"If my mother's memory and legacy are destroyed, the criminal and corrupt that she investigated, and who are responsible for her assassination, will have triumphed. And the universal values that my mother worked so hard to defend will have failed,” Matthew Caruana Galizia told attendees at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. Matthew accepted the posthumous 2020 Guardian Award on behalf of his mother, journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered in a car bombing in Malta in 2017.

Retired DEA agents Javier Pena and Stephen Murphy took attendees at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference through the wild story of how they tracked infamous drug kingpin Pablo Escobar for six years before capturing and killing him. Escobar was known for his extreme violence and immense wealth while he ran the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia.

"When new people come in because there's change, it's sometimes harder to spot anomalous behaviors,” said the editor in chief of WIRED Nicholas Thompson in his Tuesday morning keynote address at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. “Of course spotting anomalous behaviors is how a lot of fraud detection works. You know the patterns of what we do, you look for things that don't quite fit those patterns and you identify that as fraud."