Many scams are easier to pull off than expected. PI Newswire reports that a husband and wife easily pulled off this fraud scam, with a small margin of detection:
A business owner was granted a maintenance contract by a company with a facilities department run by his wife. Without the company’s knowledge, the husband invoiced the company for work he had never actually completed, while his wife wrote out the checks. “They were outwardly stealing from the company,” says Chris Giovino, investigator at Dempsey Partners, which offers services such as forensic accounting, risk consulting services, and claims management.
Investigators, including Giovino and the staff at ICU Investigations, are using social media and proprietary databases to get leads in fraud investigations. In Giovino’s case, the investigation “led him all over the Internet, from Facebook to LinkedIn to the White Pages. He eventually found an address associated with the maintenance vendor that matched an address associated with the couple’s grown children.”
All it takes is that one little bit of information, and we are able to run with it. With the population’s willingness to post such intimate and personal information on the World Wide Web, there is rarely a dead-end.