The Talk of the ACFE Conference
By Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior VP
The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) held its annual conference and exhibition in Washington, DC this week. Through the keynote address and the plethora of wonderful speakers, one message became loud and clear – fraudsters are becoming more and more creative in finding ways to circumvent your policies.
We heard stories of insider trading, bust-out fraud, mortgage fraud, insurance claims fraud and organized retail crime. Despite the diligence and hard work by the certified fraud examiners, too many of these stories ended up with a common theme – the crooks got away with an awful lot of booty before getting caught.
Predictive analytics and behavioral analytics have provided organizations with a great weapon in combating fraud. Establishing norms and ranking activities against those norms can have a dramatic effect on reducing losses to fraud and crime. What has been missing, however, is the wide-scale adoption of a tool that allows fraud examiners to “automatically connect the dots” between the bits and pieces of forensic information they have. Identity Resolution is that tool… and it has been the talk of the conference here.
The powerful federated similarity search capabilities of identity resolution help investigators understand the hidden relationships between individuals across enterprise data (Applicants, SARs, Incidents, Employees, Claimants, Witnesses, etc). Let’s face it, the fraudsters are typically not stupid. They know how to get around the systems by engaging their family and friends to form a profitable fraud ring. Identity Resolution gives companies the power to search into ALL their data with a view to understanding “who’s who” and “who’s working with whom” – despite deliberate attempts to deceive.
We believe this technology is becoming absolutely critical for corporations to predict and examine fraudulent activity, and that mainstream adoption is happening right now.
