Live coverage from the ACFE Global Fraud Conference, including anti-fraud articles, session highlights, video clips and photo gallery.
Between 2009 and 2010, Iran’s nuclear program was the target of a devastating cyber attack. A virus took control of centrifuge controls in facilities across the country, causing thousands of machines to break. The hackers weren’t satisfied yet, though. To add insult to injury, they reportedly hijacked the facilities' workstations and used them to play AC/DC … loudly.
Read MoreThink emojis are used only for personal text messages from Gen-Yers? Think again. According to Wale Ayantoye, emojis within payment apps could help you spot drug deals, gambling transactions, prostitution and fraudulent business trips.
Ayantoye is a Global Sanctions Consultant at Square Inc. and shared his experience of using data from emojis combined with geo-location to catch illegal activities by savvy fraudsters. “It’s more of a cat and mouse — we are thinking how are we going to catch up with them and they are thinking how are they going to evade our programs,” said Ayantoye. “For any compliance or fraud program, you need access to all of the information you can get.”
Read More“2020 feels like the year that cyber and fraud truly partner in innovative ways. I'm going to use the virtual conference sessions and networking opportunities to dig deep into successful risk management.” — Danielle Hagerty, CFE, Senior Manager at Capital One
Read MoreIs this a good time to be a corporate whistleblower? Probably, according to a panel of watchdog experts, with some caveats.
The ACFE’s 2020 Report to the Nations shows that tips remain the most common way for fraud to be detected, which accounted for 43% of the survey respondents’ cases. However, panelist Stephen Kohn, a longtime counsel to whistleblowers, said employees should think twice before they report problems internally.
“My message to members is, don't fall on your sword,” said Kohn, chairman of the board of the National Whistleblower Center and partner, Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto LLP. “If you raise a concern, if you issue an audit report, if you make an internal complaint — and you get resistance from the company — don't set your hair on fire,” he said.
Read MoreHoward Wilkinson, the recipient of the 2020 ACFE Cliff Robertson Sentinel Award, admits that he’s a bit of an accidental whistleblower. And if his employer had been more responsible, he wouldn’t have been a whistleblower at all.
“Back in summer 2012, I had to help someone in the Estonian branch of Danske Bank where I was working [as a trader] get some financial information on a client,” Wilkinson said, during the lunch general session. “The client was a British limited liability partnership (LLP), so I went to Companies House, which is the U.K.’s official government agency that collects all the company information and annual financial statements,” he said. “I paid one pound, and I downloaded this company's financial statements.”
Read MoreIdentity is a subject that has fascinated humans for ages. Who am I? Who are you? While no one can easily answer these philosophical quandaries, identity is an important part of many fraud investigations — especially when someone is trying to hide it.
In his virtual session “The John Smith Problem: Forensic Identity Resolution in Global Investigations,” at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference, Robert Sinex, CFE, walked attendees through some of the ways they could find identities and use them to further investigations. Sinex, who is a solutions engineer at Dun & Bradstreet, explained that identity is made up of not only attributes, like a name and telephone number, but also behavior, like hobbies and routines.
Read MoreLooking to strengthen your financial institution’s (FI) financial crimes initiatives and get ahead of potential schemes and scams? Follow the steps below, and you will be well on your way.
Assess your risk as a group with leaders from different areas of Fraud, Cyber and AML.
Decide on your recipe for countering those risks.
Layer that with a top-level governance structure with all of the people on different teams dependent on each other.
Sounds easy enough, right? Not so fast. This checklist requires patience, fortitude, teamwork, leadership and the expertise of people from every department in your organization. Oh, and executive buy-in and support.
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