“On the heels of the very successful Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) conference last month comes an industry event which represents investigators of financial crimes and fraud. The International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators (IAFCI) meets in Washington, DC next week with an agenda that is chock full of sessions involving discussions of best practices for solving and preventing financial crimes.”
“In a recent report, Light noted that the key to successful fraud mitigation with technology is applying a combination of several methods - including the typical red flag approach, predictive modeling, neural networks, profiling, claims databases and identity matching - to ‘maximize the identification of true positive fraudulent claims and of true negative fraudulent claims.’”
“Robert Riegle from the Department of Homeland Security describes fusion centers as force multipliers. ‘They leverage financial resources and the expertise of numerous public safety partners to increase information awareness and help our law enforcement agencies more effectively protect our communities.’”
“L&I works extensively with state and federal law enforcement, and other regulatory agencies to detect and prosecute individuals committing workers’ comp fraud, contractors failing to register with the state, and businesses that wrongly classify workers to cheat on insurance premiums. Some investigations lead to criminal prosecution. People tend to think fraud only involves workers cheating the workers’ comp system. But in reality, millions of dollars are lost when employers, medical providers and contractors commit fraud.”
“At the national level, the number of potential fraud cases continued to rise throughout the first half of the year. Figures released last week by the Illinois-based National Insurance Crime Bureau show a 14 percent increase in questionable claims of the year in four of the six categories the agency tracks… Nationally, reported incidences of suspected organized insurance fraud cases grew 65 percent to 1,837 cases during the first six months of 2010 compared to the same period in 2008, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau.”
“The initiative makes Maryland among the first nationally to establish a statewide network for data generated from license-plate readers. While the devices have not endured regular scrutiny and occasional opposition the way public surveillance cameras have historically, the technology in many respects is more powerful. Privacy advocates warn that plate recognition enables police to document where drivers go – both guilty car thieves and innocent citizens alike – by registering their GPS locations when each license plate is scanned. Police need reasonable suspicion that a crime has been or will be committed for much of the contact officers have with the public, at least in theory. But laws that restrict data gathering by law enforcement don’t always keep up with the 21st century.”
“American authorities are investigating the U.S. division of global banking group HSBC over its compliance with anti-money laundering procedures, according to a regulatory filing… ‘These examinations and inquiries pertain to, among other matters, our global banknotes business and our foreign correspondent banking business, and our compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act, Anti-Money Laundering and Office of Foreign Assets Control requirements,’ the filing said.”
“Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history — a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.”
“The identification of the patient is not always accurate in healthcare. Information for one individual may exist in one or multiple databases where it resides as ‘duplicate,’ inaccessible or unknown to those needing to see the complete or most current picture. Due to administrative errors, information on two different individuals can be ‘overlaid’ and presented as one person’s record. Linking the wrong clinical information to a person not only can cause great personal harm to the patient, but also can incur huge costs to the healthcare provider in correcting and mitigating the error.”
“‘By working with our partners across the globe, we have achieved historic advances in international aviation security – including bolstering explosives detection, strengthening the vetting of passengers against terrorist watchlists, refining passenger screening techniques and deploying tens of thousands of trained aviation security personnel—that make air travel safer for everyone.’ Among other things, the report showed that aviation security received a large boost with the implementation of Secure Flight for 100 percent of passengers flying domestically and internationally on U.S. airlines.”
“The Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) will host the 15th International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ) on November 12-14, 2010. The ICIQ attracts researchers and practitioners in the academic, public and private sectors from across the globe.”
If you’re involved in fraud detection, then you’re probably aware of ACFE, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. With over 50,000 members, it’s the largest single fraud anti-fraud organization in the world. ACFE is also the publisher of FRAUD magazine.
The conference is geared to address the challenges faced by anti-fraud professionals, featuring top-level educational sessions and providing a great forum for participants to network with colleagues. Join us in Washington, D.C. and experience for yourself why this is the most important event for anti-fraud professionals.
If you would like to schedule some time to meet with Infoglide representatives, please contact us at sales@infoglide.com.
“Crown prosecutors said they will likely be able to collect about $6.1-million, about $450,000 less than what Mr. Malik owes from the original winnings, including interest. That money will be returned to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp., which paid the money to the real winners, plus interest, when it discovered Mr. Malik’s fraud.”
“ICE’s experience in trade-based money laundering investigations has shown that one of the most effective ways to identify instances and patterns of trade-based money laundering is through the exchange and subsequent analysis of trade data for anomalies that would only be apparent by examining both sides of a trade transaction.”
“McClain heads up Contractor Compliance for the agency and has just 27 inspectors to cover the state. The agency registers 55,000 contractors each year, so reigning in folks like Mulinski is a difficult task. ‘Finding them working on a job site is a real challenge,’ he said. Once we find them there, knowing that they are registered, who are employees and who are workers?’”
“In the last few posts, we reviewed the basic architectures used to implement entity resolution (ER) systems. Although this gives us the big picture at the systems level, ER really takes place at the reference (record) level where the system must ultimately decide whether two references are for the same or for different real-world objects, i.e. to link or not to link. In this series I’ll discuss some of the most common methods for making these linking decisions.”
“NYAAIF noted that the New York-based Insurance Information Institute reported that fraud and abuse in the New York no-fault system accounts for roughly 20 percent of every no-fault claim paid—or about $1,561 per claim. Spread across the state, that amounted to nearly $230 million in ‘fraud taxes’ in 2009, according to the Alliance.”
Three states (Wyoming, Nevada and Delaware) do not require any proof of identification to set up a business. Another 26 states allow a limited liability corporation (LLC) to be set up without showing beneficial ownership. ‘When banks try to cross-reference within their own business customers, they’ll find the connection,’ she says. ‘But when they distribute it across several banks, it’s not clearly visible. It’s hard to do pattern relationships because banks don’t compare notes, so that’s how [the fraudsters] dilute and avoid detection.’”
“The Secure Flightwatch-list matching process occurs before a passenger even gets to the airport so if you get a boarding pass, the Secure Flight matching process is done. In other words, you are clear once you get that pass.”
“During 2010, independent/standalone data quality vendors (Clavis, Pitney Bowes, Human Inference and Trillium) will focus on name and address cleansing as they struggle against better-funded match/merge and data profiling capabilities increasingly integrated with megavendor MDM. Also at this time, a dearth of non-aligned matching algorithms (such as those from Digital Trowel, Infoglide, Omikron and Uniserve) will engender ‘algorithm envy’ among disenfranchised MDM providers.”
“Rockland County Legislator Ed Day, R-New City, has called for a review of Medicaid spending by the county that would also determine whether enough is being done to prevent and detect Medicaid fraud. ‘Medicaid expenditures represent an amount that is 110 percent of all the property taxes collected here in Rockland,’ said Day.”
“The most significant area of concern is organized crime. Canadian Security Intelligence Service estimates that there are about 750 organized crime groups operating in Canada and 80% of them are involved in the illicit drug trade. The cross-border movement of currency was identified as a continued concern.”
“The accepted meaning of ‘multi-factor authentication’ is employing at least two of the three standard factors used to authenticate identities:
something the user knows (e.g. , PIN or password)
something the user has (e.g., ATM or smart card)
something the user is (e.g., biometric such as fingerprint)
Building upon this well understood concept in the banking and financial services world, I’d like to describe how identity resolution technology extends and greatly enhances the value of authentication systems to the enterprise.”
“Mr. Goldstein also failed to cooperate to allow NYSIF to audit the companies’ payrolls, wherein NYSIF would simply raise premium rates on the policies in effect. To avoid paying higher rates, Mr. Goldstein allowed NYSIF to cancel policies for non-payment, and repeated this pattern by allegedly obtaining other policies from NYSIF under false pretenses.”
“The federal EHR program authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 consists of two parts. The first provides financial assistance through Medicare and Medicaid to healthcare providers who implement EHR systems. In the second phase, instead of receiving financial assistance, providers who fail to comply with EHR implementation requirements will be penalized by reductions in their Medicare or Medicaid reimbursements.”
“Today, many developers are converting existing programs to run on clouds, rather than creating new types of applications that could work nowhere else. And they are held back by difficulties in keeping track of data and getting reliable information about what’s going on across a cloud.”
The accepted meaning of “multi-factor authentication” is employing at least two of the three standard factors used to authenticate identities:
something the user knows (e.g. , PIN or password)
something the user has (e.g., ATM or smart card)
something the user is (e.g., biometric such as fingerprint)
Building upon this well understood concept in the banking and financial services world, I’d like to describe how identity resolution technology extends and greatly enhances the value of authentication systems to the enterprise.
A tacit assumption of multi-factor authentication is that the user mentioned above is legitimate: how else could he or she have the password, smart card, or biometric data? While this assumption may be enough to protect against stolen cards, it doesn’t guard against the user who finds a way to open an account through legitimate means with the intent to defraud. Let me explain.
Billions of dollars are laundered through banks and other financial institutions each year. Accounts (and account owners) that appear legitimate to the institution often move money into and out of the financial system undetected by various means, including trade-based money laundering. Presumably this activity happens despite the presence of authentication measures.
To catch the perpetrators, institutions often focus on improving data quality, either through simple measures like de-duplication or more sophisticated master data management systems. We’ve talked many times here about how these “data quality” efforts can actually harm the process of identifying multiple identities and hidden relationships held by bad actors.
Consider instead the benefits of of integrating authentication systems with high-powered identity resolution systems tied to multiple data sources. Existing multiple identities and hidden relationships become another layer of authentication and incorporate fraud identification into the process. If Joe Blow has multiple related identities, for example, the system can pose a question during authentication drawn from one of the identities that would validate whether the user was legitimate.
Food for thought, and we’d like to hear your thoughts!
“Who’d have thought that iTunes could be used for money laundering? Yet that is exactly what five men in Great Britain were recently jailed for the other day. Using stolen credit card numbers, they bought £750,000 in vouchers, then sold them at cheaper prices over eBay. Methods of money laundering continue to evolve.”
“So the question is if authorities may have avoided losing 5 billion taxpayer Euros if some identity resolution including automated fuzzy connection checks and real world checks was implemented. I know that you are so much more enlightened on what could have been done when the scam is discovered, but I actually think that there may be a lot of other billions of Euros (Pounds, Dollars, Rupees) to avoid losing out there by making some decent identity resolution.”
“In a 2008 study conducted by Kroll Fraud Solutions/HIMSS Analytics to better understand the status of patient data security at hospitals, the hospitals surveyed reported an average level of preparedness to deal with a security breach of 5.88 on a one to seven ascending scale.19 Yet the same study indicated that only 56 percent of these hospitals had notified patients whose information was compromised as a result of a security breach.”
“The ‘official use only’ bulletin, produced by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a partnership of federal, state, and local agencies originally set up to deal with drug trafficking, is entitled ‘Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula’s Online Rhetoric Signals Shift in Intentions.’”
Infoglide Software provides entity resolution and analysis solutions for retail, banking, insurance, government, and law enforcement. Without the need for data cleansing or warehousing, Infoglide Software's Identity Resolution Engine™ (IRE) analyzes all of the information relating to individuals and/or entities from multiple sources of data and then applies...
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