GUEST BLOGGER
Hallie Ayres
Contributing Writer

Ever wanted to try your hand at running a Ponzi scheme, banking assets in offshore accounts or fleeing the country to escape legal investigations? In Fraud: The Game of White-Collar Crime, players have the unique opportunity to step inside the shoes of corrupt CEOs on a mission to bribe, cheat and defraud opponents as they race to bank $150 million before they collect three indictments. Created by software compliance expert Pete Newman, this new card game infuses the fraud examination industry with a dash of humor by satirizing wicked, white-collar crooks who are seemingly always scheming. It also helps fraud examiners get into the mindset of a fraudster, which in the end, could help develop skills they need in real-world investigations. I recently chatted with Pete over the phone to get a sense of his journey in creating the game and the potential benefits he sees in being able to laugh about the serious enterprise of fraudsters.

Could you give us a general overview of the game?

Sure, the game itself is a fast-paced, take-that style card game. It’s modeled off a classic card game called Mille Bornes, which is a 1950s card game. In French, that name means “a thousand miles.” In Mille Bornes, you’re a race car and you’re trying to go a thousand miles before your opponents get to that milestone, and along the way you can throw hazards in their way — things like flat tires, out of gas cards and speed limits. So I took a card game that is quick and easy to learn, and since I knew how the game’s mechanics worked, I used that as a template for a very different game that satirizes corporate greed and white-collar criminals.

From my perspective, fraud’s really serious. I had my identity stolen. I’ve spent my career in financial compliance software. But fraud also deserves to be satirized. The thing that I’m spoofing specifically is corporate corruption. I picked famous fraudsters from the past as inspirations for the characters in the game. For people like me who work in finance, we understand the complexities of fraud. I’m not a fraud examiner or a forensic accountant or anything like that, so my connection to it is through the financial world. We’re exposed on a daily basis to all sorts of greed and malfeasance.

It’s interesting that I started this game and released a beta version of it in 2010, and it had a corrupt Ukrainian CEO in it. Fast-forward to now, and that’s headline news, like life imitating art.

How is it played, and what are the characters’ relationships to fraud?

In the game, players are banking assets in offshore accounts, throwing fraud cards and attacking opponents, and using defense cards to fend off attacks. For instance, you could play an Investigation card against your opponent, and they could defend that by playing a Shred Evidence card, or you could throw an Insider Trading card on someone and they could then play a Flee the Country card.

The mechanics are pretty simple. I’ve played it with kids as young as 10 who have gotten it and who have liked it, as well as with adults who are sitting around, having a few cocktails, and laughing about being corporate crooks. Card games are hot, and I’m trying to make it as accessible as I can, but since it is about financial crime, part of my challenge as a game designer is finding the target market.

It’s cool that kids are playing it and enjoying it, especially since something like financial crime seems so removed from a child’s experience. How does the game expand the general knowledge base when it comes to fraud and white-collar crime?

In general, people who don’t know much about fraud are the ones who have played it so far, and they like it and think it’s funny, which makes me believe that people who are really in the industry are going to enjoy it, because they know what things like securitization and insider trading actually are.

Everyone, especially kids…we’re all staring into our phones a lot of the time. The cool thing is that card and board games are making a big comeback, and these games serve as a way to create a new world while you’re playing, whether that’s Monopoly or Cards Against Humanity. Any game creates a world, and in this fraud game, especially because of the art by illustrator Rick Parker, you can create a whole world that involves collaboration and also ganging up on people. It’s a way to renew family bonds or meet a new friend while playing at a bar. But because it’s a tactile, interactive, physical experience, it’s a lot more personal. Humor also comes out of this world. You can really laugh. You’re being mean to each other, but you can laugh about that. We need more of that in our society. I think that’s why a lot of people make these kinds of games. We need that physical connection, we need that release in the form of laughter and satire, and you don’t always get that with a digital interface.

So which came first: the desire to create a card game or the idea to satirize white-collar crime?

By way of a backstory, when I was first doing my startup, which was a software company focused on financial compliance, my identity was stolen, and that sparked the inspiration for the game. So this goes back to the early 2000s. In 2000, I started my company Gotham Software, and I was trying to raise funds. In the middle of that, I met these consultants who said they could help me with fundraising, development and resources. The setup seemed legitimate, and I was also kind of desperate as a startup entrepreneur. I think that’s what happens in many fraud scenarios — a lot of people fraudsters take advantage of are smart and ask the right questions, but they can get tricked and hurt anyway. That’s what happened to me.

But once I got a couple of phone calls from credit card companies saying that I needed to pay bills and that I had thousands of dollars of debt with them, I started doing research really quickly. I figured out I could put a fraud alert on my credit report. I did that as the first step. What ended up happening was that a bank gave out about $200,000 worth of small business loans under my name because they weren’t doing due diligence to see the fraud alert on my credit report. All of a sudden instead of crying about it, I just started laughing because the system is so messed up and corruption bred more corruption — the bank got greedy and didn’t do their due diligence. That was where I started wanting to expose corporate greed and corruption and just how many crooks are part of it. Over the next nearly 20 years, I’ve been working on the game.

I did a beta release in 2010, but I hadn’t really perfected it yet, so I never tried to sell that initial version. I did a lot of play testing in the meantime, and then I launched a Kickstarter in April of this year that was successful. During the Kickstarter campaign, the former white-collar criminal Walt Pavlo endorsed the game. I’m friends with Neil Weinberg, who reports on fraud, and he’s the co-author, along with Walt, of the book “Stolen Without a Gun,” which is all about the MCI WorldCom scandal. So that personal connection was another thing that kept this game in the front of my mind and kept pushing me to create it.

How did your relationship with the illustrator Rick Parker come about?

Rick was a local illustrator. He used to live in Maplewood, New Jersey, where I’m based, and I connected with him in 2007 or 2008. He did all the art for me. Rick’s probably best known as the artist of MTV's Beavis and Butt-Head Comic Book, and was on the staff at Marvel Comics for many years.

The illustrations he did are what set the mood for the game: a party game with clever and satirical art. It’s like Mad Magazine meets “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Fraud is such a robust field, and the headlines keep getting bigger and bigger. Are there any plans for future editions or expansion packs of the game?

For sure. I’m going to the Chicago Toy and Game Fair looking for licensing and distribution. Right now I’m selling on Amazon, and I did a launch party a couple weeks ago where everyone dressed up as a white-collar crook. For new versions of the game, I’m definitely thinking about a sports fraud version, where the characters are athletes who are taking steroids, or college athletes who are now getting paid. And there was that whole admissions scandal, there’s celebrity fraud, and that could all make a really hilarious next version.

There are so many different versions of fraud, and it’s cool that this game could serve as a platform or a kind of template, so people could even devise their own versions based on my model and use it for educational purposes or to focus on a specific area, like government fraud.

My task as a gamemaker is to be able to satirize something like fraud without making fun of specific people. I don’t have specific white-collar criminals named, and that makes it more timeless, more entertaining. People can have fun with it 10 years from now just like they’re having fun with it today.

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