Always on duty

An anonymous whistleblower hotline should be a critical weapon of any organization’s anti-fraud arsenal. Fraud examiners should understand some of the key success factors that make hotlines good tools in fighting fraud.

In July 2019, Capital One revealed that it had been victim of a data breach in which the personally identifiable information of more than 100 million applicants and customers, including bank account numbers and Social Security numbers, were stolen or compromised. According to The New York Times coverage of the breach, a former employee of the cloud services provider used by Capital One committed the fraud. The company became aware of the issue when a tipster wrote to a Capital One security hotline to warn some of the bank’s data appeared to have been leaked. A subsequent investigation into the tip led to discovery of the breach. (See Capital One Data Breach Compromises Data of Over 100 Million, by Emily Flitter and Karen Weise, The New York Times, July 29, 2019, and The 5 most scandalous fraud cases of 2019.)