Around 74,000 years ago, a supervolcano called Toba erupted in what is now Indonesia.

It was the largest known natural disaster in 2.5 million years of Earth’s history. The eruption ejected somewhere between 2,700 and 3,000 cubic kilometres of material into the atmosphere. It triggered what scientists believe was a decade-long volcanic winter. Some genetic evidence suggests it may have reduced the entire human population to just a few thousand individuals – a bottleneck so severe we nearly didn’t make it through.

Our ancestors had no warning. No instruments, no models, no early alert systems. No one saw it coming – they simply survived it, or they didn’t. Survive it they did, or we simply wouldn’t be here now. Research showsthat we adapted, eating more fish, and we migrated. We showed some of the earliest signs of human resilience that are still traceable (and we are still learning from) today.

How does any of this relate to financial crime? Well. My task as a criminologist is to help people – policy makers, practitioners, law makers, the public – understand crime in ways that help defend against a different sort of harm. I mainly do this with research, but we are at a point where the numbers just don’t have any sort of tangible impact anymore.

It’s almost like the cost of financial crime has become so large now, we can’t comprehend it. It is unreal, and therefore, easier to ignore. But that is a failure in my work and others like me. We are supposed to help you to understand, make those in a position to do something about it care enought to follow through. But that’s all of us now. Financial crime has always been everyone’s problem; now it simply needs to be everyone’s responsibility.

The first step to dismantling the monster in the shadows of your childhood bedroom was shining a light on it to see what it actually consisted of. Once you knew it was the shadow of the moonlight over your hung-up housecoat, or a spiky stuffed toy, you could understand and change your feeling about it, or do something about it.

This is what I attempt to do in my keynote speeches, webinars and research reports, and its what I will try and do here.

So why is financial crime bigger than an environmental disaster that nearly wiped out the human race 74,000 years ago? Well, if every pound lost to financial crime each year were a second of time, you would travel back 76,000 years – roughly to when our ancestors were about to have to rebuild a species from the edge of extinction.

Financial crime is that old, in scale. And unlike Toba, every single part of it is man-made.

The largest human-created disaster you’ve never thought of as a disaster

We reserve the word disaster for things that arrive suddenly: Earthquakes, pandemics, explosions – things with a visible before and after.

Financial crime doesn’t work like that. In fact, most crime doesn’t work like that. It’s chronic, not acute. It bleeds rather than ruptures. Some victims, or the criminally exploited, may not ever realise it, and others may never really recover. Whilst others don’t believe it’s a problem because it hasn’t touched them personally. And so we don’t experience it as the disaster it is – even though by almost any measure of scale, it dwarfs most of what we categorise that way.

The 2024 Nasdaq Verafin Global Financial Crime Report put illicit funds circulating in the global financial system at over $3 trillion annually. The IMF estimates that between 2% and 5% of global GDP is laundered every year. INTERPOL’s latest assessment puts fraud losses alone at $442 billion in 2025, and that figure is growing at nearly 20% annually, accelerated by AI.

We talk about financial crime as though it’s an industry problem, a compliance problem, a specialist problem. The numbers say it’s a civilisational one. And here’s what makes it different from Toba. Our Stone Age ancestors had no warning systems. No models, no data, no instruments, no accumulated knowledge of what a supervolcano could do. They could not see it coming, and no framework for responding when it arrived.

We have all of that. We have decades of data, sophisticated detection technology, international legal frameworks, specialist agencies, and thousands of highly trained professionals whose entire careers are dedicated to understanding exactly how this works and what needs to happen to stop it.

Financial crime is not a natural disaster. It is an entirely preventable one, perpetuated at civilisational scale, with more warning signs than our ancestors could have dreamed of, and a collective response that remains, still, catastrophically inadequate to the size of the problem.

The reason the response stays inadequate is, at least in part, a communication failure.

Not an evidence problem – the data is extraordinary. And unfortunately, it gets more extraordinary every year. The 2026 Nasdaq Verafin Global Financial Crime Report, estimated $4.4 trillion in illicit financial activity globally , growth of $1.3 trillion. That takes us back a further 35,000 years.

The problem is that even the concept of trillions just doesn’t land. Its far more than we can comprehend. Human beings are not wired to feel the difference between millions, billions and a trillion. We hear “unprecedented scale” so often that it has stopped meaning anything.

So when I speak, whether it’s a conference stage, a boardroom, or a legislative committee, I have to translate.

So let me take you to the moon.. 91 times.

This week, NASA completed a mission that pushed human presence further from Earth than at any point in the history of spaceflight.

On April 6, 2026, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen surpassed the record for the farthest distance any human has ever travelled from Earth – a record that had stood since Apollo 13 in 1970. At their furthest point, Artemis II reached 406,771 kilometres from our home planet. They also became the first humans to see parts of the far side of the Moon with their own eyes.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen marked the moment from aboard the Orion capsule:

“We will continue our journey even further into space before Mother Earth succeeds in pulling us back to everything that we hold dear. But we most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived.”

We built the mathematics, the engineering, the materials science, the navigation systems, the life support, the communication infrastructure, and the sheer institutional will to send human beings to a distance that would have been pure mythology to every generation that came before us. We solved problems that didn’t have solutions yet. We built tools for challenges we hadn’t encountered. We did it through innovation, creativity, resilience, and an absolute refusal to accept that the distance was too great.

The same species that painted cave walls in the dark, survived a supervolcano, and just punched further into the cosmos than ever before, is sleepwalking into a man-made catastrophe it has every tool to prevent.

We just sent humans further into space than ever before. So why can’t we save ourselves?

Financial crime is not a physics problem. It doesn’t require new laws of nature to be discovered or technologies that don’t yet exist. The frameworks are there. The intelligence is there. The expertise is there. What is missing is the urgency – the collective decision that this is a problem serious enough to meet with the full force of human capability, the way we meet the challenge of space.

Instead, we normalise it. We treat it as background noise. We build compliance functions designed more to demonstrate effort than to create outcomes. We measure our success by processes followed rather than harm prevented. We allow a $4.4 trillion criminal economy to operate, year after year, at civilisational scale, with less than 1% of its proceeds ever seized or frozen.

Charting a course for the sun

The data suggests that financial crime is growing at a compound annual rate of 19.3%. At that rate, if nothing changes, the centimetre-line reaches the Sun, 150 million kilometres away, in roughly eight years.

We are not talking about a problem that is holding steady while we work out what to do. We are watching it accelerate toward the nearest star.

I use these not as rhetorical flourishes but as calibration tools. Because until someone can feel the size of a problem, they cannot properly assess whether their response to it is proportionate. And right now, almost nowhere in the world is the response to financial crime proportionate to its scale.

I spend a lot of my time in rooms full of people who already understand this. Financial crime professionals, regulators, law enforcement, fraud prevention specialists – they live in these numbers. They don’t need convincing.

But the decisions that shape our ability to fight financial crime are rarely made in those rooms.

They’re made by legislators focused, quite reasonably, on the issues their constituents are raising. By executives who see compliance as a cost rather than infrastructure. By a public who mostly only encounter fraud when it happens to them, and who are still more likely to blame themselves than the system that failed to protect them.

The fifth-largest economy on Earth. Except it doesn’t build anything.

Here is one final translation, for anyone who thinks in economic terms rather than cosmic ones.

If financial crime were a country, its GDP would be $4.4 trillion. That places it alongside Japan at $4.28 trillion and India at $4.13 trillion – the fourth or fifth largest economy on the planet, sitting inside the top five alongside the United States, China, and Germany.

It would be larger than the United Kingdom, larger than France, and larger than every economy in Africa combined.

But unlike every other economy at that scale, this one produces nothing. It builds no infrastructure, generates no innovation, creates no employment worth having. It extracts – entirely and only. It takes from individuals, from businesses, from governments, from the most vulnerable people in every society on Earth — and it gives nothing back except misery, eroded trust, and the hollowed-out feeling of having been taken for a fool by a system that was supposed to protect you.

Financial crime is a parasite, and it is growing at nearly 20% a year.

At that rate, within a decade, we won’t be comparing financial crime to Japan or Germany. We will be comparing it to China.

We are not stone age survivors. But we should adapt like them.

Toba’s survivors had no agency. They could not have seen it coming, could not have modelled it, could not have built systems to reduce the harm. They endured it because enduring was the only option available to them. We are not in that position. We have never been less in that position.

We are the species that just extended our physical reach beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined – driven by the same impulse that got those early humans through the volcanic winter and out the other side. Innovation. Determination. The absolute refusal to accept that a problem is bigger than our capacity to solve it. Jeremy Hansen said from a quarter of a million miles away that this record should not be long-lived. The point of breaking it was to dare the next generation to go further.

I want to say the same thing about financial crime.

This scale should not be long-lived. The point of understanding it, really understanding it, in seconds and centimetres and GDP rankings and trips to the Moon, is to make the current response feel as inadequate as it actually is, and to dare everyone with the power to change it to go further than they have before.

Financial crime is not a force of nature – it is a choice. A collective, ongoing, entirely reversible choice to under-resource, under-prioritise, and under-react to the largest human-created economic disaster on the planet. We didn’t accept that space was unreachable. We shouldn’t accept that this is inevitable either.

This time, unlike our Stone Age ancestors, we have no excuse for not seeing it coming.