"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."

Rebecca Jarvis, host of "The Dropout" podcast and a chief correspondent for ABC News, led a panel on whistleblowing Monday at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. She was joined by Stephen Kohn, Partner at Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto, LLP, Tom Mueller, New York Times best-selling author of "Crisis of Conscience," and Jane Norberg, Chief of the Office of the Whistleblower for the U.S. SEC.

"You should never really have heard of me,” Howard Wilkinson, the Danske Bank whistleblower told attendees at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Conference on Monday.

“Something bad had happened in the branch. We all know bad things happen. A whistleblower reported it, internal audit investigated it, reported it to top management. And top management had taken the necessary action, made the necessary reports and done what needed to be done. You would have never heard of me. It didn't happen like that."

“All along the way, hundreds of people who worked for us all over the world had that CFE designation. And it was the CFE team, individuals, groups, that provided the bulk of the analytical work, the accounting analysis and the other analysis dealing with fraud,” said Jules Kroll, founder of K2 Intelligence.

Kroll spoke to attendees at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference on Monday morning and took them through the story of how he began J. Kroll Associates in 1972 (later Kroll Inc.), and how he helped shape corporate forensic investigations as we now know them.