Majority of fraud cases in 2017 had insider involvement – e-Crime

Statistics have revealed that 69 percent of fraud cases recorded in 2017 in Ghana had insider involvement, Mr. Alex Oppong – Principal Consultant, e-Crime Bureau – has stated.

He said 31 percent of fraud cases within the 2017 period were conducted by external perpetrators, which did not include any direct insider involvement.

He explained that the modus operandi of these external perpetrators includes recruitment of insiders and engaging them to connect devices knowingly or unknowingly to their network, whereby they gain access remotely to the systems.

He said after gaining access they manipulate databases, records, or steal information which they use for their fraudulent activities.

Mr. Oppong disclosed this at the maiden edition of the Integrity Management Forum in Accra.

The forum, which was organised by e-Crime Bureau, seeks to equip participants to evaluate existing processes of employee recruitment and engagement with third-party service providers.

Mr. Oppong noted that some employees have been found to upload trade secrets and proprietary information by exploiting cloud services such as Dropbox, google drive and one drive, which they use to their own benefit.

He said a culture of integrity creates a highly respected work environment, declaring that: “It impacts the quality of corporate administration and provides a foundation for worthy long-term financial performance.

“This has necessitated the need to conduct Background Checks, Mystery Shopping and Polygraph Testing during the on-boarding process, as well as investigation issues of employees and perpetrators,” Mr. Oppong added.

He said to this end, the main objective of the forum is to keep participants abreast with specific strategies to adopt for effective integrity management of their human resource processes – which include regular background checks on employees, mystery shopping and the application of polygraph testing technology for investigations.