Here's a striking thought.

I was already in practice when the first IBM PCs and Apple Macs arrived (and fake Macs off Nathan Road in Hong Kong) and by the time clones appeared , I had my own firm in London.

By then, Hong Kong criminals had already found out how to apply "good enough" holograms to credit cards breaking the latest security measure within six months, it's been reported. And a decade before I'd helped a friend whose family petrol station had become notorious after a rogue employee had a card swipe thingy under the counter.

My first office computer had a 5.25 inch floppy disk and 10Mb (not a mistype) SCSI hard disk; the processor was the Motorola 8600, the same as in my nephew's Chinese made equivalent of, and better than, my son's Commodore 64. The cost to increase the hard drive to 20Mb was GBP750. In 1987.

When I had my first fax machine a solicitor on the other side of a transaction asked me "what's a fax" . The local law society near my office was holding meetings to decide "whether to go on the fax". That was the year my centralised office computer was installed and I set about redesigning the software because it had been designed by people who understood computers, and data, but did not understand practice. Does that sound familiar today? It should.

My first laptop was in 1987 and had a built-in modem. It ran at 2400 baud (that's bits per second to you). And it had 3.5 inch floppy disk drives which were fast, small and robust and held a lot of data compared to the 5.25 inch versions. And they were an obvious risk as "sneakernet" grew and reasonably large quantities of data could be saved from the computer or network and carried out in unnoticed in a pocket.

I had a mobile phone when it had to be screwed into my BMW (oh, the holes) with a giant box in the boot and a proper handset, followed by a succession of ever smaller phones including an early Nokia that vibrated in my jacket pocket and I thought I was having a heart attack in court and the pretty Motorola StarTAC that broke every few days.

I tested "AI" speech recognition and fuzzy logic on the new IBM Pentium machine (thanks, IBM - it was a nice machine). Speech recognition was rubbish (it still is and remains one of my acid tests as to whether so-called AI has achieved viability. It hasn't) Fuzzy logic on the other hand was and remains a demonstration of how algorithmic analysis and contextualisation can work. If it's set up properly. Mostly, it isn't.

I worked on the design and implementation of an "expert system" for law firms. It wasn't complicated to design and the algorithms did not need to nest dozens of levels: careful planning meant we could segment tasks and run them simultaneously (thanks to the Motorola chip - it wasn't possible on, for example, Intel). When I closed my own firm and merged with a firm in The City, it was a bonus that they had bought "my" system. It was also a bonus that I could fix stuff when they got confused and broke it because I had the back door key :) It was a tremendous lesson to find that everyone in the firm was terrified of it and didn't want to learn: it ended up being little more than a time recording and accounting computer which was a horrible waste.

I was there when peer to peer payments between devices was created (Mondex), when online banking began (Bank of Scotland and Minitel) and when internet banking (it was biggest and fastest in Finland) became a thing.

I was there when you could buy, legitimately, a licensed bank or a US "bankcorp" for USD10,000 (advertised in the back pages of The Economist) and when you could buy a bank in a box software for USD200 (it was really hard to set up because the code was messy).

I was there when virtual currencies became a thing: not crypto, notional balances held in artificial banks sometimes by crooks and sometimes genuine attempts to disrupt the status quo of fiat currencies long before people thought "disruption" was a thing. Often they took the form of depositories of precious stones or metals with websites laden with photographs of full vaults. Yeah, right.

In 1996, I was able to "paint", one pixel at a time, one image into another without the "halo" effect (the same effect that so many people accept today using video conferencing software against an artificial background) that identified Photoshopped images. The GOO software cost me USD35. About fifteen years later, for USD165, I had Realvision Inc. software that allowed me to create animated face avatars, clip art or from a photograph, more or less synced with a recording of my own voice or using a stock voice reading a script I typed in. I loved that program (lost when my last Windows PC packed up and I moved everything that would move to Linux) and as I play with so-called AI products today I see little improvement in most cases.

I was there when telecommunications was liberalised and when fraudsters found out how to make money out of low-cost-routing companies. Not actually a technology crime but most people thought it was: the fraud was on the accounts departments of companies not by directly accessing the computers that controlled the systems.

I was there when high-pressure telephone sales of "investments" became common and when least-cost-routing moved the operations from e.g. London to the Far East and boiler rooms ran share and land-banking scams under the noses of authorities who had no idea they were there: you think the "scam compounds" reported today are a new idea? Think again.

I was there when the Money Laundering Regulations came into force in 1994, working with a wide range of clients creating risk and compliance systems and policies and delivering training and I eventually left practice to start my own consultancy business that soon brought in The Financial Crime Forum and World Money Laundering Report.

I was there when credit cards attached to telephone bills became a major source of revenue for criminal gangs who worked out that the user of the cards in hotels, etc. didn't see their bills for weeks and so the numbers and pins (extracted from the hotel's phone records) could be rented out and used to make international telephone calls at a discount for the user and a profit for the criminal.

I was there when Nigerian Scams mutated from actual letters posted by mail, through telex (bizarrely expensive and traceable), fax and onto email and the web.

I was there when tech companies defrauded investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, in conspiracy with accountants and regulators, in inflated "revenues" and massive losses.

When banks said their latest card systems would prevent fraud, I took a card from the wallet of the head of security of a UK bank and paid our lunch bill while he was in the washroom. How? Social engineering. I just told the waiter, "I don't think I ever sign my name the same way twice. Can I look at the card to see which version to use" and signed with a passable imitation.

I wrote "How not to be a money launderer" in 1996, a book which is now recognised as the first of its kind, introducing trade-based financial crime, sex tourism and the risk-based approach, all later adopted as significant issues, and many more. I've written several more books since and hundreds of articles on tech, law and financial crime and appeared on major broadcast networks all over the world, aided by a nice, clear "broadcast" voice.

I delivered "The use and abuse of the internet for financial crime" at York University and then at MMU in Malaysia in 1999. It's still a landmark paper in how crime (never to be called "cybercrime") is committed over the internet. I've had other papers published, too.

I'm writing a book about fraud, for laymen, and as I wrote about the arrival of spam email through Compuserve and America Online addressed to my domain countermoneylaundering.com (one of the first 10,000 or so domains ever created) my brain worked its magic and took me back to my tropical garden in Essex - palm trees, hardwood furniture and the smell of jasmine - in the 1990s where I'd explained to BBC Radio 4 how money laundering works in soccer transfer fees and ownership so I could re-run the conversation in my head today in the actual tropics where I've lived for a quarter of a century. That football programme was shortly after the BBC's lawyers had vetoed a programme where I'd actually demonstrated how to build a fake website appearing to be a real bank, in ten minutes. I demonstrated it, and still demonstrate it, all over the world and it's incredible to me that even today so few people know how it's done and how easy it is. So I've added it to the new book about fraud.

When I read about this new and that emerging, I shrug and groan.

I think all this stuff is old hat because to me, it is. There's nothing shiny except the outer shell that people dress it up in. Been there, done that, lost the t-shirt. Probably left in an airport with one of several Palm Pilots and mobile phones because I was there when the office went mobile.

"They" say you can't buy experience. "They" are wrong. You can buy mine, in person or online and if you can't buy my time, you can buy my books.

I'm Nigel Morris-Cotterill and I make complicated stuff easy.