Investigating Cash Skimming Cases

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Investigating Cash Skimming Cases

They are impossible to solve. They are too time consuming. The documents don’t exist. Tiffany Couch, CFE, CPA/CFF, Principal Acuity Forensics, reviewed these three myths surrounding cash skimming schemes to start off her breakout session at the 28th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference.

She shared four case studies to dispel these myths and illustrate a few ideas on how to effectively investigate and prove cash skimming schemes. We’ll take a deeper look at one of them, which she dubbed the “Busy Mom” scheme.

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Convicted Bank Fraudster Thankful to Attendees for Allowing ‘Lex Luthor’ to Talk to the Justice League

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Convicted Bank Fraudster Thankful to Attendees for Allowing ‘Lex Luthor’ to Talk to the Justice League

The contrition of convicted fraudsters* who speak to attendees at the end of each ACFE Global Fraud Conference ranges widely. Some are desperately sorry and others are still rationalizing. Former bank executive James Scalzo, who went to prison for bank loan frauds totaling $1.4 million, seemed to want to convince attendees of the full repentance of his crimes.

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Paving the Path to Truth

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Paving the Path to Truth

Andrew Price and Lisa Chafin’s breakout session, “Building the Perfect Investigations Team to Find, Eliminate and Remediate Misconduct” kicked off with a two-minute therapy session. Price requested that those in the room turn to their neighbor and share a few pain points they’ve encountered when working on an investigative team. As the room grew louder and as voices grew more animated, Price commented, “It sounds like we’ve got a lot of pain in this room.”

After hearing some of the points — unclear objectives, misaligned priorities, personal conflict — Price and Chafin outlined five key elements of an effective cross-functional investigations team.

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Social Psychology: What Selling Candy Can Teach Us About Getting Confessions

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Social Psychology: What Selling Candy Can Teach Us About Getting Confessions

In his Tuesday morning session, “Social-Psychological Behaviors: An Underused Tool for Fraud Investigators,” Bret Hood, CFE, shared that candy story with attendees of the ACFE Global Fraud Conference. The child in question was his daughter and after slumping candy fundraising numbers, he taught her to use a two-prong question method to increase the likelihood of people buying the bars. He explained that fraud examiners can use a number of psychological tactics like two-prong questioning to interview and elicit confessions out of suspected fraudsters.

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​​​​​​​Spies Now Conduct Espionage From Their Couches

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​​​​​​​Spies Now Conduct Espionage From Their Couches

“There are no hackers; there are only spies,” cybersecurity expert Eric O’Neill told attendees at the Tuesday Working Lunch. “Hacking is nothing more than the necessary evolution of espionage. As we took our information out of file cabinets and we put it into databases, and then because we wanted to communicate quickly we hooked those databases up to the Internet … we exposed ourselves to a new way of espionage.”

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The Challenge of Proving Intent

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The Challenge of Proving Intent

We often talk about the importance of getting inside the mind of a fraudster in order to prevent and detect fraud, but taking that journey into the psyche is crucial when proving one of the pillars a fraud case stands on: intent. In her breakout session today, Janet McHard described the elusiveness of proving someone’s intent to commit fraud.

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