Why I write and the Scurry cast of characters
Why I Write
I grew up in the shadow of Silicon Valley during the era that Gordon Gekko made famous: greed is good. It wasn't just a movie line — it was a philosophy that shaped a generation of business culture, and one I watched play out in real time.
The scandals came fast, and they never really stopped. Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken turned insider trading into an art form. Enron and WorldCom taught us that the largest companies in America could be built on fiction. Bernie Madoff stole billions from people who trusted him completely. ZZZ Best was a carpet-cleaning company that was almost entirely imaginary.
I wrote one of my undergraduate theses at UC San Diego on insider trading — long before most people understood how pervasive financial fraud really was. That obsession never left me. Then came the next generation of scandals, bigger and bolder.
Jho Low and the 1MDB fraud looted more than $4.5 billion from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund — money that flowed through Hollywood, real estate, and the highest levels of global finance, laundered so elegantly that nobody wanted to look too closely.
Sam Bankman-Fried built FTX into a $32 billion empire on a foundation of customer funds secretly funneled to his trading firm, all while presenting himself as the altruistic face of responsible crypto. He nearly got away with it.
Elizabeth Holmes sold Theranos on the promise of revolutionary blood-testing technology that didn't work, to investors, patients, and regulators, for years.
Each of these figures was celebrated — on magazine covers, at Davos, in congressional hearings — right up until the moment they weren't. The pattern is always the same. What fascinated me wasn't just the crime. It was the culture that made the crime possible — and how readily that culture celebrated the perpetrators. It wasn't only finance. The same pattern showed up everywhere I looked.
Lance Armstrong built a dynasty on lies and bullied anyone who threatened to expose him.
The Houston Astros industrialized sign stealing with cameras and trash cans.
Tim Donaghy fixed NBA games from the inside.
Spain sent an essentially non-disabled basketball team to the Paralympic Games and won gold.
The list never ends, and each scandal follows the same arc: intense competitive pressure, a culture that rewards winning above everything else, corners cut quietly at first and then brazenly, and the inevitable collapse. My thesis then, and the thesis of this series now, is that this era never ended. It simply moved. I've spent most of my life a few miles from Sand Hill Road, in the Flood Triangle neighborhood of Menlo Park — close enough to watch the flywheel of Silicon Valley wealth spin at full speed. The $20 million homes a few blocks over. The destination weddings. The Porsches and Lamborghinis treating Highway 280 like a test track. Opulence here isn't subtle. It's the backdrop of daily life, and it creates a particular kind of pressure — to perform, to grow, to win, and to never let the controls get in the way of the numbers. I've worked inside that pressure. I know what it feels like to sit in a month-end close and watch the gymnastics required to make the numbers say what leadership needs them to say.
I've been in rooms where I was told — explicitly — not to do things that were legally required. Not suggested, not implied. Told.
I've seen what happens to the people who push back, and I've seen what happens when nobody does. I've watched embezzlement happen inside a company I was part of. Not as an abstraction, not as a case study — up close, by someone trusted, in ways that took too long to surface precisely because the controls that should have caught it weren't there, or weren't enforced. That experience changed the way I see internal trust permanently. During the PPP loan program — designed to keep small businesses alive during the pandemic — I watched money get treated as an opportunity rather than a lifeline. Loan proceeds laundered through layers of transactions, funds that were supposed to pay workers routed elsewhere, applications built on phantom payrolls. The scale of what was stolen from that program, from American taxpayers, is staggering and still largely unpunished. And then there's the Glendale fraud ring — a case that crystallized for me exactly how sophisticated, organized, and relentless modern fraud operations have become. Not lone actors. Not opportunists. A coordinated network, operating methodically, exploiting the gaps between institutions that don't communicate with each other well enough or fast enough. That story is in the books, because it deserves to be told in full. Beneath it, the same pressures that produced Enron produce something I've watched firsthand in fintech: a culture I call "996 BRO." Work 9am to 9pm, six days a week, ship fast, grow faster, ask questions later — or don't ask them at all.
Venture capital rewards growth metrics, not compliance infrastructure. FinCEN cares about neither. The result is a gap between appropriate financial controls and aggressive expansion that sophisticated fraud rings have learned to exploit with remarkable precision. Meanwhile, ordinary people are losing their savings to romance scams, advance-fee schemes, and crypto fraud run from overseas compounds by people trafficked into the job. These aren't abstract financial crimes — they are devastatingly personal, and they are accelerating. Because now there is AI. Artificial intelligence has become the great amplifier. It makes every scam more convincing, every fraud more scalable, every synthetic identity more believable, and every deepfake more impossible to dismiss. The fraud rings operating against U.S. financial institutions today are not the disorganized opportunists of twenty years ago — they are sophisticated, well-funded, AI-enabled organizations running what amount to corporate operations. The defenders inside American banks and fintechs are underfunded, understaffed, and perpetually behind. That is the world of Scurry. I write these books because this story deserves to be told — not buried in compliance white papers or FinCEN guidance documents that nobody reads. Fiction gets inside a story in a way that journalism can't. The characters are invented, but everything they navigate is real. The fraud typologies, the startup culture, the pressure to look the other way, the human cost of financial crime — readers who've worked in this industry will recognize every corner of it. The scandals haven't stopped. They've just gotten smarter. So have we.
I wrote one of my undergraduate theses at UC San Diego on insider trading — long before most people understood how pervasive financial fraud really was. That obsession never left me. Then came the next generation of scandals, bigger and bolder.
Jho Low and the 1MDB fraud looted more than $4.5 billion from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund — money that flowed through Hollywood, real estate, and the highest levels of global finance, laundered so elegantly that nobody wanted to look too closely.
Sam Bankman-Fried built FTX into a $32 billion empire on a foundation of customer funds secretly funneled to his trading firm, all while presenting himself as the altruistic face of responsible crypto. He nearly got away with it.
Elizabeth Holmes sold Theranos on the promise of revolutionary blood-testing technology that didn't work, to investors, patients, and regulators, for years.
Each of these figures was celebrated — on magazine covers, at Davos, in congressional hearings — right up until the moment they weren't. The pattern is always the same. What fascinated me wasn't just the crime. It was the culture that made the crime possible — and how readily that culture celebrated the perpetrators. It wasn't only finance. The same pattern showed up everywhere I looked.
Lance Armstrong built a dynasty on lies and bullied anyone who threatened to expose him.
The Houston Astros industrialized sign stealing with cameras and trash cans.
Tim Donaghy fixed NBA games from the inside.
Spain sent an essentially non-disabled basketball team to the Paralympic Games and won gold.
The list never ends, and each scandal follows the same arc: intense competitive pressure, a culture that rewards winning above everything else, corners cut quietly at first and then brazenly, and the inevitable collapse. My thesis then, and the thesis of this series now, is that this era never ended. It simply moved. I've spent most of my life a few miles from Sand Hill Road, in the Flood Triangle neighborhood of Menlo Park — close enough to watch the flywheel of Silicon Valley wealth spin at full speed. The $20 million homes a few blocks over. The destination weddings. The Porsches and Lamborghinis treating Highway 280 like a test track. Opulence here isn't subtle. It's the backdrop of daily life, and it creates a particular kind of pressure — to perform, to grow, to win, and to never let the controls get in the way of the numbers. I've worked inside that pressure. I know what it feels like to sit in a month-end close and watch the gymnastics required to make the numbers say what leadership needs them to say.
I've been in rooms where I was told — explicitly — not to do things that were legally required. Not suggested, not implied. Told.
I've seen what happens to the people who push back, and I've seen what happens when nobody does. I've watched embezzlement happen inside a company I was part of. Not as an abstraction, not as a case study — up close, by someone trusted, in ways that took too long to surface precisely because the controls that should have caught it weren't there, or weren't enforced. That experience changed the way I see internal trust permanently. During the PPP loan program — designed to keep small businesses alive during the pandemic — I watched money get treated as an opportunity rather than a lifeline. Loan proceeds laundered through layers of transactions, funds that were supposed to pay workers routed elsewhere, applications built on phantom payrolls. The scale of what was stolen from that program, from American taxpayers, is staggering and still largely unpunished. And then there's the Glendale fraud ring — a case that crystallized for me exactly how sophisticated, organized, and relentless modern fraud operations have become. Not lone actors. Not opportunists. A coordinated network, operating methodically, exploiting the gaps between institutions that don't communicate with each other well enough or fast enough. That story is in the books, because it deserves to be told in full. Beneath it, the same pressures that produced Enron produce something I've watched firsthand in fintech: a culture I call "996 BRO." Work 9am to 9pm, six days a week, ship fast, grow faster, ask questions later — or don't ask them at all.
Venture capital rewards growth metrics, not compliance infrastructure. FinCEN cares about neither. The result is a gap between appropriate financial controls and aggressive expansion that sophisticated fraud rings have learned to exploit with remarkable precision. Meanwhile, ordinary people are losing their savings to romance scams, advance-fee schemes, and crypto fraud run from overseas compounds by people trafficked into the job. These aren't abstract financial crimes — they are devastatingly personal, and they are accelerating. Because now there is AI. Artificial intelligence has become the great amplifier. It makes every scam more convincing, every fraud more scalable, every synthetic identity more believable, and every deepfake more impossible to dismiss. The fraud rings operating against U.S. financial institutions today are not the disorganized opportunists of twenty years ago — they are sophisticated, well-funded, AI-enabled organizations running what amount to corporate operations. The defenders inside American banks and fintechs are underfunded, understaffed, and perpetually behind. That is the world of Scurry. I write these books because this story deserves to be told — not buried in compliance white papers or FinCEN guidance documents that nobody reads. Fiction gets inside a story in a way that journalism can't. The characters are invented, but everything they navigate is real. The fraud typologies, the startup culture, the pressure to look the other way, the human cost of financial crime — readers who've worked in this industry will recognize every corner of it. The scandals haven't stopped. They've just gotten smarter. So have we.
Akinde — Former Golden Eagle. Current predator.
Eric — CFE. CAMS. Navy SEAL. BSA Officer. Marathon swimmer. Ultra runner. DOJ witness.
Chinara — CFE. Fraud Architect. Almost Olympian. Future San Franciscan. Current Problem.
Simon — Chief Fraud Investigator. Fedora. Trench Coat. Zero Tolerance.
Maxim — Former KGB. Current Chaos. Perpetual Problem.
Kathleen — Navy SEAL. Contract Operator. Zero Small Talk.
Rachel — MBA. Triathlete. Madrid Born. Morally Complicated.
Matt — Head of Growth. NYU Dropout. Chipotle Loyalist. Brooklyn's Finest.
Aleksei — Former KGB. East Bay Resident. Quietly Terrifying.
Harvey — Navy SEAL. Black Ops Contractor. USC Fraternity Legend. Cautionary Tale.
Mia — Triathlete. Aucklander. Eric's Greatest Distraction.
Jing — Shanghai Branch Head. Six Languages. Zero Tolerance for Rachel.
Crick — Navy SEAL. Engineer. Tallest Person in Every Room. Harvey's Babysitter.
Roger — General Counsel. Stanford Law. Harvard Undergrad. Completely Unethical.
Karl — BSA Officer. CFE. CAMS. The One Roger Cannot Stand.
Victor — Caracas Branch Head. UCV Business Graduate. Maduro Adjacent.
Paul — Head of BSA Ops. CFE. Eric's Most Important Phone Call.
Jenny — Head of Operations. Penn State. D1 Volleyball. Last One Out of the Office.
Veronica — Navy SEAL. Ultra Runner. MMA Fan. The One Eric Literally Carried.
Phil & Corey — The Co-Captains. New Zealand's Open Water Legends.
Rocket- Eric's black lab. Mexican Drug Cartel eliminated him. Eric has not forgotten.
Rocket- Eric's black lab. Mexican Drug Cartel eliminated him. Eric has not forgotten.
Commencing the week of 2026-05-18, Scurry's Instagram will pair these character portraits with evocative narratives. Should your preferred characters be absent from this selection or our social feeds, please reach out; we would be delighted to provide the imagery and details necessary to enhance your reading experience.
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Please follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scurryfraudsquad/
The Fraud Squad and Fraud Syndicate Roster
