Imagine possessing a lifetime of experiences but being unable to explain who you are.

Imagine having survived war, served in military security and intelligence, and learned to read danger before it became visible—yet suddenly struggling to complete the most ordinary conversation.

That was my reality when I landed in Australia in November 1998.

I arrived with professional experience, discipline, and ambition. I had already lived through circumstances that many people would consider difficult to imagine. 

I had survived 1,800 consecutive days in combat during the war in Croatia. I had worked in environments where observing human behaviour was not an academic exercise; it could determine whether people lived or died.

But in Australia, much of that history became invisible.

I had no functional English.

When you lack confident communication, people may not see the person behind the silence. They see hesitation. They hear an unfamiliar accent. Some assume that because you cannot express an idea fluently, you lack one.

One of the hardest lessons of migration is that your knowledge doesn’t disappear, but your ability to show it can.

Today, I have written multiple books in English. 

I conduct investigations, advise businesses, and interview extraordinary people through my podcast, “Life The Battlefield”. I became a Guinness World Record holder for the longest audio-only livestream, broadcasting for 55 hours and 25 minutes in the language I once struggled to speak.

My accent remains.

The difference is that I no longer consider it evidence of a weakness. It is evidence of the distance I have travelled.

The other day I was talking to a client about social media presence and why it’s important that every business urgently needs its own home on the internet—not just an apartment on someone else’s land.

Imagine a storefront.

You’ve rented a shop on the busiest street in town.

The display window is gleaming, everything inside is in perfect order, customers are walking in, browsing, and buying, and you’re happily counting your revenue.

Then, one morning, you arrive at work only to find a notice from the building owner giving you one month’s warning to move out—or worse, telling you to leave immediately.

The landlord changes the rules overnight and simply says the following:

“I’m opening a coffee shop here now, so you’re moving to the outskirts. By the way, if you want your former customers to know where you’ve gone, you’ll need to pay me twice as much.”

Would you ever build a serious, profitable business on foundations like that?

Probably not.

And yet, with sincerity, how many businesses in the digital world do exactly that every single day?

During decades working across military and diplomatic security intelligence, corporate investigations, and now digital media, one lesson has remained remarkably consistent: never place your most valuable assets under someone else’s control. 

Whether protecting sensitive intelligence or building a successful business, dependency creates vulnerability. The principle is the same online.

As someone who has spent years navigating the ever-changing landscape of social media—testing algorithms, analysing digital behaviour, and building audiences across multiple platforms—I have learned one painful lesson:

Social media is not your property.

It is someone else’s backyard, and the landlord can change the rules before you’ve even finished your morning coffee.

Today I want to share, without sugar-coating but with a healthy dose of humour and practical strategy, why every business—whether you sell advice, shoes, professional services, or fitness training—needs its own digital platform that is constantly evolving.

More importantly, I’ll explain how that platform can become your most valuable business asset and your most powerful media channel.

I spent years in the maelstrom of war on the front lines, and it taught me one fundamental thing about the enemy: when they want to eliminate you, they make a lot of noise.

A sniper’s shot, the whistle of an incoming shell, the roar of an engine overhead—these are all clear, brutal signals of danger.

On the front line, you know who is shooting, where they are, and how to survive.

Later, when life moved me from combat boots into diplomatic suits, I realized there are far more dangerous forms of warfare. This type of warfare involves no explosions or bloodshed, yet the victim ultimately signs their death warrant.

Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, when the system always listened carefully to whatever was said around the coffee table, we all knew where the invisible red lines lay.

We knew about the State Security Service, about informants, and about “friendly advice” to tone things down. 

I still remember my father listening to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America on the lowest possible volume because, back then, tuning into broadcasts from the West was considered an act of disloyalty.

While our domestic brand of socialism often relied on intimidation, surveillance, and direct detention when convincing people that the regime was wrong, those lines were crossed; something even more sophisticated was quietly taking shape on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

In the 1970s, the East German secret police—the Ministry for State Security, better known as the STASSI—developed a tactic that looked less like traditional policing and more like a carefully engineered psychological weapon.

They called it Zersetzung, a German word that literally translates as “decomposition,” “disintegration,” or “rotting away.”

The concept was deceptively simple: why arrest political opponents, risk turning them into martyrs, and attract unwanted international attention when you could quietly dismantle their confidence, relationships, and mental resilience until they destroyed themselves?

The goal was never to kill you.

The goal was to make you too weak to get out of bed, much less oppose the regime.

Unlike many intelligence operations that remained unwritten, Zersetzung became an institutional doctrine. 

Internal STASI directives described it as a method of “decomposition” designed to undermine an individual’s confidence, reputation, and social standing without leaving visible evidence of state persecution. 

By the late 1980s, historians estimate the Stasi employed around 91,000 full-time officers while relying on approximately 189,000 unofficial collaborators (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter), creating one of the largest domestic surveillance systems in modern history. 

The objective was no longer simply to observe dissent but to neutralize it psychologically before it could grow into organized resistance.

What should concern us today is that, fifty years later, the underlying logic of this method has quietly evolved into the digital age.

A street thief steals a wallet.

A cybercriminal steals millions of dollars.

A terrorist steals lives.

Different crimes. Different weapons. Different battlefields.

Yet, after more than three decades of working across military operations, diplomatic intelligence, and corporate investigations, I have reached one uncomfortable conclusion: they all think far more alike than most people realise.

Crime constantly changes its form. It adapts to new technology, new opportunities, and new societies. 

What once required a crowbar can now be achieved with a laptop. What once demanded physical presence can now be executed from another continent.

But despite these changes, human nature remains remarkably constant.

Every day we are overwhelmed with crime statistics. 

Vehicle thefts continue to rise, cyberattacks cost businesses billions of dollars each year, and headlines report violent offences, organised crime, domestic violence and politically motivated attacks across the globe.

It is easy to become overwhelmed by the scale of modern crime and believe we live in an era of complete unpredictability.

Yet once we strip away the headlines and statistical jargon, one simple question remains.

Every day, millions of people voluntarily walk into an interrogation room.

The only difference is that they carry it in their pocket.

Across the screen sits someone smiling, confident and persuasive. Not a detective. Not a prosecutor. An influencer.

Without realising it, we begin answering questions they never actually asked.

What should I buy?

Who should I trust?

What does success really look like?

After decades working in military environments, diplomatic intelligence and corporate investigations, I have reached one uncomfortable conclusion.

The most dangerous lies are rarely shouted.

They are carefully edited.

Picture this: you’re sitting in a dimly lit interrogation room. Across the table is a suspect accused of fraud. He’s tight-lipped, weighing every word, and his eyes widen ever so slightly each time you present another piece of evidence.

Now replace the interrogation room with a ring light.

Swap the silence for upbeat music.

Instead of denying a fraud, the suspect is enthusiastically explaining how a fifty-dollar tub of powder transformed his body in two weeks.

Welcome to modern digital forensics.

After years of working in Insight Intelligence, analysing influence networks and understanding how information travels, I have learned one universal truth.

People become remarkably adept at lying to themselves long before they lie to anyone else.

Today, your smartphone has become the world’s largest interrogation room.

The difference is that very few people realise they are being questioned.

Imagine spending days researching a product, writing an honest review, earning the trust of your audience, and finally convincing someone to make a purchase through your recommendation.

Weeks later, the sale goes through.

The customer is pleased.

The retailer makes money.

But your commission disappears.

Not because you did anything wrong.

Not because your content wasn’t good enough.

It disappears because someone you’ve never met quietly stole the credit before the customer even clicked the “Buy Now” button.

That may sound like something out of a Hollywood cybercrime thriller, but it is happening every day across the internet.

Recently, a friend of mine who breathes, sleeps, and eats affiliate marketing called me in a panic.

“Someone told me my partner platforms might be losing money to something called cookie stuffing,” she said. “They also said I could be losing legitimate commissions because of it. What on earth does that even mean, and how do I stop it?”

It was a fair question.

Despite working behind the scenes of billions of dollars in online commerce, cookie-stuffing remains one of the least understood forms of digital fraud. Most people have never heard of it, yet many unknowingly become part of it.

The reality is that cookie stuffing isn’t a new scam.

In fact, it is one of the oldest tricks in digital marketing.

What has changed is who is allegedly using it.

Recently, Bloomberg reported on allegations involving an artificial intelligence shopping startup called Phia, a company co-founded by Phoebe Gates, the 23-year-old daughter of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Phia promotes itself as an AI-powered shopping assistant designed to compare clothing prices across the internet and help consumers find better deals.

Investors certainly believed in the idea, pouring more than US$43 million into the company and reportedly valuing the startup at around US$185 million.

But according to Bloomberg’s investigation, the company’s browser extension allegedly did more than compare prices.

Researchers claimed the extension opened hidden browser windows during online purchases, inserted its own affiliate tracking codes, and potentially redirected affiliate commissions to itself instead of the marketers who had legitimately earned them.

The company responded by describing the issue as a coding error that had since been corrected.

The public continues to debate whether the behaviour stemmed from flawed programming or a more deliberate action. Flawed programming or something more deliberate remains a matter of public debate.

However, from an investigative perspective, the underlying mechanism has a familiar name.

We call it cookie stuffing.

And if allegations of this nature can emerge around a venture-backed AI company operating at the highest levels of Silicon Valley, it raises an uncomfortable question:

How many smaller businesses, affiliate marketers and online shoppers have no idea similar practices may be happening every single day?

As someone who has spent decades investigating deception—from organised crime and corporate fraud to intelligence operations—I have learned one simple lesson.

Technology changes.

Human behaviour is often unpredictable.

Fraudsters are constantly searching for opportunities where complexity hides accountability. The more technical something appears, the less likely ordinary people are to question it.

That is precisely why understanding cookie stuffing matters.

New York. 38 Prince Street in Manhattan’s ultra-chic SoHo district, a six-story brick townhouse worth a cool US$21 million.

With eight bedrooms, a sweeping multi-level spiral staircase, and a monthly rent of US$40,000, it is the epitome of the modern American Dream—or, at the very least, the hyper-glossy, cryptocurrency-fuelled version of it.

But in May 2025, this playground for the newly wealthy transformed into a literal chamber of horrors.

Inside, a 28-year-old Italian investor named Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan was tied to a chair with electrical wire.

For 17 agonizing days, his captors subjected him to an ordeal that reads like a Hollywood script rewritten by a sadist. He was tased while standing in pools of water, beaten with a firearm, and sliced on his arms and legs with a chainsaw.

His tormentors dangled him over the vertigo-inducing drop of that beautiful spiral staircase, threatening to drop him five stories onto the hard floor below.

When physical pain failed to break his resolve, they resorted to psychological humiliation, urinating on him and forcing him to smoke crack cocaine.

All of the torture was done for a single piece of information: the password to a digital wallet containing roughly US$28 million in Bitcoin.

This isn’t just an isolated, bizarre crime story.

It is the most extreme example of a terrifying global phenomenon known as a “wrench attack.”

It connects ultra-modern cybercrime with medieval thuggery, demonstrating that while your money may be securely stored in the decentralized cloud, your physical body remains firmly grounded.

What makes this case particularly significant is that it is no longer an anomaly. 

Security researchers and law enforcement agencies have observed a steady increase in violent attacks targeting cryptocurrency investors, executives, and influencers across Europe, North America, and Asia. 

As digital wealth has become easier to move than traditional assets, criminals have increasingly shifted their attention from hacking computer systems to coercing the people who control them.

There is a precise moment, usually around 4:15 AM, when the rest of the world is wrapped in warm blankets, snoring softly, and you are standing in a freezing garage or a dimly lit gym parking lot, wondering if you have finally lost your mind.

Your joints ache.

The silence of the city is heavy, almost mocking.

From the outside looking in, you seem like a lunatic. A man over fifty who should be nursing his lower back and accepting the comfortable decline of middle age, yet instead choosing voluntary suffering before sunrise.

My friends told me I was crazy.

They didn’t say it maliciously. They said it out of genuine concern.

But I had to face a reality that many men my age quietly ignore: if you want different results, you have to be willing to do things differently.

For decades, I lived by that principle.

I trained throughout my life, stayed physically active, and when the absolute worst happened—when war caught up with me—that physical readiness wasn’t just a hobby. It became the foundation of survival. I had to remain sharp, capable, and unbreakable because there was simply no alternative.

Then civilian life happened.

Not overnight, but gradually.

The slow creep of routine, successive crises, economic uncertainty, and the constant mental demands of modern life started piling up. Unlike war, civilian life rarely announces when it begins changing you. It happens quietly, one responsibility at a time, until one day you look in the mirror and realize the man staring back at you is carrying the weight of the world but has forgotten how to carry himself.

Mental and physical strain never asks for permission.

It simply settles in.

In my experience, many men accept aging as an unavoidable part of getting older. I don’t.

And in our world, as men, no one is coming to save you. Eventually, you have to accept responsibility for rebuilding yourself, because nobody else can do that work for you.

So, I decided to become “unreasonable.”

Not for attention.

Not to prove a point.

I realized that ordinary thinking almost always leads to ordinary results. If I wanted to become a stronger version of myself, I had to stop negotiating with comfort.

If you think scams only happen to the naïve, the uninformed, or older citizens still learning how to send a text message, prepare yourself for an uncomfortable reality.

Recent evidence reveals a starkly different narrative.

Cybercriminals increasingly target people in their professional prime—business owners, executives, university graduates, and individuals with above-average incomes.

Scammers and confidence tricksters are as old as humanity itself.

Technology has simply made them faster, more scalable, and infinitely more precise.

Instead of walking through crowded markets looking for victims, today’s criminals use social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, leaked databases, and behavioural profiling to identify people who are most likely to respond emotionally.

Official figures from the Australian Signals Directorate and international law enforcement agencies show that online fraud, identity theft, business email compromise, and investment scams continue to increase every year. 

The victims are not selected because they are unintelligent.

They are selected because they are human.

So, relax.

If you have ever purchased clothing from an Instagram advertisement that did not arrive, you are not alone.

Believed fake online reviews.

Clicked a convincing email.

They may have relied on a website that appeared to be professional.

You are not alone.

Smart people do not fall for scams because they lack intelligence.

They fall because scammers do not attack intelligence.

They attack emotion.

Let us begin with the front door, which is surprisingly ordinary.

If you wish to work for organisations such as the Central Intelligence Agency or MI5 as an analyst, linguist, cybersecurity specialist, or intelligence officer, you should not wait for a mysterious invitation.

You simply visit their careers website.

Upload your résumé.

Complete an application.

Attend interviews.

In many respects, intelligence agencies resemble any other large organisation competing for highly skilled professionals. 

They attend university career fairs, advertise graduate programmes and recruit engineers, data scientists, psychologists, accountants, and software developers, while presenting themselves as employers offering meaningful careers and public service.

For most applicants, the process appears remarkably familiar.

Until it doesn’t.

Unlike multinational corporations, which conduct routine background checks, intelligence organisations undergo one of the most comprehensive vetting processes anywhere in the government.

Every significant aspect of an applicant’s life may become relevant.

• Financial history.
• Foreign travel.
• Personal relationships.
• Professional conduct.
• Digital footprint.
• Psychological resilience.

Security clearances are not simply granted because someone possesses technical competence.

They are awarded because the organisation believes an individual can be trusted with information that compromises national security.

During my years working within security-intelligence, one lesson became abundantly clear.

Intelligence services are not merely recruiting knowledge.

They are assessing character.

An applicant’s technical expertise may secure an interview.

Their judgement, integrity and emotional stability determine whether they progress further.

Candidates frequently undergo extensive background investigations, structured psychological assessments, and, in many jurisdictions, polygraph examinations. Investigators seek to understand not only what an individual knows but also how they respond under pressure, handle personal adversity and resolve ethical dilemmas.

The objective extends well beyond confirming honesty.

It is about identifying future vulnerability.

Could significant debt make someone susceptible to bribery?

Could unresolved grievances create resentment?

Could egos, ideologies, or personal ambitions eventually override professional loyalty?

Ironically, the gateway into a profession built upon secrecy requires extraordinary personal transparency.

It remains one of intelligence work’s enduring paradoxes.