Government Accounting Technology Conference - Virtual-Handout - Ripped From The Headlines

Handout - Ripped From The Headlines - Lessons From Interesting Tech Crimes

Pdf Summary

This document is a training session on “interesting tech crimes” and what accounting and finance professionals can learn from them. It covers real-world fraud, cybercrime, insider threats, electronic payment abuse, AI-enabled deception, and governance failures, focusing on how crimes happen, what warning signs are missed, and how stronger controls could prevent them.<br /><br />Key themes include:<br />- Fraudsters are often trusted insiders, not obvious outsiders. ACFE and KPMG research show many fraudsters are experienced employees or managers with long tenure, and losses can be much larger when authority is involved.<br />- Insider threats can include industrial espionage and theft of sensitive business data, not just stealing money. The Rippling v. Deel case illustrates how internal messaging, CRM data, and access logs can reveal suspicious competitive intelligence gathering.<br />- Electronic payment fraud often begins with weak approval processes, compromised workflows, or poor segregation of duties. Examples include ACH theft, virtual credit card abuse, and business email compromise.<br />- Cybersecurity is changing rapidly as AI makes both offense and defense more powerful. The presentation highlights AI tools that can speed phishing, create fake documents, clone voices, and help attackers scale fraud.<br />- AI can also be used for fraud, such as generating fake music streams to steal royalty payments.<br /><br />The course stresses practical prevention: strong authentication, access reviews, logging, monitoring, out-of-band verification, device governance, DLP, SIEM tools, incident response planning, and cross-functional oversight among finance, legal, HR, audit, and security.<br /><br />Overall, the message is that modern fraud is faster, more human, and more technology-driven, so organizations must treat sensitive operational data and security controls as core business risks.

Keywords

fraud

cybercrime

insider threat

electronic payment fraud

business email compromise

AI deception

access controls

data loss prevention

SIEM monitoring

governance failures