Fraud's History is Impressive: From Over-the-Counter Cure-Alls to Florida Real Estate and Musical Talent Fraud The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners has built up a choice collection of fraud souvenirs under founder and chairman Dr. Joseph T. Wells. Visit the Accounting Today site to see  some of the most notable pieces, which include Bernie Madoff’s cigar box, an Enron stock certificate, a Nigerian F ...

How Much Do You Know about Protecting Personal and Corporate Information from Would-be Fraudsters? Find out what you know about how to analyze credit, what causes data breaches, what precautions to take when accessing hotspots in an airport with a laptop, current identity theft laws, and controlling physical access to restricted areas. ...

Tracy L. Coenan published a succinct guide to fraud analysis last year in the Wisconsin Law Journal that's very much worth reading.  Excerpt: ...

Corporate investigation may lack the glamour of Bond and Bourne, but the two worlds aren't so far removed.  Former Kroll analyst Chris Morgan Jones tells The Independent's Tim Walker why.  Due diligence and forensic accounting don't set the pulse racing like, say, the trailer for the latest 007 movie, so it's quite a feat for Morgan Jones to have conceived a thriller about business intelligence that is genu ...

"With New Firepower, S.E.C. Tracks Bigger Game,"  Ben Protess and Azam Ahmed  report at the New York Times Dealbook. Embarrassed after missing the warning signs of the financial crisis and the Ponzi scheme of Bernard L. Madoff, the agency’s enforcement division has adopted several new — if somewhat unconventional — strategies to restore its credibility. The S.E.C. is taking its cue from criminal authorities ...

This piece really has no new information in it, so if you're looking for that, you can stop reading here. Instead, it's for Anglophiles.  Observers of British culture.   The BBC recently posted rather prominently a piece pondering the tragedy of the human condition wistfully, as it so often does.   Well, that's not quite what the article was about.  Actually, it's rather hard to tell what the article is abo ...

Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things NPR's Chana Joffe-Walt and Alix Spiegel have put together a fascinating podcast that examines the psychology of fraud. It often isn’t as easily explained as bad people doing bad things. Ethicists and psychologists have documented an unusually high number of people who start out, in their minds, doing the right thing. The story follows the case of Toby Grove ...

Corporate Investigations Increasingly Aided with Digital Forensics Digital investigators can do more than retrieve data from devices. They can also use data to reconstruct past events to explain how computers were used to perpetrate wrongdoing.  Info4Security has introduced a new column, the Forensic Technologist, which will be written by Ernst & Young’s Simon Placks and explore how computer forensics a ...

Fraud and the Family Business: It’s Not So Unusual The dynamics of a family-owned business are like no other, writes Robert Rothbort at Accounting Today.   There's usually a great atmosphere of trust. But that can leave family businesses uniquely vulnerable to fraud.  Here are some common schemes: • “Ghost” employees. The family member overseeing payroll creates “ghost” employees that do not exist and arran ...

IT Guru Turns Out to Be Security Hole  Roger Kay reports at Forbes:  Small businesses have become a choice target for hackers, but by far the most common — and devastating — attacks on small businesses are inside jobs. This is the story of one such assault. The target (we’ll call him Peter) trusted his IT guy (Joe, for our purposes) because Joe worked magic.  Peter didn’t understand exactly what Joe was doi ...

Who Is the Mystery Hamptons Moneybags? asks the New York Times DealBook. The hunt is on for the New York mogul with questionable cash management skills. Speculation bubbled on Wednesday after a receipt left hanging out of a Capital One ATM in East Hampton that displayed its owner’s remaining balance as $99,864,731.94 — yes, that would be $99 million and change — was posted on Dealbreaker. The receipt, which ...

Have you had a chance to check out the Guard Series™ insurance policies?   Since claims against BV practices and properly credentialed professionals have historically been quite rare, these policies are deeply discounted.  NACVA and Primus Assurance Group (PAG) announced the policies' availability last fall, and since then PAG has built out its web site with lots of detail: Providing Professional Peace of M ...