Trust is now a cybersecurity problem. The heads of the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund warned that rising cyber-attacks could undermine confidence in the financial system. They issued the warning during IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok, where a panel launched the Bangkok blueprint, a new set of international principles for avoiding cyber-fraud in financial institutions.
Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, linked the issue to the growing reach of artificial intelligence and connected technology. He pointed to headlines about self-replicating AI agents hijacking personal devices, along with a French supermarket hack that heated fridges to 50C.
“If you try to say what’s at the heart of this debate about AI – for me, it’s about trust in technology and it’s about human control to achieve that trust in technology,” Bailey said. The concern is not limited to whether systems work as promised; it is whether people still believe they can control the systems around them.
Bailey tied that concern directly to money. “If we don’t have trust in money, we don’t operate as a society.” Financial systems depend on people believing that payments, accounts and institutions will remain reliable even when criminals use new technology to attack them.
Cyber-fraud can push people outside formal finance
Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the IMF, warned that the toll of cyber-fraud could drive people out of the formal financial system altogether. “I would have my dollars in a shoebox under my bed,” she said, describing the response that could follow if people lose faith in financial institutions and digital transactions.
Georgieva expressed concern that many people might end up with shoeboxes under their beds if the issue goes unaddressed. The threat is particularly acute for people on the fringes of the financial system, where a loss of trust could remove the courage needed to take part at all.
The IMF has already placed the possibility of a big cyber-attack among the factors raising the global financial stability threat level to “elevated”. Higher borrowing costs and the risk of an AI share price crash also contributed to that assessment, creating a distinctly unpleasant trio of risks for a system that prefers its crises one at a time.
Social platforms face pressure to share responsibility
Bailey stressed that fraud now travels through social media platforms and apps, not only through traditional financial channels. He called for big tech and social media companies to take responsibility for fraud transmitted through their platforms and to become part of the response.
He contrasted the legal responsibility carried by UK newspapers with the position of social media platforms, which have no real liability for content. “We’ve moved into quite an extreme position of, well, these platforms are open to everybody and there’s no real liability to the provision of the platform to what’s on it,” Bailey said.
“Everything’s on it. You know, the good, the bad and the incredibly ugly and downright criminal and terrible.” The point is blunt: platforms that carry the fraud cannot treat the damage as somebody else’s problem simply because the transaction finishes somewhere else.
“There is responsibility all around,” Bailey said. He added, “We need to evolve to a world where everybody understands this responsibility, and everybody is then a part of addressing the problem.” That includes financial institutions, technology companies and the social platforms that carry the messages used to deceive people.
Bailey put the demand plainly: “We must get the social media companies involved because a lot of this fraud is transmitted through those channels.” The Bangkok blueprint now gives that argument an international framework, though principles alone will not restore trust if responsibility remains optional.
He also argued that the same technology causing the problem can help contain it. “This technology is arming the offence but it can also arm the defence, and it must do.” That leaves the financial system with a clear task: protect human control, make every participant answer for the channels they operate and prevent cyber-fraud from turning distrust into a reason to abandon formal finance.
Based on
