Live coverage from the ACFE Global Fraud Conference, including anti-fraud articles, session highlights, video clips and photo gallery.
“It is unusual for those of us in the inspector general community to have people, when you are introduced, to actually stay in the room to listen and talk to you. Usually, people run for the doors,” joked Michael Horowitz, the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), as he addressed another packed session at 34th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference in Seattle on Tuesday.
Read MoreNow in his seventies, Tony Kwok has settled nicely into retirement after spending decades successfully fighting corruption and wrongdoing in his own native Hong Kong and in other parts of the world. Even though he’s no longer actively fighting fraud, he still has some important life lessons for aspiring fraud examiners.
Read MoreKnown as the “Original Internet Godfather” for his exploits as one of the first cybercriminals, Brett Johnson’s life reads like a Hollywood film script, and his story of crime serves as a lesson for fraudsters and the law enforcement officials who hunt them down.
After being placed on the United States Most Wanted List, captured and convicted of 39 felonies, he escaped prison. Captured again, Johnson served his time and accepted responsibility. He now advises the FBI and corporate America about how to understand a virtual underworld that he helped create.
“Those 39 felonies had to do with refining a lot of the different online financial crimes we see today, from account takeovers, credit card fraud, phishing schemes and tax return identity theft,” he told John Gill, J.D., CFE, ACFE vice president – education, at the closing session of the ACFE Global Fraud Conference.
Read More“COVID was a golden era for people wanting to commit cyber fraud [and] cyber threats,” Robert Herjavec told attendees at the 32nd Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. As he addressed the virtual audience while sitting in his Toronto home, he looked back on a year that saw the coronavirus upend people’s lives and open opportunities for fraudsters like never before.
Herjavec may be best known as one of the judges on “Shark Tank,” the Emmy award-winning TV show about aspiring entrepreneurs that is now heading into its 13th season. But he also has a day job as Founder and CEO of Herjavec Group — one of the world’s most innovative cybersecurity firms that he founded in 2003.
Read MorePreet Bharara laughed when asked about how he feels about “Billions,” the TV show that is loosely based on his investigation of the hedge fund SAC Capital when he was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District Court of New York.
“It is fun for there to be a television show that is popular, even though it takes a lot of liberties, that is about the U.S. attorney as opposed to the district attorney … so that was nice,” he told ACFE vice president and general counsel John Warren, J.D., CFE, at the 32nd Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference.
Read MoreThe very public decline and fall of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) involved bitter partisan battles, allegations of voter fraud and a secret video recording. But it is also a story of heroes — namely a group of eight people — who at great personal sacrifice exposed embezzlement at the community-based advocacy group.
It is that clutch of brave souls — better known as the ACORN 8 — that wins this year’s Sentinel Award, which the ACFE bestows annually on a person or group of people who, without regard to personal or professional consequences, publicly discloses wrongdoing in business or government.
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