What to Do After You File Your Investigation Report

/
What to Do After You File Your Investigation Report

As a fraud investigator, you may be used to being given a case, investigating it, submitting a report with the findings and then moving on to the next case with little follow up on what the result of the report was. But what happens after the report is filed may be just as important for the organization as the investigation itself.

Sherman McGrew, J.D., CFE, highlighted the importance of what happens after an investigation in his virtual session at the 2020 ACFE Fraud Conference Europe. McGrew, who is a program analyst at the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) walked the audience through the practical steps of investigating a fraud allegation. Although many fraud examiners may be removed from the process after the investigation is complete, McGrew urged them to make a few recommendations to their employers before they’re completely done with the process.

Read More

Implementing the Lessons Learned From Maersk's Major Cyberattack

/
Implementing the Lessons Learned From Maersk's Major Cyberattack

When Lewis Woodcock, head of Cyber Security Operations at A.P. Moller — Maersk, spoke to a virtual crowd at the 2020 ACFE Fraud Conference Europe, he remained cautiously optimistic. Despite the gravity and intensity of his experience on the ground during the cyberattack that plagued Maersk in the summer of 2017, Woodcock recalled his time working with the response team saying, “there was no sense of panic, more of a distinct, determined energy. There was work that could almost be described as excitement to tackle the enormous challenge that lay ahead.”

In this case, “enormous challenge” could almost be considered a euphemism. Maersk, an integrated transport logistic company, manages nearly 20% of world trade; its vessels make 50,000 port calls each year. The company itself is large and complex, employing approximately 88,000 people globally and with no real central office. When their networks were struck with a cyberattack that shut down all their computer operating systems, the outage it caused transcended national borders and affected hundreds of thousands of people.

Read More

Criminals Use Cryptocurrencies to Launder, Extort and Steal Money

/
Criminals Use Cryptocurrencies to Launder, Extort and Steal Money

Cryptocurrencies are no longer new nor nascent, but they are still a popular vehicle by which criminals use to extort, launder and steal money. “I remember when ransomware started, they [criminals] used PayPal,” said Costel Ion, CFE, director - principal investigator at Deutsche Bank in his virtual session at the 2020 ACFE Fraud Conference Europe. “Now ransomware criminals are using many forms of cryptocurrencies.”

Read More

Using Open Sources for Financial Crime Intelligence

/
Using Open Sources for Financial Crime Intelligence

The world wide web is a constantly fluctuating ocean of information. Investigators often have to navigate through massive currents of data to find a few pertinent threads. A technique or tool that you use today may not be the same or even available tomorrow. But as Stephen Hill, Ph.D, MLPI, CIIP, managing director at Hill Bingham Ltd, said in his virtual session at the 2020 Fraud Conference Europe, “At the end of the day, a search engine is a database, and you’re running a query against that database.”

The goal for open source intelligence gathering is to take something broad and find the query that will narrow it down to the specific information you need. The key to doing this is your creativity. Although the tools and techniques might evolve as time passes, here are three important building blocks you need when using open sources for gathering financial crime intelligence.

Read More

Making Compliance Cool

/
Making Compliance Cool

“Before you get to what you’re going to teach people, you’ve got to get their attention.” Vince Walden said, quoting Rashelle Tanner, the director of the Compliance Learning Program at Microsoft, to illustrate what he wanted to convey about compliance to virtual attendees of the ACFE Fraud Conference Europe on Monday. He added, “You have got to make compliance more engaging and figure out how to make training stick.”

Walden, the managing director of Forensic Technology Services at Alvarez & Marsal Disputes and Investigations LLC, encouraged listeners to use different techniques to make compliance training and adhering to best practices fun, engaging and even a little surprising.

Read More

Are Rewards Necessary for Whistleblowers in Europe?

/
Are Rewards Necessary for Whistleblowers in Europe?

With each new edition, the ACFE’s Report to the Nations shows the importance of tips in detecting fraud. In the upcoming 2020 edition of the report, 43% of the fraud cases were discovered through tips, and in organizations with fraud awareness training and formal reporting mechanisms, the number rose to 56%. Establishing a hotline, anonymous web form, email address or other tip reporting mechanism is often an inexpensive, and highly effective, way to detect fraud in organizations of all sizes and industries. But what use is a tip reporting tool if no one uses it?

Stephen Kohn spends a lot of his time pondering this question. Kohn is widely recognized as one of the U.S.’s leading whistleblower and qui tam attorneys, and currently represents Danske Bank whistleblower Howard Wilkinson. In his keynote address at the 2020 ACFE Fraud Conference Europe, presented virtually, he asked attendees, “How do you create a whistleblower program where most employees will report?”

Read More

Critical Considerations of an Investigation

/
Critical Considerations of an Investigation

In her 2019 ACFE Fraud Conference Europe session titled “Dos and Don’ts in Investigations,” Cindy Hofmann provided attendees with practical explanations of how fraud examiners should prepare for an investigation. With a calm, measured way of speaking, Hofmann methodically worked through each consideration a fraud examiner should make before, during and after an investigation.  

Read More