I work as a member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. This week I was going to make a presentation in one of the universities of our country. I talk about the dangers and true occurrences of fraud. I was told about the identity theft of the professors of the university. At first, there were only two victims but then during a month their number increased to fifteen. All the victims noticed unexplained charges and credit accounts on their credit reports. I became interested in this case, that was why I decided to help them.
We will try to provide a plan in order to review this case. Also, we will present some ideas in order to slow down the occurrence of identity theft. In order to slow down this theft, we will hold education workshop where we will provide the university staff with useful information about identity thefts.
In order to reveal the motives behind this case, we will use ‘the Fraud Triangle’. The Fraud Triangle was developed and described in the 1940s by Donald Cressey. Donald Cressey was a criminologist. His main task was to understand the reason why people tend to commit a fraud (Goldmann, 2009). The Fraud Triangle consist of three main ‘sides’ – Pressure, Opportunity, and Rationalization. In this case, ‘Pressure’ can be visualized as credit debt, a great amount of health-care bills, or any other kind of financial problems. These problems will run mechanism in order to find a better decision to deal with them. Then, a person will move to the next step – ‘Opportunity’. The opportunity appear when a person, who works or was working in a certain company, knows or finds out about weaknesses of a company’s anti-fraud system. It opens a person the opportunity to see all the transactions or deliveries of the company. With the help of such information, he or she can make up a plan of actions and commit a fraud (Goldmann, 2009).
The last part of the Fraud Triangle is Rationalization. It is a psychological process, when a person, who has already committed a fraud, tries to convince oneself that he or she is not guilty. A person convinces oneself that he or she deserves stolen money. People that commit such kind of frauds always see themselves as victims of the system. They were treated badly that is why they will steal money from the company, which offended them (Goldmann, 2009).
With the help of this scheme, we will build our plan. We will gather all the needed documentation. After this, I will need to prove that there was a case of fraud. That is why I will need the access to the university’s system and internal information about professors. Then, I will examine what I can get if I check public information. Everything that I will find out will be written in the detailed report.
Also, I would like to speak to all the employees who have more than a year of work experience. We have to remember about the trust factor. All the employers believe that they can trust their employees with experience. Nevertheless, the most experienced employees are those who know your company the best and can use it. People least expected to be guilty are always the ones you need to look for (Goldmann, 2009). I believe my scheme will help the university to find out the thief. Also, I think with the help of this investigation we will find out drawbacks of university security system.
I do not think that the identity fraud can be controlled and stopped in any way. We can see that our government find out cleverest people in order to help people to keep their identity safe. Nevertheless, always there are people who can deal with new systems. Still, we can slow it down. As we all know, forewarned is forearmed. That is why I will hold educational workshops. There, I will provide the staff with relevant and useful information in order to protect themselves.
I will provide eight steps, which will definitely help to prevent those cases of identity theft, which depends on the person’s negligence:
Protect your SSN (Social Security Number).
Be aware of scam artists’ techniques (be careful when answering your phone or e-mails).
Destroy every paper with your personal information before throwing it out.
Try not to lose your wallet and make sure that it will not be stolen.
Do not share your password (ever), even with your family.
Ask questions when any kind of authorities need your personal information.
Be careful on the Web. Use strong passwords and visit only well-secured pages.
Do not share your personal information on the Web (Protect Yourself from Identity Theft, 2017).
One of the widely used methods of identity theft is your cell phone. The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) said that from 250,854 identity theft in 2010, 3.7 percent, or 9,282, of them were accomplished with the help of a cell phone messages and calls (Holtfreter, 2012). Often, the victims of identity thieves are those people who never check their credit accounts, those who do not care about their private information, and those who can easily share their credit cards numbers or passwords.
The penalty for identity theft differs in every state. Usually, it is incarceration, fines, restitution, and probation (Theoharis, 2017). However, it depends on the seriousness of the theft. Still, I believe that identity theft should be treated more seriously because numbers of the incidents increase every year.
References
Goldmann, P. (2009). Fraud audit and control workbook (1st ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
Holtfreter, R. (2012). Beware of These New Cellphone Identity Theft Scams. Acfe.com. Retrieved 17 January 2017, from http://www.acfe.com/article.aspx?id=4294972188
Protect Yourself from Identity Theft | Columbia University Information Technology. (2017). Cuit.columbia.edu. Retrieved 17 January 2017, from https://cuit.columbia.edu/protect-yourself-identity-theft
Theoharis, M. (2017). Identity Theft Laws, Penalties, and Charges | Criminal Law. CriminalDefenseLawyer.com. Retrieved 17 January 2017, from http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federal/identity-theft.htm#
