Investment Scams These are often known as ''boiler room scams'' and involve a cold-caller offering shares or property investments. Sometimes these shares and properties do exist, but are worth nothing like the amount suggested by your caller. Unfortunately, majority of people who fall for these scams are experienced investors. Alarm bells should ring if you are called out of the blue, particularly by a company based abroad. You can see whether a firm is legitimate by checking it against the agency responsible for the registration of authorised firms in your country of residence. For example ..read more

Work at Home/Business Opportunity Scams This scam is likely to become ever more popular due to  high unemployment rate. Typically these scheme offer a large income for not very much work, such as filling envelopes, assembling craft items or other easy-sounding jobs. They offer what sounds like a lot of money for this work and usually stress the advantage of working from home when it suits you. If you sign up you may find that you need to spend money to make photocopies, take out newspaper ads or buy software. If you buy craft kits and make items you may find the promoter will not pay o ..read more

In the coming weeks running to the festive period, I am going to talk specifically about top 5 financial scams and how to spot them. As the global economy is yet to recover fully from the recession, more and more people are becoming vulnerable to financial tricks and scams.  Millions of people fall victim to various scams due to reasons such as being attracted to financial gains, not being rational, unemployment etc. Today’s article would look at:  Advance Fee Fraud An advance fee fraud is a scheme in which the fraudster persuades the target to advance sums of money by falsely pr ..read more

It's been almost 6 months since my last blog update and for that I would like to apologize. With my experience of working in fraud prevention, I have come across several situations where people had their credit cards compromised. For this reason everyone must apply caution while shopping online. These days, most people buy goods and pay for services online, after all, it is a very convenient alternative, especially if you are a round the clock person like myself and don’t have much time on hand to go out there and shop. Almost every shopper would know that among the legitimate online sh ..read more

    To give us an understanding of why people commit fraud, the fraud triangle provides a simple model and also helps us understand the fraudsters mind. Fraudsters come from all age groups, backgrounds, walks of life and ethnicities. Identifying a typical fraudster is no straightforward task, although what we can do is to think about those forces that induce a person to commit fraud. A detailed explanation of those forces is reflected in a theory developed by Donald Cressey, a sociologist in the 1950s.According to him, three factors must be present for people to commit fraud.&n ..read more

  Fraud in Houses of Worship Through my ongoing research, I came across an article that sparked my interest “ Fraud in Houses of Worship”. The article details a former church secretary defrauding a 200 member church congregation for 18 months by writing herself duplicate paychecks, stealing cash from donation deposits and taking credit card accounts in the church name, among other schemes. In the current economic climate, am not surprised to see an uptick in this type of fraud, fraud examiners who are incharge of church finances and internal controls may be labelled a ..read more

The concept of predicate crimes can be traced to American Law and were initially classified under drug related offences, however legislation has since broadened the definition to include any serious crime and ever since the 2004 Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations, predicate crimes have guided Anti -Money Laundering (AML) definitions and several jurisdictions have a list of crimes they consider to constitute serious crimes, however the ununiformed variation in definitions has resulted in several bad actors taking advantage to circumvent the law and evade detection.  Predi ..read more

Taking a historical look at the Black-Market Peso Exchange (BMPE) in the 1970s where Latin America drug cartels moved the proceed of cocaine sales to Colombia, this is a form of TBML because of the paramount importance of imported products that require hard currency. Over the years, there has been an understanding of TBML to a wide extent, however the issue has been staying abreast with the variants and changes in the political economic, legal and regulatory landscape that has sparked a huge shift in TBML typologies, which still permits the flow of billions of dollars across various jurisdict ..read more

Beneficial ownership refers to the person or persons who ultimately own or control an asset (for example, a property or a company). It is vital to emphasise that such ownership control could benefit from its establishment either legally or illegally. A drug trafficker for example could set up a car renting service in order to appear to have legal sources of income from renting out cars for personal use while in reality the money is derived from the sale of drugs. Therefore, the identification and verification of beneficial ownership are very critical requirements for combating every form ..read more

As the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc and devastates nations across the globe, it is despicable that many individuals and businesses have fallen victim to fraudsters more especially the older and vulnerable people who are isolated from family and friends. The truth is that we are in precarious times, hence it is therefore critical for us to prepare for a dramatic increase in various fraudulent activities, fraudsters would constantly seek ways to exploit our fears and anxiety, the disruption of our normal daily routines also presents an increased risk more especially during this emergency t ..read more