Fraud Intelligence

Two thirds of employees, auditors and regulators believe levels of fraud in US publicly-traded companies - already in the billions of dollars - will increase over the next two years, a new report from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) and Anti-Fraud Collaboration has revealed.

Oligarchs from Russia or with Russian links under investigation by the UK's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) have hired spies to carry out surveillance on the former investigators who had explored their business dealings, according to a report by The Guardian newspaper.

The race is on - though many who should don't know it - to defend against a new order of computing attack, which will cut straight through existing cryptographic data defences. Keith Nuthall looks at how soon that will happen and reactions in the USA and Europe.

Earlier this year, Kettering Health, a major hospital network in Ohio, USA experienced a ransomware attack that paralysed its IT systems. While these types of attacks are all too familiar - ransomware breaches have increased from 0 in 2010 to 222 in 2021, accounting for nearly one third of all major healthcare breaches last year [2024] - the Kettering Health incident was notable for what followed the initial attack.

Transparency International (TI) marked International Youth Day on 12 August by celebrating young people worldwide who stand up to corruption, offering a graft-busting toolkit: "15 Ways Young People Can Fight Corruption".

With English criminal courts staggering under a 75,000 case backlog, a review recommends that serious and complex fraud cases should be tried by judge alone. However, the choice "is not between efficiency and delay, but between investment in democratic justice and retreat from its fundamental principles", argues James Broomhall of Grosvenor Law.