was FATF president Giles Thomson said, “the predominant predicate offense in 90% of the FATF mutual evaluations done across the global network in our last round.”
Thomson, who also serves as director for economic crime and sanctions at HM Treasury, was candid about the limits of the FATF’s reach. FATF president Giles Thomson said, “We recognize that the FATF is not going to be the entire solution at a global level. But we think we can be a much bigger part of the solution through the global network that we have.”
For compliance teams, the roadmap points to three shifts: typology requests from regulators before October 2026, closer scrutiny of scam-related transaction patterns such as mule activity and rapid cross-border payments, and accelerating convergence between fraud and AML functions. Institutions that document fraud typologies now and integrate fraud and AML operations are likely to be better placed as supervisory expectations evolve.
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