Live coverage from the ACFE Global Fraud Conference, including anti-fraud articles, session highlights, video clips and photo gallery.
Mortgage fraud continues to evolve in tandem with new technologies. According to Julie Treloar, CFE, director of risk and compliance for a digital lending platform, successful investigations often come down to looking beyond what's on paper.
Read MoreIn a lively, Wednesday morning session, Inès Panou, CFE, MBA, engaged 37th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference attendees in a discussion on conducting audits across international borders. Panou, the chief risk officer for SANRU, a nongovernmental organization in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said that fraud is a universal condition that starts with people — not when the money disappears. According to Panou, the human element of fraud and how people rationalize committing it is an overlooked part of the Fraud Triangle.
Read More
Photos: ACFE/Victor Goodpasture Photography
It’s a continuing trend in the headlines: Fraudsters are exploiting government-funded programs or targeting public-sector organizations directly. Fraudsters targeted Medicare. A child nutrition program was exploited in Minnesota. Hundreds of millions of dollars in California welfare benefits were stolen by a Romanian crime ring.
All these fraud schemes are similar in that they involve government programs, but, according to Linda Miller, there's one more similarity: All these systems were designed for trust. That was the subject of “Designed for Trust, Exploited at Scale: Why Government is Easy to Defraud,” presented by Miller, president of Program Integrity Alliance, at the 37th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference.
Read MoreHow do experts spot a deepfake? During his keynote at the 37th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference, AI and deepfake detection expert Dr. Hany Farid gave attendees an inside look at the forensic techniques used to identify manipulated images, videos and audio.
Farid explored the growing capabilities of generative AI, the risks posed by emerging technologies like agentic AI, and the reality that humans are often not as good at detecting fake content as they think. His message for fraud fighters: while deepfakes may not disappear, organizations can make bad actors work harder. As he put it, “You don’t eliminate it. You just make it more painful, more time consuming, more risky, more difficult, more skilled.”
“Let’s say you get a call, paramedics are surrounding a body that has visible scratches on the arms and you’re told the victim owns a German Shepherd with a history of aggression. What are you going to think?”
Derek Ellington, CFE, posed this question and scenario to introduce the power of compelling narratives in his second session covering the Karen Read case. Continuing from his first session on lessons in digital evidence collection, Ellington conveyed an important lesson for fraud examiners in the ability of narratives to influence how evidence is interpreted.
Read MoreIt all began when Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent Sarah Halleran received a complaint through the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a public hub for reporting crime. The complaint was from a financial advisor against Adam Lowe, the owner of a Florida company called The Diamond Desk Corporation. Lowe claimed to be a supplier of natural, fancy-colored diamonds, but an FBI investigation team that included Halleran, forensic accountant Lavderim Hysa, CFE, CPA and Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Anton revealed him to be the mastermind of a complex multi-million dollar investment and Ponzi scheme.
Read More© 2026 Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, Inc. All rights reserved.
