‘Accidental Whistleblower' Decries Corporate Irresponsibility

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‘Accidental Whistleblower' Decries Corporate Irresponsibility

Howard 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.”

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How Do You Find Someone Who Doesn’t Want to be Found?

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How Do You Find Someone Who Doesn’t Want to be Found?

Identity 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.

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Financial Institutions: Collaborate and Converge or Suffer the Consequences

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Financial Institutions: Collaborate and Converge or Suffer the Consequences

Looking 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.

  1. Assess your risk as a group with leaders from different areas of Fraud, Cyber and AML.

  2. Decide on your recipe for countering those risks.

  3. 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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The Cat-and-Mouse Game Between Financial Institutions and Their Unseen Adversaries

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The Cat-and-Mouse Game Between Financial Institutions and Their Unseen Adversaries

“If you build a better mousetrap, it’s highly likely that an adversary will build a better mouse.” Jean-Francois Legault, Managing Director, Global Head of Cybersecurity at JPMorgan Chase, shared this metaphor at the beginning of his virtual breakout session at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. It captures a sentiment that fraud examiners are all too familiar with — it can sometimes seem impossible to stay ahead of the fraudsters. But in his session “Building a Cyberfraud Intelligence Program for the Financial Industry,” Legault shared practical advice and tips on how financial institutions can build a cyberfraud intelligence program from the ground up.

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The Money Pit: Rogue Projects Can Lead to Construction Fraud

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The Money Pit: Rogue Projects Can Lead to Construction Fraud

“Everyone at some point in their life has picked up a hammer or has walked by a construction site,” said Wayne H. Kalayjian, CFE, PE, SE, managing director at Secretariat International, during his virtual session at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. “They’ve seen cranes and pile drivers … everyone has some sort of intuitive understanding of what construction is.”

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Jules Kroll Stresses That Practitioners Can’t Grow Without Innovating

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Jules Kroll Stresses That Practitioners Can’t Grow Without Innovating

Jules Kroll recently had a shocking conversation with the head of compliance at a major European bank. “I asked them what they had seen in terms of fraud in the first quarter of the year,” said Kroll, during the Monday Opening General Session of the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. “They were seeing [fraud] up over 600%. So, we have our work cut out for us. … I don't think we're ever going to see a sudden outbreak of honesty.” Kroll, the 2020 recipient of the ACFE’s Cressey Award, says the profession needs to continue to innovate to find new ways to combat fraud as he did when he was a pioneer of the modern intelligence and corporate security industry.

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Seen on the Screen: Gathering for Our First All-Virtual Fraud Conference

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Seen on the Screen: Gathering for Our First All-Virtual Fraud Conference

“We can only win the war against financial crimes with intelligent collaborations, mentorships, partnerships and by developing tools and policies that is globally scalable. Criminals are getting smarter; it is our jobs to ensure they end up on the losing side at all times.” — Wale Ayantoye, Global Sanctions Consultant, Square Inc.

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