Identity theft is a subject that is raised and discussed at many fraud forums and similarly reported in an increasing number of news articles. It is not just the cloning of identities followed by fraudulently obtaining goods or services on credit cards that results from identity thefts. Some very complex frauds are built on false identities and credibility stolen from others.

A report in this week’s Financial Mail in the Mail on Sunday illustrates how such fraud might be working. It involves a potential boiler room fraud which involves the selling of bogus or worthless shares in business ventures by high pressure salesmen. Credibility to their product is provided by details of another real and likely more successful venture whose details can be checked in the public domain.

In this case it appears that an oil company is touting for investment in its two “proven” oilfields. Its web site gives details of a director that are the same as those of another company Petroneft Resources who also has oil fields in Lineyoye and Tungolskye, names that are curiously similar to those quoted for the other bogus oil company. The bogus oil company cannot be contacted and its address details given are false. Petroneft, which is based in Ireland and is clearly a bone fide company, was astounded to find that there is another company that appears to be advertising the same assets as it owns.

Petroneft has reported this instance of credibility hijacking to the Irish Financial Regulator, Financial Services Authority and City of London Police. The FSA say that incidents of identity theft and associated unauthorised sale of investments in typical “boiler room frauds” has increased dramatically over recent months. In the last three months alone it has received 29 such reports.

It does seem that even with the current economic climate that there is plenty of money that investors are seeking to find homes for. This may be a case of moving funds around in an increasingly competitive market or there being more money available for investment. Whatever the case, people with money and those responsible for others’ are still investing in bogus schemes at an alarming rates. Ponzi frauds and other advance fee scams are still being reported and the current flavour it seems is the boiler room threat.

Financially astute persons (i.e. those with money or investing it for others) should not be easily caught by these scams. There is a level of fraud prevention due diliegence that can be carried out that does not involve much effort but will uncover, or at least throw up some red flags, most of the bogus investment opportunities. It is no good relying on company searches in a climate where identities are so easily hijacked. Drilling down into an individual’s or organisation’s identity is essential, to uncover all of the public information available and checking or cross referencing this wherever possible. When investing several £100,000 or millions, surely it is worth checking to see if a director is who he says he is and lives at his stated registered address? For a few pounds this, and many other details, can be so easily verified.

Mark Jenner is a forensic accountant specialising in fraud investigation and fraud prevention.

There has been little news in the ensuing period concerning the NFA’s activities. Appointments of interim and permanent chief executives were well advertised as with all political posts. One of the first outputs seems to be a survey of the level of fraud in the UK that was published in January 2010. It was this survey that announced that fraud cost the UK some £30.2 billion per year that reminded me of the NFA’s existence and made me wonder what they were currently doing to help deal with the problem of fraud.

It does seem that one of the Authority’s tasks is to roll out details of the progress that they are making together with the general anti-fraud message at various relevant gatherings around the UK. These include speaking slots at the different Fraud Fora events that are held around the country. Therefore it was with much interest that the North West Fraud Forum’s annual conference was attended on 11 February 2010 at the DeVere Whites Hotel in Bolton.

Two out of three talks during the morning session were related to the NFA. However, the very first talk was on a different subject – an interesting piece by Lancashire MP Rosie Cooper, who related a personal experience of identity theft fraud. The talk highlighted the weak and ineffective response the authorities  have historically made to reports of such fraud and Rosie and the audience (which included over 100 respected public and private sector fraud practitioners from around the UK) eagerly awaited the NFA’s report as to how their new thrust would help frustrated victims of fraud like Rosie.

Unfortunately the NFA’s chief executive Dr Bernard Herdan could not make the conference and a last minute substitute of his colleague Cordia Lewis was made. Cordia was an Australian librarian with an MBA. She began her talk be reiterating private sector fraud statistics that had been compiled by the leading accountancy firm KPMG.

Her speech included details of the NFA’s intention to compile a regular Annual Fraud Indicator and an update of the newly established fraud reporting functions of “Action Fraud” for individuals and SMEs or the “National Fraud Intelligence Bureau” for larger organisations and fraud regulators.

Her message was - that if Rosie had experienced identity fraud now she would be able to report the matter to Action Fraud. However, this caused a storm of response from the audience with questions along the line of “do we stop reporting fraud to the police?” and “is this not another level of beaurocracy being inserted into the system?”

The next speaker had a recent example of how the reporting process worked.  Detective Superintendent Steve Clarke of the City of London Police headed up one of this squad’s six fraud groups and which was also the lead force in the coordinating the efforts of the NFA. He also headed up the NFA’s National Fraud Intelligence Bureau – the reporting point for major frauds. Steve related the case of Focus Clothing which the City of London is now investigating. This case which has been in the news resulted from over 50 calls to the NFA’s fraud helpline from individuals who had not received goods they had bought online from Focus.

It does seem that there is a lot of talk and good intentions from the NFA but certainly the audience at the North West Fraud Forum were not convinced that reporting a fraud to them would result in any more action than if the fraud was reported to the police or other front line fraud regulator. I discussed the matter with a solicitor, a government company inspector and a private sector fraud investigator all on my table at the conference. Together with my own views as a forensic accountant specialising in fraud matters, the consensus was that the £29 million would be better spent on funding more dedicated fraud squad officers in the various regional police forces!  Only time will tell.

By: Mark Jenner – Forensic Accountant

The reason of course is that businesses are the target for all forms of fraud – employee fraud, creditor fraud, supplier fraud, Internet fraud…the list can go on. You should not wait until your business becomes a victim as it inevitably will at some point, do something about it now.

Apart from the obvious security issues for your assets, you need to put together a fraud reduction strategy that will help protect your business from various types of fraud, phishing, pharming, identity theft plus hacking and virus threats to your IT systems.

Your data needs protecting also. Even apparently simple information such as your customer lists are valuable and you do not want your employees giving it to your competitors. The data can also be lost through burglary and criminal damage to your premises. Think of the effort that would be required trying to recreate this information.

Remember to vet your employees when recruiting. You want trustworthy workers who will not put your business and assets at risk. Resumes very often contain falsehoods, and at best exaggerations. Make sure you take up references, check periods of employment and question what an applicant was doing in a “gap” period. Perhaps they were doing time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for fraud! Yes fraudulent employees do commit the same crimes time and time again, moving from one complacent employer to another.

Complacency is the name of the game when it comes to fraud risk. Although it does not always pay to be overly oppressive in your anti-fraud policy and cause resentment and even fear amongst your staff, a tightly controlled work place will undoubtedly prevent the fraudster striking or at least make him think twice before having a go.

Mark Jenner is a forensic accountant and fraud expert advising companies on cost effective ways of preventing fraud.

Why would they do that? If a criminal trial is not managed properly and proportionately it will either fail completely leading to a re-trial or an appeal. This happens a lot and is the biggest reason why costs of dealing with criminals in general are so high.

The Legal Services Commission comes under fire a lot – not just from this blog site! The Daily Mail yesterday (2nd February 2009) reported the gross waste of public funds by the LSC. Audits have revealed that they have paid some £25 million too much to criminal defence lawyers over the year. If a public auditor is able to uncover £25 million wasted out of a budget of £2 billion per anum then just think how much a proper fraud investigator would find!

This may sound a bit of a sweeping statement, and is based purely on anecdotal evidence. But do not forget that as a forensic accountant I not only get paid for a lot of my work by the Legal Services Commission but also deal very closely with firms of solicitors and barristers that do also. Yes I do see some barristers getting paid £1 million each year from public funds, but I also struggle myself to receive ordinary market rates for my own work.

Sometimes I must argue my case with an LSC case worker that is questioning a quotation that I have submitted. Having done these sorts of jobs for over 15 years I usually have a good idea of how long they will take and what resources I will need to apply. It is not always easy to translate these ideas into a recipe for my costs and sometimes have to argue whether or not each of 10,000 documents will require 20 or 25 seconds to review! I know that I will need a week and a half or so but putting it into simple science is not always so easy.

Apparently since the 1980s spending by the LSC has multiplied 7 fold. Its not surprising – forget the published inflation figures – in 1983 we bought a house for a price that we would easily have to pay 12 times more for now. That aside, the past decade or so has seen the labour government increase the amount of legislation in place many times. The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 is only one example of many new laws that were introduced, were lengthy and ill conceived. They have led to substantially more work needed to be done by the Defence solicitors and barristers to prevent miscarriage of justice. I have assisted in some of this and know how much time can be wasted by the Crown.

I would rather be putting the fraudsters away any day, but am happy to present a truly interdependent stance within my Fraud Advisory Services work portfolio and act as expert accounting witness for the defense in white collar crime cases. Because the Crown tends not to prepare financial cases in a safe fashion, often by not utilizing forensic accountants, there is much scope for checking and representing the case by the defense. My work in this area is not intended to get the dguilty off, but ensure that their case is presented at an accurate level of severity so that the courts can award a just sentence. If the LSC continue to be criticized for waste and their budgets cut accordingly, who will be doing the essential fraud defence work to balance the system?

The NFA web site does not appear to work and very little information appears to be forthcoming from a Google search. It appears that the National Fraud Reporting Council (NFRC), whose NFRC web site also appears to be inoperative, is still embryonic in its development.

In 2008 the UK government allocated £29 million to put into place the various recommendations resulting in the decision to establish the NFA and NFRC. The City of London Police is to take the lead role in investigating serious and complex fraud and are tasked with helping other police forces with their investigations. They are working with the government to establish the NFRC.

Nothing much seems to be happening at present. News broke in 2009 about the appointment of Bernard Herdan as the full time chief executive of the NFSA (or NFA) to spearhead the coordination of inter organisation efforts against the growing problem of fraud. Herdan’s provenance is as an interim chief executive at the Securities Industry Authority since 2006, prior to that having spent some seven years as an executive director at the Identity and Passport Service. The distinct lack of a broad serious fraud experience does rather smack of this being a political appointment of a crony by Baroness Scotland (the Attorney General).

Although nothing much seemsto be occuring, there are one or two reports attributed to the NFA – National Fraud Authority.

For example in its first Annual Fraud Indicator report the NFA estimates that fraud costs the UK £30 billion per year – almost twice the previous estimates of some £17 billion. They say that the highest sectors of fraud loss are:

• Tax fraud at £15.2 billion
• Consumer scams at £3.5 billion
• Insurance fraud at £2 billion
• Mortgage fraud £1 billion

These figures should be viewed with some suspicion. There have been a number of estimates of the level of fraud in the UK over the past few years, many endorsed by the government. These are usually between around £40 billion and £100 billion. In addition, every fraud survey usually caveats their results saying that they are likely to be on the low side because of the hidden nature of fraud and the fact that much is not reported. The estimates do not include money laundering or hiding the proceeds of other crimes such as drugs, trafficing and extortion.

If the truth be known, the level of fraud as a proportion of the economy is huge but will never be accurately estimated.

Take the mortgage fraud figure of £1 billion for example. I was involved in a mortgage fraud case worth around £100 million. During the course of my investigations I began to understand how great the problem was. There were 100s of other property developers and others undertaking the very same tyoe of business that I was looking at. In fact it seemed to be the case that the way the UK plc was being run was fraudulent! Much of the toxic debt in the UK today results from overvalued properties and freely given loans without due diligence. In the past one to five years the annual level of mortgage fraud was well in excess of £1 billion.

Tax fraud is another example which must be viewed carefully. The level of tax evasion is not widely understood, especially by HMRC. I recall other cases over the past six or so years ago where I investigated a number of different support publishers. These companies pretend to represent good causes and charities and sell expensive advertising space in diaries, wall planners and directories. Many of the companies were closed down by the authorities as a result of the investigations, but likely sprang up immediately afterwards under a different name (phoenix companies).

The common factor between these companies was that they all employed teams of tele sales operatives to sell their advertising space. Every person was employed on a self employed basis and responsible for their own tax. Most never declared any of their commission earnings and many were also on supplementary benefit. I attempted to present my revelations to HMRC. Many of their junior managers were interested and tried to arrange a meeting for me with a senior policy maker – but none were interested. I was told that the UK would have to wait for new legislation. This meant that anybody interested in preventing such whole scale tax loss (as this practice ran much further than just the small sector I was investigating) would need to start lobbying members of parliament! It seemed that HMRC was only interested in applying its duties by the book – not looking to plug an obvious gap.

Much of the tax fraud in the quoted figures comes from Value Added Tax evasion – though if we think that HMRC have solved the carousel fraud problem (missing trader inter community fraud – MTIC fraud) by introducing reverse VAT charges on mobile phones, computer chips and now carbon credits, we are sadly mistaken. A recent investigation that I was involved in revealed that the spiders web of businesses involved in VAT fraud across the UK is huge, and the commodities exploited range through everything that can be traded – I have seen clothing, textiles, furniture, household goods, electronics, books, dvds, food supplements, spectacles, drugs……………..

I do hope that the figures presented by the NFA have not used too much of my tax money! There is a feeling that £29 million of funding would be better spent developing individual economic crime units and fraud squads around the uk. Fraud prevention and fraud detection at the coal face is money better spent than the development of even larger public sector agencies and quangos!  A couple of new well trained financial investigators in each regional police force together with all the supplementary resources and technology required including access to proper experienced forensic accountants – would be money better spent.

Back to my desk after the break sees a number of cases to continue with in my fraud investigation portfolio and a couple of new inquiries via the Internet, one being from a police force economic crime unit and the other from a new firm of lawyers.

It seems that this year is heading off for a basket of criminal frauds and fraudulent trading – not much changes there then! It will be interesting to see if there are any pronouncements from the Legal Services Commission about their proposed cut backs in funding experts or will we all just experience a harder job getting our quotes agreed?  Without any cohesion amongst us forensic accountanst I can forsee many simply dropping their rates just to make sure they get the work. I am sure that the LSC will use market forces and the lack of perfect information to ensure that they get away with underfunding criminal cases.

A new investigation is kicking off into yet more bad business management and phoenixing of businesses. I guess that people like to make the money but hate to pay any of it back to the suppliers or tax man!

I agree that the big fraudsters should be targetted a lot more than they are. The whole concept of fraud is that it is a hidden crime and many organised criminals are currently getting away with various fraud scams big time. Yes, a lot of them get caught eventually, most having run for between three and five years. An awful lot of damage is being done to our economy in that time, which can ill afford it in the current climate. There are many fraudsters that do not get caught – or worse still, the authorities are unable to act fully or effectively, such is the complexity of the scam being perpetrated.

But there is a huge raft of smaller frauds taking place. Fraud is endemic in our society of high taxes and consumer excesses. If you thought that the ‘under table’ economy was restricted to third world countries or other less advanced administrations, you were wrong. Our society is as corrupt as any other, just that we are more circumspect.

Systematic tax evasion occurs, where workers are encouraged to claim benefits and not pay tax by their employers so that the wages bill can be less. These are the sort of companies that trade for a year or two, closing down and then starting up under a new name and very likely leaving a few unpaid bills behind them. These are the businesses that steer clear of any professional help, from lawyers and accountants who have a legal obligations to shop them to the authorities that overides any professional duty of confidentiality. In this way the Anti Money Laundering Regulations are missing a large proportion of the illegitimate cash that is being circulated and tax that is being avoided.

Add to this the wide ranging stress and hardship that is caused by the smaller frauds that come to light. Old people are duped out of their savings by an unscrupulous carer, small businesses go to the wall when the bookkeeper embezzles the funds needed for next month’s wage bill and individuals risk their dwindling pension funds in an attempt to provide for their families future. The fraudster does not care about the hardship he or she is causing, and for every ‘big fraudster’ systematically skimming millions, there are a thousand con men and scam merchants earning much less but nevertheless causing immense harm to innocent people.

If the City of London is upping the size of the frauds it targets, I hope this is not the pattern around the country. Already the small fraud is too easy to commit, and the chances of the local police investigating are remote. Not only do they not have the resources to investigate, they also lack the will because their performance is measured by dealing with more ’serious’ crime like murder, rape, burgelary and social nuisance. I agree that these are areas that need continued attention, but should rank alongside fraud when bidding for funding from central government.

Instead of attempting to budget a limited sum of money, and cutting back on fraud, attempts should be made to discover how much money would be needed to establish a comprehensive fraud resource and then worry about funding it! I know that if this resource was established, the level of asset recovery of criminal proceeds of crime would escalate substantially and not only provide self sustaining funding for economic crime units, but also contribute to compensating the victims of fraud for their losses! I just hope that there will continue to be funding for at least some work for forensic accountants - forensic accounting is the only efficient way to unpick the financial records behind some of the more complex frauds that are detected.

The decade has seen a massive raft of VAT frauds in the “Carousel” merry go round of Missing Trader Inter Community mobile phone and computer chip scams. Coming years may see this fraud extend to all forms of products, even including the trading of carbon credits!

The scale of the Ponzi investment frauds that started emerging in the latter part of the decade only reflect a business model that seems to have been flourishing for three quarters of a century since Charles Ponzifirst gave his name to such an obvious swindle. There will be more of this in the newspapers for years to come as I believe the culture of the Ponzi style fraud is ingrained in the financial systems around the world. A lot of it is sustained in the same way as the global economy is sustained – the illusion of a bottomless bucket of credit.

And throughout recent years we have seen the authorities try to get tough with the organized criminals by confiscating their assets. What has happened is that the career criminals have enough money to hide behind and the onerous asset seizure is routinely applied to those who fail to cover their tracks or are stupid enough to neglect filing even token tax returns!

So where will we be in the coming 10 years or so? I think the fraud regulators may start to form some sort of cohesive group but how far will they get? Given the public sector wastage of the past 12 years or so I suspect that the limited funding available as a result of propping up the banks will not go far.

Speaking of funding we are still awaiting effects of the public spending cutbacks on the forensic accounting profession. Will criminal fraud and money laundering trials become shallow bun fights without the financial issues being fully aired by competent accountants?

My own views are that there will be ample scope for the efficient fraud operator to assist private clients if they are efficient, hard working and not greedy for fees. A hard task perhaps? I do not think that the individual or small business who has been “ripped off” is properly catered for. Losing £10,000 or even £100,000 does not seem to excite the authorities these days, but they will spend tens of £millions on the big frauds.

By managing fraud cases on behalf of groups of individuals who have lost out to systematic sharp businesses or outright fraudsters - it may be possible to persuade those agencies with the powers available to them to get involved.

Recessionary pressure affects employers as well as employees. Cutbacks have to be made and it is often the case that a company is in constant review of its finances, looking for ways to survive let alone grow and make profits. There will be constant talk of “tightening of belts” and likely rumours of redundancies – even if these do not actually take place. This has a knock on effect on the employees, many of whom will start to feel insecure in their jobs.

This leads to one of the drivers of employment fraud due to economic downturn. There is a decreased loyalty shown to the employer because of the real or imagined layoffs. This can result in some seeing the opportunity for compensation in the form of helping themselves fraudulently! This tendancy is even more marked if there have been reductions in pay levels or even cuts in overtime opportunity.

The second cause of employee fraud during an economic downturn is the financial hardship experienced by the employees families generally. Even if the employee is secure in his own position, a family member might have lost their own job and household income is reduced. It might even be perceived pressure from the need to save more in case of much greater hardship in the future.

The third clear driver in the increase in employee fraud during a recession comes from the cost cutting excercises that an employer might be taking. Very often non essential positions are cut. These tend to be the middle management levels, not the productive workers and not those in ultimate charge. The trouble is that this is the layer of management that effectively controls fraud within a business. It is the layer of supervision, the division of duties and monitoring that creates a secure financial system. Remove some or all of this and large windows of opportunity for the fraudster can appear. It often happens that internal audit and dedicated fraud prevention functions are seen as non essential and down sized accordingly.

With an increase in employee fraud and a reduced capability to deal with it, when a fraud does occur a company might find itself in the position of having to call in specialist fraud investigators. The cost of employing a fraud investigator in a recession is an added burden in trying to out ride the downturn.

Mr Hopes will spend several years in jail and lose every penny he has ( and probably do extra time in jail as a result of a harsh confiscation order against him). So it has not been worth his while – but consider he was only caught because he lavished his proceeds of crime on prostitutes who then flaunted their wealth. Suspicious police investigated and it wasn’t long before the money trail let to Mr Hopes.

I reckon he might have got away with it. He had been taking sums up to around £300,000 for three years. His activities had escaped three years of internal and external audits. If he had squirreled his money away and retired he could be living in some sun soaked land in the life of luxury?

Maybe not – but the lesson again must be how easy it is for the fraudster to escape for significant lengths of time before being caught, just because of the complacency of the organisation. Mr Hopes had been an employee for 23 years. There is no doubt that the organisation’s trust in him allowed him to escape detection for so long. It is breathtaking that Toys R Us, which has 1,500 stores in 33 countries world wide, did not have a more robust system in place to prevent fraud and also to detect fraud.

I have offered anti-fraud services for many years but it is the area of business that sees the least instructions every year. Why is this? There are clearly many organisations that do not have adequate fraud protection, from the smallest to the largest business. Frauds in these are what keep me in work! Yet, as Toys R Us will learn, it would have been far, far cheaper to spend a little on its fraud prevention program than it will end up spending on investigating the fraud, tracing the assets and recovering what little may be left of the losses and probably going over the top in its now ongoing efforts to prevent fraud happening again!

Further details of this fraud can be found on my forensic investigation web site.