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A number of weeks ago CYFOR was asked to feature in a Raconteur supplement in The Times on Business Ethics.

Of course we agreed and our comment is featured on page 11 of the supplement which was published today.

Click here for the Business Ethics supplement

An extract from the article entitled Fraud without frontiers…

‘Joel Tobias, managing director of fraud specialist CYFOR, believes that monitoring bank accounts is by far the best way to detect when something is wrong.  “Misappropriation of funds, purchase order fraud, embezzlement, mortgage fraud, it all comes down to electronic transactions” he says.  This is why his company offers its forensic service in which a business can hand over its computers and CYFOR checks every email, every document for suspicious activity.’

‘A business that thinks it is being defrauded will almost certainly co-operate with a forensics company like this.  But several organisations, including some substantial concerns, are now allowing employees to buy their own computers – in the same way you get a car allowance, they offer a computer allowance – so equipment is not the property of the business and they cannot hand it over for examination.  “In the same way that lawyers can get orders for people to hand evidence over, we can apply if we have sufficient evidence”, Mr Tobias says.’

‘Many people will be more interested in how to avoid being in this sort of position than in what a forensics company does after the proverbial horse has bolted.  Mr Tobias urges that rigorous IT policies should be in place, with back-ups taken diligently, so there is always an auditable trail of every event that happens on the network and why it has taken place.’