A still from The Man With a Thousand Faces, which is screening at the 2025 Fraud Film Festival. Photo / Supplied
A still from The Man With a Thousand Faces, which is screening at the 2025 Fraud Film Festival. Photo / Supplied
A festival dedicated to scams, cover-ups and imposters aims to shine a spotlight on fraud next week.
The Fraud Film Festival 2025 at Wellington’s Roxy Cinema runs on Monday and Tuesday with screenings and panel discussions about movies.
Fraud Film Festival board chair William Fotherby told the Herald about scamsproliferating lately which most worried him.
“What concerns me most is these pig butchering scams and just the scale of them. It’s now a verifiable industry at scale and targeting consumers directly.”
Pig butchering involves con artists plying victims over a long time with fake friendship in order to lure them into investment scams or similar frauds.
The scammers, who may be trafficking or forced labour victims themselves, initiated contact with potential victims through social media, dating apps or texts.
A still from the movie Hackers: Identity Theft, screening at the 2025 Fraud Film Festival. Photo / Supplied
Fotherby, a Meredith Connell litigator and fraud expert, said pig butchering happened at an industrial scale, especially in parts of Southeast Asia.
He said scammers often worked on the law of averages, targeting many people in the expectation a few would fall for the scams.
“I also worry that New Zealand’s a pretty easy target being advanced and wealthy, reliant on mobile phones and internet and perhaps a little bit comfortable.”
Fotherby said scammers could achieve a wide reach through Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The festival in Miramar will cover cutting-edge scams where criminals misuse AI and also delve into older forms of information manipulation and corporate cover-ups.
A still from the film Stasi FC, a true-crime story of how, in the late 70’s, East Germany’s secret service (The Stasi) attempted to subvert the last remaining oasis of free speech in the country – football. Photo / Supplied
In Hackers: Identity Theft, victims tell how internet criminals have destroyed their lives.
The Man with a Thousand Faces follows a love rat impostor who lives with four women at the same time, adapting his story and even his personality traits to each one.
Your Face is Ours explores the mass collection of biometric data for facial recognition and investigates potential abuse of this technology.
In Stasi FC, filmmakers hear from the footballers who became targets of East Germany’s secret police.
Ticking Time Bomb: The Truth Behind Takata Airbags follows the exploits of a whistleblower and engineers who unveiled a corporate cover-up sparking the recall of more than 100 million vehicles worldwide.
A still from the movie Hackers: Identity Theft, screening at the 2025 Fraud Film Festival. Photo / Supplied
Lie to Me examines the OneCoin pyramid scheme, which festival organisers called the biggest crypto fraud in history. It also looks at how and why some people keep getting scammed.
Sometimes people get scammed, and then scammed again by a person pretending to be a saviour.
“There’s a secondary market and people are very vulnerable at that stage,” Fotherby said.
“That kind of fraud thrives preying on [people] and it is surprisingly effective.”
Fotherby said attendees would discuss how issues in the film affected New Zealand.
Stills from Lie To Me, a film screening at Roxy Cinema for the Fraud Film Festival 2025. Photo / Supplied
“We’re trying to bring together people from the private sector and the public sector.”
Steve Newall is the programmer, so has spent time watching all the films screening at the festival.
He said The Man with a Thousand Faces was an investigative documentary.
If he had to pick a personal favourite, he said he’d probably choose Stasi FC, where the East German regime tried to subvert free expression in football.
“Stasi FC shows the sport had a huge role to play in peoples’ lives - and that’s something very tempting for an authoritarian regime to meddle in.”
The organisers hoped the festival films would raise awareness about privacy issues, personal data security, scams and the misuse of technology.
“People walk away from these films with lots of questions.”
Newall said people could easily get complacent about data sharing, and conceded he couldn’t remember the last time he read the terms and conditions on an app he downloaded.
He said he was glad the festival was happening at the Roxy, a cinema known for its art deco architecture and close to the heart of Wellington’s film industry.
“It’s a real jewel in the crown of Miramar,” said Newall, who is also the editor of Flicks and a regular contributor to Newstalk ZB and 95bFM.
He helped finalise the line-ups for discussions at the festival.
“It really means that the attendees can get a good local perspective on the film they’ve just watched. People walk away from these films with lots of questions.”
