Ponzi Banking: The Law and Psychology of Banks That Service Financial Misconduct
Journal of International Banking Law and Regulation, 40(9):317-336 Aug 2025
Co-authored with Martin S. Kenney, Head of Firm at MKS Law, BVI
Banks often evade civil liability for routine services that enable Ponzi schemes and financial misconduct, creating significant barriers to justice for victims seeking compensation. Co-authored by Dr Stein and Martin S. Kenney, Head of Firm at MKS Law based in the BVI, a founding member of ICC FraudNet and one of the world’s leading asset recovery lawyers, this groundbreaking article provides interdisciplinary, multijurisdictional analysis of this issue through legal and psychological examination of six judgments from the US, Canada, and England and Wales involving victims who succeeded or failed in seeking compensation from enabling banks. When determining civil liability, courts assess not only facts and law but also mental states—actual knowledge, wilful blindness, reckless disregard, and fraud risk awareness—of financial institution leaders and employees assisting primary wrongdoers. Even where courts agree on intentional tort elements, approaches to mental state concepts remain confused, vague, or inconsistent across jurisdictions, complicating culpability assessments and hindering bank accountability. Beyond analyzing each judgment's legal reasoning, we explain key mental states in each case and provide concise overviews of corresponding (and often conflicting) psychological features, recommending how courts can more reliably determine requisite mental state elements for holding banks accountable for harm caused. We argue that harmonizing established jurisprudence with sophisticated psychological understandings of mental states—theories of mind in law and their real-world court implications—represents a vital step toward redressing power inequities and helping fraud victims recover against institutional enablers when legally permitted.
From the Imitation Game to Techno-Imposters: How AI Became the Ultimate Tool for Psychological Manipulation and Fraud
2025 ICC FraudNet Global Report
Dr Dominic Thomas-James, Editor
Today’s advanced technologies are ushering increasingly more complex forms of fraud and economic crime unleashed at previously unimagined velocity and scale. Frontier AI systems in particular represent an unprecedented convergence of technology and psychology. Machine agents are designed to operate autonomously in society in ways indistinguishable to humans and eradicate a conscious sense of interacting with a non-human entity. No longer merely a cutting-edge instrument in the knowing commission of nefarious activities, agentic AI can now itself function as an imposter – the assumption of a false or disguised identity to deliberately deceive. We are entering uncharted territory where the fraudster is not a person but a computational system. Techno-imposturousness isn’t equivalent to a Trojan horse, a boiler room, Nigerian prince, or charlatan’s grift. We are being groomed to willingly enable what may come to be understood as the most far-reaching and consequential fraud in history – blindly abdicating human agency to computational fakery.
A Brief Field Guide to Leveraging Human Factor Intelligence Analysis in Fraud and Asset Recovery Operations
2024 ICC FraudNet Global Report — Fraud Frontiers: Emerging Threats and Innovative Solutions in Fraud & Asset Recovery [Read Report]
Dr Dominic Thomas-James, Editor
Fraud cases involve more than their commercial, transactional, and legal elements. They are centrally defined by the people whose decisions and actions influence everything that happens. Each matter is constituted of a thick stew of stakeholders’ motivations and desires, aims and concerns, and personal histories and circumstances. In this paper, a realistic but fictive case summary is advanced to illustrate these ideas in the context of a large-scale multi-national fraud. This forms the basis for a concise explanation of the advantages and practical utility of leveraging psychological expertise — specialist knowledge and tools in decoding the inscrutable complexities of human thought, behavior, and relationships — in asset recovery operations.
Innovations and Strategic Applications in the Psychology of Fraud
2023 ICC FraudNet Global Report — Fraud and Asset Recovery in an Unstable World [Read Report]
Dr Dominic Thomas-James, Editor
Fraud is a crime of relationships. It involves dishonesty, deception, betrayals of trust and abuses of power and is predicated in ubiquitous human propensities to be hoodwinked and manipulated. Despite its centrality, the psychological dimension of fraud and fraudsters has been historically misconstrued and domain relevant expertise underutilised in the ferocious psychological battle to recover victims’ losses and bring fraudsters, kleptocrats, and other corrupt actors to justice. In this article, Dr Stein redresses that by elaborating on the complex psychodynamics at play across the entire psycho-social ecosystem in fraud matters and delineating psychologically sophisticated tools for actionably leveraging psychodynamic intelligence to assist fraud litigators and allied asset recovery professionals.
Fraudsters at the gate: how bank leaders confront and defeat fraud and money laundering, part 1
Journal of International Banking Law and Regulation, 31(11), November 2016
Co-authored with Alex Moglia, Moglia Advisors, Chicago, and Martin S. Kenney, Martin Kenney & Co, Solicitors, BVI
Serious fraud poses numerous challenges for corporate stakeholders and victims beyond economic, reputational, and other obvious losses. In this two-part article, a companion to their work “Multijurisdictional concealed asset recovery: managing the risks” published in Issue 1 of the JIBLR in 2015, the authors elaborate the key issues, duties, and responsibilities senior corporate leaders must confront when their institution has been defrauded. Additional areas covered include the impact of compliance on an organisation, management of fraud and money laundering risks, and model-building an effective anti-money laundering plan based on ethics and regulatory compliance.
Fraudsters at the gate: how bank leaders confront and defeat fraud and money laundering, part 2
Journal of International Banking Law and Regulation, 31(12), December 2016
Co-authored with Alex Moglia, Moglia Advisors, Chicago, and Martin S. Kenney, Martin Kenney & Co, Solicitors, BVI
This is the second section of a two-part article addressing challenges posed by serious fraud for corporate stakeholders and victims beyond economic, reputational and other obvious losses. In the first part, published in the previous edition of JIBLR, we discussed key issues, duties and responsibilities senior corporate leaders confront when their institution has been defrauded. We also covered the impact of compliance, management of fraud and money laundering risks and building effective anti-money laundering (AML) plans based on ethics and regulatory compliance.
In this second part, we address tools, danger signs, reactions to fraud—including some institutional leaders’ reflexive response for self-preservation over safe-guarding their organisation’s best interests—and the common pitfalls of racing to the scene of an apparent fraud. We also discuss issues relating to the negative collateral public impact of large-scale frauds: the harm to additional classes of victims besides investors, employees or vendors and the consequent damage to the social and economic fabric. We conclude by delineating recommendations for senior management that include pursuit of the greater good, rather than hiding behind corporate aprons to avoid what’s often perceived as the greater bad.
Multi-jurisdictional Concealed Asset Recovery: Managing the Risks
The Journal of International Banking Law and Regulation, 30(1), January 2015
Co-authored with Alex Moglia, Moglia Advisors, Chicago, and Martin S. Kenney, Martin Kenney & Co, Solicitors, BVI
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis in the Public Sphere: A Call for Taking Analytic Thinking, Writing and Action into the Broader World
Psychoanalytic Perspectives Volume 17, Issue 2 – June 2020
Starting from the premise that psychoanalytic writing is a core feature of the profession of psychoanalysis, Dr Stein considers what and how analysts write about psychoanalysis as inseparable from the state of affairs of the field. What is psychoanalytic writing and what is its purpose? For whom do psychoanalysts write—and can or should this ambit be widened? Does the way we currently and traditionally present psychoanalytic thought and work clarify or obscure what psychoanalysts know and do? These and other questions critically probe differences between what psychoanalysis can do in the consultation room (therapeutic action) and how psychoanalysis can impact our broader world (psychoanalysis “in action”). Using the writer’s own experience as a psychoanalyst who works as an advisor and consultant to corporate leaders and organizations and who writes for a diverse business readership as a point of entry, an argument is made for psychoanalysts to use writing differently to more effectively communicate to the world what psychoanalysts do, what psychoanalysis is capable of, and to be more inventive in engaging in contemporary society.
Music (Chapter 36, Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Second Edition (2012)
Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., Bonnie E. Litowitz, Ph.D., and Paul Williams, Ph.D., Editors
Section VI — Psychoanalysis and Other Disciplines Jeffrey Prager, Ph.D., Section Editor
The American Psychiatric Publishing
Sex and the Psyche: The Untold Story of Our Most Secret Fantasies Taken from the Largest Ever Survey of Its Kind by Brett Kahr (2007)
Allen Lane Publishers (Penguin Books)
American Imago, 66(1): 123–127 (2009)
(book review)
Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. by Stuart Feder M.D.
Yale University Press (2004)
Psychoanalytic Review, 94(3):493-498 (2007)
(book review)
Between Couch and Piano: Psychoanalysis, Music, Art and Neuroscience by Gilbert J. Rose, M.D.
Brunner-Routledge (2004)
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 87(2):624-627 (2006)
(book review)
Tricycles, Bicycles, Life Cycles: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Childhood Loss and Transgenerational Parenting in Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003)
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 87(4):1125-1134 (2006)
Music, Mourning and Consolation
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52(3):783-811, (January 2004)
Music and Trauma in Polanski’s The Pianist (2002)
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85:755–65 (2004)
The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue by Steven H. Knoblauch
Analytic Press (2000)
Psychoanalytic Psychology, 18(3):597-601 (2001)
(book review)
Just choose one: Memory and time in Kore‐eda's Wandafuru Raifu [afterlife](1998)
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 82(3):603-608 (2001)
Co-authored with Andrea Sabbadini, British Psycho-Analytical Society
Well-Tempered Bagatelles—A Meditation on Listening in Psychoanalysis & Music
American Imago 56(4):387-416 (1999)
Freudian Analysts/Feminist Issues by Judith M. Hughes
Yale University Press (1999)
Psychoanalytic Books, 10(4):433-435 (1999)
(book review)
On Freud's Couch: Seven New Interpretations of Freud's Case Histories edited by Iréne Matthis and Imre Szecsödy translated by Sheila Smith
Jason Aronson (1998)
Psychoanalytic Books, 10(4):378-384 (1999)
(book review)