A recent survey conducted by financial services company KPMG Forensic has revealed that more than 72 percent of all fraud results from poor internal controls or the overriding of those controls.
Detective Inspector Colin Dyson, coordinator, assessment and response unit, of the NSW Police commercial crime agency, said technology has a lot to answer for in the increasing incidences of fraud, with a rising level of solely electronic global trading. He said deciding which jurisdiction the crime was committed in is increasingly becoming a problem, citing an example where Russian criminals purchased AU$150,000 worth of goods from an Australian store using stolen American credit card details.
Fraud committed by external parties had leapt from 20 percent of cases in 1999 to 41 percent of cases in 2001, according to the survey. Over half these incidents involved credit card fraud, and accounted for 28 percent of the total value defrauded from companies.
-External attacks are increasing," said Dean Newlan, director of KPMG's Forensic accounting team. -The gangs know which are the soft targets and they'll go for it."
Julian Beavis, vice president of Australia and New Zealand Teradata, said the sheer scale of the problem intimidated many companies, but claimed that combating fraud it isn't as difficult as it appears. -All you have to do is be a little bit better than the competition, you don't have to be the best," he told ZDNet Australia.
Beavis pushed these escalating fraud figures as pitch for Teradata's database and data mining software, and said one of the best ways to combat fraud is for companies to have all their information on a single database, where it can be cross-checked. In response to the problem cited by Dyson, he said a system that reports when multiple shipments are being sent to the same place in a certain time frame could have brought the matter to a supervisor's attention.
