Top 12 YouTube Channels about Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime

The risk of online scams and fraud schemes has become a constant feature of digital life. For individuals, that means a higher chance of being targeted. For anyone working in fraud prevention, it means that attackers’ tactics evolve faster than any company policy, playbook and quarterly report. The tricks change, the red flags become harder to spot and the delivery channels keep expanding, which is why staying up to date is truly key.

In the same way that many thought leaders share timely insights on LinkedIn (as we covered in our previous article on fraud experts to follow on that platform), a group of investigators, analysts, industry associations and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) practitioners publish video content on YouTube that breaks down scams and unveils fraud patterns in the wild. These channels show what common scams look like end to end, what signals give them away, what new trends and regulations you should know about and how tactics change as new tools or defense strategies are introduced.

Here are 12 YouTube channels about fraud, scams, financial crime and OSINT we think are genuinely worth your time in 2026.

1. Pleasant Green

Focus: Online scams, social engineering, digital fraud
Location: United States

Pleasant Green’s channel provides a clear window into how modern scams are constructed and executed. His content focuses on real scam interactions, breaking down the techniques used to establish trust, apply pressure and manipulate victims over time. We recommend starting from the video below, where he analyzes how quickly and easily scammers can now target their victims both through email and messaging apps like WhatsApp. Once scammers engage with the user, what follows is an avalanche of personalized messages, inquiries about personal data, financial requests, etc.

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To us, Pleasant Green’s channel stands out because it shows fraudsters tweaking their scripts, switching channels and leaning on different emotional hooks depending on who they are targeting. For teams building detection logic, that is useful because it turns “risk signals” into something concrete, casting a spotlight on how the scam actually works in practice.

2. Jim Browning

Focus: Scam operations, romance fraud, organized financial crime
Location: United Kingdom

Jim Browning is well known for his investigative approach to scam exposure. He’s been publishing videos on YouTube for more than 10 years, often documenting the infrastructure behind scam operations, including call centers, tooling and internal workflows. What is especially useful is when he breaks a scam apart step by step and points out the telltale signs, such as fake addresses, fake company names, or fake accounts used by the fraudsters, or when he points out sector-specific scams and their differences from more mainstream versions of the same tactic.

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We like Jim Browning’s content because it shows, in practice, what you can uncover when you combine open-source research with technical clues and a lot of persistence. For fraud teams, his videos offer a look at how scam operations actually run, providing the kind of detail that can help shape risk models, improve escalation playbooks, and support work with law enforcement or platform partners.

3. Coffeezilla

Focus: Financial fraud, investment scams, deceptive business practices
Location: United States

Coffeezilla’s videos stand out for their sleek production as much as for the rigor of his investigations. Each episode is structured as a step-by-step journey through complex fraud cases, designed to keep viewers engaged while unpacking dense financial details. Whether exposing complex financial fraud schemes, influencer scams or Ponzi-style activities, Coffeezilla's videos often begin with first-hand accounts from numerous victims of the same type of fraud. This helps humanize the impact of scams and contributes to reducing the stigma still associated with being defrauded.  

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A common thread across many of Coffeezilla's videos is how “trust” is manufactured at scale through seemingly solid social media presence, large followings and cross-community validation. We like this channel also for the high production quality of its videos, which helps sustain attention even when the schemes and mechanisms being analyzed are particularly complex.

4. Kitboga

Focus: Scam psychology, financial crime, AI-enabled fraud
Location: United States

Kitboga offers one of the clearest windows into how scammers behave in real time. By keeping them on the line for long, unscripted conversations, he shows how they pivot, changing their stories, dialing up the pressure and trying new angles when a target pushes back. One video we suggest starting from breaks down a common travel scam in detail, indirectly helping people not to become victims of the same tactic in their day to day lives.

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As scammers mix scripted playbooks with AI-generated content and voice tricks, Kitboga’s videos show how those tools get used in the real world. That makes it easier to see where tactics are headed, and how scammers will adjust once common defenses and controls become familiar.

5. Scammer Payback

Focus: Phone-based scams, organized scam operations, financial crime
Location: United States

Scammer Payback is hosted by the American creator known as Pierogi and is one of the most widely followed scam-exposure channels on YouTube, with millions of subscribers and over a billion views. The channel specializes in scam baiting, with a strong focus on phone-based social engineering and call-centre scams. Drawing on his cybersecurity background, Pierogi often infiltrates scammer systems, accesses remote sessions and disables fraudulent tools, documenting the process in real time.

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For fraud prevention teams, the Scammer Payback channel provides great insights into how fraudsters run their operations at scale in the real world. The videos highlight repeatable patterns, such as number reuse, SIM swapping, call-routing tricks and familiar pressure tactics. 

6. FincrimeAgent

Focus: Financial crime prevention, AML strategies, fintech and banking risk
Location: United Kingdom

FincrimeAgent takes a distinctly practitioner-led approach to financial crime, focusing on how risks are identified and managed inside regulated environments. The channel is run by Marco Beranzoni, a financial crime professional with roughly two decades of hands-on experience across AML, sanctions, KYC and broader compliance functions in banks, fintechs, insurance companies, and gambling operators. This background shapes the content: topics range from transaction monitoring and AML controls to emerging typologies affecting digital banking and fintech platforms.

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The channel was created to address a gap in online financial crime education, which often leans heavily on regulation and theory while overlooking day-to-day compliance work. Marco’s content regularly explores scenarios practitioners actually face, from investigations to escalation decisions, while tracking emerging risks such as trade-based money laundering and the growing impact of technology on financial crime teams. 

7. ACFE (Association of Certified Fraud Examiners)

Focus: Fraud education, investigations, professional guidance
Location: United States / Global

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) is the world’s largest anti-fraud organization, supporting more than 90,000 members globally. Its channel is one of the most authoritative resources focused on fraud on YouTube, with content spanning fraud schemes, red flags, investigative methods and regulatory developments, with a strong emphasis on education. A flagship format is Fraud Talk, a long-running interview series in which ACFE subject-matter experts speak with industry leaders about real-world fraud challenges, from emerging risks and technology in compliance to ethical dilemmas faced during investigations.

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Unlike creator-led scam channels, ACFE’s videos are explicitly designed for working professionals in fraud risk, audit, compliance, legal, and regulatory roles. For fraud prevention teams, the channel reinforces established frameworks, case taxonomies and investigative discipline, helping bridge high-level strategy with operational realities such as evidence collection, escalation and audit trails.

8. ACAMS

Focus: AML and financial crime training, panels and webinars, career development
Location: Global

With around 100,000 members from all over the world, the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS) sits at the centre of the global AML and financial crime community. Its YouTube channel reflects that strategic position: rather than sharing personality-driven content, it serves as a publishing platform for ACAMS Live sessions, conference panels and webinars, with discussions led by practitioners, regulators, and industry experts. The scale of the channel makes it one of the larger compliance-first resources on YouTube.

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For compliance and financial crime professionals, the ACAMS Live series in particular serves as a form of current affairs briefing. It focuses on what is changing in anti-financial crime and why it matters in practice, offering insight into policy direction, supervisory priorities and operational impact in a clear and accessible way.

9. FATF

Focus: Global AML and CTF standards, mutual country evaluations, international black list updates
Location: Global

The Financial Action Task Force YouTube channel is in many ways an extension of FATF’s role as the global authority on anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing standards. Established in 1989 by the G7, FATF sets the internationally recognized Recommendations that underpin AML and CFT laws in more than 200 jurisdictions. Its videos mainly consist of official briefings, webinars and expert panels covering mutual evaluations, country risk assessments and thematic work on the likes of virtual assets or beneficial ownership.

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FATF guidance is routinely cited by regulators and supervisors, then translated into national rules and enforcement priorities. Following the organization’s YouTube channel is a way for compliance and financial crime professionals to track emerging expectations early, understand the context behind grey and black list updates and anticipate how global standards are likely to shape supervisory scrutiny in the years ahead.

10. Austin Lee

Focus: Scam analysis, digital deception, fraud mechanics
Location: United States

Austin Lee, aka FraudFI, focuses on explaining real scam cases and deceptive online behaviour through concise, structured breakdowns. The channel leans heavily into short-form content, with many videos published as YouTube Shorts, making it well suited to quick explainers and one-concept-at-a-time learning. In his professional career, Austin held senior fraud operations and data science roles at major global banks, particularly in fraud analytics and mitigation. This perspective shows through in his coverage of fraud typologies such as phishing, identity theft and account takeover.

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Beyond scam analysis, the channel also stands out for its career-oriented angle. Videos regularly explore what different fraud roles actually involve, from fraud data scientist to fraud investigator or analyst. With its tight focus, the channel is more niche than mainstream scam outlets, but provides a refreshing look into what a career in fraud prevention actually involves. 

11. Bendobrown

Focus: OSINT tools and techniques, open data sources, investigations
Location: UK

Bendobrown, the YouTube channel run by Benjamin Strick, is firmly rooted in hands-on open source intelligence practice. Strick is an active digital investigator, and that shows in the way his content is framed. The channel focuses on maps, data, and OSINT workflows through a mix of long-form tutorials and shorter explainers, covering tools, techniques and data sources used in real investigative work rather than abstract theory. Because Strick also publishes written case studies alongside his videos, methodologies are explained across formats, making it easier to translate specific techniques into structured workflows that teams can actually adopt.

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Bendobrown’s tutorials are quite unique for the way they showcase techniques for mapping digital infrastructure, analyzing social and behavioural signals and summarizing insights from multiple public data sources, all core OSINT capabilities that apply directly to fraud investigations and digital footprint analysis.

12. Cifas

‍Focus: Identity fraud, emerging fraud risk within financial institutions, data sharing
Location: United Kingdom

Established in 1988, Cifas is the UK’s leading not-for-profit fraud prevention service, bringing together banks, insurers, telecom providers, public bodies and charities. It runs the National Fraud Database, the UK’s largest confirmed fraud intelligence repository, updated in real time and used by members to prevent fraud before losses occur. The Cifas YouTube channel mirrors the organization’s institutional role, publishing thematic videos and webinars that explore fraud trends, research findings, and expert perspectives, often tied to specific typologies such as romance fraud or identity misuse.

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The Cifas channel provides a timely and detailed view of how fraud risks are evolving and how organizations are responding in practice, providing a useful benchmark for fraud and risk professionals. Their videos are a valuable source of up-to-date trend awareness, closely aligned with Cifas’s research, annual threat assessments and practical counter-fraud approaches.

Stay on top of the latest fraud prevention trends

Being effective in fraud prevention is not just a matter of having the right tools in place or following regulations to the letter. Shared knowledge of how scams evolve in the wild and how you can practically counteract them is just as essential. 

The YouTube channels featured in this list provide frontline insights into attacker behavior, social engineering tactics and overarching industry trends that help professionals stay informed beyond static reports.

As fraud tactics continue to adapt across platforms and channels, staying connected to this network of independent expertise becomes an essential part of building resilient fraud-prevention strategies.

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Want more fresh insights into the world of fraud prevention and financial crime regulation?

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