We're continuing with my thought process of looking behind curtains in fraud risk, but with a slight change. This time, we're looking behind a new curtain.
Recent Posts
This month I will present at a conference a new approach to fraud risk assessment. It is the cumulation of my 40 years of experience in building the fraud audit model.
Businesses face a growing threat of account take over attacks as fraudsters become more sophisticated and take advantage of advances in technology. This week, we're pulling back the curtain to take a closer look at them and how to add this to your fraud protection strategy.
Fraud Trivia: Phishing
Phishing is a prevalent type of social engineering that aims to steal data from the message receiver. Typically, this data includes personal information, usernames and passwords, and/or financial information. Phishing is consistently named as one of the top 5 types of cybersecurity attacks.
The theme of the last three blogs was “look behind the curtain” in order to tell the fraud story. Upon reflection, maybe I did not tell the entire fraud story. Maybe, I did not look behind the right curtain. So, this month, we are going to look behind a different curtain.
This month, we're pulling back the curtain again to take a look at a look at what could be going on even when everything seems to be fine on the surface. We'll consider what can happen despite the appearance of effective internal controls and how to uncover it.
This month, we're showing how to "look behind the curtain" to uncover fraud using a sole-source contract as an example. This is when a contract is intentionally written to go to a particular vendor with ill intent.
My last series of blogs discussed strategies for detecting shell companies. I know they work because I have refined the strategies throughout my career. Now we will discuss what causes those strategies to fail.
What are the inhibitors to the successful use of artificial intelligence in fraud detection? Humans.
This month's blog is dedicated to making you aware of the scourge on society. Slavery. We now call it human trafficking. The United Nations explains human trafficking as follows:
This story is about a passthrough scheme. It is my opinion that most large companies have one of more pass-through schemes occurring. What makes it difficult to detect or prevent these schemes is that the scheme will comply with all of your controls. Your company has received the goods or services. Therefore, your ability to detect these schemes is predicated on your understanding of how these schemes occur and what they look like.
In our next two blogs concerning shell companies, I will highlight real-life shell company schemes detected by our firm using the fraud audit methodology discussed in our blogs. Remember, all these schemes were found in large publicly traded companies using the fraud audit methodology discussed in the last seven blogs. I have changed the names of the companies to respect the confidentiality of our clients. It is important to note that there were no allegations, no whistleblowers, and no leads.
