Upping Your Tech Game in Times of Extraordinary Change

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Upping Your Tech Game in Times of Extraordinary Change

In the session titled “Upping Your Tech Game in Times of Extraordinary Change” at the 2021 ACFE Women’s Summit, attendees heard from four tech experts in the anti-fraud field. As the conversation began, a few of the panelists commented on how rare (and delightful) it was to be on a tech panel with all women. However, it didn’t take long for them to dig in and demonstrate why they are each considered experts in their respective fields.

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Your Responsibility to Uphold a High-Trust Society

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Your Responsibility to Uphold a High-Trust Society

At their core, a fraud examiner is responsible for determining what is true and what is not true. As many of you know, it sounds simple, but it is far from simple. Only minutes before Nicholas Thompson, editor in chief of WIRED Magazine, spoke, attendees heard the story of Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist who was murdered for her relentless pursuit of the truth. As Daphne’s heartbreaking story illuminates, upholding the truth is often a hefty weight to bear. Throughout his presentation, Thompson touched on this question of truth several times, pointing out that as our lives become even further enmeshed with the internet, that question grows more salient by the day.

Here are the 11 biggest questions Thompson pondered (and encourages you to ponder) about fraud and the technological future.

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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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Using Open Sources for Financial Crime Intelligence

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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.

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What Fraud Examiners Should Know About the Anti-Corruption Landscape in Mexico

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What Fraud Examiners Should Know About the Anti-Corruption Landscape in Mexico

At the 2019 Houston ACFE Fraud Conference, Fernando Cevallos, CFE, and his co-presenter Javier López de Obeso explained the current anti-corruption environment in Mexico. They discussed what fraud examiners should know in order to conduct effective investigations while also avoiding putting themselves in dangerous, potentially life-threatening situations.

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Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to Keynote at 2019 ACFE Fraud Risk Management Summit

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Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to Keynote at 2019 ACFE Fraud Risk Management Summit

One of the most important objectives of any fraud examination is to find the truth. As simple as this may sound, there are a million different obstacles that can prevent fraud examiners from achieving this goal. “One's understanding of the truth — whether that's the correctness of a fact or the guilt of a person — should never be unalterable,” says Preet Bharara in his New York Times best-seller Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law. Bharara will speak to anti-fraud executives at the 2019 ACFE Fraud Risk Management Summit, to be held on October 17 in New York, New York.

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Don't Be Scared of the Data

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Don't Be Scared of the Data

Beyond traditional sources of data lie valuable alternative sources. Bringing these various data sources together to develop a hypothesis for an investigation may seem intimidating at first, but in her session at the 30th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference titled, “Leveraging Traditional and Alternative Data in Investigations,” Lacey Keller, data science managing director at Gryphon Strategies, demonstrated a common-sense approach to gathering and shaping data. The goal of doing so is to create a narrative that those outside of an investigation can easily understand.

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