• March/April 2023 | Vol. 38 | No. 2

Featured Articles

  • Taming fraud in crypto’s Wild West

    The meteoric rise and sudden downfall of crypto exchange FTX, and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, is likely to become an essential case study for fraud examiners seeking to understand the new Wild West of the financial markets. Here we look at what happened and lessons learned from possibly one of the largest U.S. financial frauds.

    Sleuths on the cyber trail

    Andy Greenberg, the award-winning WIRED reporter, talks to Fraud Magazine about his latest book on bitcoin tracing and how law enforcement still has the upper hand in its fight against cyberfraudsters and other criminals on the dark web.

    When subjects admit guilt but they’re innocent

    Why would someone confess to a crime they didn’t commit? Often an interviewer, trained to be accusatory and aggressive, will pressure subjects to admit guilt. Here’s how fraud examiners — rightfully constrained by higher ethics guardrails — can prevent false confessions that result in wrongful terminations and improper convictions, and ruin innocent subjects’ lives, while leaving the guilty free to commit additional crimes.

    Fraud in reconstruction: What awaits Ukraine?

    When countries devastated by war, natural disasters or other calamities must rebuild, valiant efforts to rise from the rubble must be paired with another intangible quality: integrity. But prior experience with hastened economic relief underscores the need to couple that relief with a fortifying effort to deter corruption.

    Discount fraud

    Sales of “gray market” products generally are viewed as legal, but diversion of deeply discounted products from authorized distribution networks is often based upon fraud. Here we examine schemes to illicitly obtain millions of dollars of discounts through this pervasive but relatively unknown type of fraud. And we offer ways to ward off fraudsters’ efforts.

Columns & Departments